Committing

On why I go to movie theaters

Last week I saw The Secret Agent, a political thriller set in Brazil during what the film describes as “a time of great mischief,” aka the era military dictatorship. It follows Marcel, a university researcher forced into hiding by a government-connected industrialist who wants him dead for reasons that add up to basically nothing. The researcher has returned to his hometown of Recife, where he holes up in a hotel for political refugees and waits out the four days it will take for a fake passport to arrive, so that he and his young son can flee the country.

This is the through line of the movie, but there is a lot else going on, an entire epic novel’s worth of wonderful and sketchy and hapless people just trying to get through the day. It’s Carnival, and there’s much dancing in the streets, along with idle speculation on how high the death toll will be this year. A fake police station is set up, complete with fake file clerks, for a wealthy woman’s convenience. At the cinema, Marcel’s projectionist father-in-law screens Jaws and The Omen to large crowds as Marcel’s son lobbies ceaselessly and fruitlessly to be allowed to see the former. A corrupt police chief and his weird sons scramble to deal with a real shark that swallowed a human leg, a leg that later comes to life (sort of) and…well, you should see for yourself. Marcel has a dalliance with a fellow refugee, a dentist who has somehow also run afoul of the regime. His cheerfully anarchic octogenarian landlady tells tales of her youth in Italy under a different regime.

I haven’t even gotten to the Angolans, Clovis the gay teenager, or the present-day part where a historian visits a blood bank. But you get the gist.

The Secret Agent is probably too shaggy to call a masterpiece, with that term’s implications of perfect artistic control. But it’s a stunning, electric achievement all the same. I staggered out feeling moved, exhilarated, fortified, and even slightly disappointed by the relative colorlessness and banality of my real world. (It’s tempting to draw glib comparisons between 1970s Brazil and America under Donald, but I think it would be lazy and intellectually dishonest. We aren’t there, at least not yet.) When I make my 2025 Top Ten list later this month, it will be in either first or second position. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t end up in my top ten for the entire decade.

Also, if I’d been watching at home, I doubt I would have made it through the first hour.

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I have long been an evangelist for seeing movies in the theater. As recently as this year, I’ve been labeled an ableist Covid denialist for this, so let me try to get out in front of that now: any way you personally choose to watch movies is fine with me. I am aware that viruses circulate more easily in enclosed spaces, especially crowded ones, and that people have widely varying levels of risk tolerance for widely varying reasons that are none of my business. I also know that moviegoing is expensive, that other audience members can be rude, and so on. These things aren’t true for me, since I generally attend lightly populated matinees and if I think I’m going to need a snack or drink, I usually bring my own from home.¹

But if they’re true for you, or you just don’t fucking feel like leaving the house, great! I don’t know what’s best for you. I only know that seeing movies in the theater is best for me. And it’s not for the reasons you might think. It’s not because I think movies need to be seen with a bunch of strangers, although an engaged crowd can enhance the experience sometimes. And it’s not because a big screen is that much more visually impressive than a state-of-the-art TV. My own TV is middling in size and quality and movies look just fine on it, though I should note that the whole “vinyl is way better than digital” music trend was also lost on me; I’m just not all that picky. There are occasional movies—Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is one—that combine images and sound in such specific ways that I think they must be seen theatrically for the full intended effect. But in general, I’m not a sticker based on technical details.

I’m a stickler because I know my own brain. Specifically I know that while it’s a brilliant one in some ways, it sucks in other ways that are the shadow side of the brilliant ones. It’s highly associative, curious about a huge spectrum of topics, and interested in following an idea to its end point and/or origin. Which is great! Except when it’s not, which includes times I’m watching a movie that demands something from me, whether it’s patience or close attention or emotional fortitude. In those cases, going to the theater is often my only hope. Only in a dark, single-purpose environment can I truly commit to the film.

And thank God I know this about myself, because some hard-to-commit-to movies are among the very best I’ve ever seen. The Secret Agent is a perfect example. Though it’s categorized in the press (and here) as a political thriller, the “thriller” part is kinda stretching things. It wanders. It gets interested in side characters who don’t have a lot to do with the main arc. In some ways, it’s more of a hangout film about the ways living under fascism alters your daily life and habits of speech in ways you may not even consciously realize. And have I mentioned that it’s nearly three hours long, and feels it? Even in the theater, I spent the first hour thinking “this is great, but where is it going?” By hour two, I understood that by asking that question I was missing the point, and I was able to fully relax into the experience.

On my sofa, staring at a small screen, I doubt I would have made it that far. Sure, maybe I’d keep watching in theory, but I’d also be texting and playing with my dog and taking pee breaks without bothering to pause. Or I’d stop midway, telling myself I’d watch the rest tomorrow, and never do it. That’s roughly how I treated my at-home viewing of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, a 2021 period Western that plays for all the world like a psychodrama about toxic masculinity until the last puzzle piece clicks into place and you realize you’ve actually been watching a vicious little thriller all along. I suspect I still would have felt impatient if I’d seen it in a theater, but at least Campion’s austerely striking compositions and the actors’ faces would have held me to an extent they didn’t at home. I’ll always hold a personal grudge against Covid for robbing me of the chance to see it properly.

