Meaning at the Movies // The Power of the Movie Theater

There are few things I love more than a trip to the movie theater, and with summer just around the corner, I can already feel the excitement buzzing in my veins. 

One of my favorite summer activities, and one I wish I could do way more often, is a double  — sometimes triple — feature at the movie theater. Spending the whole day cozied up in a theater seat with a Diet Coke and a tub of popcorn is my own personal heaven. 

The movie theater has been a lot of different things for me across my life — a space I was terrified of, a site of familial connection, a place of joy for me and my friends and a way for me to escape into a different world. The movie theater is so much more than just a place. It’s a facilitator of love, understanding, laughter and fear. It’s the building that lets stories run free into the world. In a world increasingly based on streaming and attempts to restrict important stories, the movie theater becomes all the more vital. 

However, this wasn’t something I always understood — when I was a little kid, I was infamously afraid of the movie theater. According to my parents, little me, who was already afraid of the dark, saw the Tim Burton “Alice in Wonderland” trailer and was so scared by it that I then refused to go to the theater for many months following. When I finally did return, it was with my Sleeping Beauty night light clutched tightly in my hands, a small attempt to ward off the darkness at hand. 

My fear of the dark, and whatever hid in it, kept me out of the theater for a long time, but not forever. Eventually, my already burgeoning love for film won out over my fear of the dark — well, that and my constant need for a cherry Icee. 

The movie theater, except for those few months I refused to go, was always a site of connection between me and my parents. I’ve spent many afternoons with them at the theater, seeing whatever film we could finally agree upon — or more likely than not, whatever thing two of us wanted to see and the other one agreed to go to. In a family of relatively quiet people, the movie theater was a way for us to speak to each other without uttering any words. 

The theater has also become both a sight of joy for my friends and me and, on some days, a space where I can retreat and reset all by myself. Especially in college, although I often go with my friends to the theater, it’s not that often. When we do go, there’s a kind of joyous feeling. The decision to set this time aside to go somewhere and watch something, and specifically to do that together in a community, is a valuable and treasured one when people are as busy as many college students are. The movie theater is a place of community, the practice of watching a film with an audience, one that can be transformative, one that marks an active decision to enter into a relationship with these people and that film. For a moment, while that film is playing in the movie theater, you are all united in a kind of sameness, a single purpose, to watch and be impacted by these stories. And although reactions and interpretations may differ, there’s still something beautiful about that singular space and time where everyone in that audience is tied together. 

This is the reason, too, that I never mind going to the movies by myself, because you’re never really alone in that theater. Even if there are only one or two other people there, you are still a part of something, of beholding, of sitting with a story. Going to the movies by myself is in fact one of my favorite things, as I am fully allowed to sink into the film, to have my own independent thoughts and reaction, and to know that even as I may not speak to the others in the theater, they are doing the same thing. 

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I don’t just love movies — I also love movie theaters. I believe in the importance and the necessity of the movie theater so deeply. I wouldn’t have this blog if I didn’t love the movie theater. The theater is where I learned to love movies, and in a big way, it’s also where I learned to love myself. 

So, if you can see a movie in the theater, it might just change your life, and you’ll probably see me there.