Getting Ready for the Drive-In Saturday Tuesday Movie Review Series to Restart

There is little I like doing more than going to drive-in movies. I can’t say entirely why, but it probably has something to do with the sense of artificial nostalgia that Bowie himself tapped into with songs such as… “Drive in Saturday.”

“Artificial nostalgia?” I’ve seen the term “future nostalgia” as it applies to Bowie, but I just made up this term “artificial nostalgia” (apologies to anyone else who came up with the same formulation).

What I mean is this—though there is something genuinely nostalgic for me about going to the drive-in, because I’ve been going since I was a child (though I get to go more now as an adult), the experience taps into a sense of something that goes back further—further than my actual age allows me to have experienced. Drive-in theaters seem evocative of the 1950s. I was born in 1969 and never made it to a drive-in until the 1970s. “Drive-in Saturday” also has both a 50s and future feel about it—I’m not the first to make this observation. To be fair, the song was released in 1973 when plenty of Bowie fans had actual memory of the 1950s, so to some extent he tapped into actual nostalgia, but I have a feeling that even in 1973 there were plenty of people for whom that song was evocative of something they didn’t actually experience.

Plus, the Jericho Drive-in has ice cream (their ice-cream stand was open almost all year, and I had some great visits during the dead of winter).

The “Drive-in Saturday Tuesday Movie Review” is named that because of the Bowie song, the fact that I usually go to the drive-in on Saturday, and I usually post the movie review on Tuesdays. Sometimes the movies have some Bowie connection, and sometimes they don’t. But I always include a “Bowie Connection” part of the review. So if you are coming to the site only for Bowie content, Bowie will at least be mentioned in my reviews of movies that might have very little to do with him.

Another reason I like drive-ins is that I associate the experience with summer. The local season commenced this past weekend, but for uninteresting reasons I was unable to make it out this inaugural week. I’m hoping it works out this upcoming weekend. Of course, we’ll be in early May, not summer. And here in Albany, NY, the last show of the season usually runs in November. But normally, the weather has to cooperate and the heart of the drive-in season is summer. The older I get, the more I like summer and the more I despise winter.

So, that’s it. I’m writing this post because I’m thinking about the drive-in season starting up, and hey, it’s my blog, I can write about whatever I want. And if the weather or circumstance makes it impossible to go to the show on any particular weekend, perhaps the strange ones in the dome will lend us a book, we can read up at home…*

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* Yes, I know the lyric is “read up alone…”