Before Sunrise (1995) follows two strangers, played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who meet on a train, get off in Vienna, and spend a night walking and talking. They play pinball in a bar for about five minutes, sharing a single machine while drinking beers and alternating turns. The physical actions around the machine punctuate conversation, enabling role shifts between player and observer and prompting personal revelations. A struck line about breakups underscores emotional power imbalances and memory. The pinball machine's sounds and motion break conversational stasis and deepen the scene's intimacy and texture.
Pinball is the most romantic of arcade games. A bit of my belief in this comes from real life, but most of it comes from the movie Before Sunrise, which I spent my late teens and early 20s watching over and over alongside anyone with whom I shared an emotional connection. It's a 1995 Richard Linklater work, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, about two strangers who meet on a train in Europe, get off together in Vienna, and spend a night walking around.
They play pinball in a bar for about five minutes on screen, sharing a machine while they drink their beers. Every time one of them loses a ball, they do a very cute switch where the one at the wheel surrenders their position to go lean on the side of the machine, and vice versa. Each reveals something about their past while they do-the confusing intensity of Delpy's feelings for a bad ex-boyfriend and Hawke's petulant frustration at having traveled all the way to Europe just to get dumped. One line he says has never really left my head, about the unavoidable emotional power imbalances on our journey to find people we like: "You know what's the worst thing about somebody breaking up with you? It's when you remember how little you thought about the people you broke up with, and you realize that is how little they're thinking about you."
The pinball machine provides a subtle but valuable boost to this scene. There are some diegetic beeps and boops, which adds to its texture, but in a visual medium it's also a solution to the static nature of your average conversation. It's like when a TV show has characters walk and talk at the same time to provide the illusion of action, but much, much better. The ball dropping below the flippers provides an excuse for the two actors to periodically switch their roles-player to observer and bac
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