Even with the increasingly astronomical ticket prices and all the ill-mannered half-wits who can’t unplug themselves from their text-messaging gadgets for 90 lousy minutes, I still maintain that the best place to see a movie is in an honest-to-god movie theater. Yes, I have an HDTV and a huge collection of DVDs (and let’s not forget those pathetic old VHS tapes!) and I watch movies at home all the time, but these are really just a pale substitute for what I consider to be the primal cinematic experience., i.e., watching a movie projected onto a screen while sitting in a dark room surrounded by many other fellow humans. And just why do I think that’s so cool?
Because when you’re watching a movie at home, even if you’ve got a few friends over, you can’t possibly replicate the shared electricity generated by several hundred people sitting on the edges of their seats during a chase scene, jumping in fear when the velociraptor attacks, tearing up when Yoda dies, or laughing in unison at the antics of Charlie Chaplin. Movies can be watched in solitude, of course, and that has its pleasures, too (remind me sometime to recount my first viewing of The Silence of the Lambs — all alone in a gradually cooling auditorium in the wee hours of the night), but my strongest, most satisfying movie experiences have always been communal. While movies don’t always generate a strong audience reaction (sadly, most of the time they do not), when they work their magic on a big crowd, and the crowd’s reaction mirrors and amplifies your own emotions… well, it can be a form of genuine transcendence.
That’s my theory, anyhow. The ubiquitous John Scalzi has another one that I think is interesting, too:
So what does the movie theater still offer viewers that you can’t get at home? I’m going to suggest something that I think is counterintuitive: It offers lack of control.
Take WALL-E … My family sat down to watch it the other night, but we came nowhere near close to watching it [un]interrupted all the way through. The phone rang and it was my wife’s mother on the phone; we paused it so she wouldn’t miss something. Then at some point we all decided a bathroom break was in order. Another pause. Later, snacktime. Pause.
…
Contrast this with how I saw WALL-E in the movie theater. Once the film started, it was out of my control: The story unfolded at the pace the filmmaker chose, and the story’s emotional beats came in a rhythm uninterrupted by my personal life and preferences. Short of walking out of the film entirely, I had to take it on its own terms — surrender my will to the story, as it were. As a result, the emotional highs of the story were higher, the funny parts funnier, and the wrenching parts (yes, there are wrenching parts in WALL-E) that much more affecting. In the theater, you are able to approach the movie as a complete work, and as complete experience in itself. How we know WALL-E or any other film is a really good film is by how it makes us feel — which is to say, how much the film sweeps us along and makes us a participant in its story.
Being able to pause and rewind and such is all very cool — they’re part of the reason people like to watch movies at home, and it’s especially fun with science fiction films, because thanks to special effects there’s usually something cool to stare at in the background. … But these features come at a cost: Each pause and skip degrades the actual viewing experience. Each pause and rewind draws you out of the story and makes you aware of the separation between you and what’s going on in the movie, and that keeps you from getting everything you can — or everything the filmmakers hope you can — get out of it. You’re never more aware that you watching a movie than when you’re watching it at home, because you have control over how it plays. The extra bits and the commentary tracks and everything else that comes with DVDs these days are all super cool, but they’re not really “extras”: They’re compensation for what you lose.
Sounds about right to me.
