We like to escape. We love to commune. We get a weirdly exalted satisfaction, sitting in a screen with complete strangers and all emoting. It goes back to our Neanderthalic ways of life. Or am I pushing this further out in terms of metaphor and hypothesis than it needs to be given over to?
Probably. Most likely. That, or a bit of both.
We like to think of ourselves as critics, and connoisseurs of, well, just about anything. Ever since the advancement of the internet and (anti)social media, we have an opinion, and a platform to rant, rave, or write our thoughts up – on everything and anything. But, those of us that are into the landscape of pop culture and entertainment, we cannot help ourselves. We see to enjoy, and see to pontificate. We don’t surely go out to cinemas just to feel part of something, other than the digital world’s culture-club and clique-based fandoms online? No. We go to be a part of something greater, something almost celestial. Though we will always in some way bump into the types of people that should stay in the fictional world, of let’s say a Nick Love movie, or some Wannabe-Bad-Boi-Gangsta film. You come into contact with a variety of folk, and we still determinedly push on through our biases, judgments, emotions, to just settle in and be transported.
The cinema is my temple. I am not religious, but the kinds of adoration and dedication I had to cinema from the ages of 3 years to 18, was something the Catholic Church (or any ole church) would admire. And if they do send out scouts, seeking new blood, they’d see me as a prime candidate. That was how dedicated I was to cinema – so, it wouldn’t surprise me if the agents of this religion or that religion witnessed the type of zealotry I displayed for all things cinema and targeted me as a potential candidate; they could easily believe I was one prone to manipulation, a young soul susceptible to their doctrine – to “nurture” and corrupt to their ends.
Fuck that, cinema was all my life was about.
I wanted to watch movies. I wanted to spot what was coming out. The posters. The trailers. You could only get them in this sacred place. For example, I didn’t know how to use the internet around the age of 11, not well enough to type into search engines things related to films – half the time I only knew a film was coming out was when I spotted a poster or teaser trailer shown at the cinema - also our own computer was owned and used solely by my sister; so when I visited a family friend, I’d badger Jamie, the family friends son – the resident computer-user, much like my sister – who was a fire-eating, Slipknot fan, to look up things for me. And often he entertained this, but once he was off the computer, my sister was on it. I mean, why? She had one at home, let me have this moment. And when I spotted those posters, or saw those trailers on the big screen, it reinforced the reality that, the cinema was the place to be for all things cinema – a temple that offered the up and coming attractions and so much more.
The cinema (say it in a French accent, it is so sexy) is my safe place. The cinema space is a special one. Always has been, always will be…but, sadly it wouldn’t always be special, because what has eventuated over the years is a disregard for these special temples of commerce, entertainment and mind-unplugging. It doesn’t hit like it used to.
Maybe it is age? Perhaps wonder has been replaced by adult pessimism, and has corrupted everything that used to be so essential to our being?
Maybe my heightened awareness’s have clouded my past wonderment?
Maybe as an adult my senses are attuned more to the people, than the temple – and its architecture, and the coming wonder of a movie projected onto that Big, Big, Oh So Fucking Big Beautiful Screen.
And I have. I have it sectored in my memories, so much I know now that of which these places lack.
That sensation. The whole aesthetic, the stylisation of emotion and feeling, is lacking. A reverence and a respect, that I wish I could usher onto these now delipidated, desecrated temples, to try and guide others to respect it as I do.
I am always canoeing my way through these existential storms in relation to the cinema/ multiplex/ theatre-experience. Astounded that I cannot source the feelings of the past and translate them into the now. I need to do this, to try and bestow it that of which it is owed.
Yet, I can’t.
These recollections, these experiences, that feeling I am clamouring for, exist in the mind, at the back, and cannot be replicated. No amount of nostalgia can bring this back. I am annoyed that this divine experience, so heavily part of my youth, is left as a thing, a means to attain by recollection, and not by reexperience. Cinemas used to possess those secret niches, those shadows, those curvatures and dimensions that were somehow personal to us and us alone. And when translated mentally and physically, it made you feel totally in the moment and present, in a way we have never been before. You were there. Away from the world of violence, insanity and noise. A certain quiet used to fall upon you, when you visited a cinema, a quiet only experienced or usually bestowed when visiting a chapel/a cathedral/a church; only, it was cooler, hipper, and far more entertaining and sensorially motivating and experiential than those places of religious fervour and indoctrination and history. Blah! The only excitement sourced from a church was when a Priest/Father/Holy Man had his way with the kiddies, and to be honest, that isn’t fun, that is criminal and perverted.
