The myth of the consecrated movie theater

Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton, 1955

The digital guru and blogger Anil Dash has raised hackles in cinephile circles today with a lengthy and rhetorically free-wheeling (to say the least) post called "Sushers: Wrong about movies. Wrong about the world." In this post he expresses a good deal of disapprobation against "regressive resistance to cultural challenges." (One of Dash's most lively rhetorical devices involves unpacking a lot of sophisticated language, which reflects well on his sophistication and vocabulary, but showing an extreme disinterest in what that language might imply against his argument, as in, for instance, what constitutes the difference between a "culture" and a "civilization," or what the difference might be between those entities and a "society" or even, heavens to Betsy, a "civil society." But, you know, if I drag Heideggerean concepts such as "authentic being" versus "inauthentic being" into this argument, we're gonna be here all day, so let's just table the observation for now.) In this case the regressive resistance is to people who want to pay money to go into a movie theater and treat the place like their living room: talk, text, do pretty much anything except engage with what's on screen. OK, Dash is cool if they wanna engage with what's on screen; he expresses almost awed delight, if not exactly pure solidarity, with an ostnsibly adult male who stood up and cheered at a robot's announcement of self-hood during a Transformers picture. Later, Dash sniffs, "When I saw Jiro Dreams of Sushi [sic] in a theater with only a handful of others in the audience, there was considerably less of that kind of dramatic response, but I liked that film very much as well. It’s fine for there to be movies that encourage quiet contemplation, too. If someone had pulled out a phone during the screening, it wouldn’t have bothered me at all. Maybe someone did, and I didn’t notice." It's great for Dash that he's capable of being so, you know, Zen. and I'm not being entirely sarcastic here; by the end of this piece I'll be recommending that you, too, adapt a similar approach. The good news for ME, personally, is that if Jiro Dreams of Sushi is Amil Dash's idea of an ideal quietly contemplative sinematic experience, there's little chance that I'm going to be sharing cinema theater space with the guy anytime soon. 

Back when he was expressing doubts about the viability of home video equipment to reproduce cinematic experiences, Steven Spielberg compared the movie theater to a church, or perhaps a cathedral; I can't find the quote, but I feel pretty solid on it. In the recent book of Henry Jaglom's conversations with the great filmmaker Orson Welles, Welles, who throughout the book makes small jabs at young filmmakers for whom film culture is the only culture, recalls a much less sacrosanct age of moviegoing as it was done in New York City in the 1930s. "In my real moviegoing ays, which were the thirties, you didn't stand in line. 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 the bar. Every movie theater was partially empty. We never asked what time the movie began. We used to go after we went to the theater. We'd go to the Paramount where they had a double bill, and see the B-pictures, and go to laugh at bad acting in the Bs. You know, childish, stupid things. [...] We'd leave when we'd realize, "This is where we came in.' Everybody said that. I loved movies for that reason. They didn't cost that much, so if you didn't like one, it was, 'Let's do something else. Go to another movie.' And that's what made it habitual to such an extent that walking out of a movie was what for people now is like turning off the television set." You also see, in the film writing by the French Surrealists, descriptions of how guys like Breton or Eluard would walk in during the middle of a picture, with no idea of what it was, the better to bring on the "derangement of the senses" they were in a Grail-like search for. None of which is the same thing as talking or texting during a movie, but bear with me for a moment. 

I am not a historian so I cannot even begin to pinpoint the time during which the notion of the movie theater as a consecrated space came into being. But given certain cultural signifiers—the movie line confrontation scene in Annie Hall, for instance, and that movie's lead character Alvie Singer's neurotic refusal to enter a theater once the opening credits of a picture have begun—I infer that the art film, the repertory cinema, and the counterculture all had something to do with it. As for the end of the idea of the movie theater as a consecrated space, I could guess that future historians will pinpoint Susan Sontag's 1996 New York Times Magazine piece "The Decay of Cinema" as the green flag in the race to the end of it all. What Sontag experienced as the death of cinephilia has become, for a generation more than once removed from her own, a miniaturization and privatization, as it were, of cinephilia, with the theatrical experience and all its multiform glories and discontents being just one aspect of it. I'm old enough to have experienced both kinds, and while in many respect I prefer the thing that Sontag lamented, I'm not entirely discontent with the other. What one misses, increasingly, is something that may have always been a kind of willed delusion anyway: that in giving over our rapt attention to a screen we were engaging in a form of actual cultural communion rather than merely consuming a product. It's pretty clear from my reading of Dash that in his world, what constitutes culture is ONLY product, and that really is the thing that gives him an airtight case. Ah, materialism.

