Everybody Should Watch Movies

Play

Bad news again today.

Families torn apart.

Bombs, real bombs, dropped in countries I once didn’t know existed.

I’d take ignorance if it meant they were safe. A million times over, I’d take ignorance and to never know the name of a child whose face is gone.

Healthcare, anythingcare. We can’t call these a part of our past if they were never here. I can’t even miss them properly.

Out of my mouth comes “why” and “how?”

But “why” and “how” don’t even sound like real words anymore. Just a noise when it hurts, like when you step on a dog’s tail.

I think I’ll go watch a movie.

Rewind

I’ve always been a confused person. More than most things, I’ve known how to fall apart and hold the pieces like junkyard antiques in hands too small to carry it all. Some part of me believes I was born this way; maybe my mother ate too many spices, or watched too many sad movies. What was it that she fed me through our umbilical cord? Nerves and Alfred Hitchcock, probably.

Whatever it was, I have been helplessly untethered and distressed in every way you could imagine. I don’t know if there was ever a time I felt truly secure in who I was, where I was, or what the things around me were.

What it was was just an otherworldly difficulty to feel “right” with the world and like we were square. I didn’t know how to be in a place somewhere so vast, and kind of awful. All the parts of my life were like a sweater two sizes too big, with a third arm hole, and itchy everywhere. Things just didn’t fit.

Friends were fun, but friendships were fragile. School was fine, but it was school. Church never took, and I wasn’t bright enough to keep up piano lessons.

Home.

Home was safe.

But it was lonely.

There is a unique kind of pain of being unable to communicate well with your family. It’s like being submerged in a pool, screaming and pantomiming what you’re trying to say while your heart pounds against your chest. All that trying, but nobody understands.

Because of this, home was either deathly quiet, or terribly loud.

Yes, there was the language barrier, but—well, what’s a word for when Mom and Dad loathe each other?

That. We had that.

Sometimes, my parents would go months without talking and during the few times they would, the talking usually ended up as yelling. My brother and I would pick sides, or worse, stay out of it entirely. Things would break and doors would slam; it was all just noise, or nothing at all. So much of my childhood was spent with all of us in separate rooms so often, I thought we were richer than we actually were because of all the space in between our bodies. Without much real talking getting done anywhere, our small family of four felt how small four really was.

But it wasn’t all bad. There was still love there. Fierce and fanged as it was, we all loved each other in so many ways besides words. Saving the last bowl of cereal for the other person. Waking each other up so we didn’t sleep in and miss something. Miss everything. Even the ways we didn’t get along.

Funnily enough, the times we’d get along most is when we all just purposely shut our mouths, and watched a movie.

Watching a movie together, we could laugh and sing. Let’s get down to business!
It was the way we learned words together that we didn’t know. Doe, a deer, a female deer.
And how we asked each other questions. You talkin’ to me?

We would cry, and for once not because of each other, but because Jack froze in the water before Rose could blow a frozen whistle in the dark. We understood each other better when we learned the things that made us jolt or chuckle. A runtime would be the longest conversation we’d have.

Movies became an integral part of my life this way.

At home, we had bookcases filled with old VHS tapes with covers I knew well: All Dogs Go To Heaven, Kazaam, Ghost, Jumanji…

We’d destroy the black film from rewinding and fast-forwarding religiously. Talk talk talk talk talk talk. We’d lift the flap of the VHS tape and wonder how an entire world, how Bill Pullman or Tom Hanks, lived on a thin strip of paper. I love you I love you I love you I love you

So where was it that I felt innately, unquestionably held?

With them, there. With a movie playing.

It’s what I’ve always known and needed to feel just a little bit put together.

Fast Forward

Years passed where movies fell to the wayside. There was just life I was living, all this growing up I had to endure.

During the Lost Years is when I’d started noticing boys, how I looked, and other unimportant stuff that seemed like the biggest deals in the world at the time. I didn’t have much space for movies anymore.

Until, one day, I’d gotten sick like never before.

I was bedridden with a three-digit fever and at that ridiculous age where I didn’t want my mother to take care of me. Fifteen or so. It was also that ripe age where one’s suspicions of the world being a cruel place started to solidify like Jell-o.