I wanted the cinema quiet before the cinematic/movie storm - before the speakers in the cinema blasted you into a new universe. I don’t feel this anymore. Seeing a film is such a chore now.
The amounts of drifters, assholes, and noisy-barkers are like an ocean of arrogance and self-certainty and superiority you have to go through before you can get out of the car park, let alone to your seats. You wade through them, hissing, growling, ascertaining if they will be the noisy asshole that talks during the film - and when you get to your seats, the fuckers park in front of you, and you are on high alert, coming up with hundreds of things you will say, but won’t say, if they bring their noise, and their reception area personas in with them.
The homelife bonhomie is brought in with them, that work break hanging out back of work congeniality, which doesn’t translate well in the cinema temple – it is merely exemplified by the new tonality of such a space – a uncaring void, to be filled not with the expectation; but of people’s issues and hangups and how their individuality is translated in these zones, than any form of cinema-zealotry and respect.
A space where utter disregard for this shared, experiential environment is used as a stop-gap between meals, that or to just “chill” and unwind - in the pub-sense of the word.
There is no respect for others. Nor for the etiquette of the cinema experience.
Which exists – for and by myself and Laura, my fiancĂ©e.
I miss it. That specific tenor, that explicit and unique quality a cinema used to offer.
You go in, you hush, then you shut the fuck up, and only make yourself known when the movie tells you too and encourages you to.
It is indeed lost, but it makes me wonder, is it less to do with audience members, and more to do with myself?
Am I too tuned into reality and unable to tune into that cinema-broadcast?
Was youth providing a veil, that only shredded once I hit a certain age?
Am I too self-aware now, as an adult, not to be taken by this transcendental fantastical aura a cinema so used to produce and generate inside the likes of myself?
Going to a cinema is a luxury that not many could afford growing up, whether in the 40s/ 50s/ 60s/ 70s/ 80s/ 90s/noughties – I know I was spoilt and lucky, in this regard.
Very, very lucky. I was lucky enough that my Grandparents encouraged my need for films, and most specifically this temple – a place they too basked in and admired. I used to see a film once a week, sometimes two films a week – and going to the cinema was an event.
Whether travelling by bus with my Grandmother, or when my Grandfather was free on the weekends to take us - this obsession, this idolatry and need for entertainment and transcendence was my first true love. A shared one. But one that out-adored my grandparents' own affinity with the cinematic temples. And, often it wasn’t always about which certain film I was going to see, it was just the experience of going there. Being there. Feeling it. Being adored and also being able to adore something other than my relatives and animal friends.
I also spent so many hours of my youth infatuated by cinema listings, so much so I’d make up my own – the film names, their run time, and the times they were shown. I was always taken by these prints at the back of our local newspaper. The smell, the print coming off on my fingers – cinema was always somehow closing in on me. The novelty of a cinema listing, whether in an old newspaper or eventually those glossy-paged pamphlets, they were special. The same goes with the tickets. I collected all my stubs and tickets. Until someone told me to get rid and grow up. And pessimism and in a faux-adult response, I got rid. And then I started it up again. Then it slowly stopped altogether.
As an adult, life is busy, and it is hard to make time to see things and to go places, so now, the way of the ticket is digital, and convenient, and I wish I continued collecting my tickets, but due to convenience I no longer do.
Am I the issue?
Have I contributed more to this devolution of the cinemagoing experience, than I might have conned myself into believing wasn’t my own, whilst laying blame on everyone else’s own attitudes and modern-day-malodorous-stink?
I haven’t got the time to bask, and go through that old-age ritual I so catered to and evolved for myself and the cinema. I want to get in, not come into any form of confrontation, and watch the film, and get the fuck out of there.
I don’t want to sit with others as the credits roll, or share in the laughs, barks, and physical responses, because everyone is physically responding to something else rather than the film they are watching. This was connection, through print, to the cinema, was special.
