I Watched Until My Eyes Bled

 

 

Manohla Dargis

It was a year of watching obsessively yet indiscriminately, a year of small and smaller screens. On one lost day not long ago, I spent a horrifying (embarrassing!) 11 hours and 15 minutes on my phone. I read the news, doomscrolled Twitter, did puzzles, checked my email and kept scrolling. It’s no wonder that my eyes had begun to regularly ache and sometimes sting, prompting me to worry that I needed a new prescription for my glasses. I didn’t, I just needed to stop watching, but I couldn’t put down my phone, which tethered me to the larger world that I greatly missed.

The point of a top 10 list is to share our preferred movies. But in thinking about my favorites of the year and all the many new and old titles I’ve seen, I also thought a lot about how I watched movies and, well, just watched. A big-screen fundamentalist, I love going out to the movies, to first- and second-run cinemas as well as to art houses, museums and cinémathèques. I know which theater and studio in Los Angeles (where I live) has the biggest screen, the best sound, sightlines and seats — me, I like to sit in the middle of the theater, perfectly centered.

When movie theaters closed in Los Angeles in March, I cried. (They’re still closed.) The tears of critics are tiny, but moviegoing is who I am. I grew up in New York in the 1970s watching as many films as I could, including on TV. But going to the movies was one of my first adventures in sovereignty, one of the first ways that I experienced navigating ordinary life without parental supervision. Moviegoing was my thing, a way of seeing and of being. Up until March, it was also instrumental to how I understand time, its shape, texture and demands: moviegoing dictated what I did day and night, including the many hours I clocked driving to and from screenings.

Like a lot of people, I have felt unmoored this year partly because of how I now experience time. I’ve long worked from home, but to review movies, I go to theaters. So I found it challenging learning to watch the movies I was reviewing at home, how to respect the focus they required and deserved, how to sit — and keep sitting — on the sofa and not hit the pause button, not check Twitter. It didn’t help that we have a lot of windows, which made it impossible to replicate a dark screening room, even with the shades drawn. So, staying classy, I hung sheets over the shades and even taped Trader Joe’s shopping bags over one small window, which was as ridiculous as it sounds.

I finally figured out how to really watch the movies I was reviewing at home when I categorically separated them from the other images I was soaking up, the stream of faces, shapes and moments that also defined my year: Sarah Cooper’s devastating Trump performances; Doggface skateboarding to Fleetwood Mac; the Scottish sports announcer Andrew Cotter and his dogs Olive and Mabel; the sometimes shocking science videos demonstrating how far sneezes and coughs can travel (27 feet!); and the friends and strangers whose lives I’ve watched as they made bread, settled into new homes, marched for Black lives and, at times, mourned the deaths of loved ones.

This stream has been alternately sad and joyous, devastating and enlivening. I have grown fond of people I have never met, and become invested in their well-being. Occasionally, the stream can feel like an inundation, as it did on my shameful day of 11 hours-plus on my phone. And I know, yes, the arguments against spending too much time on social media, in particular. But all these streaming images are entirely different from the discrete pleasures of movies not just in terms of how they look — the integrity of their images, where the camera is — but also how movies begin and how they end, the specific rhythms, shape and sense of time they create.

The seemingly endless, indistinguishable months of the pandemic have been perfect for the undifferentiated streaming flow of baking shows, crime dramas, TikTok videos, fleeting Instagram stories and five-second GIFs. Streaming companies know how to do flow: they often bypass credits and start up the next episode before you’re finished watching the current one. Streaming blurs time and before you know it you’ve watched four episodes of “The Crown” back to back. This is of a different order of how we experience time when we go out to the movies, which give us two or more hours’ respite from the clock-and-capitalism-determined flow of everyday life.

Every so often, someone asks what I think will happen to movies. I haven’t a clue, beyond my conviction that good, bad and indifferent ones will continue to be produced, distributed and exhibited. How and what we watch, though, is much less certain. What we do know is that the American movie industry has weathered — and profited from — a succession of cataclysmic crises from its monopolistic foundation to the coming of sound, the end of the old studio system and the introduction of television and of home video. The advent of streaming has added another chapter in a history that will continue to morph and outlive any one company or crisis. Time will tell, and so will we.