In defense of the movie theatre

Last Saturday, I embarked on a journey to Kendall Square Cinema. After maneuvering the rain, underground traffic and a hike in Uber fares, I found myself rather comfortable with my jacket slung over the back of my reclining chair and a greasy brown bag of popcorn teetering on my lap. As my eyes were glued to the colossal screen, quite the acclimation process from my measly laptop, I actually began to get quite flustered. "Love Is Strange" (2014), an expose of an elderly gay couple struggling to find a home after a loss of income, certainly attracted an older crowd that liked to gasp, gab and chew rather loudly. The woman directly behind me impressed me with her ability to project her whispers in such a way that somehow I could hear every comment she was making, but her husband kept having to ask her to repeat herself. Again and again and again. I knew I was being a brat but the movie was so intimate and captivating that these breaks in my attention were a real bummer. Yet strangely, it was in my peak frustration that I found inspiration for this week’s column.

It only takes half an hour in any Tufts film class to realize that the point of cinema is subject to hot debate and varies depending on who is creating the film. Yet the one ironic overlap between Hollywood blockbusters and cinematic, revolutionary calls to action is that they are both created for the collective. Film may be the only terrain where its interpersonal consumption is just as integral as its intrapersonal experience. In the theatre, we process films in two layers: as the individual and as the microcosm of society that found itself in the same theatre at the same moment in time. We are fed and influenced, no matter how lightly, by the laughs and gasps and tears of those around us. While I may have been aggravated by that woman’s comments, it was in my aggravation that I smiled, shrugged my shoulders and realized this is just part of the joint experience, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I wish I could say that I am not trying to romanticize the theatre, but I am, because the theatre is astoundingly romantic. Sure, there is a guilty pleasure in wrapping your sweatpant-clad self in layers and layers of covers, cuddled upright on the corner of the Tufts bed in your dorm room, using your crappy Apple headphones to hear the script that someone spent months creating, the carefully selected soundtrack and the tediously perfected inflection of the actors. I am not trying to instill guilt, just to enhance appreciation. With movies, just like with anything in life, you get out only as much as you put in, and if there was any time to drop a mom-like cliche bomb it was probably then. When you make this entertainment -- the most enhanced visual storytelling of our modern age -- into an event, then you find yourself with people who are also committed to the collective experience well beyond the bare bones of the film. You find yourself not only more invested, but more connected. You find yourself a little bit more part of a whole and your experience much less individual, although that part is never lost.

I guess my defense for the cinema is not really about the cinema at all; it’s about community. A community that extends beyond the people you know and instead is rooted in this company of strangers, strangers who miraculously become considerably less strange as the final scene cuts, the screen goes black and the credits begin to roll.