Now lost to the advancement of technology and convenience.
My only connection without actually being there was through those listings.
Though it may seem sad, that I spent hours just admiring the cinema listings in the local newspaper (The Argus) or going onto teletex, admiring all these times, all of these films, the majority I couldn’t see - still I basked in the titles, the times, and who and what was being shown at the Odeon or Cineworld cinemas in my hometown of Brighton.
This temple housed various mini-temples. Various screens, that showed various films, some that made sense to be shown there, whilst others I thought deserved to be on the bigger, more expansively seated screen. These screens were where the magic happened. I enjoyed the wait, the anticipation. The foyer of the cinema, the ticket booths (when they existed) the usherers and ticket-splitters, arms crossed over, hands clasped, in front of their junk – the grand deciders when was best to let an audience in, well so I thought, when actually it was all related to the mop-up crew, clearing the vestiges of the previous audiences, whom, from my recollection were never as messy and disrespectful to the screen they had been housed within, for hours, as they are now.
Also, the screens no longer seemed cleaned properly, the youths mopping up using this as an excuse to chin-wag and half-heartedly make out they care about the state of the screen they were assigned to reshape, and rejuvenate.
These screens themselves all had more familiar than other’s some more favourited than screen 1 or 5. The hush, the lull, the piping in of music, some of the chart toppers, or if you’re in a cinema-cinema, pieces of music from film scores.
It just sets the mood. It prepares you, entices you, centres you.
Though it is my own personal temple, I do not alone own it, as it is a shared space, a place of wonder for many others. A shared safe place. We congregate and come together, and admire, adore, the spectacle that I look (upon/at) – in my seat, comfy, snug, beholding this tablet this screen, basking in its grandiosity.
It is a place to empty one’s mind, and have all focus be riveted onto that square/oblong sheet.
Well, it was. The cinema is a cosy space. It gives off vibes of a visit to a relative you are enamoured with, their home being a place of the past, but also simultaneously so rooted in the current, exacerbated by their good vibes and closeness.
Movies are my religion. They are my hobby. They are my life. Watching a film is an easy experience, but also an experience that can easily be tarnished by one’s mood, and circumstances on the day they decided to go get their tickets. It never used to be like that.
As soon as you sat in your seats, and allowed that most specific, universally adored aura to descend upon you, it took your troubles, your woes, and filtered them/numbed them, just enough, that you knew you were in a safe space, with fellow weary-travellers of this thing called existence, coming to chill out, unwind and be transported.
Behold that vast screen, the curtains billowing, the force of the automated cord’s tug still rippling that most wonderous draft – the musk of the curtains billowing over you, preparing you for the start of the adverts, and the coming-attractions.
We don’t get that any more.
Which is a real shame.
Going to the cinema recently has been nothing but downright awful.
I’d much prefer to struggle through bad internet connection – that makes my viewing of yet another crime documentary five-hours longer than its initial approximate runtime should have been, than step into a cinema ever again.
It is worse than doing you’re your weekly food shop. I find more solemnity in a fellow trolley-pusher, seeking out the right sort of veg or cut of meat, than any cinemagoer I have shared a space with in the past three years.
The reverence, and the respect for a temple, such as a screen in a cinema, has been lost. Everyone is so damned obnoxious, and antagonistic. There is no excitement to sit in a theatre with strangers any more, and share in the exaltation of a movie. To be transported away, far away from reality.
And, I think the argument for this being interrelated to Covid-19 doesn't stand up, any longer.
I believe audiences are just badly behaved, and exacerbated by terribly run cinema-chains. If the cinema and staff give off a scent of general No Fuck Offs Given, the audience/cinemagoers think, unconsciously, yet still so heavily influenced by this influenza of disregard, that it is okay to be a fucking knob, maybe larger than they are in real life, a space to be theatrical, a place where to be loud is excused – modern cinema audiences are obnoxious and exacerbate their bad behaviour in a place that has an overall bad vibe about the place.
It isn’t streaming platforms that have generated this.
Translating how one acts in the living-room, to the shared temple of the cinema-space.
I did believe this, but, as cinema has slowly progressed back into its “standard” state, meaning the velocity of films out and cinemas no longer being shut down, people are coming, in hope for an experience they cannot get back at home. A communal sanctity and closeness. A shared experience without having to touch, make contact or communication, merely all experiencing the same thing but in totally different ways.