That day, sick just about everywhere and disgusted by just about everything, I’d locked myself in my bedroom and refused to turn on any lights. Maybe it wasn’t so much a conscious refusal as it was a physical inability from the illness.

Whatever it was, I knew that I felt so bad, I simply wanted to die.

I was just so sick.

I couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t do much of anything at all. I had so little power to do or change anything about the situation. All I could seem to do was wait it out and pray for things to get better.

On that day, time worked against me. It meant nothing at all and bent like a spoon, remnants of DayQuil pooled in it. When you looked outside, it was 6 am or 6 pm. I swam in indistinctness and acetaminophen.

Sweat stayed slick on me like a second skin, and food was just a distant memory of something I used to like. Kimchi something. Burgers and spaghetti, or whatever. Heat ravaged my throat. Rendered it some sort of desert scorched underneath a sun that knew only this patch of land, my mouth.

Desperate and alone, all I wanted was to get out of my sick body.

Hold me hold me I’m so scared; something I could bear to ask only on the brink of death. Foolish.

But on my hands and knees, I crawled to movies once more.

There was a logical choice behind movies: they offered a practical escape or distraction from my illness. But more than that, there literally wasn’t an ounce of energy in my body for anything else besides it. When I was will and when the world felt dark, there really seemed to be no other choice than to watch movies.

At the very least, it would restore time and make it pass in a way that made sense. All I had to do was benchmark the time it’d take to watch three feature length films and I knew that by the time they were over, I would be closer to health.

The movies themselves.

It’d probably make for a better story if I knew why I’d chosen these titles, but the truth looks a lot closer to scrolling on Netflix and picking whatever I thought would be good. Honestly, I wanted to pick movies (should I say films?) that would render me “deep” (I was fifteen, remember?). So in succession, alone in a dark, musty room, I watched Donnie Darko, Requiem for a Dream, and The Silence of the Lambs for the first time. Movies I’d always heard of and had seen these cool, dark stills of floating around on Tumblr (again, fifteen).

The sun rose or set outside my window as the movies played. Every so often I sat up a little taller. The films moved me, in every single way.

Pause

You never really forget the movie(s) that turn you on to movies.

While I’d always loved them, I was much too young to really understand what they meant to me. I only had the vague notion that movies meant connection, meant a bridge to my family and even myself. For that reason, movies were massively important to me, but I hadn’t yet realized the greater impact movies actually had on me as a human until that day in my room.

It’s strange. I didn’t feel seen in any of these films, not really, but I had the strangest feeling that I could finally see.

Maybe my big, bad, tough teenage defenses were down from the illness, but I saw others in a way I simply hadn’t before. My developing brain finally understood movies as an art form with the ability to seep into your entire being and ask it walk outside of its own body. You had to shed your skin suit and put on another (no Silence of the Lambs pun intended).

Without getting into detailed synopses of each movie, one of the commonalities is that they all explore the darker sides of humanity; the angst, depths, and evil that lie within us all. These movies are graphic, perplexing, and violent, and yet, it was here that my heart grew a hundred times bigger. I understood what it might be like to try to and come of age when the entire world seems to be counting down toward some inevitable, anxiety-ridden demise (Donnie Darko), or what it might be like to want to feel good so bad, you’d be willing to do just about anything (Requiem For a Dream), or what it might be like to seek help and humanity from a monster who literally ate people (Silence of the Lambs).

What movies did for me was simple: they deepened my empathy.

I know, I know. It seems so un-special and common enough in a sentence, but when you’re a teenager in the absolute throes of teenage-hood, the moment you realize your little world is not all that there is one of the most important and crucial moments one can have. (I still think plenty of adults need to have this moment!)

That was really the first time I felt trapped in a room, and all over the world at once. Blasted in a million pieces and somehow put back together at the same time.

The substance that simultaneously cracked my heart wide open and glued me back together were just these stories. These beautiful, confounding, violent, truthful, quizzical, ridiculous, wild, scary, emptying stories and scenes of lives that settled in the spaces between my ribs. They dared me to breathe and see how it could that my heart had not expanded.

