Putting Down my Phone

I must admit something. It’s hard to watch a full movie without my phone. I have done it before, I’m aware that it is possible, but I’m just being honest here. With watching most of my movie watching, if any, in the past few years, all happens at home and on my laptop. I’m watching movies in bed, middle of the day, while cooking, and of course, while scrolling through my phone. I was luckily born at the crux of knowing what life was like before smartphones, my first phone was a no-frills flip phone and the best it could do was make calls. And with so much of my movie watching in the past few years being distracted, I’ve decided to make a change. I want to stop watching movies with my phone.

There’s simply no reason for it. When I was a former aspiring film director/student I understood the power and presence that I could feel by letting myself get lost in a two-hour journey of moving frames. The phone and the movie screen have two contradictory goals at hand. Social media sites, memes, viral clips, etc. are all in the business of short and quippy jolts of emotion. Make me laugh in 30 seconds or I’m scrolling past, double tap “like”, like again, heart react. I’m sure you’re familiar with the old routine. But movies are here for our patience. I think I’ve lost the art of learning how to genuinely appreciate a scene between two actors. Even more than just a scene, I’ve lost the art of how to enjoy a story arc. We all know stories have a beginning, middle, and ending, but when is the last time you let a story arc take you by the hand and it just let it guide you?

By putting down my phone I’m hoping to get into my long watchlist of unwatched foreign films I’ve heard lots of praise about. These movies include Ali: Fear eats the soul, Parasite, Close-Up, Fallen Angels, Wings of Desire, Smiles of a Summer Night, and The Spirit of the Beehive to name a few. I also have had my eyes on this Essential Collection of the Universal Movie Monsters, you know, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and so on. I’m hoping this putting down of the phone, and focusing on enjoying my movies again, for all that they are worth, will create a habit where I’m less attached to checking my notifications overall. Maybe an obscure position to take, but I enjoy knowing very little about a movie before I start watching. I have never been a fan of trailers, a synopsis is fine and probably necessary, but I don’t need to spend my time googling who played who or scrolling the Wikipedia page of a piece of art that I’m actively taking in while it is in front of me.

I realized this decision to put down my phone was needed when I made my first trip back to an in-person theater in just about two years. I saw a brunch screening of Singing in the Rain. The theater was small, maybe twenty people if I’m being generous and I had a very enjoyable time. Streaming services are great, they are convenient for sure — but I don’t think any service could have given me what I felt that day. On that day, I was in the theater and somehow when the lights went out, I was in a different world. I was in a world where work didn’t matter, what people wanted from me didn’t matter, the only important thing was my complete visual pleasure. And with watching a musical from the fifties, I was intensely focused on everything in the movie that was different from today’s modern culture. I paid attention to the cadence of the characters, the bright and ostentatious colors of their attire, the meticulous choreography. All these elements being created for my entertainment as an audience member, made me appreciate the hard work that goes into making a movie and how this medium still deserves to be seen. Movies deserve to be seen fully and with sincere effort. Yes, Tik Tok will be funny, Twitter will be hilarious, and we can groan about what things we saw today on Facebook or Instagram, but there is still a place for movies to be special. The temporary discomfort I expect to experience as I form this new habitat will be worth the effort as I allow myself to become engrossed completely once again in the art of cinema.