Our theme for the month of March is “How to.”

It is 4 pm on Valentine’s Day. I am doing what all those deemed to be single on such a day should do: I am parked in the faux leather recline of a cinema seat, a bowl of popcorn cradled in my lap as I await Captain America: Brave New World (2025). Over several weeks I have nursed (read: deluded myself into) an optimism, even an excitement for this. Perhaps another entry in Marvel’s steadiest series can mark a return to its former glory, to those teenage days of sojourns to the comic book shop with my brother and midnight premieres and the long stint in sixth grade where I wore a Captain America shirt and ran around with a trash can lid (true story). Instead, I leave feeling somehow more alone than I did when I sat down before the silver screen in an effort to escape ruminating on my singleness.

It is 9:30 pm on March 1st. Ahead of the Oscars, I am sitting in a small student apartment to screen The Substance (2024). Surrounding me are fellow cinephiles, amateur scholars, and Letterboxd aficionados, as equally practiced in the classical theories of Kracauer, Benjamin, Eisenstein, Bazin, Mulvey and the rest as we are in predicting the proprietary blend of performance, self-congratulating, and virtue-signaling that is the Academy Awards. The issue at the forefront of my mind: the wisdom of betting it all on Demi Moore for Best Actress (as it turns out, a poor choice). The result: two hours and twenty minutes of derivative slop, over the course of which the timbre of the living room discourse shifts from playful to concerned to dumbfounded to agonized to panicked. Minutes after it concludes, six Letterboxd reviews ranging from half to one-and-a-half stars appear in rapid succession. We watch Planet Earth to try and believe in something again. It mostly works. One of the ten Best Pictures of the entire year, the Academy claims.

Is cinema dying? Who knows; some are asking. If we went by ticket sales, it’s been in death throes since 1946 (reports of box office records being broken intentionally don’t adjust for inflation). And how one assesses if there’s been a decline in the quality of films on an industry-wide scale, I couldn’t even suggest. But cinema is changing—perhaps in more dramatic ways than usual—and as my two anecdotes suggest, at least for this viewer the changes haven’t always been positive. Worse, they’ve often been baffling. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into an empty pastiche of prior films in the series that offers barely even a spectacle. A self-indulgent, incoherent body horror film pretending to be biting social commentary while mostly being unpleasant in all the wrong ways. Films where it seems a thousand bad decisions were made and committed to.

This isn’t to deny good, even great movies are being made (and nominated for Best Picture). But loving something that shifts and disappoints as frequently as filmgoing does requires the development of a special kind of patience and some tangible ways of coping. I have three suggestions.

1. Rewatch Often

I think all of us have a list of All-Timers. The five-star movies that aren’t actually five stars based on our normal criteria, but they are the ones that shine through a nostalgia fog, that found us in a moment of need, that taught us something, or that—for some inexplicable, movie-magic reason—always seem to revitalize us. The beauty of the streaming era is that all of them are likely a few dollars away. Let them be a refuge.

2. Embrace Short Films

The film industry is, in fact, an industry; it is fashioning a product it thinks will generate profit. It has rules it believes experience has proved, and it will abide by them. Right now, and since 1918 or so, that has meant the feature film dominates the commercial scene. But from the very beginning of cinema, the short film has been the playground of filmmakers—be they early adopters, film school students, or basement hobbyists. Amidst their largely unprofitable labor is a host of experiments and imaginings that can broaden one’s horizon, reawaken one’s senses or challenge one’s thinking without the feature length time commitment. A brief string of shorts can ease the failures of many a feature.

3. Love What You Love

In that same living room on March 1st, amidst a pantheon of armchair film theorists and friends I deeply respect, I waded alone into a hopeless, but necessary battle: the defense of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (an easy five stars). The combat was short, as the opponents weren’t interested enough in the film to make much of an effort to diminish it. But it had to be fought. We love what we love; we dislike what we dislike. Some of us even love to dislike. There is so much for us and so much that is not, and all of this is represented intricately within a hundred and thirty years of filmmaking. So find the experience you need, or return to it, whether that’s throwing popcorn at your face to another CGI circus or attending to the rapid shifts and obfuscations of an experimental short or sitting in an apartment watching slop simply because you’re glad to be with your friends. They (the Academy, the local cinephiles, your friends) might not love exactly what you do. But you do—and that’s enough to sustain a long and fruitful relationship with it.

Kipp De Man

Kipp De Man graduated from Calvin University in 2023, having majored in film and media studies. He is currently working towards a master’s degree in the same discipline at Washington University in St. Louis. He enjoys reading and writing poetry, rock climbing, and Coke Zero.