In one of my favourite books, Too Much & Not the Mood, Durga Chew Bose describes the experience of going to the movies in an essay titled ‘Summer Pictures’. She insists on calling it ‘the movies’ to preserve a sense of experience that is almost ritualistic. She describes it as an experience where she sits motionless for two hours, but by the end of it is bubbling with energy. Almost as if the story and the colours have passed through her from the screen and the body is experiencing a sense of newness. On borrowed bravado from a story that is not yours. I remember feeling what comes closest to envy when I first read the piece. I tried to interrogate the reasons for it. Most of the time the answer comes out to be the Internet, like most things.
Having been raised on the Internet, everything I do is solitary. Not that what Bose describes is not a solitary experience. She talks about the movies as an experience of ‘private bliss’ when the lights go dim. But her description of this private bliss suggests that the experience is the sum of something more than the alone-ness of it. Something about being in a room with strangers who are all there for the purpose of watching a story unfold. You have to respect the sanctity of it. Maintain your silence and look at what is being played. The space demands a sincerity that you are ready to hand out. After all, you paid for the ticket with real money. It is not playing from a family subscription on Netflix.On the internet, I can put on a movie on my MacBook and have it run in the background. I chew on the remaining bits of chips through sticky fingers. On the side, I am scrolling. I miss a lot of the dialogue. So I catch myself replaying the scenes often. I still cannot fully connect the dots. I have missed so much of the plot. The replay starts feeling violent after a while. I am taking the story being told and bending it to my will, subjecting it to the pathetic state of my attention span. By the end of it, I have crawled further and further into my bed with my phone still in my hand. I tell a friend I could not finish the movie and we laugh about it.
This indifference to the plot and lazy attempts at consuming art repackaged into convenient consumption models is what I locate as the source of my envy. Is this what ‘the movies’ could be for me? I have not witnessed a summer day where I walk to the movies and buy a bucket of hot popcorn with a friend and we lose ourselves on recliner seats for a while. This feels inauthentic to say–I have done the occasional purchase of a ticket and consumed a movie or two. But Bose is talking about something entirely different. ‘The movies’ as a space where you are present in community, with your solitude intact. A group of strangers in front of a screen. Two hours and then you come out new. You talk to a friend about it. How is the world new for you now that you know this story? Walk with me while the sun goes down and please tell me if you thought the performance was weak by the end but the message broke your heart. I find no place in this city where I can walk to the movies and experience community in that way. Is envy just anger that the Internet has meant that I do everything alone from my bed and hope that the world catches me somewhere in the algorithm? Like this essay? I don’t want to think about it much.
One of my earliest memories of what comes close to Bose’s ‘the movies’ is when I was a child. I watched Queen with my family. To this day we laugh about how I asked everyone what certain ‘explicit’ scenes in the movie mean. At the movies my innocence was an inconvenience of sorts for people who had to ensure the world was still all flowers and bees for me. It stayed stuck in our memory. We cannot watch Queen again without talking about it. I also remember watching Talash with my family. At one point, when the plot reveals itself and the audience finds that Kareena Kapoor’s character has been the ghost throughout, I jumped two seats to land on my mother’s lap. She laughs about it often. I am 23 and the day has been at least a decade gone. But that day is frozen in time. If I think hard enough I am jumping two seats and in the drive back we are giggling about it. While watching Laapata Ladies with my family at the movies, I worried if I would start crying too much and would be asked to be quiet because of loud sniffing. But at some point I looked to my right and saw my father bawl. I had a new entry point into his world. I haven’t seen him cry much. But I knew then that this story about the way a woman’s world breaks found a way to break him too. I knew more about his heart and something shifted in the way I saw him. I envy Bose because these experiences are the extent of what ‘the movies’ have been for me. I now tell my mother about the movies I watched the next day. I give her Netflix recommendations and we both tell each other days later what stayed. She does not get to see me trembling, trying to find her because I was scared. We do not get to sit together and walk out with that sense of newness together. I will probably never get to sit with my father again and get to know what his heart is made of without him having to tell it to me. Will we ever walk out of an audio visual again having known each other more with something to joke about for years on end? I don’t know so I write about it in my notes app on my phone in my bed.
On the Internet everything I experience, I do it alone. ‘The movies’ for me are as private as it gets. I close my curtains because I do not want to be seen when I am sitting crawled up with my laptop stuck somewhere between my thighs. I take breaks to scroll and the message of the story reaches me in bits. So it never really does reach me. There is no summer where I get to experience ‘the movies’ as a ritual. There is no sense of community in my consumption. Sometimes it feels like I consume them like a bag of chips. All to myself, greedily in the way I want. I disregard what I don’t want. The convenience makes the gluttony uglier. I love the Internet until I think of what it has taken from me. Or what I have let it take from me. What is scarier is that the Internet has made me a very insincere audience. I bend all of it to my will and don’t think about it twice. While pausing a movie to scroll through Instagram is not worth something having a crisis of faith over, I think I have been trying to say something larger here. You spend enough time on the WWW and you think the world is what you want it to be. But at ‘the movies’ it comes to you as it is. A story, in its full glory, asks you to look at it and let it pass through you. You are strictly the audience. You have no control and must trust that this time will be worth it by the end of it. On the Internet I have lost the art of being a good audience. In the name of convenience I have become insincere in my consumption. Will I be moved by the message again? Can I even catch the message?
