When your apartment doubles as your office, a workday can decay into a deserted arena for rival compulsions. Eventually you need to be among people again. That’s why I head to the movie theater at weird hours, seeking some semblance of ceremony. One ticket buys the ability to be privately public. Without companions nearby, the conversation becomes visual: I glance at the whispers and flirtations in the audience, at those people leaving early, the ones staying serenely behind. I listen to the crickety rustle of popcorn. I run my fingers over oxblood velvet. Whether you’re in church or in a theater, sometimes the frescoes are prettier than the liturgy.

I don’t buy into the rather precious notion of cinema as ritual, at least not the solemn kind. A laptop or a smartphone has its uses, and its charms. I’m just too distractible to relax in front of a computer screen by myself — it always feels like research. The piety of moviegoing is ahistoric, anyway. Orson Welles once described how it was in the 1930s: “You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night. Like you’d go in to have a drink at a bar. Every movie theater was partially empty. We never asked what time the movie began.” You’d leave when you realized the reels had wound back to the point at which you entered. As late as 1960, Hitchcock could use “no latecomers” as a novel marketing gimmick for “Psycho.”

The studios have since become mere adornments of multinational conglomerates, producing films merged into “cinematic universes,” and the theaters have consolidated, too. They are fewer but more elaborate. And to counter the routine of streaming something or other whenever, both multiplexes and art houses increasingly frame every screening as an exclusive occasion. “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” sold $100 million in advance tickets, more than all but a couple of dozen films grossed over their entire domestic runs last year. Manhattan’s new Metrograph is a distant corner of the industry, where you can see beautiful restorations of Dorothy Arzner pictures from an assigned seat, and they sell every ticket that way. Such convenient hassles will never feel quite like sidling spontaneously into a cinema alone, the moth circling the marquee’s light.