celebrity gossip, academic style

But not for the reasons you think.

In today’s movie economy, we tell people “they must see something in the theater” when something indelible, something crucial to the film itself, would be lost without seeing it in the theater. This season’s unanimous theater must-see is Gravity, with its gorgeous, revelatory use of 3D. But the maxim also applies, albeit less regularly, to a certain type of comedy film — rewatch Borat or even The Hangover without a theater full of infectious laughter, and you have a profoundly different experience of the movie.

You must watch 12 Years a Slave in the theater, but not for aesthetics, and not for some sort of communal energy. You must watch it in the theater for a very simple reason: once it’s on DVD, or streaming, or AppleTV, it’ll be all the harder to decide to see it. It is a sad, devastating, incisive, and fiercely important movie and, to my mind, the very best of the year. And those are the hardest movies to get yourself to watch on a Friday night on the couch.

We all want to watch these movies on a Friday night at home. These are the movies that stick around in Netflix queues for years or, once delivered to your home, get so dusty that Netflix eventually emails to ask if you’ve lost the DVD. You want to be the sort of person who watches A Separation, or 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, or The Hurt Locker, something that everyone’s told you you should see, but when it comes down to it, you just keep choosing that week’s DVRed episode of Scandal or the latest relatively innocuous hipster rom-com (see: Drinking Buddies).

Don’t get me wrong: my use of “you” here not somehow excluded myself from this practice. You do it, I do it, many, many people do it. And it’s not because you’re morally weak so much as fortified by choice: when there’s so much out there to choose instead, and you’re already in your pajama pants and have a glass of wine in your hand and want to be asleep by 11 pm, the laws of inertia are simply against you. 9 times out of 10, you will choose the thing that will not challenge and fundamentally alter your world view. Again, it’s not because you’re lazy, it’s because submitting yourself to art that alters you is hard.

Someone once told me that the way to judge whether a piece of art is “good” or not is whether or not you’re a different person when it’s over. You don’t have to be a profoundly different person, but a person who sees him/herself and the surrounding world in a different way, however slight. And 12 Years a Slave isn’t simply good art — it’s the very, very best sort of art, it’s frankly criminal not to watch it, and since I’m still recovering from seeing it earlier today (and weeping, uncontrollably, for the last thirty minutes of the film), I can only tell you to read Wesley Morris’s superlative review on Grantland.

But please, just for a moment, be honest with yourself: when you decide to go to a movie, it’s intractable. You could get to the parking lot or the ticket window and suddenly change your mind, but the inertia, in this case, is against you: you will go to the movie you decide to see. All you need to do is tell someone else that you’d like to go, and then you’re accountable, just like telling someone that you’d like to go running at 6 a.m.

And when you’re in the movie theater, you can’t check your phone, you can’t turn it off, you can’t retreat, and a film of this caliber deserves that. 12 Years a Slave isn’t just aesthetically beautiful; it’s morally and politically necessary. Set yourself up to the path of least resistance to seeing it: even if you only see one movie a year in the theater, let it be this one. Sometimes it’s hard to choose to consume the things that matter most, in no small part because it’s difficult to submit ourselves to media that indicts and questions the status quo, whether that relates to the present, the past, or the cathartic, hope-inducing narratives that depict it. Make this one small thing easier for yourself: see it in the theater, and do it now.