In one of the best films about filmgoing, “The Dreamers,” the narrator remembers student days, when he and his friends sat as close as possible to the screen: “Maybe it was because we wanted to receive the images first.”
“The Dreamers” is set in 1968 Paris, when a dispute over the firing of an art-house programmer led to clamor in the streets and the cancellation of the Cannes Film Festival, eventually serving as prologue to the full-blown riots that followed in May.
Movies mattered. Seeing a film was like a visit to an unusually cool cathedral, the kind where you could smoke.
In the interval, as movie styles adapted (and in many ways improved), the filmgoing experience remained essentially the same, only with cupholders displacing the ashtrays. Now it is collapsing in on itself.
I don’t mean people will stop going to the movies. Young people will always need a reason to get out of the house, and despite years of ticket-price increases outpacing inflation there is practically no form of entertainment a pair of teens can share for a couple of hours that costs so little.
But the specialness of cinema has been permanently obliterated.
Cut to: a screening of David Fincher’s fun, rapid-fire but callow “The Social Network” as experienced by filmmaker Atom Egoyan: “People were talking to each other, like absolutely out loud, having conversations as though there was no sense of an experience that needed a degree of respect or consideration . . . It was as though they were watching in their living room . . . They were talking, they were texting each other, there were all these other sources of light in the room.”
That story appears in film critic David Thomson’s wonderful analytical history “The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies,” which along with David Denby’s thoughtful new essay collection, “Do the Movies Have a Future?” carries the character of a lament.
Even five years ago, a trip to the movies (or theater) was just about the last thing we did that involved absolute concentration on just one thing, total surrender. Then came the iPhone.
For a couple of years it has been my habit, when someone sitting next to me pollutes my peripheral vision with one of these pernicious little boxes, to call out, not quietly, “Will you SHUT THAT OFF PLEASE?” My purpose is to emphasize the rudeness of the habit by being even more obnoxious. Usually this tactic incites nasty stares, and I suppose one day it’ll earn me a beating. But something must be done.
Just in the past year or so, the iDistracted disease has spread to private, invitation-only screenings attended exclusively by fellow journos, entertainment-industry types and other invitees who really ought to know better. When there’s a quiet stretch of one second or more, someone is likely to disrupt the moment by sparking up some iCrack.
Diminishment pushes from outside in as well. Denby remembers the “King Tut meets Cecil B. deMille” aspect of “the old picture palaces,” where “some of the interiors were an unaccountable combination of the Paris Opera and a seraglio, with hints of wicked luxuries and lewd liberties in upholstered scarlet boxes off to the side . . . the absurdity of the theaters was reassuring — an ersatz environment for an art form that was so lovable precisely because it was devoted to the unending appeal of illusion.”
Today, the last real picture palace in New York, the Ziegfeld, which is losing $1 million a year, is a busted business, a sorry siren living out its last days on West 54th Street with the crumbling hauteur of Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Blvd.”
Decline is a choice, and all of this is a result of market forces. Youngsters, like a 16-year-old acquaintance of Thomson’s who watches “The Tree of Life” five times on a computer screen, are rejecting full immersion in favor of a dip in the shallow end. As Denby puts it, “To watch ‘Citizen Kane’ on TV for the first time is a half-fulfilled promise; to see it on a big screen is a revelation.”
Watching on TV, or a computer or on an iPhone, you are besieged by competing demands for attention. The majesty and awe can’t survive this fragmentation: of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” Denby notes that on the big screen, stately camels traverse 70 feet of canvas. “On the iPod the camels would traverse my thumb.”
Filmmakers know and are adjusting, speeding things up, cutting faster, steering far away from those boring old intervals of contemplation. So, hello David Fincher and goodbye David Lean. Except tomorrow’s filmmakers will be even less patient and more frantic. Soon Fincher will seem as old-school as Lean.