In his impatience with the "shushers," Dash unpacks what I'll call a fuckload of baggage in order to demonstrate that the moviegoers who believe that they are entitled to expect a modicum of what they understand to be polite behavior don't just not "get" today's groovy plugged-in world, but that they're racist, too. One of his straw men (he never directly quotes anyone) is of the opinion that talking and texting in movie theaters happens "because [those doing it] are of a race/class that does not know how to behave. (These days, people say 'acting ghetto' instead of 'I don’t like black people and their culture', or 'white trash' instead of 'I should be able to tell poor people how to act'.)" Hmm. Allow me to get a little "real" here. I've written more than once about my moviegoing experiences in Paterson, New Jersey in the late '70s, and in Manhattan's Times Square in the '70s and '80s. (Harlan Ellison, too, has some particularly vivid talking-back-to-the-screen anecdotes from his Times Square moviegoing days.) At my beloved Plaza Theater in Paterson, particularly, patrons, most of them African-American, came in during afternoon Kung Fu triple features with their boom boxes on, and left them on; they talked back to the screen with no compunction; some even got into knife fights with each other, halted, called a truce, and sat down and caught a bit of the movie. I didn't object to any of this, and it wasn't because I feared for my safety if I spoke up. It wasn't even because I felt like it would be presumptuous of me to do so because I was a "guest" in "their space." I kept my mouth shut because I understood the tacit social contract governing this theater was an entirely different one than the one that governed, say, Cinema Village, which at that time had a smoking semi-balcony in which My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™ and I could sit and puff madly at our Winstons while staring in silent concentration at Syberberg's Hitler: A Film From Germany or maybe a David Cronenberg triple feature. But as far as the Plaza was concerned, it was not a case of my judging or generalizing with respect to some hostile "they." It was exercising a little amiable common sense.

Dash later gleefully announces, "The most popular film industry in the world by viewers is Bollywood, with twice as many tickets sold in a given year there as in the United States. And the thing is, my people do not give a damn about what’s on the screen." Dash is Indian, you see, that's why he calls them "my people." Goddamn John Wayne had a point about "the hyphen." OK, that's a bad joke (well, I don't actually think it's that bad), but Dash does, while thoroughly uncollegial likely does not lie with respect to what is, for lack of a better term, "cultural difference." Although how you even KNOW there is a baptism scene in The Godfather if it's on screen while you're comparing cricket scores is beyond me. Some multi-tasking I don't get, and also, how does Dash watch a cricket match? But still: Dash's description of an Indian cinema brought to mind the critically reviled Pirates of the Caribbean movies. These pictures do not function as coherent narratives but rather as environments; they in a sense encourage a mildly disinterested consumption. One can text and talk through it without actually "missing" anything. It's designed that way. As are, in a sense, the Transformers movies. Yes, they do contain elements that will satisfy the deeply passionate follower of Optimus Prime (Jesus Horatio Christ), but they are also, not to sound patronizing, eminently ignorable. This is not the future of moviegoing; it is contemporary moviegoing. 

And while we're facing facts...well, I want to say "let's admit," but I hate that kind of writing, so instead I'll say that the lost Golden Age of Cultural Communion was not always all that. Before there were talkers and texters to complain about there were the inappropriate laughers; well I remember a rep screening of Laughton's Night of the Hunter that was all but ruined for me and the other sensitive soul I saw it with when what seemed like at least eighty percent of an admitedly packed house roared with derisive laughter at what my sensitive companion and I took to be one of the film's most touchingly lyrical moments, when the boat piloted by the two kids who are running from Robert Mitchum for their lives floats quietly past a lily pad and frog. Remember how we used to bitch about the insecure folks who signalled their "getting" every obscure cultural reference that showed up in a Godard film subtitle by ostentatiously chortling at it? Yeah, those guys were fun. (See today's excellent Film.com piece by Calum Marsh on "Watching Movies Ironically.")

