I am a proud movie person. I love watching movies, arguing about movies, learning about movies … you get the picture (no pun intended). I can tell you who directed “Sleepless in Seattle,” who won Best Actress at the 2012 Academy Awards and why precisely “Gone With The Wind” still reigns supreme as the highest-grossing movie of all time when adjusted for inflation.
Ever since my dad first took me to the local AMC when I was three years old to see “Ratatouille,” movies have been at once an escape, an old friend and a point of fascination for me. Let me draw a distinction, though, so that you don’t get my expertise mixed up. I am not what you would call a “film aficionado,” someone who waxes rhapsodic about the beauty of each and every frame of their favorite austere arthouse offering, someone who gets into spirited debates over whether Scorsese or Tarantino or Nolan is the better director, someone who refuses to shut up about how “Bonnie and Clyde” is the most important movie to have come out of the late 20th century. Those kinds of people bore me endlessly because, in my (admittedly laywoman’s) opinion, turning the consumption of film media into such an exact science ruins the special beauty of visual storytelling.
The reason I know so much about movies is not because I’ve spent hours and hours pouring over tomes of film criticism and analysis; it’s because, like I said in the opening line of this article, I just adore watching movies, and I’ve watched enough of them at this point to learn the intricacies, study the connections and truly come to appreciate their wondrous magic. I love nothing more than sitting down and watching a two-hour action comedy, crime caper, tear-jerker, science fiction epic, screwball or romance … just so long as the action comedy, crime caper, tear-jerker, science fiction epic, screwball or romance in question is a darn entertaining movie.
In particular, I had always held a special place in my heart for seeing movies on the big screen. There was an extra oomph added to the experience when your eyes were glued to a wall-to-ceiling projector in a pitch black theater. It was an event going to see a movie in cinemas, getting together with friends, reclining my seat, munching on deliciously salty popcorn. It was a communal experience, cheering at the highs, laughing at the silly moments, crying when things got sad. A good theater experience could change my entire opinion of a film, buoyed by the good faith of other cinema goers who had understood the assignment.
But as I’ve learned more and more over the past year or so, with unenjoyable cinema outing after unenjoyable cinema outing under my belt, that good faith is slowly wilting away. The “movie theater experience” is dying, and more quickly than you might think.
Other articles would pivot at this point to talking about how nobody’s going to the movies anymore (which is true), how theaters are starting to price themselves out of the average consumer (which is definitely true) and how studios aren’t putting enough faith in original movies, leading to overall impressions of slop in the top ten (which is definitely, definitely true). But all of those perspectives have been done to death. One thing that I haven’t seen talked about really at all is the way that the experience of watching the movie—once you’ve wrangled some chums together, picked out a film getting decent reviews, paid $16 a pop for tickets and $10 for popcorn and a drink, and maneuvered your way to a slowly peeling, ever-so-slightly out of commission seat—isn’t the same anymore. The movie theater experience really begins, in the wise words of Nicole Kidman, right “as the lights begin to dim.” And as of late, it’s been right as the lights begin to dim that the magic has disappeared.
In the past (roughly) 12 months, I have seen the following movies in theaters: “Dune Part II,” “Inside Out 2,” “Wicked,” “The Marriage Banquet,” “Sinners,” “Thunderbolts,” “How to Train Your Dragon,” “Superman” and “Fantastic Four.” Not too many, certainly, but considering ticket prices and the added difficulty of managing plans as a college student, I think that’s a decently respectable number (with a fairly wide breadth of release dates and target audiences) to use to make conclusions.
At every single showing that I went to this year, I was incredibly disappointed by the etiquette of my fellow cinema-goers. Behaviors that used to be so frowned upon that even hinting at them could have earned you the ire of your entire theater were so commonplace that it felt criminal.
People were texting, the bright blue and green iMessage bubbles set against the white app backdrop immediately drawing the eye away from the screen. People were on Instagram, not just checking their notifications but liking other peoples’ posts and scrolling through the Explore page, as if that was their intended activity for the next two hours. People were talking, not just whispering, and not just about a specific funny line or about a fledgling prediction for the climax, but outright speaking at normal out-of-theater decibel levels, and for more or less the entire film. Even if the offender would put down their phone, or shush themselves after a while and commit to enjoying the movie, somebody else would inevitably pick up the cause later down the line. The more shocking thing was that the perpetrators weren’t just the teenagers, as some people might expect. Boomers were absolutely in on it too, suggesting that these patterns have permeated nearly all of our society.
Hopefully, I don’t come across as too snobbish or too square in saying this, but talking and texting are just not supposed to happen at movie theaters. The cinema is supposed to be the last great bastion of a time before mobile phones, a place where you are required by societal expectation to be disconnected from the rest of the world. Your only mission in a movie theater is to enjoy a good film (or a bad one, as the case may be). You shouldn’t be checking your notifications, you shouldn’t be sneaking a peek at your socials and you definitely, definitely should not be talking. If you’re bored, try to focus on something else, go for a really long bathroom break or roll your eyes aggressively whenever something dumb happens. Think about how you’re going to make fun of the movie afterwards, or try to find some modicum of enjoyment out of the drivel. It should be up to you to find a way to make it interesting for yourself that doesn’t ruin the experience for other people. And, if you are actually enjoying the experience, then you have absolutely no excuse to be distracting yourself or others. You are actively ruining the movie by taking yourself out and returning to the world beyond the cinema doors.
The fact that such disruptive behaviors are apparently acceptable enough now that people have no qualms about them honestly sickens me on some deep emotional level. The magic of the cinema used to be its perfectness, its bubble. But when the bubble breaks, I have to ask myself: what is the point of continuing to go? If I’m not going to be able to enjoy watching a movie in theaters, why should I bother? If I’m going to be distracted by someone else being distracted, how am I going to be able to focus? If I call people out and ask them to turn off their phones (which I do, by the way, I am indeed that person), that creates a further disruption and adds tension to a situation where there should be none. I feel guilty, and they get annoyed … but at least it results in the bubble repairing itself ever so slightly. Maybe they won’t be so inclined to be a disrupter if they know that there’s the possibility that somebody will actually call them out for it.
But why even go to the effort of trying to correct bad manners when I could much more easily construct a setup on my own couch that fits my movie-watching goals? I can make my own popcorn, rent or stream my own movie for a fraction of the cost and watch in complete and utter silence, just as was intended.
I remember when it didn’t used to be like this, though. Back when people actually cared about preserving the movie theater experience. There are a lot of reasons that that approach changed, and a lot of reasons that I don’t think we’ll ever be able to go back to what it was like in the time before. There’s an expectation now that you should be locked in at all times, attached to your phone at the hip like your life depends on it. Attention spans are way down, too, and it might be too strenuous for someone to conceive of actually concentrating on just one stream of content for an entire two-hour block. The pandemic also definitely had an outsized impact. People got used to being able to check their phones and talk at will when watching a movie in the comfort of their own homes. That habit is hard to break, especially if you see other people also having trouble getting back to the cinema world of pre-2020.
I hope, of course, that I’m wrong, that the movie theater magic will somehow come back. But at the rate that we’re going, and judging by other key indicators, the outlook is grim. I don’t think that people are going to fully detox from their phones. I don’t think that peoples’ attention spans are going to get longer. I don’t think that streaming is ever going to underline for people the differences between at-home-watching and cinema-watching. And that’s a real shame, because even though with my TV remote I can still dim the lights, go somewhere I’ve never been before, be entertained and somehow reborn … it doesn’t feel like the same kind of magic, not at all.
