Chapter Text
“I don’t see what you like about this movie.”
“What is there not to like? We have gun fights, witty banter, one of the most iconic endings of all time. Okay, not to mention the score. You know, critics in 1969 hated it, they thought it was all anachronistic and not serious enough for the genre, but Paul Newman and Robert Redford have been vindicated by history.”
Steve sighed, looking back up at the screen with his arms crossed over his chest and head slightly cocked. “It’s because you like Katharine Ross with her shirt halfway off.”
“It is not…! Okay, I do, fine. But come on. You have eyes.” Steve bobbled his head from side to side, concurring with her point. “But, even if Katharine Ross didn’t have a second of screentime, it would still be my favorite movie. Maybe historically inaccurate and misogynistic, because Etta Place was a critical part of the Wild Bunch, but still.”
“So has Nancy come back yet?”
“What?”
Steve shrugged again. He was trying so hard to be nonchalant that he was acting like… well, kind of like Robin, all jittery movements in a misguided attempt to be lackadaisical. “It’s just, you know, this is like. The fifth day in a row that you’ve insisted on playing nothing but Westerns, because you know everything there is to know about Westerns, and it gives you a chance to tell me about the production history, and you’re so busy talking about that, you’re not thinking about oh my God, what if Nancy doesn’t like the movie that I picked out for her.”
“Maybe I just felt like watching Westerns this week. County fair came by, got me thinking about it.”
“See, I would believe that, but we went through a very specific pattern. We started with High Noon, which is easy, because you mention at the start of it that did you know this is the first movie where the plot progresses in real time.”
“One of the first.”
Steve put his hands up, something halfway between a dismissal and a mea culpa. “Then it was Shane. Then, I have seen more Clint Eastwood this week than anyone other than Mrs. Eastwood. Now we’re watching –”
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Steve and Robin whipped around with the synchrony of two people who had been around one another for too long, enough that the caduceus of friendship had become more like an ouroboros. Nancy Wheeler, the dull fluorescent lighting somehow forming a halo around that perfect head. Her eyes sparkled, but there was one problem: they were fixed on the screen, not on Robin. “We watched this movie in English class last year. It’s great.”
“It’s Robin’s favorite movie.” Steve, Steve, Steve, you absolute dingus of a wingman. Maybe Nancy was only claiming that she liked it to be polite, and now she was thinking about what an uncultured moron Robin was for liking such trash. Maybe Roger Ebert and Time magazine were right. Maybe it was just a mess held together solely by the charisma of its two stars – kind of like the Family Video store in Hawkins.
“Really?” Robin couldn’t read that raised eyebrow. Curiosity? Intrigue? Pure judgment? Great job, Harrington.
“She likes the fighting and the banter and the ending.”
“I just think it’s one of the only films that can successfully walk the line between being a love letter to the genre and a parody of some of its more ridiculous elements. The comedic beats poke fun at some of the more ludicrous tropes of the spaghetti Western – I mean, Butch and the Kid think that they can go to South America, but they don’t even know Spanish – but there’s still this creeping undercurrent of dread. And then the ending – ” Nancy knew how it ended, right? She said that she watched it in class, but maybe they only watched sections, or she was sick one day. “The ending finds a way to make hope out of annihilation. You know realistically that there’s no way they escaped the Bolivian Army, but by stopping right before they’re riddled with bullet holes, you can close your eyes and picture that maybe they made it there out of all, beat the odds like they always do.”
She sounded ridiculous. It was just a movie. It was something fun that the actors and writer and director did, probably to get a trip to South America on the company dime, because they filmed on location. Whatever she was making out of it, it probably wasn’t that, but she had to sound cultured, had to justify what made this the best movie of all time, because Steve had set her up for it. Thanks again, dingus.
“She’s seen it like 500 times.”
“Okay, not 500. Maybe, like, 20.” Was that too many? Was that weird? Or maybe it wasn’t enough. No, 20 was definitely too many times to see one movie, and the worst part was that it was probably an understatement. Then again, they worked in a video store. They watched movies as part of their job. She had probably seen American Graffiti even more times than that because the manager insisted that it would help the adolescent demographic, even though everyone who had actually seen that movie when they were kids now had children and a mortgage.
“So, um.” Please get this conversation away from me before I dig myself into an even deeper hole. “What’s your favorite movie?”
“I… don’t know. I haven’t thought about it as much as you two probably have.” You two. That was generous. It assumed that Steve put much stock into the specifics of his job. Robin knew which movies he hated, and it was anything that he had been forced to experience more than a handful of times. “It sounds like such a stereotype, but… probably Network.”
“The story of Howard Beale, the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.” It would have been easier to go with the classic quote, the one that everyone decided to scream from their rooftops in a sense of fake rebellion, We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore! But Robin wanted to prove that she actually knew that she was talking about. It was… one of her many flaws, really, but the way that Nancy smiled, looking down and nodding, made her feel like she was on the right track. Steve, for his part, was looking between them with his eyes bulging out of his head, trying to figure out if (and, honestly, hoping that) Robin was only speaking metaphorically.
“Yeah, yeah. Total stereotype. I know.”
“It’s a good movie! Faye Dunaway is… wow. Amazing.” Robin thought that she played that one off pretty well; it could so easily be a comment on acting abilities and not the whole ruthless journalist persona that she gave off. Huh. Weird that such a character might do something to Robin.
