I have been reading Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari about the difference between the “experiencing self” (the person who is sitting in the movie) and the “narrating self” (the person who remembers and reconstructs the experience of sitting in the movie.) I have no doubt that our experiencing selves find theatrical releases a more visceral experience than home viewings. But as for our “narrating selves” — the persons who remember and synthesize the memory of the movie, I wonder if they find relatively little difference between the experiences (unless the narrative self is predisposed to prefer the cinematic experience because they are a cinephile, etc…). Have you ever seen a movie at home or on a small screen that you liked and thought, “boy, that was great, but I wish I had seen this on a large screen.”?
