The theater lights begin to dim and the speakers come to life. The speakers whisper “all around sound” and as it travels through the theater, a wave of excitement washes over my body and I rip into my chocolate covered cookie dough bites.
I sit anticipating a life-changing two hours and half of my popcorn is already finished before the movie even starts. The screen opens up to the first scene and I am already overjoyed.
Two hours later, I walk out feeling shocked and oddly enough, powerful.
Since their inception, movies have always been a source of awe to the world. First it was because the idea of people acting on a screen was so unusual.
Then, when talkies came about in the late 1920s, people were shocked because they didn’t have to read the dialogue that would pop up on screen during a silent movie, the films became more realistic. Throughout time, movies have shocked the world again and again.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, movie theater attendance has been on a decline. Because of this many streaming platforms started to make exclusive deals with studios that would completely skip the in-theaters experience and bring the movie straight to the platform.
This led to the rebranding of many streaming platforms, such as HBO Max which is now just Max. All of this is to say that the value of movies is slipping.
With the arrival of movies on big streaming platforms, it is easier for a good movie to lose its value. People often complain the volume control is off or that the lighting is terrible as they sit in the comfort of their beds viewing a movie meant for a theater.
People can also simply skip through, pause and never finish, or not even engage in watching the film as they scroll through their phones. Doing this, you lose the true essence of the movie going experience. The overly salted, buttery popcorn and reclining seats in a perfectly air conditioned theater is all part of the experience just as much as the actual movie itself.
The limitation of a phone in the theater serves to help you experience the movie and absorb the message being sent across. What if people had been scrolling through their phones instead of watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the world would’ve missed out on a classic about vanity.
Movies get global messages across. A great example of this is Disney.
Each Disney movie, while it may seem like they’re about talking animals or effortlessly stunning princesses, carries a larger life lesson with it. Frozen taught us that love has many forms, Elemental (2023) taught us that love should not have barriers and Mulan (1998) showed us that women really can do it all.
While those may seem on the simpler side, there are a multitude of other examples. Life Itself (2018), my all-time favorite movie, showed us that, while life is the saddest experience, it is also beautiful because of the sad things that happen to us. Most recently, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023) showed us the complexity of human beings with Tom Blyth’s character, Coriolanus Snow. Movies always serve to teach us something, if you look hard enough there is a secret message waiting to be realized.
With these messages comes powerful emotion. I have never left a movie viewing experience without feeling like my world has been rocked. There is an odd sense of power that a movie gives you, even the sad ones. That’s how it has been in my experience at least.
I walk out feeling changed and inspired to have that same effect on the world. It motivates me to be better than I was before and further pushes me on my journey in understanding the human experience.
That’s it!
Movies give us a small glimpse of the human experience in two hours, inspiring us to go out and truly live it again and again no matter what.
To me, that seems like something worth preserving.
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