So,while Dash's I-Am-The-Future triumphalism is hard to stomach, there are many ways in which he is, technologically and sociologically, not wrong. New generations used to get themselves noticed by trying to change the society that they lived in; now they affect a societal change by the way they choose to define experience. I think that Jason Bailey's recent Flavorwire piece, "The Only Way To Solve Movie Theaters' Talking And Texting Problem Is To Give In to It" makes good sense. (And it's not as defeatist as you might gather from its title.)  I mean, let's remember a few things. First, unless you want to engage people directly, which runs the risk of leading to a confrontation that could get physical, you really can't control other peoples' behavior. Second, "rules" only go so far. And if a theater's management cannot make its rules count, you're out of luck. (Look up and memorize the Serenity Prayer, people.) Third, some people really are pretty awful about not caring whether your behavior is bothering them or not. Dash himself ends his post with a taunt to the shushers: " [Y]ou could do that thing where you turn around and glare really fiercely—it seems to be working great!" 

Actually, that brings to mind a story I am not particularly proud to recount, but heck, I'll do it anyway, as it took place an awfully long time ago: 1987 or 88 if I'm  not mistaken. I was with a friend at the very short-lived downtown arm of the Thalia repertory theater, and we were watching a picture. The Thalia was a small house, with terrible sightlines and a low ceiling with visible piping, but what were you gonna do. Some guy a few rows in front of us was chattering to a friend very, very loudly and very very constantly, and I said, "Would you mind keeping it down a little up there?" And the guy shot back, "What if I don't," and I glared, fiercely, and I said, "Maybe I'll break your fucking neck."

He shut up.

And the thing was, the movie was Beyond The fucking Valley Of The Dolls. 

Comments

[Peter Labuza]

Excellent as always GK. In response to one of your inquiries over when theaters became a "cathedral" so to say, I'm not sure this totally satisfied your answer, but Linda Williams argues that it was PSYCHO's stringent screening policies that at least changed that practice. For those curious, it's called “Discipline and Distraction: Psycho, Visual Culture, and Postmodern Cinema" and is located in the anthology "Culture" and the Problem of the Disciplines" edited by John Carlos Rowe.

[Jeff McMahon]

This Dash piece reminds me that you can craft an piece with arguments that are valid and hard to dispute in the particular cultural context, and still be a huge raging dick.

Also, was that a jab at Jiro Dreams of Sushi?

[Glenn Kenny]

Not a jab. I just didn't consider "Jiro" all that transcendental. And the music had already been near-egregiously over-used...

[preston]

“And the thing is, my people do not give a damn about what’s on the screen.” That’s nice. In Kolkata there are plenty of Bolly/Holly-wood cinemas where social behavior is certainly on the level of a nice public house (minus the alcohol, of course.) Just down the street in the Satyajit Ray Film Center, people sit quietly and respectfully watch the screen, just like those prudish, shushing Americans. What the fuck is wrong with these people?!? Let’s go in there and show these people that “they need to find a way to accommodate us…”

What a peculiar race card to pull…

[David M.]

This is why physical violence, or the threat of it, is so very, very wonderful.

[Fredrik Gustafsson]

Psycho was indeed a key development in movie going habits, with a marketing campaign that was built around the fact that nobody was allowed into the cinema after the film had started. "It is required that you see the film from the very beginning!" with an image of a stern Hitch pointing at his watch was one example, or the even more aggressive "No one...BUT NO ONE... will be admitted to the theatre after the start of each performance of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho".

Wonderful post Glenn.

[Jesse Crall]

Good on you for taking the time to write this, Glenn.

Sit down, shut up, and enjoy the fucking movie. If you can't, go to a pediatrician and see if you need to get a prescription for Ritalin. Any other attitude in a public theatre means you're an immature, unfocused moron who doesn't have the brains and soul to appreciate things in public. And in terms of the quality of movies dictating your response...Hey, I thought Transformers sucked but I wouldn't screw around in the theatre because I respect that someone else might dig it and doesn't need me wrecking their experience because I'm "above it" or something. Real life is a bitch; I don't need other people intruding on my 2 hour escape.

