The first piece I had published in my high school’s magazine was an adaptation of a letter I sent to Cinemark in 2013, when my friends and I, accustomed to midnight launches for blockbuster films, realized that the Hunger Games sequel had added showtimes as early as 7 p.m. Three years before, at the seventh Harry Potter film’s midnight debut, the same friends and I struggled to secure seats, brushed shoulders with fully costumed witches and wizards, and heard spells cast from the concessions stand to the bathrooms. Now, I lamented, because of the additional screenings—for those skeptical parents and noncommittal fans—Catching Fire’s audience, in the wee hours of Friday, November 20, numbered seven.
This was the first time I remember feeling strongly about the way a film ought to be experienced. I had imagined a full house and vocal audience at Catching Fire, but because of changing release strategies, it didn’t get one. I still count the two-part Harry Potter finale among my favorite films, because of the heightened collective response I witnessed, to a narrative whose stakes had grown inescapable. If you didn’t care about what happened to Harry or Hermione or Ron, you were at home sleeping.
The togetherness that accompanies filmgoing—or which once did—has served as a core argument for the popular movement against streaming, an argument I long found myself repeating. The filmgoing I remember from the first part of this decade could certainly be defined as gatherings, of diligent Oscar pundits and early-evening Scorsese-ians, or rom-com indulgers and venue loyalists. Of those categories, the first still commands crowds—look to the success of Parasite and Jojo Rabbit—as does the last, evidenced by Big Exhibition’s push to distinguish its locations with luxury seating and special programming.
The second category has surrendered to budget offers from Netflix and Amazon (Scorsese’s awards-season stump speech revolves around the assertion that no old-school studio would make The Irishman the way he wanted). As for the third category, we might never again see mid-range performances like that of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, or the spotless movie-star records of the nineties and early two-thousands.
When I think back to American Hustle, which I watched with my mother and father, I remember how the rush of parental permission elevated the impact of that dry-cleaning kiss and microwave-turned-marital-explosion. Was it also the filmgoers around me? I can’t remember them, so I don’t think so. I had for months been anticipating Oz the Great and Powerful, another film from 2013, but it dragged and deflated as James Franco was swallowed by CGI, and the busy theater emptied out in silence at the film’s end. How much do I care about recapturing the joy of South by Southwest premieres like Booksmart, The Highwaymen, and The Art of Self-Defense? I have steered clear of all those films since their wide releases, for fear that the human cacophony now missing from the soundtracks would dull my judgment of each film’s craft.
This inconsistent role played by audience members in a theater has slowly made me rethink my justification for theaters’ relevance. I’ve realized, too, how readily I dive back into certain moments in Marriage Story and The Irishman, by scrolling with the trackpad on my laptop. The immediacy of such focused, isolated readings, repeated as many times as the viewer would like, must represent some vital new aspect of a film’s engineering, or else a template for the coming decade’s developments.
In analyzing, then, what it’s like to watch a film at the Metrograph or the Castro, Lincoln Square or Grauman’s, I’ve decided I consider the buildup and the aftermath, the competing distinction and ambiguity of an establishment. As a filmgoer, should I insist on ignoring distractions—phones, iPads, dishwashers, neighbors—for the film’s duration, as is only fully possible in a theater? As a city dweller, should I venture to the movies or museums or national monuments for the kind of cultural education that benefits my interactions with others, or for that which benefits my peace of mind? These questions are not new, only more urgent, with the attentional bombs dropped by the closing decade’s technology.
My understanding of the cinema as essential—as tactile and mortal—has to do with the push-and-pull of distinction and ambiguity. I need a seat in a theater for time to think, for my thoughts to lock with a sequence, then wander off into the darkness (and wander back). I’ve never liked watching films as much as I’ve liked thinking about the ones I want to make, so I latch onto a frame or conceit and detach it.
What’s beautiful about this process is how definitively it allows films to belong to every viewer. We make note of and forget different moments; we came in varying states of fatigue, emotional distress, indifference. Great films can pull people out of trances, but cannot avoid melding strangely into minds. A theater’s distinction depends on our history with it, the walks to the subway or parking garage, which provide spaces for decompression and routine. A single instance of filmgoing might not be impacted by the environment that frames it; the same is not the case for the collections instances comprise.
One of the paradoxes of the Internet I’ve noticed this decade is its allowance of broader cinematic discourse and simultaneous muddling of discursive quality, a paradox that makes filmgoing more important. American academia, of course, maintains its screening rooms and seminars, but contained exclusively in journalistic criticism is the critic’s hoarse, jaded voice, compromised by short staffing at publications, and the rushed conjecture that follows.
When I started reading reviews, a shift was already taking place, toward grading and ranking, practices that have spurred the success of aggregation sites now crucial to a film’s success. I was wedded to the quantitative practice partly because of my first subscription, Entertainment Weekly, which I received for my tenth birthday, and which still goes so far as to stamp a bold letter on each review, in the vein of high school English papers. Now editors at Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, lacking conclusive opinions from a critic, assign a number to a critic’s words, or worse, a binary designation: “Rotten,” “Fresh.” Worst of all, I check Metacritic daily, Rotten Tomatoes once or twice a week. It’s because I don’t think I have the time, to take a chance on a film without assuring myself that it will be worth two hours. I hate that I tell people that I only watch good movies, but I do—good as judged by a writer in the immediate hours after they watch, hours before the next screening, and the next.
This is why film theory exists at universities, perhaps, because minds change and consensus shifts after months or decades, or, if that hasn’t happened, a few passionate people advocate on a film’s behalf, for its inclusion in a syllabus or retrospective, having come across it accidentally, against their will, having taken a lover’s suggestion, having caught the film playing on a projector in a park in dead July heat. The circumstances shaping filmgoing determine the outcome of filmgoing, unfailingly and inevitably.
“Inevitably” must prove overabundant in the reviews I’ve written, inappropriate in places, but applicable to my conception of the course of film and life, the state of my life as wrapped in cinematic imagery, thrust upon me both with and without my consent, and so determining my deconstructions of the filmgoing I do deliberately conduct. Given my frustration at getting words down now, I don’t know that I will ever really be better at it, but maybe that’s the point—that I continue without expectation, only truth.
Fergus Campbell is a sophomore in Columbia College.