she replies, “No, it’s awful.”
He looks over at me, still smiling. “I’m glad this is about network news, because it’s so much easier to make fun of. That other reporter guy”—he means Albert Brooks’s character—“has the soul of a print journalist.”
It’s my second time watching the movie, so I watch it for technique and structure instead of just plot. I take note of the framing devices in the beginning and how they establish the main characters’ personalities so quickly.
I’d forgotten how the movie ends—with none of the people in the love triangle ending up with each other. The lack of a typical happy Hollywood ending makes it feel kind of old-fashioned, and for a minute I worry that I’ve made a bad call for a first non-date.
Here’s my dirty secret: When it comes to movies, I’m not an auteur like Priya is. I like good stories, but I don’t go into raptures over a film’s cinematography. I watch movies to be manipulated. I watch them to cry, to laugh at inappropriate jokes, to get indignant over injustices, to experience romance that bubbles through my skin and makes me hopeful that one day I’ll find someone to make me feel that way for real.
I love that movies can take a burned-out, cynical person like me and make them believe for just a short while that romance can happen to them. I love that movies keep my dreams alive.
This is, of course, the exact reason my parents hate movies. My dad thinks they’re a waste of time, pure escapism. “So unrealistic, they fill your head with such fluffy nonsense,” he says. My mom is more neutral about them, which is almost more upsetting to me. How can she just not care? Are my parents really that dead inside?
Inviting Will to watch a movie with me was, I admit, kind of a test. I wanted to see whether he could fall under a cinematic spell the way I do. Because there’s a reason movies are such classic dates—they’re an instant shared experience. They give you something to talk about.
But Broadcast News isn’t your typical romantic comedy. It wasn’t designed to make two people believe in the power of true love, or to be the entry point for a good make-out session. It was meant to make you laugh and be pissed off about people manipulating the truth. It was meant to show you how sometimes you can be attracted to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. So… maybe not an auspicious movie for a non-date?
WILL
Broadcast News is a good flick. Scratch that, it’s kind of an amazing flick. Funny but bittersweet, and totally spot-on in the way it captures the drama of being on deadline and the drive to tell a story the right way. It was kind of amazing, too, that in the end Holly Hunter’s character didn’t end up with either William Hurt or Albert Brooks. I can’t think of a single movie that I’ve watched where a romance ended up this way. It’s brave, and probably it’s true.
“Did you like it?” Jocelyn asks carefully as the credits roll.
“Yeah, it was terrific.” I talk about all the little things it got right, and a smile lights up her face. “They really don’t make movies like that anymore, do they? With endings that don’t tie up in a nice bow?”
“Not the major studios, really.” She shrugs. “I don’t blame them. People like to leave a movie theater believing in happy endings. Why not, when the world seems like it’s such a shitshow?” She pulls one of my grandma Domenici’s afghans over her knees. “Sometimes you just want to laugh.”
Idly, Jocelyn leafs through the coffee-table photobooks my mother made after our family trip to Nigeria a few years ago. She stops at a picture of us on safari at Yankari Game Reserve. “Does your family go to Nigeria often?”
“Not really,” I say. “It’s too hard for my mother to schedule enough time off, and most of my extended family is here in the States now. That trip was my first visit there since I was a baby.” After I came back, it was the first time that I started thinking of myself not only as “black” or “mixed race,” but also as Nigerian American.
“Why did your mom come to the US?”
“For graduate school, like a lot of other Nigerians. When my mother was a teenager there were years of military rule and attacks on the press, and most people who had the