The uncool solo moviegoer going to cool movies

If it is 10 on a Saturday night and you walk into a movie theater alone, you better see something that is

1) Satisfying on a narrative level, because you’ll need to be enchanted by a beginning middle end enough to have a complete experience after the decision to go to a movie alone at 10.

2) Transporting at the level of exposition—setting the movie in a place unfamiliar enough to make you forget that you are the creepy guy in the theater alone who decided to sit behind two people who had no idea that a man in his 30s with a Ziploc bag of peanut M&Ms and a smuggled can of Sierra Mist soda in his pocket would decide the best seat in the theater was the one right behind them.

3) Not a serial killer movie, a Japanese anime movie, a children’s movie, an Adam Sandler film, or Piranha 3d.

4) Fun enough that the mood between you and the other moviegoers is lightened once the actual movie starts

5) Cool enough that halfway through you think to yourself, “You see, going to movies alone late on a Saturday night is actually cool.”

6) Is provocative enough that you leave the theater with thoughts that cloud out the, "I decided to go alone to a Saturday night movie with a Ziploc bag of M&Ms and I am leaving 10 dollars poorer.”

In other words, you should go see Source Code, the new movie where Jake Gyllenhall has eight minutes on loop to find out who blew up a train on its way to Chicago. That would be the only option.

For my next list, I’ll tell you all the reasons Source Code is better than Inception, the comparison that occurs when you go see thrillers that take place in alternate realities of consciousness with time limits, dreams, wires to the brain, and handsome protagonists:

1) It is about human beings that have feelings rather than human-like things that are made up of obsessions, brooding moments, and strategies.

2) There is something at stake in Source Code other than the psyche of Leonardo Dicaprio.

3) It has no scenes of gathering a team together made up of guys with specialties like explosives, rewiring, and disguises.

4) It is not so serious that only Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the only actors who has never joked or smirked in any of his roles, could play the character. Christopher Nolan should make a movie that stars Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio as competing serious intense guys who have never understood or said a joke, and they are trapped in the world of jokes where you have to figure out the puns in order to make your way through the levels of logic. Finally, when DiCaprio is at the level where the statements themselves are also jokes because they are absurd, he sees Bale, who is not really Bale but a short-term projection of Bale’s memory of himself, or of his twin brother, but the jokes are riddles that are no longer funny because the world in which you or the memory of your twin brother is is really a world in which statements like “You must not interact with the short-term memory of your twin brother’s projection” are not jokes but philosophical conundrums. Turns out that DiCaprio and Bale are actually twin brothers who have co-existed in the world of language games all along. Nolan, if you’re out there, I am not going to copyright this idea—it’s all yours.

5) Its ideas are less “cool” than interesting, and useful: Whereas Inception gets its conceit from Being John Malcovich and Synecdoche, New York, Source Code gets its conceit from Groundhog Day, which suggests that the implications are less about mind-puzzles and more about ethics and humanism. I prefer the latter.

6) Nobody wears a trenchcoat nor a suit vest, nor does anyone have slicked back hair.

7) There is no scene on a rugged snow mountain with snowmobiles

8) You don’t have to be in the theater with a bunch of white high-school aged males who make a lot of “oh ho ho ho ho” guttural sounds after the movie is over and give each other middle-5s.

This is all to say that I enjoyed Source Code as much as I have enjoyed a movie in some time, which was important while riding my bike home alone at midnight on a Saturday. By the way, on my way home, I rode by the other guy who went to the movie alone, who was also white, scruffy, and a bit ashamed, while he was walking home himself. As I rode by, I turned to him and gave him a guttural “oh ho ho ho ho.” Not kidding. The weirdest part, though, is that when he turned to me I realized that he was only a projection of myself, a product of the short-term memory of my unconscious. I turned and rode home in exactly eight minutes.