We’ve all been there. You’re happily ensconced at the cinema, pleased with your positioning and your jumbo snacks. Daring to unwind, you recline with a pleased sigh, ready to escape your dungheap of a life for a little while.
That is, until a noisy group of chumps stumbles in late and proceeds to talk throughout the movie. It’s not just teens; verbally incontinent adults are legion too. I’m not confrontational, but this depressingly growing problem summons my inner hall-monitor. Maybe it’s because no social contract is so easily breached – you wouldn’t read and comment over someone’s shoulder in the library.
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At Beau Is Afraid last year, a tittersome twosome kept up a steady stream of uncomprehending jibber-jabber. Unable to take it anymore, I told them, with a quickening pulse, to give it a rest. They fell silent. And thus, having shown rare defiance, I’d never feel so empowered again – although my ensuing anxiety proved as distracting as their wittering. Even more discreet forms of inattention can be maddening – a couple murmuring, deluding themselves into thinking they’re being respectful because they’re whispering, or the glowing beacon of someone’s smartphone as they paw mindlessly at their newsfeed.
What with disruptive dullards and dwindling ticket sales due to films streaming prematurely or not even getting a theatrical release, the embattled cinema is a sanctuary needing protection. I see cinema-going as analogous to the psychoanalytic session: it lets us delve into our innermost feelings in an economy where therapy is rarely affordable.
How are they similar? Both are taken on their own terms. Just as you can’t pause the cinema screen, the analysand must sit with their feelings, however oppressive. The director decides the film’s length; the analyst decrees when the session ends – Jacques Lacan finished sessions on a point of significance (sometimes after five stingy minutes) so they wouldn’t devolve into mindless pleasantries. Likewise, a deferred ending diminishes a film’s power.
Both cinema-going and therapy require unconditional empathy that’s usually suspended outside the sealed-off space. Just as an analyst radically accepts a client’s feelings, cinema vicariously makes grubby, forbidden feelings allowable. While cinema is a more ersatz way of excavating emotions, its very artifice means it bypasses your defences.
To psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, therapy is a “holding environment” where the analysand feels safe enough to explore feelings. The first “holding environment” is provided by one’s mother (or primary caregiver). By bathing, feeding, and keeping a watchful eye, the mother helps the baby develop its individuality; conversely, this togetherness enables the child to experience solitude. In psychotherapy, it’s the analyst’s job to reestablish this holding environment.
Critics talk about whether a film can hold a viewer. The original “holding pattern” provided by the baby’s mother is similar to fellow cinemagoers’ silence. Both involve togetherness and solitude. Just as the mother provides an environment where the baby can be alone and develop its selfhood through playtime, the cinema offers shared solitude through imaginative identification with characters. The presence of others enhances this absorption – the world’s incessant prompts to distraction fall away.
That is…if fellow cinemagoers zip it. The total darkness of the cinema environment is machine-tooled to drown out distraction, but braying louts are spoiling the one remaining aesthetic experience that is immersive and flows uninterrupted.
To be clear, this isn’t to say that total silence is mandatory. Some distinctions are necessary – disabled people who maybe have tics or struggle with total silence need accommodating; relaxed screenings and, aptly for our purposes here, Parent & Baby screenings should be commonplace, with a wider variety of titles on offer to suit different tastes. Second, while caution is advisable, some interruptions are downright charming: the sound of laughter at a good joke; a bloodcurdling scream very much lends itself to a horror movie; scandalised, elderly women tutting at Poor Things is winning, and fainting during a Gaspar Noé film is awesome and commendable. An outbreak of hilarity can become infectious; a comedy can fall flat when you watch it on your own. Anxious anticipation of a jump scare pervades the cinema. Even disdain for a movie can be a unifying experience, as proven by packed-out screenings of the infamously bad cult classic, The Room. What unites these blurtings is that they redound to the absorption of cinema-going, proving the holding pattern’s success.
Aloneness is under siege. Modern life is calibrated to obliterate it, what with prattling podcasts, push notifications, and – most odiously of all – the TikTokification of culture. Social media now breaks down videos into clips. As Ted Gioia states in a brilliantly alarming piece, “The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time… But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity”. Cinema should be the last remaining bulwark against this. But, alas, some are even filming the cinema screen and their friends’ reactions during films, causing a disruption for other paying customers.
On a more conciliatory note, these (predominantly young) people are coerced into consuming exclusively bite-sized content. Distraction is the business model: here’s a bulldog puking; now here’s a man doing a somersault onto his head; forget that, because here comes a young woman twerking, unaware her mother is watching, etc. We are all captive to distraction. As Gioia chillingly outlined, distraction is now a form of addiction, and “it can last forever – because it’s based on body chemistry, not fashion or aesthetics”. With TV, yesteryear’s supposed great corrupter, we at least followed three-act structures, something the unremitting dopamine hunt online is supplanting.
Of course, such attention-hijacking is everywhere – who hasn’t glumly forborne someone’s blared music on the bus or had a pop-up video ad invade the website they’re trying to browse? But even so, when you have paid good money to be at the cinema, it’s particularly galling to be at the mercy of easily distracted audience members. Fancifully, I’d love to see Yondr pouches used in cinemas, as they have been at certain gigs to stop intrusive photography and recording. At a minimum, the enforcement of cinema etiquette should be less lax. I can’t valiantly shush all offenders.
