When you think of Valentine’s Day what movies come to mind? When Harry Met Sally? Before Sunrise? That movie where Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner played a couple? It makes sense. October is for horror movies, December is for Christmas movies, so, naturally, February is for romance. The weekend of or before Valentine’s Day there’s at least one big studio love story. 2014 alone saw the wide release of Winter’s Tale, Endless Love, and About Last Night, so every demographic had a romance to see. And there’s always something aggressively non-romantic for the single folks. 2014 had the RoboCop reboot. 2019 had Alita: Batle Angel. And in 1991, Valentine’s Day saw the debut of The Silence of the Lambs.

When you think of a date movie you don’t really think of The Silence of the Lambs. But someone at Orion Pictures knew it’d be good counter-programming. After all, couples see horror movies together too. One of the many couples that saw it that weekend were Steve and Helene. It was the first movie they ever saw together. When he originally asked her out she wanted to say no. But their work lives occasionally overlapped and to avoid the future awkwardness she gave him an “I’m really busy right now and not sure when I’ll have the time.” She finally, reluctantly, accepted the date when her mother, upon hearing his Jewish last name, begged her to say yes. It’s only one date, she thought. At least she’d get a free meal out of it.

But one date turned to two and two turned to three and the next Valentine’s Day they saw Silence of the Lambs. The following year they got married and the year after that they gave birth to their first child, Griffin. Two years later they’d have their second child, me.

The Silence of the Lambs swept the major categories at the Oscars, including director Jonathan Demme’s first and only Oscar win. Unlike most directors, Demme didn’t live in Los Angeles but instead in Nyack, NY, just a couple towns over from where my parents settled in New City, NY, a town so Jewish it’s referred to as “Jew City” and its residents don’t take offense. 

About 30 minutes from New City stands the Jacob Burns Film Center, an independent non-profit movie theater know for booking special guest Q&A’s, which I took full advantage of once I got my drivers license. The theater was well known amongst the film elite. In interviews Ron Howard often wears a Jacob Burns hat. In the DVD commentary for Before Midnight, Ethan Hawke brings up the influence of the 1945 marital drama Journey to Italy and frequent Burns guest Richard Linklater mentions how it was just playing there, which is how I first saw the film.

But the most constant guest at the Burns was Jonathan Demme. Along with moderating other Q&A’s, Demme would host and program a serious called Rarely Seen Cinema, which basically gave him a chance to show whatever movies he wanted on the big screen. Before each of them he’d ask the audience by a show of hands if they’d seen it before. He didn’t come at from the condescension of “What?! You haven’t seen ________??” but rather the excitement of “What?! You get to see ________ for the first time!!”

The first one I attended was for Luciana Martel’s La Cienaga, a movie I didn’t fully get (I was 16 give me a break), but my dad liked it because it reminded him of growing up at a bungalow colony in the Catskills.

Demme always sat in the VIP section on the left side in the center row, giving guests easy access to the exit and the stage entrance. Next to him sat a man with white hair in a blue sport jacket, who I could have sworn I knew. From a couple rows back I could only see out the back of his head and just a bit of his profile. I stared trying to figure out where I’d met him. He just looked so damn familiar. I asked my dad, a social butterfly if there ever was one, if he knew. He glanced up from his phone and said it was “somebody’s father or something.” BUT WHO’S?? I ignored Demme’s entire introduction and focused entirely on the man in the blue jacket, cycling through the parents of my friends and my brother’s friends hoping to find a match. As the lights dimmed it hit me. The man in the blue jacket was David Byrne.

Almost 30 years since Demme directed him in the legendary Stop Making Sense they were still friends and still went to movies together. 

After each movie in the series, Demme would walk to the front of the theater and lead a discussion about what we’d just seen. He went back and forth with audience members as if they came to the movie together, and in a way they did. Going to more and more of his screenings these discussions were as big an attraction as the movies themselves. I was a teenager, but one of the great American directors took my opinion as seriously as anyone elses. The best of these was after Kelly Reicahrdt’s first film River of Grass, about a woman on the run after she believes she committed murder, not knowing her bullet missed and the intended victim oblivious to the whole thing. It’s a scrappy little crime movie with some nice comic moments throughout. During the discussion I compared it to Raising Arizona and he shot up, pointed at me and exclaimed “Yes!” the way you do when someone says the exact thought on the tip of your tongue. I went on to say how while the movie was very funny, different pockets of the audience laughed at different times. “And when I first saw it nobody laughed,” he said. “Isn’t that great?”

