Because movies these days are most often viewed at home, on relatively small though continually expanding screens, some may have difficulty understanding what it was like to watch movies during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, particularly in a small town such as Shillington, Pennsylvania, where John Updike grew up. The author, who from the age of six attended movies alone, as often as three times a week, describes the communal nature as well as the grandeur of the experience:

Although film continues to lift and inspire, the experience is somehow different in one's family room where the telephone may ring, or even in a mega- Cineplex where movies, listed like flavors in an ice-cream shop, are screened simultaneously in a dozen identical box-theaters. Further, during Updike's youth the projected visual image was relatively new, and the movie theater, along with the movies it presented, offered a radically innovative experience. Today projected visual images - via television, home video centers, computer screens, video games, digital cameras, and megascreens posted on disco walls and suspended above sports arenas - dominate our lives, to the extent that excess dilutes intensity. Whereas “[t]he major sexual experience” of Updike's boyhood was watching a newsreel showing women wrestling in a pit of mud (“The mud covered their bathing suits so they seemed naked”), today's children are each day likely to observe scores of images that possess far greater, or at least more graphic, sexuality (Assorted, 180).