Shared Experiences

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I never understood these guys who like to go to movies alone. And it’s always guys, never girls – just think about those giggling bathroom visits at restaurants. Girls have this down pat; they know innately that they should do certain things together.

My former roommate, for example, was a guy like this. He’d take off inexplicably for a couple of hours, and I’d only find out after the fact that he’d just seen a new movie that I might or might not have wanted to take in as well. He’d shrug in this exaggerated Generation-X way of his and say, “Oh, I didn’t know if you’d want to see it.” It would never cross his mind to ask if I wanted to go. That kind of thoughtlessness always drove me nuts. But he was also one of those guys who would go to animé features at the local arthouse, something I had no interest in seeing, so maybe this blanket inconsideration was a good thing after all. What kind of animé, you ask? I’m not sure – all I can say is, he spent a lot of time in his room with the door shut, "downloading Japanimation." You can piece it together.

My best movie memories have always been with one or more people, and more often than not in a packed theatre on opening night. For instance, a couple of years ago I went to see that movie Signs, accompanied by a girl I had been seeing for a couple of months. Signs was, I believe, the next movie after The Sixth Sense, the wildly popular “twist” movie by that director, I can never remember his name, that Joey-Joe-Joe-Junior Shabadoo guy. Signs was apparently going to be another creepy kind of suspense movie with a similar “reveal” at the end (just like every one of Shabadoo’s movies since then, but that’s a story for another day). So in consideration of all this, Signs was a full house that night, and more so for it being the opening night for a widely-anticipated summer blockbuster.

Anyway, there’s this scene in the middle of the movie I remember: so far in the story, a lot of unsettling and creepy things had been happening around Mel Gibson’s farm (I’m going to assume here that you’ve seen the movie and know what I’m talking about), building up over the course of 45 minutes or so. We were being led by the nose to believe that some kind of space alien might, just might, be outside the farmhouse in Mel’s cornfield. So naturally, that meant that Mel had to go investigate by himself in the dead of night with a flashlight.

So Mel was outside walking around his cornfield, nervously shining his flashlight all over the place at any innocuous crackle or pop that might signify the location of a possible alien. At this moment in the theatre, nobody was doing a thing, not moving in their seats, and barely even breathing. Usually you can hear people eating popcorn, whispering, getting up to go to the bathroom, but not at this moment – and it was a packed house, remember. A couple of hundred people were seated side-by-side taking this all in. Everybody sitting there knew that Something Was About to Happen. A long, faint, and ominous violin note was being held, on and on, just to let us know that a sudden explosion of sound was about to assault our eardrums. We clutched our armrests and the damp hands of our dates. You could see it in Mel’s eyes: What the hell am I doing out here?

It was then that I was seized by an irresistible compulsion. I knew that the tension was about to be broken, but I wanted to be the one who did it. If you know anything about scary movies, there’s always the bait-and-switch suspense moment: something sort of scary will happen, relieving you momentarily just before the really scary thing happens, causing the weaker audience members to leave a wet spot in their jockeys. So I waited with the knowledge of a veteran moviegoer that the bait-and-switch was imminent…and there! A sudden sound on the screen, but not the Big One. My moment!

I screamed out loud, erupting with the most girlish, high-pitched and cowardly screech I could possibly summon. And it was the greatest – the entire theatre instantly roared with this total release of sound-stage style laughter. You can’t do that in an empty theatre, you just can’t, and you can’t do it if you go to a show by yourself. Why would you want to? My date was wiping her eyes she was laughing so hard, and when the actual scary moment happened onscreen, nobody jumped at all. I had successfully defused the tension, to everyone’s obvious enjoyment.

It’s reasons like these that I have to share movies with other people. And it’s not because stories like these happen every time you go. And movies aren’t particularly deep or meaningful either, like going to church with your family on Christmas Day might be. It’s just all about simple, good fun, and it's better with other people around you. At the very least, it gives you someone to talk with later on when you’re eating tacos from the drive-through and recalling the cheesy lines the characters said in the movie. For god’s sake, if you think you want to see a movie, don’t be a pathetic turnip in the back row all by yourself. Call somebody before you hit the road – unless you want some quality time with the Kleenex box and animé behind closed doors.