“So I don’t mean to break up the party, ladies, but we’ve got other customers. Like… that family. They look like they need help. So… see you later.” The family in question – a mother and her two children, one boy and one girl, the very picture of small town American values – needed no help at all, except maybe choosing between a few different Disney movies, but Steve had already leapt over the counter, making his clever depart from the conversation.
Both Robin and Nancy turned back towards the film. Butch and the Kid had just reached Bolivia, their last chance at outrunning fate. It was an excuse, maybe, to linger a moment longer without any burgeoning awkwardness, or maybe just to share in something of great importance to Robin.
“So, um.” Nancy cleared her throat, coming back to reality. “I realized I never actually checked out these movies, but I should probably give them back. You know, for your records or whatever you keep.”
“Did you… did you watch any of them?” Or had they just been sitting collecting dust for the past week? And if so, why? Was it that Robin’s taste was complete shit, or was she too scared to actually delve into them? And even then, was it fear because they were, you know, horror movies, or was it because she had some conception of Robin’s taste and didn’t want to be disappointed when it turned out that she only liked B-movie crap? Well, no. That last one was ridiculous.
“What? Oh, yeah. All of them. Wanted to be thorough, you know?”
“Yeah. Dogged journalist.” Robin, you sound like an idiot. Or maybe just someone who was a little too whipped over the girl she wasn’t even dating. Who probably didn’t even like girls. When her eyes kept flitting back to Butch Cassidy, she was genuinely watching the movie, not trying to stare down Katharine Ross’s shirt. And she definitely wasn’t avoiding Robin’s gaze, unless she was, because she knew the way Robin was looking at her and it made her uncomfortable. “So, uh, what… what’d you think?”
“About…?”
“Any. All. I don’t really get to have deep cultural conversations with Steve, so. Bring it on.” Deep cultural conversations about the absolute schlock she had handed over. Yeah, sure.
Nancy took a breath, report at the ready. If she had a pen behind her ear and a notebook in her breast pocket, both would be out to recount the notes that she had taken, but she hadn’t prepared for an interrogation. She simply had to recite from memory. “Well, I didn’t think I would like Fright Night. I read the back of the box and it sounded kind of… kind of cheesy.” No offense. At least it was self-aware about the cheese, unlike every black-and-white movie with monsters made out of rubber reciting lines with all of the charisma of drying paint. “But it was… it was charming. You can tell that everyone involved really liked vampire movies, and they wanted to do something different.”
“Yeah. Yeah, no I vant to suck your blood.” Stop that impression right now, Robin Buckley. It was dated, it was stupid. Shut the whole thing down.
“I kind of thought the same thing about American Werewolf. It was… it was unique. I think. I don’t know, I don’t watch a lot of monster movies.”
Don’t… don’t watch a lot. And Robin gave her, like, five of them. Of course, she had asked for an education, and that was what Robin had done. She was only following orders, so it was still on Nancy if she didn’t get anything out of the genre.
“Um, can I be honest for a second?” Nancy asked.
Oh God. Oh no, here it came.
“Yeah, yeah. Totally.”
“You guys… you can see when we stopped watching something, right?”
“Well, not if you be kind and rewind.” Robin gestured to the sign. There were a few of them plastered all over the store, and yet Robin had yet to log a return that didn’t have to be rolled back to the beginning.
“Well… I got kind of freaked out partway through Evil Dead. So I… panicked and turned it off. And maybe threw it across the room a little bit.” Nancy laughed and shook her head, staring at the linoleum floor. “It’s so embarrassing. I mean, everything in the Upside Down and then some stupid special effects just made me…” Nancy made an inscrutable noise, something between a horse’s whinny and a dog shaking off the rain on its coat, shaking her hands in case the message wasn’t already clear.
“No. No, it’s not stupid. I… I mean, it’s a horror movie. It’s supposed to scare you.” Robin remembered when it came out in theaters with the NC-17 rating slapped on it. She had managed to snag a copy for a sleepover once and was practically thrown out by the other adolescents who had gone into the evening expecting to see a rom-com or something else lighthearted.
“Well, I can return all the rest, but… I want to give it another shot. Just… maybe with some company. You know, so I don’t start seeing monsters in the shadows or anything stupid like that.”
“I already said it wasn’t stupid.” But… Robin might have been. Some company, huh? Nancy had Mike, she had her parents, she had her other friends. Steve was probably around, if he hadn’t found his latest conquest to shack up with for a night or two, and… oh. She was asking Robin. Was she? She hadn’t said it explicitly. Robin was like a vampire: invitations had to be explicit.
Nancy, for her part, seemed to register that her conversation partner was dense as a brick wall. “Are you free on Thursday?”
“Uh. Yeah, yeah, I can be.” Way to sound desperate. Steve would have to cover her shift, but once she told him the reason, there was no way he wouldn’t acquiesce, right? And if not, then maybe she came down with something. Some 24-hour-bug that wouldn’t raise suspicions and might even get her some sympathy.
“Great! 7 p.m.?”
“Sounds great.”
“See you then.” Robin blinked, imagining in the faint second where her eyes were closed that Nancy was leaning over the counter to kiss her, some quick peck on the cheek, like couples did, but all that the other girl did was smile, waving on her way out. It was only once her back was turned that Robin allowed some of her veneer to drop – that which hadn’t already fallen halfway off the second that Nancy walked in. Did she just… did she just get a date?