But sitting alone in a cool, dark theater is a portable indulgence, one I’ve taken to dozens of other movies since, and the pleasure of this experience has never explained my fixation on The Matrix. (Cellphones existed back then but, as the movie makes clear, we relied mostly on landlines.) The surprise pleasure of cinematic solitude was amplified by that film’s virtuosities, its delicious technical novelty, its nesting of worlds. Perhaps part of the appeal was that I first saw it alone, when my friend didn’t show up and I couldn’t reach him. Read: A movie like ‘The Matrix’ might never happen again And the violence in the film was jarring-three weeks after its release came the Columbine shooting, and the spectacles of a gun massacre on-screen turned into shadows of an unsimulated cataclysm. I also had at least some appreciation for competent writing, which is nowhere to be found in The Matrix. Remember those it’s-almost-the-new-millennium sunglasses? They were a bit matchy with the vinyl jumpsuits even then. My devotion was perhaps on-brand: I was a sci-fi geek, if slanted toward the sunnier, Star Trek end of things, and not three years would go by before I was a philosophy major, engaged in the same (in my case literally) sophomoric speculation about the nature of reality as the movie’s creators. Still, $7.50 was a lot of money-more than I earned bagging groceries for an hour-and 11 was a lot of times to drive to and from the movie theater. My colleagues have written about the reasons we see movies repeatedly-even, in some cases, to the point of memorization. When I was a teenager, I paid $7.50 or so for the privilege of watching The Matrix not just three or four times, but 11. How many times is too many times to see a movie in movie theaters? This question has trailed me through adulthood. About the author: Michael Owen is a former deputy editor of The Atlantic.

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