Check this shit out! Straight up Jurassic Park. I don’t know what we’re going to clone from this glorious preservation, but I am calling first dibs on riding it. Hell yeah! Buying my new riding crop. T-Rex. Giant spider. Don’t matter. I got firsties.
Ain’t any narrative experience quite like watchin’ a movie in the theater.
Some’ll tell you that it’s the communal aspect, the fact that everyone has come together for the sharing of a story. From this perspective, the big-screen is the electrically-charged descendent of the fire that our cavemen ancestors gathered `round. Stories are means of sharing ideas with one another, and film accomplishes this unlike any other medium.
Others suggest that the infatuation with the movie-theater experience has actually been rekindled by the recent advancements in home video technology. Sure, it’s easy to stay home and watch a movie on Blu-ray or Hulu or YouTube or Netflix streaming. But at home, it’s just as easy to get distracted by text messages or emails or the baby that just won’t stop crying. But at the theater, there’s no pause button — time and attention are consciously dedicated to the narrative at hand.
And still others attribute the appreciation for the cinema to the fulfillment of a deeply-rooted psychological desire. These folks, who read Freud and Lacan and textbooks that I’ll never understand, draw parallels between wombs and movie theaters — dark, comfortable, and designed for the unilateral providing of sustenance (life-giving and consciousness-altering, respectively). According to psychoanalysis, theaters are uniquely affective.
I won’t try to figure out why, but I know for sure that goin’ to the movies has been the basis for some of the most memorable experiences of my life.
Feel free to twist it, rephrase it, or ignore it, but here’s the jumping-off point for our discussion: What is the first movie you remember seeing in the theater?
Steven Spielberg may lament changing E.T., but it appears he isn’t beyond throwing together some shitty 3D for a re-release of Jurassic Park. Hey, you win some, you lose some.
I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility… for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now — you’re selling it — you want to sell it!
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