—

After finishing all three, I remember thinking, “So this is what a movie can do.”

I felt I finally understood the greater purpose movies would have in my life.

It’s hard to admit that the purpose of movies in my life stretches beyond connecting with my family (something I want most in this world), but it is. It is beyond them. Movies are in my life because they help me become a better person.

It’s really not that profound, but it’s so incredibly vital.

These stories, dark and frightening as they were, made everything feel somewhat right again. A dose of cinematography and empathy pulled me out of the sickness.

I was healed. I watched movies, and emerged better.

But I just don’t know if all this movie-watching is enough anymore.

I think I’m sick again.

Plot Twist

I’m not well.

I don’t feel very good.

Everything hurts, and I feel utterly powerless.

In 2026, I am infinitely more exhausted than when I was when I was deathly sick in 2011. I’m a fish out of water, gasping for air.

And what I didn’t see coming was how the empathy I’ve built over all these damn movies would render me a nervous, shaking, overwhelmed chihuahua about everything even more so than I already was.

It’s everything.

The obvious atrocities—war, genocide—to lesser injustices that hurt a different kind of hurt.

Things that seem so simple to fix.

The right, good opinion to have of maybe not bombing a school full of children or walking into a synagogue with an assault rifle.

Smaller things, too.

The sight of an elderly Asian man who even slightly resembles my father will bring me to my knees, and the mere thought of a lonely mother somewhere in the world makes me want to gouge my heart out and fling it into the Pacific.

All of it hurts.

The more I see, the less anything makes sense. And lately, I can’t tell what movies are doing for me anymore. I’m not sure if all the movies in the world can thaw and crack my heart open again like it used to.

Watching movies used to make me feel heroic, like everything I’d watch would make me a kinder, warmer, funnier, smarter, and better human being. You listen to film critics like Roger Ebert talk about movies like they are disciples sent upon the earth to help us feel what it’s like to come from another race, gender, sexuality, economic status, and that it’s one of the most worthy uses of our time because they’re empathy generators.

But in an ultimate plot twist, I think I’ve seen too much. In between the daily atrocities, all the big and small grievances that seem indicative of End Times, hell, I’ve seen enough.

Eject?

I don’t know if I can watch enough movies to catch up. It all just feels so insurmountable and futile.

Some days, gaining the strength or energy to sit on my couch and watch a movie feels on par with scaling a mountain with nothing but a pair of worn-down Birkenstocks and a broken carabiner.

What’s the point?

And soon starts the condemnation. I recognize how stupid it sounds to complain about not having the energy to watch a movie, but this is genuinely where we’re at.

This feeling, it’s tar. It’s some spreading taffy I’m getting stuck in. I want a heart full of empathy for everyone, everywhere, but I’m too tired. I have so little power to do or change anything about any situation. All I can seem to do is wait it out and pray for things to get better. And I’m afraid my heart is too broken now, and too spurned by what it’s witnessed, to open and offer itself up to love the way it did before.

I’m scared my love is just not fit for a world I don’t understand. It’s like constantly trying to shove a dollar bill in a vending machine that only rejects it. I keep creasing and bending in the center.

I keep on trying, but it doesn’t seem to work.

In fact, I fear all the world’s hate is winning. It’s turning me hateful.

What does it mean to secretly hope for a president’s death? How far does my empathy and goodness really go? And what about all the stupid, painful things I’ve done or said in the past? The terrible intrusive thoughts when I’m cut off in traffic or see someone litter? What if I’m just a shitty, hateful person?

I want so desperately to find the love—that exact right substance—to help absolve the world of its suffering but maybe I’m just part of the problem. Sometimes, this feeling gets so heavy, I can actually hear my skull splinter and crack like ice.

I’ve relied on movies to help me love and find more love and be more loving, but it’s possible a completely different story has been unfolding this entire time: I’ve been telling myself that movies are somehow the thing that saves. The thing that makes me Good.

I’ve found myself in front of a movie screen again and again, wanting to siphon what it’s like to be, feel, taste, understand, and know others, as well as know what it’s like to suffer the world’s suffering. If I siphon enough, I’ll know how to alleviate the world of its suffering, won’t I? Or at the very least, I would simply not add to it.

