To Those Who Say Going To The Movies Is Dying, I Say “Well, Bye”

Photo of Meridian 16 Cinema, downtown Seattle. 2012 by Sea Turtle on Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Just so you can emotionally prepare yourself for the words that are to come, I’m fully embracing my neo-curmudgeon for the remainder of this here topic of going to the movies. It isn’t that I don’t love movies, for I certainly do. I pepper everything from my everyday conversations to the title of this very piece with quotes, allusions, and references to the multitude of films I’ve enjoyed. Spoiler warning: there will be a whole bunch more between now and then end as well, so if you want a play-along-at-home game to add some fun for the whole family discerning them all out to counterpoint my ranting about the modern cinema experience, have at it. Indeed, it is my very love of movies that has driven me to explain why I am against the thing that comes between me and them.

But that is enough build up, no 20 minutes’ worth of trailers and cell phone ads here to get to the point, unlike some other mediums.

And now, our featured presentation…

Writing over at The Bulwark’s The Triad newsletter Jonathan V. Last expressed sentiments that are certainly shared by many, for we hear variations on this theme frequently:

And I think I may be the last generation—or at best the next-to-last generation—for whom that is true. The Millennials seem more attached to the prestige television of their youth. The kids today seem much more likely to be formed by YouTube and TikTok than something you drive to the mall to watch in a crowded auditorium.

This is all bad. And not “get off my lawn” bad, but seriously bad.

Cinema means something. It means a blend of artistic and commercial intents. It means a level of quality commensurate with finite product lines.

It means a shared culture. It means a shared experience. It means making contact with other humans in physical, incarnate ways—you ask a girl to go and actually sit next to you at the movies.

And in a world where our attention is always divided—your phone, your laptop, the TV on the wall, the conversations of people around you—the movie theater is literally the only activity which gets your full and complete attention. It’s the only experience we’re able to give ourselves over to, completely without distraction.

And the movies are dying. Or rather, they’re being choked out of existence by the free money the stock market showers on tech companies. It’s like a super-sized version of what the big-box revolution did to downtowns and small-businesses. And how’d that work out for us?

Those big-box concepts weren’t sustainable. And neither are the economics of the streaming revolution. At some point, the bill will come due at Netflix.

But not in time to save the movies.

There is an eternal struggle when writing or commenting on culture because culture means something different to everyone, is always changing, and is like trying to explain a multiverse to someone who has only a tentative grasp of the original one. All of those same perils go double for arguing based on experience, and “the experience” to the reader/listener is either a point of commonality bringing them together or the immediate dividing line of separation. Then there is the problem that experience is a smaller wheel turning inside the bigger, faster wheel of time and the further you go, the less windows through the latter there are to access the former. What was the old math problem I never bothered learning about two unstoppable parallel trains and different speed and passing between them? But fighters fight, writers write, and experience is the fountainhead for most of a writer’s best stuff, so here we are.

It is the going to the movies “experience” itself that makes my retort to “they are dying” to be an emphatic, Shatner-esque “let them die,” complete with looking as bulged-eyed as a bullfrog in a hailstorm. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the cinema-going experience sucks. Out loud. In way-too-loud surround sound. For all the bemoaning folks do about the escalating and expanding prices of the various streaming services, a single trip to one single movie with even a small contingent of my household is of equal or greater cost. That cost is before factoring in the legendarily and much joked about concession prices that require the taking out of a second mortgage and the bartering of your firstborn into a life of indentured servitude for a box of stale candy you could get post-Halloween for pennies on the dollar. Oh, well known and practiced is the designated member of the party with the oversized purse stuffed with goodies, but such desperate methods of the underground La Résistance should not be a necessary part of “the experience.” You fancy, hoity toity cinema goers who dine at tables with steak dinners and adult beverages and such just sit this out; you are the exception that proves the rule.

“But the shared human experience” comes the cry, but your crying game has no effect on me to compensate for “the experience” of paying a premium for something that is then placed at the mercy of several hundred folks each with their own agenda. Those viral videos of crowd reactions to things like the latest reveal in the most recent of the interminable Marvel movies? No thank you. “But the experience of going to the movies with your date and…” No, nah, nope. Sell your cinematic medicine show mythology elsewhere, not to those of us who had to suffer through the slog that was the first theater run of Titanic under the cultural pressure that every eligible date HAD to see it. Usually multiple times. The effect left our love and hearts for the cinema as dead and cold as Jack being let go by the lying liar who was, literally, doing the exact opposite of her overwrought words with her dramatically scripted actions.

You want a shared human moment in the cinema? The standing ovation and applause by the social entrapped vocal males when the greatest cinema villain in all movie history, Rose DeWitt Bukater, realizes that, not content with sinking a ship and killing over a thousand people by distracting the lookouts with her ridiculousness, she also killed her street-smart love interest by refusing to share. That was a great moment in shared humanity, of throwing off the chains inflicted upon the ticket-buying masses by James Cameron colluding with Big Cinema, early CGI, and Celine Dion.

Cinema as we know it is dying? Good, let them die, and paint their failure to cater to the public who deserve better like one of your French girls laid bare for the world to see. The cinema has long been the price-gouging middleman between film and the movie-going public, and like all middlemen, time and technology has found a way around them. That’s a them problem. For far too long the public that was going to the movies was treated like so many human batteries powering an industry matrix that was only necessary in the first place because no one but the ultra-elite had a 70mm projector at their home. Now almost everyone has a device in the palm of their hands that contains the entire depth and breadth of human knowledge, including access to almost everything ever filmed. If you can get past the gatekeepers with the proper toll or a little ingenuity.

But like Kirk with the Klingons, we realize we aren’t — in the end — going to let them die. Cinemas will change to be more like what we want them to be, like the alien species in Star Trek always do to wind up more human than they started (because, human writers, ‘natch). Going to the movies will evolve into something more profitable, different, creating a new experience for someone else to reference many moons from now about how great it was way back when in 2021. Those theaters that don’t adapt will die. Those that do, won’t.

But do not fret, cinephiles and keepers of the going to the movies mythologies. We are nowhere near seeing the last picture show for those who see going to the movies as a sacrament in the civic religion. Sometime in the next decade or so the streaming platforms that culled the cinemas will overreach, overcharge, underdeliver. And somewhere far, far away in that not-too-distant future, someone will have the amazing idea of what if everyone came together and just watch one screen all together instead of doing it separately? The masses will praise them as a visionary, as the new prophet for cinematic profit. It’s the circle of life, a rebirth after a death or near-death. It is less “My God, what have I done” and more “That’s the way it goes.”

Fin.