For a two hour answer to the question below, may I direct you to Cinema Paradiso.

A few months back, a viewer sent in a question. I wrote this essay as a response, and then lost the viewer’s name. I put the essay aside in the hopes I would find his name, but the search brought nothing. If you wrote me this question, let me know, and I’ll edit your name into this piece. For now I’ll call you Mr X. Mr X asks, “Is it better to watch a movie in a theater or at home? I find that I remember movies near perfectly at home but not as much in a theater. If this is the case for you and others, what are the merits for watching a movie in a theater when the experience is more fleeting or distracted?” -Mr X.

Movie theater vs. home viewing? The short answer is movie theaters are always better. Except when they’re not. I watch more movies at home—I’d say 9 of every 10—but the experience of going to the theater is always better. I’ll try to boil my thoughts down to 1,500 words, though I feel I could write for days on this subject.

The recently-dead Stanley Kauffman, long time house film critic for the New Republic, answered your question back in1974 in his essay “Why I’m Not Bored”: “The size of the screen in itself plays a part in its sacerdotal function; it ministers down to us while the television screen paws upward, smaller than we are, vulnerable to dials and switches.” I like to quote this as often as possible not just because it’s true, but because he drops the word “sacerdotal” like a boss. It means priest-like, if you really need to know.  By extension, the movie theater is a temple, in all the most positive aspects of that word. Meanwhile, a tv set paws at you like a dog. As is often the case in metaphors, the dog comparison is negative even though almost everyone loves dogs.

Everyone who isn’t a monster.

And almost everyone loves watching movies at home. You certainly do, Mr X, and so do I. Watching a movie on a tv or (in a pinch) a computer screen is, one might say, as awesome as a dog. At the theater, you can’t stop a projector to run to the bathroom or to get a snack. You can’t talk on the phone or text without inspiring justifiable homicide. You can’t be a noisome drunk. You will be arrested if you’re naked. There’s a lot of freedom that comes along with being at home. Not just in the drunken nude texting department, but in what you get to view.  At home you have a wider variety of movies to choose from.

You can also watch with your dog at home.  Dogs are frowned upon at the cinema.

At the multiplex you are restrained to whatever movies the theaters have booked for the space. If you do not live in a large city or near a college film society you will never see a big screen movie that is not in current release. You will never see “It Happened One Night” or “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” or even a two year old film like  “Dredd” in their original format. These days home viewing is based on whatever movie you can get your hands on. And with the internet, that includes pretty much everything.  Yes, it’s one medium (film) being shown on a different medium (television), but at least the library is endless.
This is much different than how it was when Kaufmann wrote his essay.  Back in those pre-cable days, most Americans were limited to television’s 12 channels (unless you tried out the distant and static-addled UHF channels-the “U” may have stood for “Unwatchable”). We were forced to follow the whims of tv stations with their Movies of the Week, Sunday afternoon classics and late night horror shows. Cable tv spread over the following decade as did our choices. Soon after we freed ourselves from the “dials and switches” –as Kauffman predicted we would a few sentences after his priest/dog comment—we acquired what he called “television cassettes.” Video tape was a great trick to teach the old dog of television, as were DVDs and downloaded movies. At home we became the masters and the movies became our dog.

I, of course, mean “They became adorable” when I say that.

In Kauffman’s other metaphor, we have the movie screen, all big and sacerdotal (it just sounds forced when I say it). Kaufman means sacerdotal in a good way. Not everyone loves going to church, but for the sake of argument, let us imagine that we do. If you have trouble imagining that then picture this: when visiting Spain, I saw a middle aged woman giggling with delight because she was first inside when the basilica opened its doors one Sunday morning. She was there an hour early, long before anyone else. That is how I feel when I enter a movie theater. I feel thrilled as that little old lady going to mass.

A sacerdote sacerdoting sacerdotally.

As in the house of worship, there is a psychological satisfaction that comes with the whole process of entering the building: the approach, the ticket counter, the lobby, the walk down a hallway, before finally coming into the theater proper. Every step of the way the lights become dimmer and the sounds—including one’s own voice—becomes more hushed, as we shed off the real world and enter the fictional. We don’t get this when popping in a dvd or clicking onto Netflix. Today, in theaters before the movie starts there is usually a bunch of crap on the screen, ads and trivia questions and such, but when I was a child there was nothing but a blank screen waiting to be filled. In my parents’ youth there was a curtain they would stare at that would be pulled away revealing a new world. In the cinema, you sit and whisper and wait. Even with the dull visuals they present to us these days, we are still being prepared for the show. Our eyes are forward and focusing.

Unfortunately, they don’t allow kids to smoke in theaters any more. For that, you’ll have to stay at home.

And then the movie starts, and here in the theater (where ideally there is no distraction, unlike at home where all distractions are possible) we sit in rows all staring at the same thing. Ingmar Bergman compared the sensation to hypnotism. There is a light flickering 24 times per second (which means, he pointed out, 24 times a second there is darkness between the frames) and it pulls us in. It lulls us. When engrossed in a film, the building disappears and all I experience is the screen. The movie’s reality becomes my own. It is like a ready-made dream that I get to share with everybody else in the theater.
I am one of those people who when a movie is over sits through the credits. I know not all movies have some tag at the end. I don’t care who the make-up assistants or the animal wranglers are. I do it so that I have a few minutes to come back to reality before I go back out into the world, just as one might lie awake in bed for a few minutes before getting up to ease their way into the day.

Don’t cry. It’s only a mov…what? “Cinema Paradiso?” All right. Cry away.

If the movie really hypnotizes me, the sensation follows me out into real life, and the world seems solid, more vibrant and beautiful. I find I blink less and feel like I move more smoothly and if only for a few minutes, life becomes more real. This sensation is why I go out to the movies. Not every movie does it to me, but when one does, it’s worth the times it doesn’t.
I rarely feel this dream sensation after watching a movie at home (there are three exceptions which is part of the reason I love “My Own Private Idaho,” “Blue Velvet” and “The Right Stuff”). But there are scores of times I’ve left a movie theater elevated. I remember the minutes after I saw David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” at my college theater far more than I remember the movie itself, as I walked alone across a dark deserted campus noticing things I had never seen there before.  Similar sensations have happened after “Croupier,” “The Royal Tanenbaums,” Branaugh’s “Much Ado About Nothing” and I don’t know how many others.
I imagine, Mr X, sometimes upon waking you remember your dreams. When you do, you probably don’t remember every single detail as you might when something notable happens in real life.

Maybe when you are at home watching a good movie, it is just that: a notable thing that happens in real life so you remember more details. At the movies, though, it is all a dream. Stretches may be forgotten, but the dream was still there. I like life plenty. I like dreams, too. But, what I like most is when life itself feels like a dream. That’s when I know life is going right. I get the feeling from travel, from decent dinner parties, and most of all from going to the movies. I could go on about other advantages to theaters– group dynamics, surround sound, previews, etc– but the first and last reason is those minutes after the light comes up when life intertwines with dreams.  For those few minutes I feel like a child again, and that is a little bit of paradise.  Isn’t that reason enough?

The subtext of this whole essay is my encouraging you to see “Cinema Paradiso” if you haven’t guessed.  The title is Italian for “Concentrated Nostalgia.”