So I know people all over the blogo-critico-media-sphere have been talking about how darkly gorgeous and life-affirming this movie was, but I have to be honest, I think I may have missed the point. Maybe I do remember perceiving a point along the way, and maybe I actually felt it hit me. It was somewhere left of center on my chest, which is what I would have expected based on my preconceptions about the film. But then I forgot about it. Sadly, the deepest feeling I was left with at the end of the film was puzzlement that I didn’t have any deeper feelings after the film.

I’d like to think, at least, that this wasn’t all the film’s fault (or heaven forbid, mine for not having the heart to be moved by it). It was my fault entirely, however, for failing to realize that my friends, among which the cynical and weak-stomached abound, were not going to thank me for inviting them over for nightmares, or worse, a feature-length affliction of sweaty hands and restlessness. More importantly, I underestimated the effect that this would have on my own experience. Watching a movie with a group of people prone to groaning about the violence or the acting or the unbearableness of the dramatic tension will thwart the most willing recipient of that elusive quality of good movie-watching, suspension of disbelief.

You’d think that “suspending” your “disbelief” would only really be important in very fanciful or crappy movies, but in a way, all movies, simply by virtue of the medium, ask us to table our assumptions about their subjects, or really about perception in general. After all, we have to first accept the meaningfulness of a pattern of electron-induced flashes on a piece of glass in our living rooms if we are to glean anything from its interpretation.

Lately I am starting to realize that the reason I enjoy movies so much is my very predisposition to this first step of acceptance. I will happily substitute, for two hours at a time, the assumptions and emotions that are fed to me by my eyes for those that have lived for years behind them in my head. It doesn’t matter whether the movie is a philosophical monstrosity inspired by postmodern nausée or a crappy drama inspired by a director’s lack of imagination and a tight budget. The inauthenticity of this process doesn’t trouble me at all, because I have not felt anything remotely comparable to what I’m seeing, and have no intention of measuring these images up to any standard of objective logic or experience. It is sentimentality on cue, existential despair at the push of a button, stimuli-response made possible by the vicariously active passivity of a couch potato in his prime.

This makes it sound like I don’t think–quite the opposite. One who thought less and lived more than I would have a natural immunity to the lure of vicariousness, not to mention a stronger grasp of the difference between stimuli and experience. Movies are an artificial aggrandizement of lives and ideas, and I’m a sucker for big things precisely because they don’t represent the facts of my life. Big thoughts, big emotions, big moral quandaries, and big doses of sweat-inducing, knuckle-whitening, grip-weakening violence–hard to swallow, but once it’s down you can look forward to the long, fruitful digestion of overanalysis.

That process was interrupted for me today, because having real people to share it with forced me to spend the duration of the movie in the real world, instead of inside my head where the fireworks happen. I saw the events that transpired on the screen, but thought instead about events that transpired off of it. I munched on a bag of chips, looked at the people around me, and wondered why the story didn’t seem more real than real life, like it was supposed to, like movies usually do. Then I made a note to look up “Spanish Civil War” on Wikipedia.