Be on the lookout for the November and December issues of The Blue & White, on campus this week everywhere you look in Butler. As we always have done, Bwog will honor our heritage/amorous affair with our mother magazine by posting features from the upcoming issue. Below, Tom Humphreys asks a very important question: who chooses the movies at 1020?

Illustration by Louise McCune

A man walks into a bar in which a bad movie plays on several TV screens. Thirty minutes later, he freezes. “Wait…why are they playing Donnie Darko? Wait, wait, wait, that’s not Donnie Darko…why are they playing…the sequel to Donnie Darko?” This man is at 1020, where taste is relative and, perhaps, ultimately irrelevant.

The second favorite Morningside dive bar of the staff of The Blue & White (Tap-a-Keg takes the cake), 1020 has a tradition of favoring, shall we say, unorthodox cinema. Except for special occasions, the bar shuns traditional options such as Top Gun or baseball. Whether screening the atypically cerebral (Mulholland Drive), the disturbingly grim (Monster), the grotesquely violent (District 9), or the shockingly insignificant (Cuba Gooding Jr.’s direct-to-DVD works), patrons have come to expect, and even revere, the not-quite-irony of the screenings and their environs.

The reason turns out not to be as sinister as might be feared. Friday night bartender Thalia Dergham, CC ’12, explains, “Nobody ‘picks’ the movies at 1020. We simply pick a channel at the beginning of the night and usually leave it on unless something particularly disturbing comes on, even though usually when that happens we leave it on anyways.” She recalls Silence of the Lambs and The Lovely Bones as two—ahem—favorites. “The bartenders usually don’t know what is play- ing, because their backs are turned to the screens, so it’s a bit useless to ask them,” Dergham explains with a laugh. It appears that the randomness of 1020’s lineup is, indeed, random.

Just because the selection is governed by serendipity doesn’t mean that there is no accountability. 1020 lore has it that one Wednesday this semester, an uncensored porn movie ran for almost ten minutes. Eventually a middle-aged woman inquired at the bar. “I just wanted to see how long it would last,” the bartender replied.

Editors note: Last night Bwog was intrigued and disturbed by the insane samurai movie playing at 1020. If you have any information about this film, please email tips@bwog.com