That kind of aura is lost now too. Everyone is too reoccupied or drowsy, or hyper-active to the degree that when they get home they have exhausted their asshole-selves out. It is just the kinds of people that sadly populate this world/society now. Self-righteous, self-centred, disrespectful mongrels. When you enter the cinema, there is no reverence or respect. It is as simple as, I Paid To Watch This Film, So I Have Paid To Be Me In A Public Space And That Is My Right!
Is it?
The cinema isn’t a club, or a bar, a place to commune vocally, and in that heady intoxicated manner where the self is projected so theatrically you’d think they had dormant aspirations to be an actor or actress. The cinema isn’t a place to catch up, or to shout, and talk at volumes that no matter the volume of said film will never drown you out. The cinema vibe, the aura, is lost.
There is no care in the projection of a film, or the conditions of the screens material, or seating area – I almost lost the seat of my pants because I was glued to a seat, and jumped up so fast because I just couldn’t tolerate being in the same room/screen as the people that had so ruined my viewing of whatever we were watching. I don’t want to be there, nor go there.
It is a chore. It is not fun. The preamble to get to a film, with anxieties focused on what will the audience and whole aura be like? It puts you in a bad mood as is.
I want to escape, but sadly I don’t want to face the worst of humanity in my sacred temple.
Because these kinds of people, and their offspring, and ilk, and the care-free staff and their shared “values” make this temple of old, just a place that houses people, watching some film or other. The cinema has the same free-for-all vibe that Festivals and musical gigs have, only, those environments are there for such behaviour and physical exertion and personality trip-switching.
Where such behaviours are tolerated, such behaviours will evolve and continue to be perpetuated. Staff are more concerned now with using their night-vision goggles, not to see if anyone is doing something illegal or preparing a bomb, but to make you feel uncomfortable under their scrutiny, because they have the power of the goggles. Fuckers.
The referentiality of a temple isn’t conveyed or perfuming cinema spaces any longer. And the cinema is a place to kick your feet up and act out all your internal insecurities presented in obnoxious, antagonistic, disrespectful behaviours. And the staff give zero fucks, and so do the audience members, as their either too fatigued, over-worked or over-stressed to act upon that little voice telling them, This isn’t right, is it? Should this behaviour be accepted and written off?
I hate going to the cinema. And if you are the reason for this, and are part of the desecration of the cinema experience itself, fuck you.
Perhaps this is only based in Brighton, East Sussex, which wouldn’t surprise me, as most Brightonian’s are class-A cunts, being the typification of a southerner.
Yet, maybe others feel the same way?
I know it isn’t my own personal temple, and my writing reads as self-righteous and personifying an arrogance as of those I have targeted, but, at least I care, and respect the etiquette and rules – being a rule-breaker by design, in my art, and personality, this is the only place where I feel it is okay to, not conform, but respect the unwritten, but much felt rules.
These temples are graffitied by disrespect, indifference and the disregard to these temples, that means so much to many, many millions, is getting too much. So much we are neglecting to try and see films, and make it better, by leading by example.
As those of old, or new that have an affinity for the cinemagoing experience, will leave, and in their place more moronic attitudes and beings will replace us. The loud, annoying, chatterbox, corny, smelly, deluded, haired wide-boys and their dim-witted baes
These things take on such transience and form for us, and sadly the external world is infiltrating our own warped, contradictory internal, yet external relationship with a cinemagoing space.
Or maybe I am just a lunatic?
Who knows. What I know is, my temple has been desecrated and I now no longer have a place to go, to totally be freed of the shit life throws at us. It seems to now be externalised in these tits sharing a theatre space.
Probably. Most likely. That, or a bit of both.
We like to think of ourselves as critics, and connoisseurs of, well, just about anything. Ever since the advancement of the internet and (anti)social media, we have an opinion, and a platform to rant, rave, or write our thoughts up – on everything and anything. But, those of us that are into the landscape of pop culture and entertainment, we cannot help ourselves. We see to enjoy, and see to pontificate. We don’t surely go out to cinemas just to feel part of something, other than the digital world’s culture-club and clique-based fandoms online? No. We go to be a part of something greater, something almost celestial. Though we will always in some way bump into the types of people that should stay in the fictional world, of let’s say a Nick Love movie, or some Wannabe-Bad-Boi-Gangsta film. You come into contact with a variety of folk, and we still determinedly push on through our biases, judgments, emotions, to just settle in and be transported.
