Why I Love Seeing Movies Alone
Since my 18th birthday, I’ve accumulated an excess of existential dread that my life has yet to justify. Perhaps this is the price I pay for being an obnoxious, self-identified cinephile: I look to movies for entertainment, and they respond back with nihilism. Or at least, that’s what the kinds of movies I’m drawn to tend to do. I like when a film gives shape to questions I already carry. Films that reveal how easily the human soul can crack. I always watch movies hoping they’ll change me, hoping they’ll make me see things differently. And sometimes they do. But sometimes I think I’m more desperate for the feeling itself. I hate feeling like I’m lost in a flood of cybernetted information that is entirely empty.
That craving for sensation, for feeling something real, is why I love seeing movies in a theater so much. The first time I ever saw a movie by myself was when I was 18, during my freshman year of college. It wound up being the same day I obtained one of my most prized possessions: a well-worn copy of Pensées or Thoughts on Religion by the French existential philosopher Blaise Pascal. I say “obtained,” but I really just mean that I stole it.
My intention wasn’t initially to engage in petty theft, but I didn’t want to ask how to check a book out of the library during the middle of the semester, and I didn’t have any intentions of giving it back. And I also just didn’t think anyone at the University of Miami would ever notice or care that the singular copy of “Pensées” was missing. I hope I’m right, since I brought the book to Brown when I transferred the next year.
The entirety of my freshman year, I had a pretty light class schedule that honestly wasn’t challenging enough. I remember spending a lot of time by myself, being bored. Looking back, I’m grateful for the boredom because I was able to learn a lot about myself, but too much of a good thing is bad. It was too much mental downtime; the kind that invites overthinking with open arms. And while I was self-aware enough to know I was constantly at the mercy of my own thoughts, I still managed to overthink everything. Unfortunately, I was used to having too much time to think and maybe even found it comforting. I had spent the previous year and a half of high school in quarantine, which is where I initially became obsessed with existential philosophy and “artsy” movies, instead of doing something more wholesome and normal, like making sourdough.
Living in a constant state of overthinking and over-reflecting made procrastination inevitable. At the time, I was taking a journalism class, and I had heavily stalled beginning the assignment my professor gave me, which was to go see a new movie, and then write a 400-word review on it. It was an undemanding assignment, and I had only been procrastinating because I had to see it alone. I wasn’t worried about writing the movie review, it was the seeing the movie alone part that freaked me out. It wasn’t formally part of the assignment, but because it was midterm season, all my friends were swamped with ten-page lab reports and business presentations worth nearly half their grade. And I was spending my days doing too much yoga and stealing books no one else cared about from the library.
My copy of “Pensees” went straight from the dusty stacks of the library to the sun-bleached AMC within the half-forgotten Sunset Place mall. I had to walk fifteen minutes along the side of the busy Ponce De Leon Boulevard to get there. On that walk, I had more time to overthink, and I worried that a car with open windows blasting Bad Bunny would take me out, or even worse, that the University police would roll up on me and make me formally check out the book, and I didn’t have time for that. My movie review deadline was closing in fast. I wanted to kick myself; if I were smart, this essay would have already been done.
But unfortunately, I’m dumb and I forced myself to think about my decision to ignore the deadline as I also tried not to freak out about walking on the side of a small highway. I decided I deserved to go to the movies alone as a punishment. I didn’t mind the idea of someone going to the movies by themselves, I just didn’t want that someone to be me. It seemed like something that weirdos do. But considering I was already stealing philosophy books with pages the color of tea bags from the library, I was likely halfway there.
I already felt dumb and weird for stealing a book, for not doing my homework yet, and for going to a movie by myself, but the feeling was truly cemented when I got to the theater nearly an hour early. I felt like I was allergic to doing things correctly and that if God is real, that He is trying to humiliate me. I was there at 2, and the movie started at 3, which really meant I was an hour and a half early because of the trailers and the ads playing before the trailers. But honestly, it didn’t matter. It’s not like I had something else to go do.
The movie theater employees seemed like they genuinely pitied me. I really wanted to tell them that I actually did have like, four friends, but they couldn’t come with me because they want to be doctors and lawyers and midterm season was actually a really busy time for them. I tried not to gauge if the theater employees thought I was lying about having friends as I went outside to sit on a bench in front of a Dave & Buster’s. I opened my new book to a random page in the middle. This is a book where page numbers don’t really matter because this book has no narrative, it’s just Pascal’s thoughts. I was in the worst mood and seeking rationale to questions I couldn’t verbalize, but as I kept reading, one sentence revealed itself as the answer.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
I already knew this quote from my quarantine days, yet now it breathed differently, almost like it remembered me. It was as if Pascal were hiding in the letters, staring straight at me. Daring me to prove him wrong. In a way, seeing a movie alone felt like a tiny reckoning with humanity’s greatest problem. I wasn’t going to force myself to love the experience, but I had to accept the quiet of sitting by myself. I didn’t have to, but I wanted to.
While I’m almost positive I gave the movie 2 out of 5 stars in my review, I’m glad I didn’t have to force myself to love the experience of going to the movies by myself. I don’t know why I thought I was going to hate it so much. I wasn’t alone, two other solo movie-goers showed up a little after me, and we all sat very far away from each other. It actually felt really nice to just sit there in a dark, quiet room and watch a bad Marvel movie at 3pm in IMAX.
One of Pascal’s main arguments throughout Pensées is that humans are fundamentally restless and constantly seek distractions because we hate being alone with our own thoughts. Which probably explains why I kept putting off something I had to do alone. But the more I distracted myself, the louder my thoughts became. I feel like I know exactly what Sylvia Plath meant when she confessed in her journal, “I am a victim of introspection.”
I don’t believe in God, even though I wish I did, and I almost use Pensées the way some do a spiritual scripture. Something I can refer to when I’m feeling off center and need some clarity. The weird thing is, most of the time this book doesn’t give me much clarity at all. Clarity is the wrong word. I don’t get clarity out of this text, but it’s given me a unique sense of curiosity that feels infinite and boundless. Pascal, like many other existentialists argues that existence precedes essence, therefore we are trapped in a painful paradox: we yearn for meaning, yet must confront the very real possibility that life has none.
It’s strange how the thought that nothing we do truly matters sits beneath our lives, lingering in the background, as we desperately try to fill every quiet moment with often meaningless noise to escape our own minds. Sitting quietly in that theater by myself, I felt a small version of this: the way it feels to just exist in a space where nothing demands anything of you, except that you be present with yourself. The fear softens once you let yourself sit with it.
