An Ode to the Movie Theater
Every Tuesday evening for the last 4 weeks, I’ve been at the movie theatres. Discounted Tuesdays have unexpectedly become a vital part of my August survival guide and anyone who knows me would be shocked to discover I now actively look forward to sitting still for a 2-hour-long emotional rollercoaster. Lately, the group chats have been all about spontaneous film suggestions and discourse, and I dare say it might be a newfound hobby of mine.
For context, my earliest memory of watching a movie dates back to when I was a child and my parents were watching Titanic on our TV late at night. I lingered behind the sofa, momentarily captured by the screen, only to be wracked with fear and anxiety when the ship started splitting in two. I have never finished that movie. 8-year-old me was terrified. The same went for nearly every single Disney movie ever because the villains were too much for me. I was 19 when I even came to know what the plot of The Lion King was.
Most of the movies I did watch growing up were on the airplane, usually by proxy of my parents' screens while some light-hearted comedy sitcom situation was playing mindlessly on mine. That’s how I watched Inception by the way, through the airplane screen, on a diagonal just like how Christopher Nolan intended.
I have always found movies to be daunting. Two plus hours of complete emotional investment that takes you through basically the entire trajectory of a life, condensed into a neat little intro, climax, and resolution. If you watch four movies in a day, you have witnessed four different universes, souls, lives, experiences, beginnings, and endings. Not because a movie literally takes you through consciousness, but the two hours you spend empathizing and immersing yourself in a fictional reality is the only glimpse you will ever have of that world, marking the life and death of that specific story. It’s the entire human (or alien) experience in one sitting and I frankly, do not have the emotional bandwidth to partake in that adventure much less stay alert in the one i’m actually living. And when I do watch a film or two, it’s either a) because I’m physically with someone who will be by my side for the entire duration or b) I'm sat at the theatres.
Recently, I’ve realized that this emotional pull is exactly why people become so passionate about movies - why some call themselves cinephiles. I’ve always been an emotional person: highly sensitive, quick to react, and capable of empathizing almost to a fault. Two-thirds through the toughest year of my life, and I finally find myself so desperate to escape my reality that the two hours of complete and utter emotional investment into a man-made world have now become my oasis in a torched desert. The volatile and delicate nature of my emotional and mental state has rendered me so porous to the affective power of movies that I will openly cry at any sign of hope portrayed during the film. And how can I not, when every beat, every nod, every twitch of the eye is timed perfectly to maximize the scene’s emotional intent. The walls of my neurons are so permeable that watching the end scene of Fantastic Four, where the flouncy, underestimated blonde girl finds a way to beat the big ol' bad guy, genuinely brought tears to my eyes.
I get it now, the feeling of being swept into a story that’s either so far from your own life it offers pure escape, or so close to your circumstances it reminds you you’re not the only one. And sometimes it’s something else entirely: the ideal, a world you can only dream of. For a couple of hours, you get to believe you’re there, that you’ve made it, that you’re right there with the character, that their wins are your wins, their losses are your losses, just long enough for the sun to set in real life and leaving the theatre feels like the entering of a new world. Like you truly escaped into an alternate dimension, like the real world genuinely ceased to exist.