The 'Bar Movie' Is Good And Important

Zoning out and junk food is actually healthy

A bar in my neighborhood closed last week, which was a shame. It’d been open for a while and people liked it. I thought it was a good bar. I thought that because it had all of the makings of, for me, what makes for a good bar: It was close, it was reasonably priced, and the staff was always normal. Normal is an important and perhaps underrated quality in a bartender. I don’t need nor do I want you to go over the top like a Chick-fil-A pastor-employee or pretend that we’re best friends. I just need you to be normal. You notice when someone isn’t normal.

The bar was also good because it was one of the bars that often had on a Bar Movie.

What’s a Bar Movie, Brendan?

That’s you right now.

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A Bar Movie is a movie that you might not ever consciously think of watching or picking out from a menu, because it’s likely not on a streaming service menu — or at least not on the homepage. Maybe you only recognize it by name as a relic from the time before streaming.

Bar Movies play in the corner, and you are transfixed by it, even without hearing the audio, and even if you just popped in halfway through and understand none of the plot having missed out on some important context, exposition and dialogue. You stare at it, hypnotized almost, even if your friends or spouse are trying to talk to you.

They are often action movies or thrillers, often with a sci-fi bent, and often with the likes of Arnold or Kurt Russell, but not always. Escape from New York is a Bar Movie. Repo Man is a Bar Movie. Stealing Harvard is a Bar Movie but Freddy Got Fingered is not.

Bar Movies also tend to have at least one scene of gratuitous violence or body horror or sight gag that is so disturbing that one of your friends looks and says, What the fuck is happening, and you say, I have no idea I’ve never seen this, and the sound is off. A Bar Movie can work as a silent movie where you don’t read all of the subtitles, so dialogue-heavy flicks like Clerks or Wes Anderson are out.

If it’s getting or has gotten a reboot that takes itself too seriously in the last 10 years, it’s probably a Bar Movie.

There’s no real good definition of a Bar Movie. So I’ll have to rely on wholly original criteria that I came up with — I’ll know it when I see it.

Sound off in the comments if you have what you think is a favorite Bar Movie or important criteria of one.

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Pretty much every bar has at least one TV anymore. Sometimes 12. If it doesn’t have one, it’s a statement and there’s usually something baked into its business plan and aesthetic that it wants you to “unplug” and “engage,” and also has the word “craft” or “artisan” somewhere on its menu/branding.

A Bar Movie experience is the last 45 minutes of “Total Recall” at 4 in the afternoon. A Bar Movie experience is trying to discern exactly what is happening in “Scanners II” having not seen the first 15 minutes or the original “Scanners.”

And while the Bar Movie might on the surface have little nutritional or artistic value, and might even come at the expense of real conversation with real friends and loved ones, the Bar Movie serves an important purpose.

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Bars that don’t show Bar Movies often end up exposing you to the 24-hour news cycle — be it cable news networks riling you up about politics, or sports networks giving pancake-batter-brained former players three-hour bro-fests or making poor magazine columnists scream at each other for the approval of a guy in a power knot.

And when you’re fixated on whatever Keanu is doing on the screen, you’re not looking at your phone.

The Bar Movie not only entertains, it actively protects you. It is an escape from the grind of normal life the same way whatever you’re drinking is, and it is an active buffer between you and the static that we otherwise subsist on and freak ourselves out with.

The Bar movie doesn’t flick on your fight-or-flight. You’re not going to argue with your friend about politics or the Lakers. You’re talking about how gross Sam Neill looks without eyes in Event Horizon.

Because the Bar Movie is a relic from the past. A comfort. Not only because most Bar Movies are from decades prior. A Bar Movie could’ve been made last year, as long as it’s the kind of movie that you just want to sit down and watch without feeling like you need to come away with an opinion or take or having learned anything. They’re in shorter supply now.

They’re the kind of movie that you catch on TV back when you’d catch movies on TV, maybe when you were home sick, maybe late one night that you stayed in.

I like Bar Movies. I like the idea of them, and when I come across one it motivates me to go home and check out some movies I had never seen before that might’ve been before my time. And when I do, I don’t want to watch it as the Second Screen — the first being my phone. I just want to zone out and dial in. I think it’s nice that something makes you want to do that.

I should stop now, because if I were to keep going it’d become some hacky critique of both the contemporary media landscape as well as the state of movie production — both topics that have been written about to death and by those both smarter and dumber than me, and I don’t need to add to the noise when the whole point I’m getting at is that sometimes you just need this very specific amount of stimulation to feel good.

I’ll just leave it on the fact that the new Jurassic World movie will not be a Bar Movie, but if the studios wise up and let me write a spec script for a reboot done right, hit me up. Same goes for if they ever want to dig up the corpse of the Power Rangers IP.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is The Dirty Nil.