The Musical Brain: And Other Stories

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AS A KID, IN PRINGLES, I went to the movies a lot. Not every day, but I never saw fewer than four or five films a week. Four or six, I should say, because they were double features; two for the price of one, and everybody watched both films. On Sundays the whole family went to the afternoon session that started at five. There were two cinemas to choose from, with different programs. As I said, they were double bills: a B movie first, and then the main attraction (the “premiere,” though I don’t know why it was called that because they were all premieres for us). Sometimes, almost always in fact, I also went to the matinée session at one o’clock on Sunday, which was a double feature, too, intended for children, although back then they didn’t make movies specially for children, so they were westerns, adventure films, that sort of thing (and I got to see some serials, including, I remember, Fu Manchu and Zorro). A bit later on, when I was twelve, I started going in the evenings as well, on Saturdays (the movies were different) or Fridays (it was the same program as the afternoon session on Sundays, but since there were two cinemas. .) or even on weekday nights. And at some point one of the cinemas started continuous screenings of Argentine films on Tuesdays, all afternoon. How many movies would I have seen? Calculating like this is a bit silly, but four a week makes two hundred a year, at least, and if I kept going that often from the age of eight to the age of eighteen, that makes two thousand movies. It’s even sillier to take the calculation to its ultimate conclusion: two thousand movies at an hour and a half each makes three thousand hours, or a hundred and twenty-five days, that is, four long months of uninterrupted viewing. Four months.

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