Mutoscope!

On Saturday, I went to the Musée Mechanique in San Francisco, and I watched a Harold Lloyd short. Called On the Beam, it was a deleted scene from Lloyd's last short, 1921's Never Weaken.

I drop my quarter in the slot, and the light comes on. I peer into the peephole on top of the clamshell-shaped metal Mutoscope, turn the crank, and watch Lloyd dance to life on an I-beam high above the Manhattan streets.

The Mutoscope format is a hand-cranked flipbook. I think a couple of cards may have been missing. Halfway through, I began to grow concerned--these cards are pretty old. Several have bent or torn corners. A few have horizontal creases across the middle. Some of these even have cracks that I can see through as they are bent in half as I turn the crank.

It slowly dawns on me that I could be the last person to see this, that the act of me enjoying it is actually degrading it. It can only be seen finitely many times. My instincts tell me to stop turning that crank. But I can't just leave it stuck in the middle, one card bent by the flipper. I have to finish.

I'll admit, some of the fun lay in the archaic format. It's so clunky, this four-foot tall metal box containing one "film" no longer than two minutes that you watch by inserting a quarter. I wanted to go home, find it on YouTube, and post a link on Facebook, but I'd laugh about how you wouldn't really experience it the right way. Only tonight when I looked for it online, I couldn't find it.

Who knows? Fifty years from now, you'll rummage around in the attic and your grandkid will blow the dust off a DVD and wonder what it was. "It was one of my favorite movies. It made me laugh and laugh." "Can we watch it?" "I don't know. I don't think so."

Enjoy your movies while you can, people.