The Dying Theatrical Mystique

I'm not any economist by any means -- the numbers surrounding the movie industry have seemed to me to be fickle and arbitrary things, one film's bomb becomes another's belated blockbuster, especially these days in the age of streaming data where there's no outside source like theater chains to verify the 'success' of these platform-first releases. But last night, I was considering my own life in wider terms, and how the economic realities that my family developed in reflect the broader conditions of the American cinematic experience.

My mother's parents were fairly average members of the Baby Boomers, both worked at solid blue-collar and managerial jobs for most of their lives, retired without ever going to college, owned their own sizable house with a guest room and an outdoor pool, it is about as typical as you can get, members of the working class who got in on cheap suburban property when they were young and reaped the benefits of that all of their lives, both were unionized at an industrial facility and among dentistry. Each treated movies like a casual night out and have fairly random tastes. Grandfather was (is) a home media enthusiast, and watches his 50s/60s war epics on 4K UHD with his big wall-mounted TV with HDR. Never has to leave his house any more, and I doubt he wishes to.

My mother and father are Gen-Xers, mother being a therapist and father being a jailguard (the divorce was inevitable, naturally). My father mainly got that job for the solid healthcare benefits that it provided to his three children, and my mother worked to her Master's degree while raising us. We moved from one home to another over the course of eighteen years, the first becoming structurally compromised by flooding & robbery, the second by our landlord deciding that he didn't want to rent any longer because my mother wouldn't date him, and now we just rent a small suburban apartment a little ways from the city.

My younger brother and younger sister mainly grew up with videogames instead of films, but before them I was very much enraptured by the world of VHS and VCR, late-night re-runs from the TCM-adjacent MeTV, and the lost realm of Blockbuster Video. My parents would occasionally take us to see the big blockbusters as they'd come out, we're talking Revenge of The Sith or King Kong, but we didn't live near a multiplex or really any sort of theater chain, and we were usually strapped for cash anyway, so it wasn't a consistent thing at all.

Today, my brother sometimes sees films in theaters with his friends or me, usually the big stuff exclusively like Dune or Furiosa (I do my best whenever I get to see him away from college). Mother doesn't watch anything, not even any streaming services, film isn't really her thing even though she would probably go with me to the theater if I asked her to, but there's rarely a movie that would interest our collective taste (we had a tradition of watching period pieces together, but they're almost never played where I'm at).

Speaking for my own status as a late Millennial: I generally live paycheck-to-paycheck, and things have slowly cohered since 2018 for my living situation, but I still work at a minimum wage manual labor job that's calm and steady, and whatever free time I have is devoted to watching and writing about movies. But, speaking as someone who watched as many major releases as possible on a weekly basis from 2017-2019, it pains me to say that I have little reason to go to my local theaters anymore, even though they aren't bad experiences in-themselves. Unless a director I like is getting a wide release, like PWSA or Ridley Scott, I just can't justify seeing anything in a theater these days. Although prices have gone up, that's not the main issue that I face -- I simply have no interest in what goes on in a multiplex for most of the year, and it's been a change that I have mixed feelings on.

I say all of this context about my family because I am genuinely starting to think that it is illustrative of a larger change in this culture: the cinema was a business, it has always been a business, but in my grandparent's generation, it was a cheap, common excursion that basically everyone had access to, and when home video came about, they treated that with the same interest. For my parents, it was more like taking the kids to a theme-park ride or the zoo, a thing you'd do maybe two or three times a year, and then home video (then videogames) was much more preferable, and when Netflix was starting to ship out DVDs, my father was a huge fan of that because of how affordable it was.

For my generation, it's definitely the case that Netflix and other streamers are the 'default' way to see anything, and then theaters are either this negligible place that doesn't have a variety of programming, or they're like sports events that you go to for a single-night only showing of some huge IMAX or VistaVision spectacle (not to mention the demonic insanity of the Las Vegas Sphere...) -- and if you don't have one of those theaters near you, then you're out of luck. I personally don't have the time or the money to head up to Chicago on a consistent basis, so I'm completely outside of the arthouse circles that seemingly only exist at there, New York City and Los Angeles. I see on places like Twitter or Letterboxd people discussing the movies they see on 35mm every week, and I haven't seen a movie screened from a film projector in almost two decades, that's the gap of experience that is present here.

Most of the movies I want to see are ones that I'm only ever going to watch on my own Blu-Ray copies, which you can usually only buy from their particular online stores, and so what ends up happening is that I sit at home, watch them, take notes, do some writing here and elsewhere, sleep, work, then go on to the next one. I'm not trying to paint a picture of desperation here, but it's almost a 180 degree shift from how films were seen by most people not that long before me -- it was an inherently communal experience, whether that was rooted in a regular theater or a VHS rental shop or a film festival, it was a place where you met people and shared something together.