And yeah, lets take India's lead because it's such a thriving utopia. Sure thing.

[Thomas]

@Jeff McMahon - Except I'm not seeing the arguments that are "valid and hard to dispute." I'd say it's pretty damn easy to dispute Dash's raging hyperbole and logical fallacies - see, for example, Matt Zoller Seitz's responses on that site.

[Joel E]

"This Dash piece reminds me that you can craft an piece with arguments that are valid and hard to dispute in the particular cultural context, and still be a huge raging dick."

Valid and hard to dispute? A theater is a privately-owned business where each patron "rents" a seat for a particular show. Theaters, operas, restaurants, they all are the same basic business propostion as a movie theater. You must behave by the rules and most importantly, respect the establish and the other patrons or be sent out on your douchey ass.

If we both paid for dinner in a given restaurant, but I chose to stand next to your table and talk loudly through your entire meal, fart repeatedly, and stare at you the entire time, you'd likely ask for the staff to throw me out. And they would, because my behavior violates the rules and accepted social conduct. But what I was doing was "normal" and not necessarily illegal or even outside the norm of public displays. It's just not acceptable when we've both paid for a peaceful eating experience.

A movie theater shouldn't be any different. People who insist on doing whatever they damn well please in a theater can first suck a bag of dicks, and then blow me. We both paid (theoretically) and you have no right to ruin my expectation of getting my money's worth.

[PaulJBis]

I don't remember offhand who this Anil Dash person is. Isn't he one of those Silicon Valley types? If so, I see this just as another expression of the unbereable sense of entitlement that is afflicting those people lately, on par with the forest wedding of that Facebook cofounder. "I do what I want, because I am a digerati and I represent the NEW. Oh, and I'm rich, you knew that?"

Yes, I know this is an ad-hominem, but honestly, his argument is so ridiculous that isn't worth dealing with. What Mr. Dash needs is for someone to attend his next public speaking event and start playing smartphone games as loudly as possible while he is talking, only to stop as soon as it's someone else's turn to speak. That would be a better demostration of why he is wrong than any rational argument.

[Dan Humphrey]

You're my new favorite film blogger!

[Clayton Sutherland]

I remember Roger Ebert, a few years ago, mentioning a light-up pen that he used to take notes during screenings. I imagine a number of critics do this. Which begs two questions:

1) Could this light source not create a distraction for other individuals at the screening?

2) How "consecrated" could the screening be if a number of critics are not completely focused on what they're watching, because they're taking notes?

Slightly off-topic, I know, but related to the overall "immersion" factor.

[Pete Apruzzese]

You deal with a guy like Dash simply: when he opens his phone to tweet, text, or whatever, you accidentally spill a large Coke (but not a Diet Coke, you need the sugar to ruin the circuitry) on him and his device. Apologize profusely and leave. If he comes after you, apologize again and keep walking.

[Grant L]

I keep hoping it's just some sociological cliche propounded by worrywarts in think pieces, but I see evidence of "the definition of healthy self-esteem in America has gone from 'I'm just as good as anybody else' to 'I'm the center of the universe, deal with it'" nearly every day.

[mw]

Have you been to the Kent on Coney Island Boulevard? It's a place something like you describe. It's cheap and run down and a lot of lower income young people go there to see blockbusters. So where I'd get irritated at people and their cell phones or little asides as if they were watching a movie in their living room if I'd paid enough to feed a poor family Chad for a week, or at least $13, in a hi tech theater with nice, comfortable, stadium-like seating. I mean, it's easy to catch a $5 show and it's only $8 max and the refreshments are moderate, to put it moderately. These days, when I can settle into a $5 movie with a $1.50 bottle of Jarritos, I can be pretty mellow about the chitter chatter.

