In Defense of Moviegoing
We’re smaller than the silver screen and always will be. Let’s appreciate the view.
It is New York before the plague. After an unremarkable day at the office, I don’t yet want to go home. I eat a burrito bowl while sitting on a window-facing stool at Chipotle, daring pedestrians to look at me. Then, instead of walking the two blocks north to descend underground with the rest of them, I walk a few blocks south, through the rain, to see Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory at a chain cinema in midtown. The choice of film isn’t premeditated; I discover it only by checking the listings on my phone.
A yellow caution sign stands in the wet lobby, holding a weak middle split. There’s already a line. When it’s my turn at the counter, the two young employees take their time in wrapping up their banter before selling me a ticket for eighteen dollars and zero cents.
The ticket, freshly printed, is warm in my hands. Instinctively, I bend it at the perforation. I walk past a salesman in the lobby imploring me to switch to “clean energy.” At the escalators, a man holding a flashlight fishes superficially through my backpack before allowing me to head up.
I consider buying popcorn on the second floor, then see a couple walk by with a jumbo tub smothered in nuclear juice (“butter”), and my stomach decides against it. I fork from the stream of people heading into the theater playing Joker. My theater is one of the small ones. I saunter up the aisle and find a seat with a tolerable number of defects. I get lost in the trivia and the jaunty music. Every so often, an old lady wanders into the theater, squints through thick glasses up at the rows of seats, then wanders back out. I turn off my phone. By the time the movie starts, I am one of only six people seated, facing the screen.
Hours later, after I’ve left the theater, boarded the subway, and made it back into my bed, it’s those five other strangers I think about, scattered across the theater, no two of us even superficially alike. I think about how all six of us remained seated through most of the end credits, as if we’d agreed that one of us getting up to leave would break the spell for the other five, and that that would be unforgivable. I fall asleep, seeing Antonio Banderas’s face in my dreams, gracefully middle-aged, as his former lover — married now, with kids — walks away from the doorframe of his apartment.
To some, this is moviegoing at its best, worst, and most mundane. A communal, revelatory experience. Yes, the ticket prices are exorbitant. Yes, the popcorn is laughably close to costing a penny per kernel. Yes, there is always that notorious strand of hair that needs to be plucked from your seat. But when, as on that rainy day in New York, all the tedium has been endured, when the theater darkens and your peripheral vision dissolves and the anodyne Coca-Cola ad with the self-consciously diverse cast is over and the actual film begins… well, I just don’t think there’s anything like it.
There is nothing like watching human faces many walls tall. There is nothing like watching them together, with strangers, in silence, in public. The cinema is a refuge from the all-too-real reality of living one’s life. It’s a place for wakeful dreaming, for being with other people without really being “with” them, for being alone with one’s thoughts and feelings without really being “alone.” It’s one of the last accessible public venues, next to live comedy clubs and Shakespeare in the Park, for collectively affirming the value of art in our culture.
I admit: the economics are challenging. With its rising costs, particularly for families, going to the movies is quickly being viewed too much like opera, something privileged and disconnected from the masses, yet at the same time being viewed as an extravagant commodity (“TV in public”). On one hand, more visual content, from more diverse creators, is being produced now than at any other time. On the other hand, much of it is terrible (or at least “ambient”), and all of it is still disturbingly thought of as “content.”
I can’t untie all these knots (perhaps in a more rigorous future post, I’ll try). I just know that public cinema is a singular experience. It’s a complement to the wonders of on-demand streaming, not a substitute. It encourages us to adopt a unique demeanor; we sit, all of us, facing the same direction, without distractions, connected to an invisible shared organ hanging in the air (the one that allows us to palpably “feel” squeamishness or fear or heartbreak in a crowd), watching giant bodies interact with other giant bodies within giant environments. There is no other experience of art that so vividly, so mysteriously, so sensationally illuminates the subjective experience of the other, the other’s experience of experiencing.
Perhaps you’re still unconvinced. But you know who “gets it”? One of my favorite groups of moviegoers: “tissue ladies.” These are the old ladies you see at more obscure films, at independent cinemas targeted at hipsters and retirees. I call them “tissue ladies” because, in my experience, they’re always sniffling, clutching tissues in their bony hands, always fishing through their purses, passing lozenges to each other in slow motion. I love these ladies. They show up at movies like Pain and Glory. They give them a chance. These are some of the most traditional, scandalizable people (sometimes they exit the theater and I overhear them croak adorable comments to one another about how they felt “the sex scenes were unnecessary”), but there’s a purity to them. They don’t look at their damn phones (possibly because they don’t fully know how to use them), and they’re willing (despite their proximity to extinction) to give movies time. They recognize the authority of the big screen. They allow movies to teach them. Despite what they say, I sense that tissue ladies are profoundly open to the transgressive possibilities of cinema, and crave them.
Those lovable ladies stir one final thought. In 1896, the Lumière brothers, inventors of the cinematograph, screened one of their films showing a train pulling into a station (toward the camera), and, as the myth goes, the audience screamed and ran to the back of the theater, terrified of being bulldozed. Apocryphal or not, the story evokes a purity that’s common to both the tissue ladies and that 19th century audience. It’s a purity that still inheres in cinephiles around the world. It’s a purity that reflects natural awe and enchantment, and which raises interesting questions: What in our culture still holds that level of enchantment for us? mRNA vaccines? The ability to see Saturn and Jupiter together in the night sky every few hundred years? I wonder.
On the flip side, what are we passively ceding to the realm of disenchantment? How much are we allowing to become grey without a fight? And is it truly because of some unassailable techno-utopian argument that convinces us that streaming is the future, the sole future, and nothing but the future? Or have we, on some level, cultivated a diffuse apathy, disguised as hip modernity, that renders us unwilling and unable to identify and defend that which we still hold to be enchanting?
I say that moviegoing remains a powerfully enchanting experience and deserves more willful moviegoers. We’re smaller than the silver screen and always will be. Let’s appreciate the view.
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