In an earlier life as a film critic, I’d often find myself screening movies alone at the afternoon matinees each autumn. That’s when vacation season ended and school resumed, leaving the local theaters largely empty. What a kingly indulgence to sit by myself in a huge space while a new movie played, a spectacle unfolding just for me.
But over time, being surrounded by empty seats made me feel empty, too. If I wanted to get the best insights about a film, it was ideal to screen it with other people. I might not agree about what others found funny, sad or inspiring, but seeing their reactions helped me better understand myself. I gleaned new insights from fellow moviegoers that I wouldn’t have gotten if I’d watched a new film as a solo viewer.
When I watched a movie alone, it was a thing; within an audience, it was an event.
I’ve been thinking about all of this as another cultural season unfolds across Louisiana, giving those of us who live here lots of opportunities for this kind of collective experience. My mail these days includes brochures from area museums, symphonies and theater companies, and I’ve come to treasure them as much as the garden catalogs that land in my mailbox, too. They all point me to the promise of something larger than myself, which is one of the abiding wonders of enjoying a painting, a play or a musical performance with our neighbors.
The world has changed a great deal since I worked as a film critic more than three decades ago. Thanks to the digital revolution, we can savor hundreds of TV channels and an infinitude of online programming at home. All of us can be what I once was in that empty theater: lone consumers of culture, single diners at the banquet of beauty we call the creative arts.
Like many of us, I welcome quiet evenings at home with Netflix or a good book, cloistered on the couch with my wife in a world that seems comfortably self-sufficient. But that kind of inwardness, embraced too routinely, can be isolating, which isn’t good for me or the community and country I live in.
The headlines tell us of a broken world, and there are so many cracks that more than one thing is needed to mend them. But being within an audience or art gallery with other people is one way that we can share what’s good, which can help build sharing and goodness into a habit.
I was moved this week by a quote from the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that speaks to what I’m trying to say: “Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”