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pallid_regina mentioned the movie Spinal Tap in one of her
posts the other day and I thought I would give a longer explanation of my
strange experience seeing it.

I was in college when the movie came out. One of my roommates was very
into movies about bands.
I like music. Almost all kinds of music.
But, I have very little interest in movies where they follow bands around
on their tour busses or before and after concerts.
My roommate loved those movies. He was always watching them, trying to get
others to watch them and go to the movies with him to see them.
I also love movies and like to see them in the theater. So, it usually
wasn’t hard to talk me into going to the movies, except those rock and roll
documentaries.

One day, this roommate said to me “there is a great new movie playing down
town, let’s go see it.”
I agreed and we went off to see Spinal Tap.

When the movie started, my thought was “I let him drag me to another one of
those stupid documentary movies.”
This colored how I saw the movie. Being predisposed to think of it as
something I would find boring, I didn’t pay as much attention as I might
have.
Famous comedians showing up as parts in the movie didn’t make a big
impression on me as I just thought they were people who looked like other
people.

The more the movie went on, the more strange I found it.

When it came to the movie where the bass player was trapped in the plastic
tube on stage I stopped to ponder what was going on.
“This is an embarrassing thing to have happen to you on stage,” I said to
myself. “Why would they show something so embarrassing?”
“They must want people to see it,” I answered myself. “The film is clearly
made with the consent of the band, so if they didn’t want people to see
this, they would have withheld this footage.”
“Why would they want people to see something this embarrassing?” I asked
again.
“It’s funny when you think about it,” I said. “So, they must be doing this
to be funny.”

I stood up in the middle of the theater.

“THIS MOVIE IS A COMEDY!” I shouted out to the theater.

The replies I got from people indicated I was alone in not knowing this.
I followed the instructions to sit down and shut up.

It is very hard for me to describe that feeling of discovery when it all
made sense. When my expectations were completely turned around and I had
to look at the movie in a totally different way.

I have avoided every seeing the movie again as I know I could never
recapture that moment when it all made sense to me.

There are times I say “I should go back and watch the first half again”.
But, it would never be the same.