But really, I sit in the dark, hiding and hoping that nobody sees me sucking the world’s experiences like a blood-sucking leech who just needs to find a reason to be loving and good again.

But lately I’ve been wondering, “What if I just need to stop looking at movies like they’re my savior?” I’ve been wondering if in these dire times, I should turn to God instead of David Fincher.

For so long, I’ve thought movies to be some bonafide indicator of Good human beings, but even the most evil people in the world who’ve committed unthinkable, heinous crimes and injustices watch movies. If Hitler were alive today, what would be his top four films on Letterboxd? Didn’t Jeffrey Dahmer show his victims films before drilling holes into their heads?

Maybe movies are just movies, and they don’t have any influence over a person’s righteousness. Maybe I just enjoy them. And maybe I should get off my ass and stop hiding in a dark movie theater telling myself this is somehow enough and how I love the world.

But just when I’m about to break, just when I’m about to close my eyes from all these silly little movies, I hear a baby’s laugh. My mommy calls. I see my friends and the sun penetrates the window.

And I show up again. I watch another movie.

There doesn’t seem much else that’s this worthy of our attention right now than making, consuming, absorbing art.

It feels like the most dire thing in the world.

Play Again

Why should any of us watch movies when the world keeps falling apart? Does there come a point when all this just becomes a distraction?

For a moment, I thought, Well, shit. Maybe! It felt near neglectful and willfully ignorant to throw on a movie in the midst of all this upheaval and suffering. But it’s not neglectful. It’s one of the most radical things we can do. What an act of love to witness someone’s story. To give over a couple hours of our busy lives to others we don’t know. To listen and be brought to our knees, to tears, to a state of complete surrender so that we might understand each other a little better.

How much more of the world can I accept and love now that I’ve seen it?

Painful as can be sometimes, movies make me fall in love with the world all over again. This imperfect, fickle, inconceivable, beautiful world.

There is no other option than to choose to love it every time.

What else shall I do? Allow the last bits of myself that seeks goodness to be beatened into subservience? Bend over to those who stand to benefit from my exhaustion and hopelessness?

There’s an entire system preying on our collective numbness and hatred. There exists a massive force, call it an administration or The Man, that’s hellbent on rendering the averaging person bigoted only to capitalize on them. There’s big money in Ignorance. Hate’s easier to capitalize on than love.

But I cannot stay sick. I love you way too much.

I’ve never felt it more imperative to absorb good art.

Sadly, we’ve become too quick to dismiss art’s power as a society, and I’ve even met people who very openly and proudly claim to be “anti-art.” I’m just not an artistic person. I don’t really watch TV like that. I don’t have the time for movies. I haven’t read a book in years. Museums aren’t really my thing. Meh.

When I come across people who say that, I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt and think, well, maybe I’m reacting so strongly because these just happen to be my interests. I could just as easily say and offend someone if I said, “I’m not into knitting,” “I find cars loud and annoying,” or “Who needs mountain biking?”

But I don’t think these things are the same, and part of me wants to shake the shoulders of these people and say, “Hey! We are DYING over here! Watch this movie! Get wise!”

Then I remember one of the most important lessons all these movies have taught me: people are different, and I should love them anyway. Empathy is given a lot of its definition precisely because we give it freely. I can feel and extend compassion or understanding without having to qualify it, or under any conditions. And I’m no better than anyone because I like the fucking cinema. In fact, these people might be Mother Theresa in their free time who show up for their communities and fight injustices in ways much more substantial than me.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a perfect person. I’ve done and said a lot of stupid shit in my life, but I would be an infinitely worse person without any interest in art.

I think everybody should watch movies, but I understand if they don’t.

—

Why do I end up in the theater again and again?

For so long, I’d suspected I wasn’t right for the world; that it was too grand and horrible for me to understand. But what it was was that I didn’t have the tools, the empathy, to fight back with love.

But I’ve found it. I’ve found my way.

More than I love movies, movies are my way to love.

The world is a dark, dark place. But know this about me: I’m good in the dark.

Press play.