Work Text:
It’s Dick who introduces her to movies first. It’s not as if it’s a new concept to her - you’d have to be living under a rock to not see movie posters and advertisements - but she’d never watched one before. Dick has taken it on himself to be her pop culture tutor. He’s told her fairy tales before, acting out the parts. She’d liked Cinderella the most. When she’d talked about ballet, he and Babs took her to see the Nutcracker. Books were out for now (maybe one day), so the next choice was apparently movies.
That movie night is a flop. He shows her Princess Bride, Terminator, Lord of the Rings, and Wizard of Oz, saying she needs a smorgasbord of genres to really get a good picture. She can tell he likes them, especially Princess Bride, which doesn’t surprise Cass given how excited he was about fairy tales. But for her? She can’t help but frown as the movies play out. The movies feel stilted and wrong to her. She knows they’re acting, in a much more intuitive and deep way than anyone else, because she can see it even through the screen. Their movements are rehearsed, practiced. Invisible cuts that are visible to her because of how their language changes. Stunt doubles who move and speak differently than the main actor. It’s all wrong.
Dick acts out fairy tales. Ballet performances are like acting. Yet they aren’t stilted, like someone pretending to be human when they’re not. Because they’re in person? Because there’s no attempt to make the world look real, while the movies are falseness painted as reality? She’s not sure.
Dick looks over at her and sees her frowning. “You don’t like it?”
She shrugs and bites her bottom lip, struggling for a moment to find the right words. “Real… but not. Can see acting.” She almost expects him to brush her off. Of course you can see the acting. It’s not meant to be real. But his face pinches in that way it does when he’s thinking, eyebrows knitting together and lips pursed, and then he nods.
“Yeah, I guess it’s pretty weird when you put it like that.” She can tell he doesn’t fully understand what she means, but the attempt is appreciated, as is the offer to get dessert instead of finishing the movies. Ice cream, his treat.
It’s a week later that he proposes another movie day. “I think you’ll like this one more,” he promises. She’s not entirely convinced, but she agrees anyway. The worst that happens is a bad movie.
She makes the popcorn, and he puts up the sign saying it’s movie day, any interrupters will be pelted with popcorn, before they settle down on the couch. “What movie?” she asks.
“Secret of Kells. It’s an animated movie, so drawn, instead of actors.” That catches her attention. As the movie starts and a pale white face peeks through a bush, Cass sits up a bit straighter. The gentle yet almost haunting whisper of a young girl, presumably the one in the bushes, rings out over flashes of scenes. The colors of each scene shift and blend into each other. She crosses her legs under her and leans forward, blindly reaching for the popcorn as the main plot of the movie starts.
She almost forgets Dick is there at all, her attention fully wrapped up by the movie. The way figures almost dance over the screen, or how the symbols unravel and sparkle and shift, or the colors that are too bright to be true, it all draws her in. She can’t read their body language like she can in live action, but while that would normally discomfort her, losing the language she knows, she feels at ease here. She hasn’t lost anything. It’s a different world, similar yet different, and she becomes a part of it for that short time. It's more real than the other movies, even though none of the characters are.
“Did you like it?” Dick asks, but there’s a laugh in his voice and his eyes are crinkled with a smile. He knows the answer already. She still nods excitedly, a smile on her own face.
“Another?” she asks. She didn’t have to. He reveals a selection of movies already picked out on the off chance he was right and she liked animation, an assumption he managed to hit out of the park. Coraline, Princess Monoke, Land Before Time, the Painting, the Last Unicorn. They all speak to her in their own unique ways. Their language moves her, grips her tight and pulls her in, and she’s disappointed when dawn is shining and the movie day is over. She makes Dick promise to schedule another one soon.
By the end of the week, Dick has set her up with her own movie account, filled solely with animated movies.