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The Socialization Process 5 me up. My dad, annoyed by the squeaking and the movement, whispered in the darkness for me to stop. I had forgotten he was there, so absorbed was I by the film, the loud noise, and the effects of excessive amounts of salt, caffeine, and sugar. At some point, I think it was during the scene where the Emperor is trying to recruit Luke to the Dark Side as he looks through a window at his friends being destroyed, I became aware of my full bladder. Moments like these are etched into one’s memory if you missed moments in a film in 1983, you either had to come back to the cinema to see it again or get someone else to tell you what happened. Freighted with this knowledge, I held it as long as I could, but then, bored by all the dialogue anyway, I asked my mom to take me to the restroom, saying, “I’ll be quick!” Stumbling out of the cinema partway through a film, back into the liminal real- ity of the cordoned-off zones to find the bathroom you just used an hour before is one of the essential parts of going to the movies—for children and adults. The cold, hard porcelain and fluorescent brightness, the sensation of release, and the wet water splashed on the hands to make mom happy are like defibrillator shocks to the imagination, the dream of the film losing its reality the longer one is absent. Upon nestling back into my seat, I knew better than to ask anyone what I had missed. Throughout the film, as I recall, there was a sense of “us.” “We,” the theatergo- ers, the Star Wars fans (I owned dozens of the Kenner action figures as well as the hard-to-get ones, rare commodities you had to send UPC codes from cereal boxes to obtain) and the Rebels in the film were all in “this” together. When the Rebels, with the help of the Ewoks, beat back the Imperial Forces on the moon of Endor, we cheered with them. When Vader tossed the Emperor to his death, we cheered together. And when Williams’s score swelled as we, with Luke, witnessed the Rebel Forces ghosts of Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Anakin, many of us may have shed a tear or two. My mind was recording every moment, filling its cache with all the nuances and details I could capture. Returning to school on Monday having seen the film would greatly increase my social capital, and, when playing with my brother (who was always Han Solo), we could re-create and extend the cinematic experience for weeks and months at our house. Little did I know at the time that the images, narratives, and conversations from this viewing would last for decades. Even now I am talking about it. One advantage of watching a film at night is that you avoid the unpleasant experience of going from a darkened theater to the bright sunshine. Thus you get to stay in the dream a little longer, going through the motions of collecting your detritus from what seems like ages ago and putting it in the trash can as another vested employee with the broom and dustpan waits nearby to purify the space for the next showing. There is always something final about leaving a building through a different door from which you came in. That heavy steel door with the stainless push bar spat each one of us back into reality, while that sense of “us” we had all attained inside was diffused all over the parking lot, as we all went our separate ways. There are many things that could be said about this “thick description,” which serves as the common grounding narrative for my own subsequent analysis and