The cinema is my temple. I am not religious, but the kinds of adoration and dedication I had to cinema from the ages of 3 years to 18, was something the Catholic Church (or any ole church) would admire. And if they do send out scouts, seeking new blood, they’d see me as a prime candidate. That was how dedicated I was to cinema – so, it wouldn’t surprise me if the agents of this religion or that religion witnessed the type of zealotry I displayed for all things cinema and targeted me as a potential candidate; they could easily believe I was one prone to manipulation, a young soul susceptible to their doctrine – to “nurture” and corrupt to their ends.
Fuck that, cinema was all my life was about.
I wanted to watch movies. I wanted to spot what was coming out. The posters. The trailers. You could only get them in this sacred place. For example, I didn’t know how to use the internet around the age of 11, not well enough to type into search engines things related to films – half the time I only knew a film was coming out was when I spotted a poster or teaser trailer shown at the cinema - also our own computer was owned and used solely by my sister; so when I visited a family friend, I’d badger Jamie, the family friends son – the resident computer-user, much like my sister – who was a fire-eating, Slipknot fan, to look up things for me. And often he entertained this, but once he was off the computer, my sister was on it. I mean, why? She had one at home, let me have this moment. And when I spotted those posters, or saw those trailers on the big screen, it reinforced the reality that, the cinema was the place to be for all things cinema – a temple that offered the up and coming attractions and so much more.
The cinema (say it in a French accent, it is so sexy) is my safe place. The cinema space is a special one. Always has been, always will be…but, sadly it wouldn’t always be special, because what has eventuated over the years is a disregard for these special temples of commerce, entertainment and mind-unplugging. It doesn’t hit like it used to.
Maybe it is age? Perhaps wonder has been replaced by adult pessimism, and has corrupted everything that used to be so essential to our being?
Maybe my heightened awareness’s have clouded my past wonderment?
Maybe as an adult my senses are attuned more to the people, than the temple – and its architecture, and the coming wonder of a movie projected onto that Big, Big, Oh So Fucking Big Beautiful Screen.
And I have. I have it sectored in my memories, so much I know now that of which these places lack.
That sensation. The whole aesthetic, the stylisation of emotion and feeling, is lacking. A reverence and a respect, that I wish I could usher onto these now delipidated, desecrated temples, to try and guide others to respect it as I do.
I am always canoeing my way through these existential storms in relation to the cinema/ multiplex/ theatre-experience. Astounded that I cannot source the feelings of the past and translate them into the now. I need to do this, to try and bestow it that of which it is owed.
Yet, I can’t.
These recollections, these experiences, that feeling I am clamouring for, exist in the mind, at the back, and cannot be replicated. No amount of nostalgia can bring this back. I am annoyed that this divine experience, so heavily part of my youth, is left as a thing, a means to attain by recollection, and not by reexperience. Cinemas used to possess those secret niches, those shadows, those curvatures and dimensions that were somehow personal to us and us alone. And when translated mentally and physically, it made you feel totally in the moment and present, in a way we have never been before. You were there. Away from the world of violence, insanity and noise. A certain quiet used to fall upon you, when you visited a cinema, a quiet only experienced or usually bestowed when visiting a chapel/a cathedral/a church; only, it was cooler, hipper, and far more entertaining and sensorially motivating and experiential than those places of religious fervour and indoctrination and history. Blah! The only excitement sourced from a church was when a Priest/Father/Holy Man had his way with the kiddies, and to be honest, that isn’t fun, that is criminal and perverted.
I wanted the cinema quiet before the cinematic/movie storm - before the speakers in the cinema blasted you into a new universe. I don’t feel this anymore. Seeing a film is such a chore now.
The amounts of drifters, assholes, and noisy-barkers are like an ocean of arrogance and self-certainty and superiority you have to go through before you can get out of the car park, let alone to your seats. You wade through them, hissing, growling, ascertaining if they will be the noisy asshole that talks during the film - and when you get to your seats, the fuckers park in front of you, and you are on high alert, coming up with hundreds of things you will say, but won’t say, if they bring their noise, and their reception area personas in with them.
