Becoming ourselves, again, at the movies
OVER THE PAST YEAR, MOST OF US HAVE SPENT at least some time speculating on the ways in which the pandemic will change us. We’re never going to take hugging for granted. We’re going to wear sequins for daytime. We’re going to look forward to boring in-person meetings, having learned that boring Zoom meetings are hardly an improvement. To this cheerful patchwork vision of our future selves, I’m adding one hopeful scrap: we’re going to go to the movies more.
This summer, in countries that have made good progress in getting people vaccinated, many of us will at last venture back into movie theaters, and there’s enough on the summer slate to entice people from their lairs: Scarlett Johansson gets her own There are and sequels for those who’d rather be terrified in a dark theater than in their own living rooms. And Lin-Manuel Miranda’s might be the proverbial open fire hydrant that parched audiences need right now. The coming months will be an opportunity to step back into the darkness into a different kind of light. But even beyond that, they might be definitive in terms of how we think about small screens vs. big ones. In fact, the post-pandemic return to the theaters could turn out to be one of the most significant events in the history of watching movies: those of us who love the scale of the larger-than-life image, and the economy and completeness of stories told in one shot, will have a stronger sense of who our tribe really is.
