Let’s Go Back to the Movies
- Sangwoo Cho
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
No one goes to the movies anymore, or at least, that’s how I felt for a while until I watched Obsession at my local AMC a couple of months ago. It was my first time being in a packed theater in what felt like forever, and I walked out pleasantly surprised that a movie with a budget under $1 million had everyone glued to the screen. The following weeks proved that I was not alone in feeling so; Obsession became an unlikely smash hit, the kind of cultural moment that feels harder to come by nowadays.
As a frequent moviegoer, I’ve realized that the experience itself is just as important as the movie. To me, being able to forget about everything and share a moment with close friends is the heart of the overall experience. Watching Obsession, however, made me realize that getting to share that special feeling with a room packed with strangers is not as peripheral, or as much of a nuisance, as I thought. Love it or hate it, it’s a defining by-product of the experience that sets it apart from streaming a movie at home.
However, movies are only one of many ordinary shared experiences that have been quietly privatized, partly owing to the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote work and hybrid schedules, initially involuntary adjustments to the pandemic's extenuating circumstances, became a routine part of many workplaces rather than a temporary arrangement. Delivery platforms boomed during those years and stuck around, allowing customers the option to skip the hassle of eating out or picking up food. Shopping is also becoming an increasingly online activity, with e-commerce accounting for roughly one-sixth of U.S. retail sales in the first quarter of 2026.
In other words, our lives as a whole have been so efficiently individualized that interactions outside close circles have become largely optional rather than an unavoidable part of life. We can choose what we watch, where we work, what we buy, and increasingly whom we hear from. That may help explain why the decline of community has occurred alongside another defining feature of modern American life: political polarization. When people share fewer places and fewer identities across party lines, political difference is afforded more space to become the defining difference between them.
Polarization is not at all a recent phenomenon; Americans have always had disagreements, just not so cleanly along the same political divide. A neighbor who voted differently could once also be your union colleague, bowling partner, or fellow regular at the local theater. These differences did not erase disagreement altogether, but political identity was treated less as the determinant of one’s overall identity. Now, the US is increasingly trending toward social sorting, a process in which party affiliation becomes the uniform line that separates identities outside of the political. In turn, political identity fills certain gaps of community decline, but arguably exacerbates it.
In the absence of lines that connect people beyond politics, political affiliation offers aspects of community once provided more routinely: a sense of belonging, a shared purpose, and the feeling of being seen by people who understand the world from a similar perspective. But while traditional communities gave people a “we” built around their own needs and purposes, partisan politics increasingly offers a “we” built around defeating “them,” deepening the very divisions that make a broader sense of community harder to recover. In turn, community decline further accelerates polarization by reducing natural exposure to people with different beliefs in everyday, low-stakes settings. Partisan identity establishes the neighbor who voted for the opposition as the “other side” rather than a member of the neighborhood with different beliefs and values. Therefore, the loss of social capital is not merely a story of loneliness. It is the erosion of minor relationships and interactions that once prevented politics from defining the whole person.
This is why I believe the first step in bridging the current political divide is to look outside of politics: to the more routine parts of everyday life, the small moments in which politics plays no part. The goal is to think of the aforementioned neighbor as a friend who happens to live next door first and a political adversary second. In other words, Americans need to feel that political identity is not the total sum of a person again. They need more places and reasons to be reminded that someone they consider a political opponent can also be their teammate, their regular customer, or simply someone who happens to laugh alongside them in a theater. But rebuilding those connections cannot hinge on personal effort alone. Americans may need to look outside partisan politics for community, but public policy still helps determine whether affordable, accessible places for that community exist at all.
So, why not go watch a movie sometime soon? It won’t magically unite us, but maybe forgetting about it all for a couple of hours can remind us that those small moments define us more than who we last voted for.