The homelife bonhomie is brought in with them, that work break hanging out back of work congeniality, which doesn’t translate well in the cinema temple – it is merely exemplified by the new tonality of such a space – a uncaring void, to be filled not with the expectation; but of people’s issues and hangups and how their individuality is translated in these zones, than any form of cinema-zealotry and respect.
A space where utter disregard for this shared, experiential environment is used as a stop-gap between meals, that or to just “chill” and unwind - in the pub-sense of the word.
There is no respect for others. Nor for the etiquette of the cinema experience.
Which exists – for and by myself and Laura, my fiancĂ©e.
I miss it. That specific tenor, that explicit and unique quality a cinema used to offer.
You go in, you hush, then you shut the fuck up, and only make yourself known when the movie tells you too and encourages you to.
It is indeed lost, but it makes me wonder, is it less to do with audience members, and more to do with myself?
Am I too tuned into reality and unable to tune into that cinema-broadcast?
Was youth providing a veil, that only shredded once I hit a certain age?
Am I too self-aware now, as an adult, not to be taken by this transcendental fantastical aura a cinema so used to produce and generate inside the likes of myself?
Going to a cinema is a luxury that not many could afford growing up, whether in the 40s/ 50s/ 60s/ 70s/ 80s/ 90s/noughties – I know I was spoilt and lucky, in this regard.
Very, very lucky. I was lucky enough that my Grandparents encouraged my need for films, and most specifically this temple – a place they too basked in and admired. I used to see a film once a week, sometimes two films a week – and going to the cinema was an event.
Whether travelling by bus with my Grandmother, or when my Grandfather was free on the weekends to take us - this obsession, this idolatry and need for entertainment and transcendence was my first true love. A shared one. But one that out-adored my grandparents' own affinity with the cinematic temples. And, often it wasn’t always about which certain film I was going to see, it was just the experience of going there. Being there. Feeling it. Being adored and also being able to adore something other than my relatives and animal friends.
I also spent so many hours of my youth infatuated by cinema listings, so much so I’d make up my own – the film names, their run time, and the times they were shown. I was always taken by these prints at the back of our local newspaper. The smell, the print coming off on my fingers – cinema was always somehow closing in on me. The novelty of a cinema listing, whether in an old newspaper or eventually those glossy-paged pamphlets, they were special. The same goes with the tickets. I collected all my stubs and tickets. Until someone told me to get rid and grow up. And pessimism and in a faux-adult response, I got rid. And then I started it up again. Then it slowly stopped altogether.
As an adult, life is busy, and it is hard to make time to see things and to go places, so now, the way of the ticket is digital, and convenient, and I wish I continued collecting my tickets, but due to convenience I no longer do.
Am I the issue?
Have I contributed more to this devolution of the cinemagoing experience, than I might have conned myself into believing wasn’t my own, whilst laying blame on everyone else’s own attitudes and modern-day-malodorous-stink?
I haven’t got the time to bask, and go through that old-age ritual I so catered to and evolved for myself and the cinema. I want to get in, not come into any form of confrontation, and watch the film, and get the fuck out of there.
I don’t want to sit with others as the credits roll, or share in the laughs, barks, and physical responses, because everyone is physically responding to something else rather than the film they are watching. This was connection, through print, to the cinema, was special.
Now lost to the advancement of technology and convenience.
My only connection without actually being there was through those listings.
Though it may seem sad, that I spent hours just admiring the cinema listings in the local newspaper (The Argus) or going onto teletex, admiring all these times, all of these films, the majority I couldn’t see - still I basked in the titles, the times, and who and what was being shown at the Odeon or Cineworld cinemas in my hometown of Brighton.
This temple housed various mini-temples. Various screens, that showed various films, some that made sense to be shown there, whilst others I thought deserved to be on the bigger, more expansively seated screen. These screens were where the magic happened. I enjoyed the wait, the anticipation. The foyer of the cinema, the ticket booths (when they existed) the usherers and ticket-splitters, arms crossed over, hands clasped, in front of their junk – the grand deciders when was best to let an audience in, well so I thought, when actually it was all related to the mop-up crew, clearing the vestiges of the previous audiences, whom, from my recollection were never as messy and disrespectful to the screen they had been housed within, for hours, as they are now.
