What everybody knows about John Hersey is that he wrote “Hiroshima,” the one widely read book about the effects of nuclear war. Its place in the canon is assured, not only because it was a major literary achievement but also because reporters haven’t had another chance to produce an on-the-scene account of a city recently blasted by a nuclear weapon. Yet Hersey was more of a figure than that one megaton-weighted fact about him would indicate. Born in 1914, he had an astonishingly rapid ascent as a young man. Because he was a quiet, sober person who lived an unusually unflamboyant life by the standards of celebrated American writers, it’s easy to miss how much he achieved.
“We’re telling everyone to prep as if they’re going into surgery,” joked Joe Russo, one of the directors, in an interview with ComicBook.com. “Don’t have any water or anything to drink post-midnight the day before you see the film, and you’ll be fine.”
So in the United States, most audiences will have to steel themselves for three uninterrupted hours. But theaters across the world have taken control of the remote and hit pause roughly halfway through. Avengers fans in countries including Egypt, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland and Turkey all reported having an intermission during showings this week.
Intermissions were once a regular part of the American moviegoing experience, even with films that were not “Gone With The Wind”-sized (three hours, 58 minutes) epics. The reason was partly practical: Theaters needed time to swap out film reels.
When I first stepped foot in Brooklyn, I remember being utterly shocked at how empty it was. Closed shops. Few to no pedestrians. Warehouses with broken windows. Each stood as a vestige of a bygone era. But nothing in its renovation and extreme gentrification over the past 10 years pointed to which groups of people had once trampled the streets, which businesses occupied these empty lots, and what type of lovers frolicked on benches. In When Brooklyn Was Queer: A History (St. Martin’s Press, 2019), Hugh Ryan opens up this Pandora’s box, allowing new and old queers to discover the borough that birthed so many of our contemporary notions of gender and sexuality, and which gladly became the founding mother of our terminology.