What's The Point of Watching Movies?

Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Movie

You might as well just ask “What’s the point?” It’s a good question. You may come up with something powerfully Existential, mysteriously Fatalistic, or *shudders* depressingly Utilitarian. All of the answers, though, are just different jackets for the scarecrow of purpose we raise up to frighten away ennui. The why of it all is always in flux, in truth, and the asking of the question, the seeking, is the answer in itself.

Act I: Escapism

Why do I watch so many movies?

In the beginning I had a 27” TV that offered a 4:3 archway to freedom. If Mom and Dad were fighting again, if my brothers were moving away to live with their “real Dad,” if I shit my pants in gym class and everyone knew…I’d simply change the channel. Romancing the Stone is on. We can’t afford the rent? Who cares, it’s Shark Week!

I lived in a small apartment less than a mile down the road from a video store called Movie Warehouse. It was right next to the grocery store so while Mom was spending her food stamps and carefully cut coupons I could wander the aisles in search of my next release. Every movie was a furlough from the prison of self, approximately 90 minutes where I could be someone, somewhere, anywhere else. It was my Golden Ticket.

It was usually an action movie. I wanted big muscles, guns, and beautiful women. I wanted to be the arbiter of justice. Hard Target, Kickboxer, Bloodsport, anything with JCVD. Lethal Weapon, yeah, now we’re talking. Nobody regulated what I was renting. I thought Rated “R” stood for “Really fucking cool.” I wanted blood, guts, bombs and, if I was really lucky, boobs.

Only once did my mother step in to stop me. I brought my selections to the counter and, as usual, my mom didn’t even look at them. That day the Movie Warehouse clerk, Brad, betrayed me. He took a long look at my coveted copy of Quills, the Marquis de Sade biopic starring Geoffrey Rush, and said to my mother, “I don’t think this is appropriate for him to watch.” She said, “Oh, Chris, you know better. Go put that back.”

Et tu, Brad? Brad. Fucking Brad. More like Judas. It stung all the more because my mom was only pretending to care due to social pressure. I was the victim of my mother’s desire to be seen as a typical suburban mom, not the kind who chain-smokes Winston Light 100s, cusses like a sailor, and gives her son sips of Bailey’s Irish Creme, certainly not the kind who lets her kid watch Quills.

There was another employee at Movie Warehouse—her name was Sally. Sally was the older sister of a girl that I loved, the kind of potent, melodramatic love that only a 13-year-old can muster. She had jet-black hair cut in a bob like Mia Wallace, was covered in tattoos and piercings. Sally was always chewing gum and blowing bubbles, and in between each bubble bursting she helped guide my taste in music and movies.

I’d rush to the counter with Universal Soldier or Speed or Demolition Man and she’d roll her eyes, “Again? Hang on.” She’d vault the counter and saunter in her Chucks to an unseen aisle while I waited, confused, until she returned. “This is Clerks, it’s so funny, and this is American History X.”

“Is that funny?”

“Umm, no, here, take Ghost World, too.”

Thanks, Sally. Every time being me became too much I could retreat into these worlds, comforted by the most important maxim of the universe: Be Kind, Please Rewind.

Act II: Edification

Eventually your tastes begin to form and that’s a double-edged sword. You don’t want to become too set in your ways and develop contempt prior to investigation. No matter how many movies you’ve seen there’s a whole wide world of discovery hiding exactly in the place you’re sure you won’t find it.

In my late teens I started to read books on film, like survey courses on the history of cinema. I read movie bloggers, critics, and tons of “Movies You Have To Watch Before You Die” listicles. I didn’t really want to watch most of them, but sometimes I’d force myself, thinking, “God, I hope it’s not a musical.”

This is where I found City of God and Battle Royale instead of rewatching Snatch or Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for the 50th time. I plowed through the riches of Scorsese, Coppola, and Kubrick. I found Michael Mann and David Fincher and realized there was more to Spielberg than Jurassic Park. Cinema, like life, finds a way.

I was watching not just to be someone else but to learn how movies were made, what movies could be. I started to realize that stories weren’t just the way that humans passed the time—they were the way we made sense of time passing at all.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

- Søren Kierkegaard.

Act III: Empathy

I still watch movies to escape, like Snake Plissken, from my circumstances. I certainly still watch them to learn things about the craft itself and the world at large, but there are more powerful forces at work. The most beautiful thing a movie can give me is a respite from the debilitating desire to be understood, replacing that soul-corroding burden with an eagerness to understand.

I can enter the mind of a person living on the other side of the world, or 600 years ago, traversing space and time to inhabit their skin for a couple of hours. I have fought as a gladiator in the Colosseum of Ancient Rome and battled arachnids on Klendathu. I’m doing my part, too. I’ve been a troubled genius working as a janitor at MIT. I founded Facebook. I have been an assassin known to many as the Baba Yaga.

A movie can allow me the briefest glimpse of what it might be like to walk to my car through a dark alley as a young woman or spend decades in prison convicted of a crime I didn’t commit. I don’t know what either of those things are like, not really, but now I know that I don’t know and there is power in that.

Then there’s the beauty of the similarities, all the myriad ways that these characters from all across the universe are just like me. They love, they lust, they lose and hunger in all the same ways. I am alone in a dark room looking at lights on a wall, connected to fellow human beings more profoundly than I was walking beside them on the busy street outside.

Those are the moments I live for, when I see a universal truth reflected on screen that I feared was an experience unique only to me. In my Past Lives screening I watched Nora mourn the gasping love she still felt for an old friend even as she lived happily with her husband. People don’t talk about shit like that, you’re not allowed to admit it, but movies do.

What I’ve learned over time is that this is only a heightened experience if you’re also experiencing things. You can’t just touch grass occasionally, you need to full-on frolic every now and then. Travel to strange cities. Snowboard, skydive, eat snails and alligators. Make love, fall down, jump off cliffs (into water). Stories can only reflect and enhance a life that is being lived.

That’s why I watch movies.

“So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that. If I ask you about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.” - Sean, Good Will Hunting