But up until about 1980, if you saw a film in the theater, you probably never saw it a second time, unless it turned up on TV. You mostly rewatched pictures only in your memory—a treacherous, insubstantial format, although not entirely lacking in virtues. A fair number of films look best when seen in blurry memory.

When I was ten, my father brought home a Laserdisc machine, forerunner of the modern DVD player. He had also purchased three films: Jaws, Duel, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The movies came on these enormous, shimmering plates—they faintly resembled the lethal Frisbees that Jeff Bridges slung around in Tron. Each brilliant, iridescent platter had twenty minutes of video on each side. When a twenty-minute segment ended, my dad would have to get up and flip it over.

All that summer we watched Jaws, and Duel, and Close Encounters, again and again. Discs got mixed up: We’d watch twenty minutes of Richard Dreyfus scrabbling up the dusty slopes of Devil’s Tower to reach the alien lights in the sky, then we’d watch twenty minutes of Robert Shaw fighting the shark and getting bitten in half. Ultimately they became less like distinct narratives and more a single bewildering quilt of story, a patchwork of wild-eyed men clawing to escape relentless predators, looking to the star-filled sky for rescue.

When I went swimming that summer, and dived beneath the surface of the lake, and opened my eyes, I was sure I’d see a great white lunging out of the dark at me. More than once I heard myself screaming underwater. When I wandered into my bedroom, I half expected my toys to spring to antic, supernatural life, powered by the energy radiating from passing UFOs.

And every time I went for a drive with my father, we played Duel.

Directed by a barely twenty-year-old Steven Spielberg, Duel was about a nebbish everyman in a Plymouth (Dennis Weaver), driving frantically across the California desert, pursued by a nameless, unseen trucker in a roaring Peterbilt tanker. It was (and still is) a sun-blasted work of faux Hitchcock and a chrome-plated showcase for its director’s bottomless potential.

When my dad and I went out for a drive, we liked to pretend the truck was after us. When this imaginary truck hit us from behind, my dad would stomp on the gas to pretend we’d been struck or sideswiped. I’d fling myself around in the passenger seat, screaming. No seat belt, of course. This was maybe 1982, 1983? There’d be a six-pack of beer on the seat between us . . . and when my dad finished one can, the empty went out the window, along with his cigarette.