What does it mean to love the movies? We think about cinephilia as a love of the text, yet the addictive powers of viewing extend to additional layers of filmic experience. This brief essay considers the potential of the Jamesian field for a spectatorship at once nostalgic and new. While spectatorship has a deep history of political and social anxiety, certain of its pleasures still might serve to intoxicate. Here, I suggest that a desire for watching, together, in public is the yearning that today’s cinephile feels. If we are to consider the beneficial force of the movies, the best way might be through the magnetic space of reencounter.
