It’s something she’s never done alone – not once in almost 20 years of seeing movies in the theatre.
“You either go with your friends or you go on a date,” said Katey Toy, a middler physical therapy major. “I would never just go to the movies by myself. If I want to see something that no one else wants to see, I’ll wait until it comes out on DVD and rent it, or watch the movie on my computer.”
Enter the phrase “movies alone” into a Google search, and Toy’s ideology gains some context: In .28 seconds, nearly 170,000 links pop up to websites where people have discussed the norms of going to see a movie in a theatre.
Some defend their preference for going solo, while others use message boards to feel out unchartered territory: “Do you ever see movies alone? And do you feel your aloneness?” asked a poster named “Irena” in a Yahoo Answers forum last week. Some assert they would never see a movie without a date, and others say, despite what they expected before the experience, going alone wasn’t that bad.
While no definitive folkway exists for movie-going, though, there is an overarching social notion that seeing a movie is not an individual activity, said sociology professor Jack Levin.
“This is a group world – it’s a coupled world, it’s a team world. … The odd man out is a man or a woman who is alone,” he said. “When you go to the movies or you eat by yourself, you may be concerned that people see you as an outcast, as someone who doesn’t have friends, or who can’t have company.”
Those concerns might be owed in part to the social equations that movie-going has fit into historically, Levin said.
“Going to the cinema is embedded in a larger relationship,” he said. “People go out to eat, then they go to the cinema. They go to the cinema, then they go dancing. It’s a social experience, and even while you’re watching a movie, you’re actually interacting – you may talk. It’s a lot more satisfying for most people to leave the theatre and to exchange views about the movie they’ve just seen.”
Toy said sharing the experience is what makes it meaningful – especially when the people you’re with are responding the same way emotionally to the film.
“At funny moments in movies, I like to look over to the people I’m with and have that connection,” she said.
On the other hand, Emma Johnson, a junior journalism major, said solitude can be refreshing.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt awkward about it,” said Johnson, who regularly goes to the movies by herself. “I know a lot of my friends think I’m insane, but I actually like it sometimes – you’re in a theatre and it’s dark, and you’re completely anonymous. Nobody knows you, and you can focus on the movie with no one talking in your ear.”
Since the birth of cinema, the way we view movies – and with whom – has gone through a series of changes, said Gerald Herman, an assistant history professor.
When movies first emerged in America, people had no choice but to watch them alone, he said.
“They weren’t shown on screens – they were shown through viewers,” he said. “You essentially looked through something that resembled a pair of binoculars, and some of them were electric and some of them, you turned a crank [to play the film].”
Even after films evolved to the big screen, Herman said it wasn’t until around the 1930s, when movies were censored and movie-going was seen as more conventional than before, that visiting the cinema became something to do with your partner or your family. When the bar of censorship was raised around the late ’50s, and film began to compete with television with tricks like Smellovision, 3-D and stereophonic sound, people started going to movies alone again, Herman said.
Levin said as people become more and more independent, one can expect this trend to continue.
“The distinction between what’s individual and what’s social, what’s personal and what’s public, have all blurred thanks to the presence of a number of high-tech devices,” Levin said. “An individual can be among others and still be apart, and it’s more socially acceptable … than ever before. In the future we may see more people willing to take a chance and eat alone, or go to the movies by themselves.”
Andrew Thompson, theatre manager of the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, said, in fact, he sees a lot of solo movie-goers on a regular basis. Thompson, 36, has worked at the Coolidge for 11 years, and sells tickets few times a week.
“I don’t think I’ve ever observed anybody looking particularly shameful that they’re going alone,” he said. “I go to the movies alone all the time – I don’t even give it a second thought.”
