This is a very interesting post. I haven’t thought about it, but it’s true that people nowadays are reluctant to display emotion at movies. When I watched ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ (2019) last August, the cinema was quite small, one of those vintage theatres, and we were all in stitches. I don’t know if I would have found it that funny if I was watching it alone. It was definitely the energy in the air.
Absolutely. There's something wonderful about being on the same page as a group of people. It's like the difference between seeing a band you like and people dancing and having a good time versus when you look over and people are, like, checking Facebook in the middle of a song.
I have two family members who react very strongly to horror, squeeze their eyes shut and say, ‘Oh my God’ etc. But in this case I don’t find it adds to my enjoyment of the film, it’s the opposite, if anything.
For me it works because she and I have really similar taste in films. So it's not all yelling and jump scares. We're also constantly commenting on imagery or dialogue we really like. (Disclaimer: we do this when we're at home, not in a theater. We aren't monsters.)
She was very disturbed by it and was mad at me for a few weeks after. It did affect my perception of the film for years to come. I both feel annoyed that I misjudged her mood when I think about it, and thrown out of the moment, I can’t seem to get back into that film and become immersed like before. Therefore, I think another thing that happens is you associate the atmosphere of the last time you watched it with the film itself.
I am a highly emotional film viewer. Not in the sense that I'm always getting worked up, but in the sense that much of my appreciation for a film comes from how I feel while watching it. When I see a film in the theater, it almost always gets a higher score than when I later watch it on the TV. I think of it as the "theater bump." Something about that setting just adds to the enjoyment of a film. I've been told (in very condescending terms, lol) that this is the "wrong" way to rate films and that I should be more "objective". Eh. I know exactly what you mean about building a sort of emotional association with something. It's like if you get a bad meal at a restaurant. The next time you go in you have this automatic memory of the food poisoning you got.
It's also true that sometimes the people we love don't love the art that we love, and that doesn't feel good. I tend to watch a lot of horror movies, and my tolerance for on-screen violence is much higher than most of the people I know. It's tricky to gauge sometimes when something will be too much for someone else, and it doesn't feel good when you get it wrong.