I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW
THERE’S A BIT OF TRIVIA ABOUT THE EXHIBITION of pornographic movies in India that I’ve always found fascinating. Producing and distributing pornography is illegal in the country, and for decades, before sex became streamable on smartphones, short reels of hardcore porn were made illicitly and supplied to small cinema halls, where they were spliced randomly (often in the projection booth itself) into censorapproved feature films. Scholar Amit S. Rai describes encountering these “bits reels” in the midst of a movie screening in Mumbai in 2000, and watching it along with the audience. “Cannot forget that I saw a police officer in full uniform in the balcony seats, leaving the show with everyone else,” he adds.
Most of us, I imagine, have had the experience of squirming in our seats while watching a tad-too-arousing scene with friends or acquaintances or strangers (I vividly remember watching Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl on an ambivalent first date). But I find the picture painted by these accounts from India distinctly amusing: a mass of viewers in the public—even policed—realm of the theater, lit by the screen and separated from one another by inches, enjoying an indulgence as taboo and (literally) forbidden as porn. It feels preposterous, but it’s also an image that epitomizes the communal moviegoing experience: the thrilling transgression of both social and private space; the feeling of being acknowledged—and perhaps even watched—while watching. This tension lies, of course, at the very origins of cinema as a mass art. “The relation of a pair of eyes to the image was, quite literally, brought out into public view,” writes the film scholar Judith Mayne, describing the cultural transition from early instruments of individual voyeurism, like peep shows and kinetoscopes, to movie theaters.
These thoughts came to my mind recently during a group watch of (2015) with some girlfriends about a week into the COVID-19 quarantine. A
