Lights, Camera, Conversation… “In the Dark, and All Alone”

Movie-watching, unlike an evening at a restaurant, is not exactly a social activity, never mind that we seem to have made it one.

There are countless films I’ve seen on TV by myself, when the others at home were doing other things, but this doesn’t register as significant news when I speak about it. But the minute I tell people I watch movies alone – and more importantly, that I like watching movies alone – a curtain of confusion descends on them, as if I just admitted I was wearing adult diapers. I can hear them thinking, “He looks so normal. Who could’ve guessed!” The strange thing is that I think it is absolutely normal to watch films alone, just like you read books on your own and listen to music on your iPod alone and, on Sunday afternoons when everyone else at home is napping, watch a TV programme alone. In my mind, these are activities designed to keep one person, a single person, occupied. It’s like how some sports are team sports and some aren’t – when you go for a swim, you don’t really go to enjoy the company of others but simply to have a good swim.

These days, of course, I have to see films alone, as I watch them in a professional capacity. For one thing, others aren’t usually free to attend morning shows on Fridays, and besides, I don’t want someone jabbering in my ear about how this works and how that doesn’t, opinions that will very likely colour and contaminate my viewing. But even earlier, I was never one of those kids who told his friends, “Hey, feel like doing something? Let’s watch a movie.” Because to me, a movie has always represented the interaction between a person and the picture up on screen, and if I wanted to interact with friends, I’d rather go to a restaurant or the beach, where I could actually see their faces and hear what they were saying. If they wanted to conduct catching-up conversations inside a movie hall, I wouldn’t have wanted to be friends with them in the first place.

It’s also the logistics. You want to see this film, your friend something else and a third person wants to see neither, and by the time a consensus is reached the film you wanted to see is out of the theatre. (I’ve never been one of those people who says, generically, “Let’s go to the movies,” and makes up his mind at the ticket counter what movie to go to. I go to the theatre to see a specific movie.) And even if everyone agrees to see the same movie, you’re free on Saturday, someone else on Sunday, and by the time a suitable time is arrived at, the film, again, is out of the theatre. So if you’re the kind who plans to see specific films – and not just anything, seeking just the general experience of “going to the movies” – it actually makes sense to go when you have the time. Once the film begins, do you really care that there’s no one to the right or left?

But what, you ask, about movies being a communal activity, about enjoying comedies better when the people around you are laughing, about being thrilled by thrillers more when the people next to you are cowering in their seats? But going alone doesn’t mean you’re the only one in the theatre. You still have others around – strangers who are going to have the same human reactions. So the communal aspect is very much there – though most times this community makes you wish there was no one around, like the time I watched Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour version of Hamlet in Houston and I was the only one in the theatre. People today think nothing of using their phones in the dark, and when you tell them you’re being distracted by the light, they switch the phones off and switch them on again after five minutes, by which time you no longer have the energy or the inclination to complain. When they don’t understand or don’t like a movie, they make known their displeasure very loudly, not caring that they may be marring someone else’s viewing experience, and you have to think that if they too had come alone and thus been deprived of the appreciative hangers-on around them – their audience, so to speak – the world would have been a much better place, at least for those few hours in the dark.

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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