Up until March, it was also instrumental to how I understand time, its shape, texture and demands: moviegoing dictated what I did day and night, including the many hours I clocked driving to and from screenings. Moviegoing was my thing, a way of seeing and of being. But going to the movies was one of my first adventures in sovereignty, one of the first ways that I experienced navigating ordinary life without parental supervision. I grew up in New York in the 1970s watching as many films as I could, including on TV.
(They’re still closed.) The tears of critics are tiny, but moviegoing is who I am. When movie theaters closed in Los Angeles in March, I cried. I know which theater and studio in Los Angeles (where I live) has the biggest screen, the best sound, sightlines and seats - me, I like to sit in the middle of the theater, perfectly centered. A big-screen fundamentalist, I love going out to the movies, to first- and second-run cinemas as well as to art houses, museums and cinémathèques. But in thinking about my favorites of the year and all the many new and old titles I’ve seen, I also thought a lot about how I watched movies and, well, just watched. The point of a top 10 list is to share our preferred movies. I didn’t, I just needed to stop watching, but I couldn’t put down my phone, which tethered me to the larger world that I greatly missed.
It’s no wonder that my eyes had begun to regularly ache and sometimes sting, prompting me to worry that I needed a new prescription for my glasses. I read the news, doomscrolled Twitter, did puzzles, checked my email and kept scrolling. On one lost day not long ago, I spent a horrifying (embarrassing!) 11 hours and 15 minutes on my phone. It was a year of watching obsessively yet indiscriminately, a year of small and smaller screens. Manohla Dargis I Watched Until My Eyes Bled
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