Also, the screens no longer seemed cleaned properly, the youths mopping up using this as an excuse to chin-wag and half-heartedly make out they care about the state of the screen they were assigned to reshape, and rejuvenate.
These screens themselves all had more familiar than other’s some more favourited than screen 1 or 5. The hush, the lull, the piping in of music, some of the chart toppers, or if you’re in a cinema-cinema, pieces of music from film scores.
It just sets the mood. It prepares you, entices you, centres you.
Though it is my own personal temple, I do not alone own it, as it is a shared space, a place of wonder for many others. A shared safe place. We congregate and come together, and admire, adore, the spectacle that I look (upon/at) – in my seat, comfy, snug, beholding this tablet this screen, basking in its grandiosity.
It is a place to empty one’s mind, and have all focus be riveted onto that square/oblong sheet.
Well, it was. The cinema is a cosy space. It gives off vibes of a visit to a relative you are enamoured with, their home being a place of the past, but also simultaneously so rooted in the current, exacerbated by their good vibes and closeness.
Movies are my religion. They are my hobby. They are my life. Watching a film is an easy experience, but also an experience that can easily be tarnished by one’s mood, and circumstances on the day they decided to go get their tickets. It never used to be like that.
As soon as you sat in your seats, and allowed that most specific, universally adored aura to descend upon you, it took your troubles, your woes, and filtered them/numbed them, just enough, that you knew you were in a safe space, with fellow weary-travellers of this thing called existence, coming to chill out, unwind and be transported.
Behold that vast screen, the curtains billowing, the force of the automated cord’s tug still rippling that most wonderous draft – the musk of the curtains billowing over you, preparing you for the start of the adverts, and the coming-attractions.
We don’t get that any more.
Which is a real shame.
Going to the cinema recently has been nothing but downright awful.
I’d much prefer to struggle through bad internet connection – that makes my viewing of yet another crime documentary five-hours longer than its initial approximate runtime should have been, than step into a cinema ever again.
It is worse than doing you’re your weekly food shop. I find more solemnity in a fellow trolley-pusher, seeking out the right sort of veg or cut of meat, than any cinemagoer I have shared a space with in the past three years.
The reverence, and the respect for a temple, such as a screen in a cinema, has been lost. Everyone is so damned obnoxious, and antagonistic. There is no excitement to sit in a theatre with strangers any more, and share in the exaltation of a movie. To be transported away, far away from reality.
And, I think the argument for this being interrelated to Covid-19 doesn't stand up, any longer.
I believe audiences are just badly behaved, and exacerbated by terribly run cinema-chains. If the cinema and staff give off a scent of general No Fuck Offs Given, the audience/cinemagoers think, unconsciously, yet still so heavily influenced by this influenza of disregard, that it is okay to be a fucking knob, maybe larger than they are in real life, a space to be theatrical, a place where to be loud is excused – modern cinema audiences are obnoxious and exacerbate their bad behaviour in a place that has an overall bad vibe about the place.
It isn’t streaming platforms that have generated this.
Translating how one acts in the living-room, to the shared temple of the cinema-space.
I did believe this, but, as cinema has slowly progressed back into its “standard” state, meaning the velocity of films out and cinemas no longer being shut down, people are coming, in hope for an experience they cannot get back at home. A communal sanctity and closeness. A shared experience without having to touch, make contact or communication, merely all experiencing the same thing but in totally different ways.
That kind of aura is lost now too. Everyone is too reoccupied or drowsy, or hyper-active to the degree that when they get home they have exhausted their asshole-selves out. It is just the kinds of people that sadly populate this world/society now. Self-righteous, self-centred, disrespectful mongrels. When you enter the cinema, there is no reverence or respect. It is as simple as, I Paid To Watch This Film, So I Have Paid To Be Me In A Public Space And That Is My Right!
Is it?
