The day before yesterday I was having a conversation with some of my students at NYU about why people go out to the movies. We focused on the whole tribal aspect of it.<\/p>\n
When you are in a movie theater, and you are surrounded by other people, most of those other people are generally strangers. Yet you still feel a sense of being in a tribe, and your sense of immersion is amplified by that sense.<\/p>\n
It’s a powerful primal feeling, and you get the same boost when you go out to see live theater, or to a concert, or to a football game. As an audience, we all collectively manage to heighten the sense of emotional involvement for each other.<\/p>\n
I noted, for completeness, that this isn’t always how people see movies in a movie theater. “Sometimes,” I pointed out, “when a big movie mogul is screening a film, it’s just an empty theater, and he or she is the only one watching.”<\/p>\n
Of course that is a statistically rare occurrence. I mean, who is that guy? Have you ever met him? We decided it wasn’t really a point worth dwelling on.<\/p>\n
Then today I visited Lucasfilm\/ILM to give a talk and discuss possible research collaboration. The first thing my hosts did, before having me meet with anybody, was sit me down in a big empty movie theater.<\/p>\n
They directed me to center row H, because that is the best seat in the house. For the next 38 minutes, all by myself, I watched Lucasfilm\/ILM movie trailers and special effects reels on the big screen, which was a totally awesome experience. <\/p>\n
I suddenly realized that, at least today, I was that guy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The day before yesterday I was having a conversation with some of my students at NYU about why people go out to the movies. We focused on the whole tribal aspect of it. When you are in a movie theater, and you are surrounded by other people, most of those other people are generally strangers. … Continue reading “That guy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19380"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19380"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19381,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19380\/revisions\/19381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}