But I found I did have my limits. One day I arrived a little late, and after stumbling around in the dark for awhile, sat down next to a couple and the guy just kept up a constant stream of babble about everything he was thinking about the movie as he thought it. At first, I didn't pay much attention. Then, it kept up and I began to congratulate myself for my calmness. It didn't stop and I politely asked him to keep it down. That worked for all of 5 seconds and thereafter my requests became less and less polite. Finally, I cracked and said out load so the whole theater could here: "are you fucking retarded, or what," got up and found a seat as far away as possible. And of course when the lights went up, it turned out that yes, he was, shall we say, mentally handicapped, as was almost everyone else in the theater. Seems it was some kind of institutional outing. Anyway, I think that little anecdote relates. And I found a related lesson or two in there somewhere.

[Betttencourt]

I don't expect most people (or pretty much anyone else besides me) to have the sort of "consecrated" view of moviegoing that I increasingly have as I crawl through middle age, but what surprises me more and more is the apparently complete lack of interest the texters have in what's going on screen, as well as how this illuminated behavior doesn't faze their actual companions.

When the young guy sitting a few seats away from me spends most of THE CONJURING (not just the exposition scenes but the major set pieces) looking at his phone, or the teenage girl nearest me is similarly occupied during PHANTOM MENACE's pod-race (in the miracle of crappy conversion 3D), I wonder not only why doesn't it bother the friends sitting with them, but why they're even in the movie theater in the first place (and this is no defense of the over-hyped CONJURING and the getting-even-worse-with-age PHANTOM MENACE).

However, if you happen to wear a hoodie, putting up the hood is great for blocking the light from the people in your row, if not the people further down. I recommend it.

Also, re: "but I see evidence of "the definition of healthy self-esteem in America has gone from 'I'm just as good as anybody else' to 'I'm the center of the universe, deal with it'" nearly every day."

This last part is particularly true if you watch the way people drive in L.A. I'm reminded of the bumper sticker allegedly sighted in Berkeley -- "Forget World Peace -- Visualize Using Your Turn Signal."

But back to movies -- I know I'm late to the game, but I just watched THE APU TRILOGY for the first time. Holy crap those are great movies.

[jbryant]

I'm trying to figure out what it means that Bollywood, "the most popular film industry in the world" has an audience that appears to be entirely made up of people "who do not give a damn about what's on the screen." I guess it takes a lot of pressure off the filmmakers to actually be good, at least.

I'm generally pretty lucky in that I mostly see films in a modest midwestern market that always has sparsely attended matinees in which no one ever causes any trouble (so far). But for the life of me, as others have mentioned, I will never understand why anyone would pay to sit in a darkened theater engaging in a more-or-less free activity such as texting or checking email while ignoring the thing you paid for.

[Evan Connell]

My father in law, who can be quite gruff at times, was at the cinema some time ago, and there were folks sitting directly behind him, munching on potato chips very loudly, making a din of rustling, crunching and mastication. After a while of putting up with it, he turned around, glared at them and said "try sucking on them".

[andy]

I will happily confront anyone (although I am perfectly happy to start off with politesse), even getting up and walking to where they are, be it little old ladies or teenagers who might beat me up. Actually, one time in NY I thought that might be the case, so I just kept snapping my fingers behind the person's head. Worked like a charm. Another time here in Portland about eight teenagers walked into the middle of Rachel Getting Married and proceeded to gab. I walked over and said, "You know, we actually paid for this movie." This being the NW, they were immediately abashed and apologetic, and later when the dude at the other end of the chain who hadn't gotten the message started talking, they all vehemently shushed him themselves.

[Noam Sane]

"...when the boat piloted by the two kids who are running from Robert Mitchum for their lives floats quietly past a lily pad and frog."

I had precisely the same experience - this was a Night of the Hunter showing at the Castro in SF, late 90's. What is there to laugh at? And if you find a frog hilarious, why aren't you down by a creek somewhere having a riot?

Hell is other people.

[Joel G]

Is it really that bad? I find that no one respects the rules at the library anymore, but I generally have good luck at the movies--or at least diminished expectations. On the other hand, the "sophisticated" snickers at old movies are the absolute worst. I used to get a lot of that at Film Forum in the late 90s. What lunatic would feel superior to Night of the Hunter?