Going to many of these over the years it became clear that he didn’t just love movies, he loved the movies. He so enjoyed the theatrical experience he created a program where he can share that experience with everyday people. Even if he showed a sad movie like Au Hasrad Balthazar he still smiled knowing he got to show people Au Hasard Balthazar.

Through my entire time at college I kept up with the Burns’ schedule, picking out the screenings I’d go to if I were back home. It became something I checked daily as a nice little way to daydream. I’d hope an interesting screening would line up with a break from school and I’d have a reason to go there again.

With a month left in my senior year these daydreams provided a nice distraction from the end of the college experience. Like most young people about to get a liberal arts degree, I focused more on my regrets than my accomplishments. I didn’t want it to end. There was still so much left to do, but I’d comfort myself knowing a whole summer of Burns screenings awaited me back home. And then the news broke that Jonathan Demme had just passed away.

It broke me. I ran from the kitchen to my bed and everything just poured out. There were small things like never going swimming in any of Ithaca’s gorges, to bigger things like knowing that after the next month I may never see some of my best friends ever again. And I cried over him. Celebrity deaths feel abstract because Prince or Tom Petty feel more like myths than people. The morning that Bowie died my immediate reaction was “No he didn’t.” It hadn’t ever occurred to me that David Bowie was mortal. But Jonathan Demme was real. Even if I only vaguely knew him, I knew him. I spoke with him. He made me feel smart and important and that my opinions mattered. He taught me that you can multiply your own joy by sharing it with others. And now he was gone. I didn’t even know he was sick. Nobody knew really, outside of family and a few close friends.

When a public figure dies grieving is done publicly and collectively. Social media lights up with fans sharing chance encounters with these magical people and heartfelt posts about how much their work meant to them. I intended to finish and publish this piece on Valentine’s Day but I got the news that the singer Sir Ari Gold, my cousin, died after a long struggle with leukemia. Although his death did not come as a surprise the disappearance of hope that someone sick might get better is never easy. He created the podcast A Kiki from the Cancer Ward to detail his cancer treatment, and perhaps selfishly I never listened to it. I didn’t want to confront how bad he really was. It allowed that hope to keep going for as long as it did. But now I have hours of recordings of his voice I get to listen to for the first time. I guess that’s an upside to being a public figure. Even when you go you’re never truly gone.

When public and private grief collide you get to see what that person meant nto just to your circle, but what they meant to the world. A year after Demme passed, Mary Steenburgen went on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast and mentioned how she still hadn’t wrapped her head around his death. Apparently the relationship he had with David Byrne he had with everyone he worked with. He loved people and he loved movies and he loved talking to people about movies. That sentiment comes across in all his movies. Even in Silence of the Lambs, side characters played by Scott Glenn or Kasi Lemmons or Frankie Faison are given these nice little moments where they get to shine. This is perhaps clearest in Something Wild, his screwball comedy that’s just overflowing with life.

I first saw Something Wild at the Burns during the summer of 2014, where they showed a retrospective of his work in celebration of his 70th birthday. He’d asked the band The Feelies, who appear in the film, if they’d be willing to play a small concert afterwards. And so during the closing credits The Feelies started setting up. Going to concerts and movies are my two favorite things in the world and I didn’t even have to leave the room.

It was my second night in a row at the Burns. The night before they had screened The Silence of the Lambs and the four of us went as a family. After the movie and the Q&A my parents introduced themselves and he was touched that his movie got to play even a small part in their love story. Watching the three of them speak gave me a chance to zoom out and see my life for the full circle it had become. I wondered if one of the older couples there that night had also seen it together on opening weekend. I wondered if couples went that night as a date, embarking on a love story of their own. All thanks to a scary movie about serial killers that came out on Valentine’s Day.