The cinema isn’t a club, or a bar, a place to commune vocally, and in that heady intoxicated manner where the self is projected so theatrically you’d think they had dormant aspirations to be an actor or actress. The cinema isn’t a place to catch up, or to shout, and talk at volumes that no matter the volume of said film will never drown you out. The cinema vibe, the aura, is lost.
There is no care in the projection of a film, or the conditions of the screens material, or seating area – I almost lost the seat of my pants because I was glued to a seat, and jumped up so fast because I just couldn’t tolerate being in the same room/screen as the people that had so ruined my viewing of whatever we were watching. I don’t want to be there, nor go there.
It is a chore. It is not fun. The preamble to get to a film, with anxieties focused on what will the audience and whole aura be like? It puts you in a bad mood as is.
I want to escape, but sadly I don’t want to face the worst of humanity in my sacred temple.
Because these kinds of people, and their offspring, and ilk, and the care-free staff and their shared “values” make this temple of old, just a place that houses people, watching some film or other. The cinema has the same free-for-all vibe that Festivals and musical gigs have, only, those environments are there for such behaviour and physical exertion and personality trip-switching.
Where such behaviours are tolerated, such behaviours will evolve and continue to be perpetuated. Staff are more concerned now with using their night-vision goggles, not to see if anyone is doing something illegal or preparing a bomb, but to make you feel uncomfortable under their scrutiny, because they have the power of the goggles. Fuckers.
The referentiality of a temple isn’t conveyed or perfuming cinema spaces any longer. And the cinema is a place to kick your feet up and act out all your internal insecurities presented in obnoxious, antagonistic, disrespectful behaviours. And the staff give zero fucks, and so do the audience members, as their either too fatigued, over-worked or over-stressed to act upon that little voice telling them, This isn’t right, is it? Should this behaviour be accepted and written off?
I hate going to the cinema. And if you are the reason for this, and are part of the desecration of the cinema experience itself, fuck you.
Perhaps this is only based in Brighton, East Sussex, which wouldn’t surprise me, as most Brightonian’s are class-A cunts, being the typification of a southerner.
Yet, maybe others feel the same way?
I know it isn’t my own personal temple, and my writing reads as self-righteous and personifying an arrogance as of those I have targeted, but, at least I care, and respect the etiquette and rules – being a rule-breaker by design, in my art, and personality, this is the only place where I feel it is okay to, not conform, but respect the unwritten, but much felt rules.
These temples are graffitied by disrespect, indifference and the disregard to these temples, that means so much to many, many millions, is getting too much. So much we are neglecting to try and see films, and make it better, by leading by example.
As those of old, or new that have an affinity for the cinemagoing experience, will leave, and in their place more moronic attitudes and beings will replace us. The loud, annoying, chatterbox, corny, smelly, deluded, haired wide-boys and their dim-witted baes
These things take on such transience and form for us, and sadly the external world is infiltrating our own warped, contradictory internal, yet external relationship with a cinemagoing space.
Or maybe I am just a lunatic?
Who knows. What I know is, my temple has been desecrated and I now no longer have a place to go, to totally be freed of the shit life throws at us. It seems to now be externalised in these tits sharing a theatre space.
đź•® Zak Ferguson is a co-founder of Sweat Drenched Press and the author of books like Soft Tissues, Dimension Whores and One Of These Days
This type of writing takes the blog off on a different track - all the more welcome for that. Great storytelling Zak. You will always have a home here.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading this. Few things came to mind:
ReplyDeleteI've been to Brighton a few times - isn't there an arthouse/independent cinema there which reduces the anti-social behaviour that's so irritating? Strikes me as the type of place that would.
Noise and screens are hugely annoying, and I agree with the sense that cinemas have lost some of that which made them special, but as Zak alluded to, maybe we are just getting older? More anxious, more prone to focusing on threats, less full of youthful invincibility and more irritable?
Empire cinemas anniunced closure yesterday. Cineworld is on the ropes, which means Picturehouse is in the firing line. In Edinburgh, the revered Filmhouse closed suddenly and dramatically.
I'll never stop going to the cinema. But as with much in life, the little things that made it an event are becoming less than.
Such an evocative view of the modern multiplex where movies are reduced to a spectating sport instead of a journey.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, could you imagine the behaviour of the patrons in one of those old grindhouse cinemas that Bill Landis used to frequent in Times Square in the 80's?