The experience of a good movie is being engrossed.

How does it keep you there?

There are answers to do with the nature of the medium, and the type of meditation.

And a much cruder answer is this: a good film gives you one interest after another, or one pleasure after another. And here the list of what can fascinate and/or pleasure is endless, just as the list of what people are curious about and what makes them react is endless. Surprise, tears, fear, laughter; sexual, aesthetic, psychological interests; morbid interests; interests of particular objects, events, activities; interests in seeing a story through to completion, in seeing justice done, in being supplied with useful information...

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What of the afterwards? What does it mean to digest a movie?

A complete answer would be as manifold as the actual movie-watching, and the digestion would involve replaying scenes in your head, looking for plot holes, returning to mysteries, contemplating moments, objects, ideas...

But there's two aspects of the process I want particularly to mention.

One is that every movie has the potential to condition you. Movies can colour your experience of the world -- with feelings and thoughts, with reference. “I’ll never look at an x the same way again.” And this can happen whether you want it or not. And you can force this on other people. You’re supplied with material you can use, especially in conversation, especially to amuse, or to assist with difficult thoughts, or as shorthand for complex or extended thoughts.

The second is that there's a continual ethical element to watching films, and to the digestion. “Ethical” in a broad sense: how does this movie change your life, and how should you change your life? What is the best way for you to live? What do you think of the claims the movie is making -- about people, about what’s good and bad, about the consequences of a thing? And what were the best choices in the movie's particular situations?

It might even be the case that a religious upbringing prepares people to treat all texts as parables, with lessons to be learnt.

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These ethical questions, throughout the film and afterwards, are answered -- consciously and unconsciously.

Perhaps one sign of the mode's prevalence is that people imitate what they see in movies, even in speech pattern or dress. And in the course of watching, they engage with the decisions the characters make, they actively think about the choices.

The fact that we have such a mode, and continually ask and think about choice, and ingest answers, can be taken to suggest three general features of human ethics:
-- that we don’t get all our rules of conduct and values from scripture or parents or any other authority: we get a lot of it, perhaps most of it, from the world generally, from conversation, from meetings of ideas, from the hypotheticals of art;
-- that broad ethical principles are founded on experience of many particulars (though some particulars will be more striking, more vivid in the memory, than others);
-- and that our natural inclination is unabstract -- that “Is it right to kill?” and “What haircut would suit me?” are the same sort of question -- that, when the time comes, all problems boil down to choice in particular situations, to real, practical, things.