[Jonathan Woollen]

I'll never forget the opening night of The Fellowship of the Ring, during which any quiet settled over the audience following some onscreen disaster (say, getting trapped by rockfall at the mine gates), the full-grown man beside me would (at least five times over the course of the movie) chuckle for a bit and "break the tension" by yelling, "Well, that would suck."

[MarkVH]

Joel, it's kind of scary how prevalent the "laughing at old movies" disease is. I got into a tiff with a commenter over at Poland's blog (yeah, I know, never a good idea), who wore it as some kind of badge of honor that he "laughed audibly" the first time he saw Sunset Boulevard ("in a classroom," he claimed, as if that made it ok) in an attempt to prove his argument that acting in old movies was "hammy" and therefore the craft had "vastly improved" in the time since.

Funny thing is, I went through the cinema studies grad program at NYU recently, thinking I'd be among like-minded film students who'd gotten over that sort of thing. Boy, was I naive.

[Jeff McMahon]

Folks, I didn't actually think the guy's points were valid and hard to dispute, EXCEPT within his very narrowly tailored, possibly non-existent cultural context, which is the keystone to his argument. And then I didn't feel like bothering with taking that argument apart since others had done it so well.

My favorite laugh-to-show-you-get-it theater memory is the guy in the screening I attended of The Red Violin, 14 years ago, who chuckled every time something ironic happened, which in that movie was a LOT.

[george]

The Orson Welles comments are revealing about a time when people went to movies as casually as people channel-surf TV today. At least until the '50s, people didn't go to "a movie." They went to "the movies." They went to see whatever their neighborhood theater was showing, pretty much every week. Didn't matter if it was a Gable-Crawford vehicle or a crappy B movie. They saw it anyway.

The collapse of the studio system, the rise of television, increasing admission prices and, yes, Hitchcock's policies with "Psycho" led to each movie becoming an "event."

[D Cairns]

I have shushed Sean Connery at a film festival he was patron of.

I have thrown balled-up paper at whisperers when shushing them didn't work.

I have had a copulating couple ejected because his belt buckle was jingling too loudly.

For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for shushers to do nothing.

[jbryant]

MarkVH: I don't know who you are at the Hot Blog (I'm Yancy Skancy), but I was in on that SUNSET BLVD tiff, too. Ever since then, whenever I see a hammy performance in a recent film or TV show (which is rather often), I think of that guy's ridiculous argument and chuckle.

[Cadavra]

A year or so ago, I was at UCLA to see the premiere of their restoration of an early Anthony Mann called STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT. You could hear the proverbial pin drop throughout the screening, especially during a horrific train wreck that comes out of nowhere. One month later, it played the Film Noir festival at the American Cinematheque. Unfortunately, there were three gorillas (sitting right behind me, of course) who found the train wreck (and subsequent scenes of bloody bodies being hauled out) the funniest goddamn thing they'd ever seen and howled with laughter. and as you know, laughter is contagious, and pretty soon everyone was laughing, and it continued right to the end of the film. I was furious, but there was nothing I could do about it. However, it does prove that it only takes one weasel to poison the well.

As for first-run movies, just do what I do: Wait a couple of weeks. The stupid kids will have moved on, and we grown-ups can enjoy the movie in darkened peace.

[mazi]

It's part of the new culture. If you go to a multiplex, where their speakers (all 85 of them) are cranked up to 11, where you get 20+ minutes of digital television commercials before the main trailers even start, and then you get upset when someone talks or texts? Sorry, that's silly.

Personally, it's easy to avoid that if it bothers you: go see olden-tyme films at a revival house, or go see arty foreign films at an art house. Or, as Cadavra just pointed out, go several weeks after the film opens. Otherwise, someone talking or texting during the 3D version of The Great Gatsby? Ha! No problem: it's part of the spectacle.

[Steve]

So people who are open to the possibility that Hollywood could produce a film that amounts to something more than noisy spectacle should just shut up and put up with the talking and texting? Or at least wait a few weeks before going to the multiplex, in deference to 13-year-old Facebook addict's delicate sensibilities? Not to mention that plenty of people don't live near a revival house or even an arthouse (and if they do, they generally don't talk about "olden-tyme films" or "arty foreign films.")