Here’s to the Solo Moviegoer

There’s something unique about attending a movie theater by yourself.

A recent Film School Rejects article — You Should Probably Go To More Movies By Yourself — got me thinking about how being a solo moviegoer has been a recurring thing in my life.

I first became an ardent movie fan while living at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. With quite literally almost nothing to do in that bleak environment and through the good graces of Uncle Sam subsidizing the country’s military wherein a movie ticket cost all of fifty cents, during the summer and on weekends throughout the year, I would trudge over to the movie theater located on the base, most often with friends, but increasingly by myself. I discovered I liked the ‘space’, both mental and emotional elbow room to plunge into a movie’s story universe and experience it all for myself. No chattering of friends, cracking jokes, gnawing on popcorn to distract me.

Attending movies alone became something of a sacred act, a unique way for me to commune with the characters in the story, then reflect back on the feelings and emotions aroused within my evolving consciousness.

I continued this pattern when we moved to March Air Force Base in Southern California. Indeed one of my most vivid movie-going memories is watching 2001: A Space Odyssey by myself in its original theatrical run when I was 15 years old. Mind blown, I went back several times to parse what it all meant.

At the University of Virginia, I joined several movie societies and first experienced foreign films. My friends were like, “Seriously. Watching a pair of people smoke cigarettes in empty hallways. Sighing. Meaning of life. In French. Subtitled. For two hours?!?!” So more often than not, I watched those movies by myself.

In graduate school at Yale, as busy as I was, I carved out time to attend a series of Ingmar Bergman films which ran nightly for two weeks. To heighten the sense of existential angst, I watched those alone, too.

As a musician in Aspen, then Southern California, the late night schedule led me to the joys of being able to watch 2, even 3 movies in one day back-to-back by starting at noon, leaving me time to get to my evening gigs. I caught hundreds of movies over several years, my own version of film school.

Of course, many times I would go with friends, girlfriends, or dates, however rarely a week passed by in which I didn’t watch a movie in a theater by myself.

And none of that covers the countless hours late at night getting caught up in movies which just happened to be on TV.

I suppose part of the allure of watching a movie alone derives from my inherently introspective nature. I like being by myself. I’m quite content to sit in a room for hours on end — writing, thinking, journaling. Watching movies by myself slots right into that behavioral instinct.

But of deeper value for a writer, watching a movie by oneself allows us to experience that story unfiltered and unimpeded by the presence and influence of others. Sure, going out with friends to a movie can lead to a wonderful communal experience (and I have had plenty of those), however for a screenwriter to be able to process and analyze a movie, there really is a great value in not having other people around to interrupt one’s concentration.

So as I say, one key to learning the craft is to watch movies. To that we can add, sometimes… watch movies… alone.

How about you? Do you often watch movies alone? If so, why? How would you describe that experience?