For the next few weeks, we will be counting down our 25 favorite blockbusters! Read all of the entries here.

**17. The Empire Strikes Back (dir. Irvin Kershner, 1980)**

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, The Red Herring

Back on April 24th of this year, I finally saw The Empire Strikes Back at a cinema. It was my fourth experience inside a movie theater in the past 12 months. I saw Tenet at an empty press screening last August, and a second time at an even emptier public screening a few weeks later. At the beginning of April, I rented a theater so a small group of friends could see Godzilla vs. Kong together. While those were all good experiences, Empire just hits differently.

Seeing a film I have watched countless times at home in a theater made me reflect on why I love going to the movies. I'm not saying anyone should or ought to go to a theater right now, but I do want to argue for the importance of the theatrical experience as a part of the medium we call movies.

"It's like something out of a dream…”

When Luke arrives on Dagobah, looking for Yoda, he says the above line to himself. The swampy, mist-filled planet overrun with snakes–something I never noticed until this viewing–is the setting for Star Wars pivoting from a ‘Kurosawa samurai story, but in space’ towards mysticism. Here, George Lucas and director Irvin Kershner lean into Joseph Campbell’s ideas, embracing the monomyth structure as Luke gets ready to (unknowingly) face his father. They also lean into the immaterial, exploring the abstract concept of The Force in deeper ways.

"Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter," Yoda says. If this pandemic has reminded me of anything, it is that our time on Earth is inextricable from the crude matter our minds and spirits inhabit. But seeing Yoda, a puppet made from man-made materials and brought to life by a team of people, counsel Luke, lifting his X-Wing from the swamp never fails to inspire me to believe there is more to the world than we can see. All of this draws on some of the oldest philosophical traditions mankind has, reaching back to Plato.

Luke's exploration of the Cave provokes similar feelings. A brash materialist, Luke takes his weapons into the dark tree against his master's advice. He brings this ‘crude matter’ into a place of the mind, and at his own peril.

The sequence inside the Cave is infinitely malleable.This time, it struck me as an apt metaphor for how we bring our own perspective with us when we watch a movie. So many people seem to get caught up on realism. Some of these things are fun to talk about and cheekily debate, but they do not matter. How long does Luke train? How long does it take the Millennium Falcon to limp to Cloud City? That's us bringing our reality with us into the dark room of the theater, imposing these things on the film. At the same time, however, we can only truly exist in our world.

This is where the theatrical experience comes to mind. It isn't just that the theater provides a venue for minimal distraction, though that is part of it. For the runtime of a film, the movie becomes reality. This is true for any kind of venue where we go to experience art. The Cave that Luke enters recalls the Chauvet cave paintings, which seem animated by the flicker of torchlight. Viewed in the darkness, they are static images, but the flickering light–the immaterial magic ingredient–gives them life. Humans have always gone into the darkness together to tell stories by the flickering light.

This is how we dream in public, a way for us to tap into the collective unconscious. It just isn't the same without being in a communal space. Theaters, even sparsely attended ones, elevate the art form, bringing the monomyth and other stories from the unconscious to the conscious mind. We feel those feelings, and find community and commonality. This is our folklore. They may hit our unique perspectives differently, but we also participate in the larger community, and all of our experiences, plus the movie, blend together. While I am often moved by watching movies alone, the impact is compounded by experiencing them with others. Something about those others being strangers, all of us who have wandered into the temple together, makes it magical. Movies themselves, which only really exist as light on the wall of a cave, transcend the material world. They are luminous.