Throughout “Behind the Blue Curtain” by Steven Millhauser, the reader, along with the unnamed main character, feels as though they are seeing things better left unseen. Speaking in the past tense, the narrator describes a Saturday in his childhood when he was first allowed to go to the movies alone. His first description of the movie theaters, which he gives before he describes his first solo trip, is glamorous and romanticized:
“I savored every stage: the hot summer sunshine outside the ticket booth, the indoor sunlight of the entranceway with its glass-covered Coming Attractions and its velvet rope, the artificial glow of the red lobby, the mysterious dusk of the theater, the swift decisive darkening—and between the blue folds of the curtain, slowly parting, the sudden shining of the screen.”
His father explains to him that the films they see are actually still pictures, which is the first hint that things aren’t as pretty as they seem. The narrator, despite grasping, on some level, the gravity of what his father was trying to tell him, ignores reality and describes the movie stars as on a pedestal, similar to how he described the theater.
“The beings behind the curtain had nothing to do with childish flip-books or the long strips of grey negatives hanging in the kitchen from silver clips. They led their exalted lives beyond mine, in some other realm entirely, shining, desirably, impenetrable.”
This passage foreshadows the later events of the story, in which the narrator, instead of meeting his father after the movie, stays in the theater and peeks behind the blue curtain to find a different reality. He finds himself miniaturized among giant movie stars that appear to ignore him until he realizes that his presence “inspired them to be more grandly themselves. For weren’t they secretly in need of being watched, these lofty creatures, did they not become themselves through the act of being witnessed?”
The narrator follows one movie star in particular, and when she faints as part of a dramatic monologue, he touches her corset, expecting to feel “satiny material.” Instead, he falls through her, and, for an instant, becomes her. As her, all he experiences is “a sensation of whiteness or darkness, a white darkness.” He finds in the most intimate way that, when not seen, she doesn’t exist.
The entire “land of the movie stars” scene is particularly striking because in it, the young narrator is exposed to the reality of the world in a completely unreal way. His earlier description of the movie theater as a place of mystery and wonder clashes with his new understanding that the movie stars don’t exist in real life, and that the theater is run like any other business. Surrounding the fantastic scene of the giant movie stars are smaller slices of reality that the narrator describes in passing: a janitor mopping up the bathroom, an usher sweeping away discarded candy wrappers and ashes, and the candy counter abandoned, lit only by a single bulb.
At the end of the story, the narrator rushes to his father, disturbed by what he’d seen. He doesn’t seem to understand that, now that he’s lifted the blue curtain, he can’t get back the innocence he had just hours before.