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Why I’m a Prick
On watching movies properly
I love watching movies, as my readers would know. One thing I’ve realised is that a lot of people don’t really watch movies, in the fullest sense of the word: they glance at them sideways, take note of them, are idly, distractedly entertained.
I’m a person that shushes my family while watching a movie. I insist on closing all the doors and curtains, on placing cellphones face down. I hate it when people go to the bathroom and I have to pause (invariably, the remote ends up in my hands). I do not watch half a film; I tend to say “film” instead of “movie”. I am, in a word, a bit of a prick when it comes to movie night.
What motivates my tyranny? Simply that I take movies seriously. Like a novel or a painting, a film demands our full engagement. The difference is, a movie is an uninterrupted experience — we cannot lavish our attention in drips and drabs. We must watch it fully, or not at all.
Any film worth watching is designed to be continuous and cumulative. If you pause for 10 minutes in the middle of a film, you are not really watching the movie that the director intended. You’ve dissipated the tension they tried to build, have lost touch with the emotion that is so delicately conjured, and interrupted the dawning of total immersion. Recovery is difficult, sometimes impossible — if the…
