Psycho. #25

Caspar’s method for building better movie-watching habits

I love movies and want to support them and engage with them more. But how can I convince/motivate myself to see movies in theatres (or at home even!) in genres that I don't love as much? Or something I've heard mixed/bad reviews? Or should I trust critics I like and skip them and not feel guilty about it?

Oh dear — are the movies really doing so badly right now that we need to “support” them like an ailing relative? Popping to the cinema as you would make a trip to visit a great-aunt in a nursing home, bringing some nice snacks with you and a bunch of flowers. “How lovely to see you, Megalopolis, you’re looking very well — have you had your hair done?”

My instinct is to tell you just to go to the movies if you feel like it, that cinema will be fine in some shape or another, since I don’t believe in ingesting art and culture like medicine, or out of some kind of social duty. When I go to the pictures I do it because I have an urge to go and fifteen quid to spare, and it’s the same when I buy a book for myself; I’m not thinking of how I can save my local bookseller. The thing should, in principle, sell itself, should be robust; for those reasons, I tend to have little patience with literature scolds (“Don’t turn down the page! Use a bookmark!”) and movie fetishists, the pious bagmen of culture who treat their passion like some sainted relic, revering it and preaching about it with their eyes beatifically closed. 

Pearl (Ti West, 2022)

Yet I do know — all the signs are there, and I’m not a total moron — that we have a kind of debt to culture, that we are active participants in the form it takes, and in its survival. When you use AI to apply for a job, you are taking part in the destruction of the future of writing; when you (or I) find ways not to pay for things we read, watch or listen to, we hasten the demise of those things. I get it, life is hard, many of us are struggling, and we need — or have come to expect — constant stuff in our lives, which we don’t have heaps of money to pay for. But as a result of that — and because of corporate greed born of the evils of capitalism — the arts that we love are struggling. So how could I now say to you: oh god, just don’t bother to go to the movies if you don’t feel like it!