Telluride Times, September 3, 2026

I grew up with a hard-ass military father, which for the most part meant the kids were not allowed to do anything that qualified as fun. Concerts, camp, dating before the age of 16, whatever: forget about it.

In the summer of 1971, however, at the age of 13, I was inconceivably granted leave to go on a brief vacation with my friend Barbara and three other girls from our Seattle neighborhood to Birch Bay – a nearby vacationland – for a long weekend. We dressed in the uniform of the times, consisting of floppy suede hats, Clarks desert boots, and orange-label Levi’s slit up the side.

Included in our weekend – a lush oasis of parental leniency – was seeing Love Story at the local drive-in, yet another standard thrill denied us Curry kids. Because it was nothing less than an unsavory place filled with unsavory behaviors. Only it wasn’t! It was fabulous – like being in a movie inside a movie, so far removed was it from my normal life. Pheromones flying, we fell hard for Ryan O’Neal, embraced the tragedy of Ali MacGraw’s demise, and bonded in a shared experience. I returned home feeling crushed but also revived  and liberated.

What happened at that drive-in was the same thing that is still happening in theaters everywhere. People watching movies together – especially strangers – can experience a remarkable synchronization of brain activity, part of a field of study less than 20 years old called Neurocinematics. Researchers use tools such as fMRI brain scanning, eye tracking and other biometric measures to map what happens to our brains and bodies as a film unfolds.

Studies have found that viewers tend to look at the same things at the same time, and even their spontaneous blinks can sync up at moments. Activity across areas of the brain involved in vision, hearing, attention, emotion and understanding the story can begin following similar patterns from one viewer to another.

Films do this in various strengths. Editing, camera movement, and sound, for example, can all influence how tightly an audience’s attention is controlled. An emotional or carefully constructed movie can produce more synchronization than more ordinary or unstructured scenes.

This alignment in movie watchers creates something that sounds mystical but is, in fact, measurable: for a little while, a roomful of individual nervous systems will respond to the same thing at roughly the same time. Given the bevvy of post-COVID, AI-fueled trends in steeped in social isolation, I find this enormously appealing. We may enter a movie theater alone, but once the lights go down, we are all in it together.

In the early 1980s during my New York years, there was a theater I went to regularly called The Metro on West 99th Street, where, after its transition from porn house in 1982, it started showing  revivals, indie films and European avant-garde. These were the days of people smoking and eating entire meals – Chinese was particularly indiscreet– in theaters, including in this Art Deco gem.

I always went to The Metro on my own, usually to see classic Hollywood comedies. It was a place to feel cozy in the dark, to be delighted and laugh out loud – all of it with a vague sense of the patchy audience members doing exactly the same thing.

I had no idea my eyes might be blinking at the same moments as theirs, or that our brains could were becoming “coherent.”  I just knew, like everyone else, that movies in a darkened theater could feel really good.  Biochemically, this involves sub-perceptual waves of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine releasing.

A movie theater offers us something increasingly rare: the chance to be alone and together at the same time. We might call it an adult version of “parallel play.” We sit without speaking and look in the same direction for two hours, fully absorbed. We connect without effort and …. it’s good for us

At the drive-in all those years ago, I thought what had liberated my adolescent self was a tragic love story, my girlfriends and a father who miraculously had said yes. Maybe it was also the loft of complete surrender to a story with other people.

This may be old news in the sense that we all know we love movies in theaters. But even in an age when science moves faster than we can keep up with—and can easily be reverse-engineered to manipulate us—we can, for the moment, just enjoy the simple, profound sweetness of all of us riding the roller coaster together.