The year ended and I still had not gone back to the cinema

The cinemas reopened on the 9th of November. I know this because I wrote myself a note in my phone that said “cinemas open again” with an exclamation mark, which is the kind of thing you write when you believe you are going to act on it. The note is still there. The exclamation mark still intact. It is now the 28th of December and I have not gone.

I want to say there were reasons. Practical ones. The capacity limits, the staggered seating, the masks, the lingering uncertainty about whether it was really safe or just officially permitted. These are real things and they mattered to real people and I do not want to dismiss them. But they are not why I did not go. I did not go because somewhere between March and November, watching films on my laptop stopped being a compromise and became a preference, and I do not know how to feel about that.

In March, when everything closed, I mourned the cinema. I wrote about mourning the cinema. I described, with what I now recognise as a slightly theatrical precision, the things I missed: the darkness, the collective breathing of an audience, the way a film fills your peripheral vision until the screen is the only thing that exists. I meant all of it. The mourning was genuine. I missed the physical experience of sitting in a room built for watching.

The laptop became the room

But here is what happened. I set up a system on my couch. Laptop on the coffee table, screen tilted to the right angle, cushions arranged, lights off, phone in another room. I did this out of necessity at first and then out of habit and then out of something that felt uncomfortably like contentment. The laptop screen is thirteen inches. The cinema screen at my local is probably thirty metres wide. The difference should be decisive. For a while, it was not.

I watched Babyteeth (2019) on my laptop in April, during the first lockdown. Shannon Murphy’s film about a terminally ill teenager who falls for a small-time drug dealer. Eliza Scanlen and Toby Wallace, both extraordinary. The film is intimate and fractured and uses chapter titles and close-ups in a way that, I told myself at the time, worked just as well on a small screen. Maybe it did. Or maybe I was already beginning to adjust my standards to fit the screen I had, rather than the screen the film deserved.

I watched Relic (2020) on my laptop in July. Natalie Erika James’s horror film about three generations of women in a decaying house in rural Victoria. Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin, Bella Heathcote. The house in that film is a character, and the way James shoots its corridors and walls and peeling surfaces is designed for a screen large enough to make you feel enclosed. On my laptop, the enclosure was missing. I noticed this. I noted it. I kept watching on my laptop.

The guilt of the converted

In October, before the cinemas reopened, Palace and Dendy and the independents started running campaigns about supporting your local cinema. Buy gift cards. Pre-book tickets. The industry is hurting. I shared the posts. I liked the tweets. I felt the specific guilt of someone who agrees with a cause and does nothing about it, which is the most common form of guilt in public life and the easiest to live with.

The truth, which I did not say to anyone, is that I had already started to enjoy the convenience. The pause button. The ability to rewind a line of dialogue I missed. The temperature of my own living room. The absence of the man in row G who always, in every cinema I have ever attended, unwraps something loudly at the exact wrong moment. These are small comforts and they are not the point of cinema and I know that and I chose them anyway.

I think there is a version of this essay where I describe a triumphant return to the cinema. Where I walk into a darkened room and the lights go down and the screen fills my vision and I cry, not at the film but at the experience, at the restoration of something I thought I had lost. That essay would be satisfying to write and satisfying to read and it would require me to have actually gone, which I have not.

What I watched in December

In December I watched three films on my laptop. Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears (2020), the feature film spin-off of the ABC series, which I watched mostly out of loyalty and partly because I wanted to see Essie Davis be glamorous in a context that did not require me to put on shoes. The Dry (2020), Robert Connolly’s adaptation of the Jane Harper novel, starring Eric Bana, which had been in cinemas since November and which I could have seen on a proper screen and chose not to. And Penguin Bloom (2020), because it was there and because Naomi Watts is always watchable and because I had run out of resistance to films about resilience.

All three would have been better in a cinema. I knew this while watching them. I watched them on my laptop anyway.

The year taught me something I did not want to learn

There is a story I told about myself for years, the story of a person who goes to the cinema. Who values the theatrical experience. Who believes that films are made for dark rooms and large screens and the presence of strangers. This story was not false. I did go to the cinema regularly. I did value it. I did believe those things.

But the year revealed something underneath the story, which is that the story was, at least in part, a performance. I went to the cinema because going to the cinema was part of my identity as a person who cares about film. When the option was removed, I discovered that the caring survived without the ritual. I still watched. I still paid attention. I still felt things. The laptop was sufficient.

This should be liberating. It is not. It is the kind of self-knowledge that makes your previous self look slightly foolish, all those years of insisting on the big screen, of arguing with friends about the importance of theatrical release, of performing a devotion that turned out to be, at least partly, optional.

I will go back to the cinema. I know this because I miss it in a way that is starting to sharpen again as the distance grows. The habit of not going is becoming its own discomfort. But I will go back knowing something I did not know before, which is that the version of me who watches films on a laptop in the dark with her phone in another room is not a lesser version. She is just a different one, and the year made her, and she is not going away.

The note is still in my phone. “Cinemas open again!” The exclamation mark is doing a lot of work. It is carrying the enthusiasm of a person who believed that reopening would mean returning, that the doors opening outward would pull her in. The doors opened. I stayed on my couch. The year ended. I am writing this in the dark, laptop balanced on a cushion, watching nothing, thinking about what I did not do and what that means about the person I turned out to be.