The Shortening Lifespan of the American Movie Theater
What is the actual future of going to the movies? Anthony Lane asks, as “video on demand” begins to bully the poor besieged theater-owners of America. “Showmen like James Cameron, I suspect, will continue to haul us off our couches for the grand, marquee events, but smaller fare may be streamed to us direct, and new films whittled down into just another channel on TV” — and this is a bad thing, he thinks. His argument is unusual, and it’s not one that has ever crossed my mind before.
There’s only one problem with home cinema: it doesn’t exist. The very phrase is an oxymoron. As you pause your film to answer the door or fetch a Coke, the experience ceases to be cinema. Even the act of choosing when to watch means you are no longer at the movies. Choice — preferably an exhaustive menu of it — pretty much defines our status as consumers, and has long been an unquestioned tenet of the capitalist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cultural life (or any kind of life, for that matter), and one thing that has nourished the theatrical experience, from the Athens of Aeschylus to the multiplex, is the element of compulsion. Someone else decides when the show will start; we may decide whether to attend, but, once we take our seats, we join the ride and surrender our will. The same goes for the folks around us, whom we do not know, and whom we resemble only in our private desire to know more of what will unfold in public, on the stage or screen. We are strangers in communion, and, once that pact of the intimate and the populous is snapped, the charm is gone. Our revels now are ended.
This comes amid a review of Tower Heist and Melancholia, and while the first is perfect in-bed, at-home, only-while-extremely-ill viewing, I can’t imagine seeing Melancholia anywhere but in a theater. In part, that just has to do with size and projection: you can’t possibly appreciate the first five or ten astounding minutes on the small screen. (The following 5004238 minutes, though, you probably could.)
