Let's Talk About Movies: Sit Down, Sit Still, And Shut Up

Alo Party Peoples.

You may have heard that last week, AMC Theaters CEO Adam Aron told Variety that he was considering allowing texting in some theaters to attract Millennials, saying "when you tell a 22 year old to turn off their phone... they hear please cut off your left arm above the elbow... that's not how they live their life.". Nearly everyone's reaction was that it was a terrible idea. There was talk about boycotting AMC, and he of course rolled it back the next day, this was probably a case of someone's public relations agent mistakenly thinking that all press is good press, and hastily backtracking once they realized that they had screwed up.

Setting aside that it's likely that AMC didn't have any serious plans to move forward with some version of "you can use your cellphone here now" any time soon - this was probably an attempt to gauge public opinion before getting serious about it later - as for me,  a Millennial who turns off their tiny piece of transhumanism when the lights go down, I'm irritated every time some executive or marketer says "Millennial" when they mean "twenty something prick that works in New York or LA media that never had to grow up", and as a cinephile, I am infuriated at the very notion of texting-friendly theaters. That most theater chains, AMC included, are too terrified of declining ticket sales to actually enforce their cellphone bans is one thing, but actively encouraging cellphone use in a theater by saying it's okay as long as it's in a specific room, or if they have a special seat, or if it's part of a "second screen experience" is a step too far if you ask me. When the news broke, I half-expected AMC to announce that texting-friendly theaters would be the norm, and audiences would now be required to pay extra for the privilege of not having a dozen glowing rectangles constantly dinging throughout the movie...

...but I'll admit that Aron has a point. The fact is that ticket sales have been slowly declining for the last decade, and younger audiences declining to go through the hassle of driving to a specific location to pay upwards of ten dollars to see a movie once, and telling them that they can't text on top of it, when they can just stream something instead is a big part of that. The theatrical moviegoing experience simply does not sit on the same pedestal to Millennials that it did for Boomers, and as such, when they decide to go to a theater, they have less of an incentive to care about proper etiquette; why learn the rules when you'll almost never need to follow them?

Once upon a time, going to the movies was a pretty good way to teach your kids how to behave themselves in public; "sit down, sit still, and shut up because there's a movie up there to watch" was good practice for "sit down, sit still, and shut up because we're at church, or we're in a nice restaurant, or we're at your sister's ballet recital", but now, with schools and parents more concerned with preparing kids to pass the SATs than teaching basic human interaction, it's entirely possible that nobody ever taught that 22 year old how to behave in a movie theater.

However, the solution to that is not to degrade everyone else's movie-going experience, that's akin to burning the house down while your family is inside because you really hate the dog. The solution is to actually teach that etiquette. A movie theater is designed to be an escape from reality, you walk through the doors into the dark room with that massive screen looming above you, it's meant to be larger than life, to instill a sense of awe at the titanic figures onscreen. When there are a few dozen tiny pinpricks of light dancing about all around you that you can focus on instead, the immersion is broken. You're paying to be here to watch a movie, why would you ignore it? When the lights go down, turn it off, and leave it off. You, and the actual adults around you, will be grateful that you did.

But, if your schedule genuinely doesn't let you be out of phone contact for two hours, maybe you shouldn't be going to a movie to begin with.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B