I do have some self-awareness about how my own interests have diverged from the general public's, that any time you go deeper into an artform, you tend to eschew the noiser aspects of it in favor of your own peculiar interests in this or that corner, and that's exactly what's happened to me, I'm over here watching B-westerns that I've never heard anyone talk about, I'm burrowing my way into the depths, carving my own path, and then writing about it for you all, and I have no problem with that. But the overall aspect that bugs me is how filmgoing has become such a rarefied thing, like many artforms before it, that it can now be segmented into these little isolated units that don't have a ton to do with one another. I can only really speak for America, but if you don't live in any of the capital-M Major Cities, or even in the ones that host annual film festivals, you are inherently disassociated from the overall shape of whatever the contemporary trends or subjects are within this medium, it is a bare material reality that cinema these days primarily belongs to either the esoteric/solipsistic enthusiasts, or to the people who occupy the current city-states of our epoch, the cultural centers.

Cinema, at its inception, was a cheap artform for the working classes, and that's why the American studio system maintained a stranglehold over theater chains with block-booking for so long, it was the most efficient way to flood the market with your product and eliminate the competition. That system has been long gone, but I see throughout my life how the shaky economics of this art have made it into something more 'bespoke', in the way that going to an art-gallery is. For my grandparents, seeing movies was a matter of pure convenience; for my parents, seeing movies was a matter of what fit best in the budget; for me, seeing movies is a matter of mustering the will to care about what's on screen, and if that care isn't there in the theater, then there's no room for it in my life.

I feel sad about that, and maybe I shouldn't, I suppose it's just a desire to hold on to a certain notion of how things are 'supposed to be' -- but when I guess at what's happening to the medium, it's the same thing that's happening to all art, there's a mass democratization coupled with an increased aura of prestige. You can go on the internet and find almost anything you want to see, for free, in decent quality, if you know how to, but it's the difference between pirating a PDF and reading a hardback, between seeing Wikipedia's PNG of the Mona Lisa or seeing it in person, between a FLAC file of a song and hearing it in a concert. The premium you're paying for is the presence: the physical, spiritual presence of what is realer-than-real, the high-fidelity incarnation, the event-as-event. The movie theater, and the movies made for wide theatrical distribution, are becoming hyper-tangible -- think about the way that celluloid is now fetishized, how everything has to be in IMAX, the plasticity of the image requires some instantiation for it to feel 'real', and so the rhetoric surrounding the art adjusts itself to play-up the 'experience' more than what the film feels like or is about. You're no longer paying for a story, or actors, or a director's intent, what the money is going towards is the technical and physical apparatus, just like anyone who maintains and exhibits a roller-coaster would tell you.

I think this is why I find myself disenchanted from the theater as an extension of the American cinema: instead of being a ride to an imaginary destination, now the vehicle of transmission seems to matter more than where it's taking you. If you don't live on the coasts or fly into festivals for awards season, you're stuck with the dregs of major tentpoles which serve no purpose but to fill out a schedule, and barring that, you've got the usual assortment of anniversary re-releases and low-budget Christian propaganda projects. It was already like this when I started consistently seeing things in 2017, but the studios put out more 'product' back then, so every week you could see something different if last week didn't please you -- now, whenever I look at the showings for my local AMC, I always find myself saying "They're still showing THIS?", because there just isn't much there no matter how many times you look.

And so if you want to see something else, you just stay at home, and while I'm doing that, it's not functionally that different from what the streaming services provide -- so if movies aren't the cathedral-like experience in theaters, then they become the background noise while people are out here folding clothes, taking care of their kids, or trying to sleep. There's two opposing tendencies here, and neither of them interest me, but they both seem to be the way things are going, and even then you have people who would rather put on YouTube or Twitch for that endless flow of user-generated 'content' rather than specifically play a film or a TV show.

So I guess where I'm at these days is trying to find a 'middle path': not getting wrapped-up in the meaningless hype-culture of these theatrical releases, not treating movies as an audio-visual environment, but trying to approach the artform with a friendly familiarity and adventurousness that doesn't abandon context, but also tries to find the transcendent core that leads us away from all the detritus that we carry into places like our homes or into theaters, to simply engage with the text itself on its own terms and not be overdetermined by the specificity of the medium as-such. That might be impossible, especially if we take Marshal Mcluhan's words seriously that 'the content of every medium is itself another medium' -- so if the content of the theatrical film is theatre, then the content of home video is the theatrical film, and maybe the only way to really come to terms with cinema itself is to give it the intimate attention that a big theater screen precludes by necessity. The economics of the movie business make it so that most movies ever made will only be seen at home -- but I take seriously the question of 'what is lost' in regards to the theatrical experience. Ideally, it's something that can and should be easily available to everyone -- but I have serious worries that I'm going to live to see a day where watching movies in a theater is essentially how we treat going to the opera today, an activity only enjoyed and patronized by the upper-middle classes and the rich. It's already on its way there, and I'm not sure there's any counter-trends to stop that from coming to pass.