I Forgot That The Movies Can Love Me Back

A Ghost Story, A24

I love the movies, but I had forgotten how much they can love me back. I remembered tonight, sometime between the second and third trailer that played before Killers of the Flower Moon.

Before tonight, I hadn’t used my AMC A-List membership for months. Some daunting, shadowy thing that I used to think was poor time management, or chronic illness, or lovesickness for someone halfway across the world, but that I’m now starting to call depression, had kept me from getting to the theater down the street. I don’t know if my name for this thing is quite right, but I know that my brain has at times recently exchanged its lifelong penchant for racing thoughts with something lower and slower — something that keeps me alone and sad and, worse yet, sick to death of hearing myself talk about my loneliness and sadness. The only two times I’ve made it to the movies in the past three months have been when not going would mean breaking a plan with a friend who would worry about me if I stayed home.

Tonight I went, though, and I remembered what it feels like to love the movies. Not because of the latest Scorsese film in particular (though I think Killers of the Flower Moon is very, very good), but because of what the movies do for me. Almost as soon as the lights went down, I remembered what it’s like to be at the movies. I remembered the smell of my favorite theaters and the feeling of a Ziploc snack bag furtively opened in the dark. I remembered the feeling of staggering out afterwards into the sunlight, or the cool night air, or once, when I was younger, into fresh snow. I remembered MoviePass summer, when I watched movies as easily as I breathed. I remembered what it felt like to have my life change a little bit in the dark, 90 minutes at a time.

If memory feels like a balm, tonight the future felt like a miracle. I don’t know what I want to be doing in six months, except for hugging people I love. Lately I have trouble looking to the future without becoming all gasping breaths and shaking hands. The relentless inhumanity of this industry and this world has broken me down. Too often I feel like gristle caught in the gears of some great machine, and every day I wonder how to go on writing full-time when security and stability feel so far away. There I go again, getting sick of myself.

At any rate, tonight when I watched the trailers before Killers of the Flower Moon, I was able to think of the future and breathe easy for the first time in recent memory. I thought about which of the movies being previewed I would take my family to over the holidays – which would be most likely to please a group of myriad relatives who pretty much never like the same thing. How cool, though, that I have relatives to take when a decade ago my family was small and far apart.

I thought about which indie movies I’d offer to see with my friends from my hometown, and whether it would be icy when I pulled up to the Grand Cinema parking lot. I wondered if we’d get a hot cup of tea beforehand or plan a sleepover afterwards. I thought about how when I get really intense about seeing movies for award season, I’m always surprised by how many my mom is willing to see with me, and about how great her instincts are for what works in a film and what doesn’t, even if she doesn’t always put it into words. I thought about how I want to invite my mom to every movie I can, even if she hates them.

I thought even further, too, about all the movies I hope to watch holding hands with someone I love, and all the theaters across the world I’ll try to visit before I’m old. I thought about how, no matter how much time I spend laying in bed wishing the world away, I know I’ll have that feeling of staggering out into the moonlight feeling like a new person again. In fact, I had it tonight, when a filmmaking master bowed out with a profound epilogue that left me yanking my glasses off as fast as possible in anticipation of a flurry of tears.

This is embarrassing, but for a split second then I thought, as us movie-lovers are prone to do, about if I were a character in a movie. If I were, maybe the glasses-off gesture would be my famous film critic “tell” that indicated I was moved by what I’d just seen. I’m not a famous film critic in a movie, though, and I don’t even want to be. Tonight I got to be something much better: a girl sitting in the dark, alone but not lonely, remembering what it’s like to feel excitement without fear. Someone who just realized what she must have known once, but forgot: that she loves the movies and the movies love her back.