National Post (National Edition)
IS TEXTING AT THE MOVIES STILL A FAUX PAS?
THE HISTORICAL CASE FOR WHY IT’S OKAY TO TEXT AT THE MOVIES
Areporter on the techindustry beat, who one presumes is privy to such scoops, heralded in a tweet this week that Apple is poised to introduce a sort of “Cinema Mode” in its forthcoming iPhone firmware update, which will make it more convenient to text or email or indeed send speculative techindustry tweets in a theatre’s pitch dark atmosphere. Nobody yet knows what such a function would entail precisely; in fact Apple has not even confirmed the rumour, which may prove unfounded after all. Nevertheless a firestorm of indignation has erupted forth from the commentariat, as it always does when the sanctity of the cinema seems vaguely threatened, and presently the opinion pages abound with entreaties to extinguish this promised sacrilege and glorify the theatre as inviolable forevermore — unsubstantiated conjecture be damned.
To reiterate the obvious: the blazing gleam of a smartphone in the movie theatre’s scene-setting ambient dark is intrusive and irritating. The point of the dark is to better fix your attention on the screen, to minimize your peripheral vision. Catching one of those radiant little rectangles in the corner of your eye rather disrupts the effect. In short, using your phone at the movies is a vexing breach of etiquette — and should Apple endorse that breach by simplifying, facilitating or otherwise encouraging it, moviegoers who care about etiquette should expect to spend a lot more time duly vexed.
On the other hand it seems equally obvious, if you’ve done much mainstream moviegoing, that the number of people who do care about etiquette is relatively few. Habitual cinema texters do not need help from Apple to go about their luminescent business in the dark, and will doubtless continue on their merry way whether the latest iOS streamlines the process or not. These same texters will continue in ignorance, too: pleas to put away the phone are invariably met with bewilderment, as if it had simply never occurred to the guilty party that their behaviour was out of the ordinary at all.
It pays to remember that moviegoing is a social activity for vastly more people than it is a kind of religious experience, and that the respect you and I may feel ought to be accorded to the art on screen is by no means the same for most. If you think of a movie as nothing more than a diversion, why should you mind if your attention is diverted for a moment somewhere else?
Nor are breaches of moviegoing etiquette confined to the use of one’s phone. In Toronto the multiplexes tend to draw audiences in groups by age. The Cineplex at Yonge and Dundas is routinely flogged with teens, and whenever I happen upon a blockbuster or horror film there I’m reminded all over again of how little people under the age of 20 care about things like indoor voices, public decorum or shame. So rampant are the in-cinema parties, arguments and make-out sessions that I’ve long ago abandoned hope of seeing anything there in peace.
But far, far worse, as moviegoing in Toronto is concerned, is the Cineplex Varsity in Yorkville, whose elderly constituency seems in my experience fundamentally incapable of watching movies in silence. Questions of the “who is that” and “what is going on” variety shoot up at hearing-aid-conquering volumes every minute and a half like clockwork, and the overall aural effect is like bingo night at the retirement home. Point being, one does not need an iPhone at the movies to vex.
Anti-texting sentiment has of course a nostalgic character, one that yearns for a return to the halcyon days of pious moviegoing and laments the present day’s deteriorating standards of protocol and form. But was moviegoing ever really sacrosanct? Cinema history suggests otherwise.
Well do I recall seeing David Lean’s Brief Encounter for the first time and being shocked when the Trevor Howard character, dropping into a movie midway through, simply asks Celia Johnson what it’s about and what’s happened so far, as though seeing a movie from beginning to end in the proper order was a novel idea. The movie, you see, begins again once it’s over, and the couple leave when they find their way back to where they started — this prevailing practice being the origin of the phrase “this is where we came in.” In fact so common was the custom of waltzing in and out of movies at whatever point one pleased that advertisements for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho explicitly recommended seeing it from the beginning in order not to spoil the mystery.
And long did such habits endure. The critic Glenn Kenny, in a reminiscence for Premiere magazine, fondly describes the atmosphere at the Plaza Theater in Paterson, New Jersey, circa 1977, thusly: “The Plaza was not regarded by most of its patrons as a place of discovery, a sacred vessel of cinema, or any such thing,” he writes. “More than once I saw guys walk in with blaring boom boxes perched on their shoulders — and they would leave them blaring in the aisle. The talkingback-to-the-screen was largely ubiquitous, and pretty consistently entertaining.”
No doubt one could find a cinema in 1977 in which 3 Women or Annie Hall could be enjoyed among largely taciturn peers — and indeed the theatre where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton catch a second showing of The Sorrow and the Pity in the latter one imagines would have been boom box-free. In any event, then, as in 1945, and as in 2017, the sanctity of the cinema was not a universal ideal. Some patrons of the medium prefer to sit in hushed reverence and others do not.
So what we are seeing now is merely what cinephiles have always seen: an irreconcilable difference between the private communion one aspires to enjoy alone in the dark with a film and the very public nature of the venue where such communion happens. Is it noble to expect moviegoers to defer with humility and awe to the art being beamed down at them on the silver screen? Or, more saliently, is it reasonable? Maybe, maybe not. But it is foolish to presume that such a war is being lost on a technological front rather than a social or cultural one, which is to say it’s foolish to blame (speculative) changes to iPhone firmware for some phantom decline in cinematic principles.
Some people will text at the movies not because Apple will make it easier or more convenient to do so but because some people do not care all that much about movies or about your pure and unblemished experience with them. IMHO.