The Quid Novi MONTREAL, QC
MCGILL UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF LAW - FACULTÉ DE DROIT DE L’UNIVERSITÉ MCGILL
46 05 12 NOV 2024
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR On Going to the Movies Alone Pablo Mhanna-Sandoval | 2L
Last week, I had the pleasure of watching The Wild Robot (2024, dir. Chris Sanders) at the Scotiabank Cinema on Sainte-Catherine. It’s a touching adaptation of Peter Brown’s novel by the same name. Without spoiling the movie–which I recommend you go see in theatres before the end of its run–by the end credits I had been moved. I found it beautiful in its animation and story and in its mining of themes of friendship and identity. As I gathered my empty bag of popcorn and my things, I found myself almost beginning to ask out loud, “So, what’d you think?” There was one problem: I had watched the movie alone. Cinema is in some ways a collective experience. One goes to the movies, sits in a theatre full of people, and is at the mercy of these people’s understanding of theatre etiquette
and basic decency. These people in the theatre laugh and cry together. They lean forward in their seats or forget to breathe together when an action sequence picks up. And, once it’s all over and people pick up their things and walk down the steps to the exit, they discuss the movie together. Cinema is also an individual experience. One goes to the theatre and is touched by the movie in unique ways. One may find themselves acting like the main character of a movie in the following week. One may even find themselves thinking of one of the movie’s scenes during a tax class later that month. This may seem hyperbolic, but I cannot emphasize enough how serious movies can be. Star movie critic Roger Ebert once famously called movies “empathy machines”: “If it’s a great movie, it lets you under-
stand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. And that, to me, is the most noble thing that good movies can do and it’s a reason to encourage them and to support them and to go to them.”1 It is true; I had watched the movie alone on Wednesday night. But I had nonetheless started to form the words “So, what did you think” out loud. It seems that as I walked down my row of seats and I drew a breath to speak, I didn’t feel quite that alone. Bryn Mawr Film Institute, “Movies help generate empathy,” June 2, 2020. Press release. https:// brynmawrfilm.org/press/empathy-is-the-first-step/ 1
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