So that’s why I annoy people with my love for movie theaters. Because they help me to absorb a film on its own pace and terms, versus demanding it catch up to mine. All I have to do is get myself into a seat, and nine-point-five times out of ten, the room will work its magic. And sometimes I’ll emerge at least a little bit transformed.

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Here are five other fairly recent films I adore that I almost definitely would have flaked on at home:
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021). This is the one where Tilda Swinton wanders around Colombia for 2+ hours trying to identify a sound she heard. I know some sophisticated film lovers who saw it under ideal conditions and still found it interminable, and I can see why. But for me, it’s the closest thing to an out-of-body experience I’ve ever had with a film; it made me viscerally experience the act of listening in an entirely new way. (Honestly, it slightly freaked me out.) Like The Zone of Interest, I think this film almost has to be seen theatrically, unless you have an extraordinarily immersive home sound system, which I decidedly do not.

Columbus (Kogonade, 2017). A famed scholar of architecture falls into a coma during a speaking tour stop in Columbus, Indiana, a real-life hub for Modernist buildings. Jin, his emotionally distant, Seoul-based son, arrives to look after his father and strikes up a platonic friendship with Casey, a young local who longs to study architecture herself, but can’t seem to launch herself out of small-town life. Columbus is a wonderfully accessible, warmhearted drama of normal length; there’s nothing weird about it that demands special commitment, except for the fact that Jin and Casey spend a lot of their time together standing in front of various buildings and talking about them, and the way they see those buildings is critical to our understanding of the characters and their choices. I’ve since seen Columbus on a small screen and thoroughly enjoyed it; it’s an easy movie to love. But the grandeur of Columbus, Indiana, and the way the movie valorizes the entire idea of small Midwestern cities, lands much harder when you’re seeing what Jin and Casey see at something closer to real-life scale.

Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, 2016). I would never have even given this one a chance at home, because most of my Jarmusch viewing up to that point had been on the small screen, and 90% of it bored me to death. Well, thank God for the brutal heat wave that drove me into a Tacoma theater to see Paterson, because it enthralled me. In its droll, slightly surreal way, it’s the most realistic film I’ve ever seen about the process and daily life of a writer. Which makes it inherently slow and boring, lolsob. But in a good way! I still wouldn’t call Jarmusch an all-time fave, but I get him (and especially his humor) now, and seek out his films. All because I finally put myself in a room with one, and with nothing else to pay attention to.

Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002). Morvern’s boyfriend kills himself on Christmas Day. She wakes up, finds his body, looks at it for quite a while, then goes out to party. Later on she, um, disposes of it herself, then flies to Ibiza to party some more. At some point along the way, she gets a book deal using his unpublished manuscript. It’s not clear exactly when, because this movie is not particularly interested in linear time. Or in cause and effect, come to think of it. Morvern, who barely speaks, is played by Samantha Morton at her most ethereally impassive. It should all be artily annoying, and it kind of is, but it’s also a mesmerizing tone poem of grief, reinvention, and perhaps a touch of psychopathy. I had a cold when I saw it and was very very hopped up on OTC meds, and honestly, I think they helped me to get on Morvern’s wavelength.

A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017). This one is low-key notorious as the movie in which grieving widow Rooney Mara eats an entire pie in real time. There were maybe ten other people in the audience I saw this with, and half of them got up and left during or immediately after that scene. (And they weren’t even there as a group!) Can I be frank? I hate people like that. Oh boo hoo, was spending four and a half minutes watching someone eat pie just so unbearably dull that you were forced to flee a film you presumably came all the way to the theater on purpose to see? In describing his intentions, director David Lowery said: “Hopefully, two minutes into it, when people realize it’s still going on, the anticipation just evaporates and you just exist in that scene the way it was intended to function.” That’s more or less how I experienced it, as a surrendering to the movie’s own terms. I mean, 4.5 minutes is a long time by cinematic standards, and pie-eating is not inherently interesting. But so what? I assumed Lowery had his reasons for putting me through it—maybe to put me into the mental state of a young woman who finds the acute stage of grief just as grindingly slow. And unlike those who left, I was rewarded with a second half that takes a leap I never saw coming and moves with almost dizzying speed through thousands of years of time.

1. Sugar-free ginger ale and a bag of freeze-dried raspberries from Trader Joe’s, if you must know, though hard-boiled eggs with a Ziplock for the shells are also a decent leave-no-trace option. And if the theater doesn’t sell coffee, in cold weather I have zero qualms about bringing my own in a lidded Yeti inside another Ziplock. Dear theaters: I know concession money is important to you, and I promise to spend it just as soon as you start carrying something I want to eat.)