A reader writes, apropos of my recent posting
on the postmodern decline of the movie theater:
I decided to brave the storm and go to Times Square to see the latest version of Fellowship of the Rings. Made me think of your latest blog about the demise of the movie theatre. Sorry, this may date me, but for me there’s nothing that will replace sitting in the dark watching a world unfold before me larger than life. I must get it from my mom, who was a teenager in the forties and like most of her friends lived in the movies. She was not content to keep it to herself either – I first saw ‘Gone With the Wind’ on the big screen when I was 9. You forget that for the young, going to a movie theatre is a social thing of getting out of the damn house and even if the whole concept of the dinner -n- movie gets tiring after the third decade, it still gives a couple of strangers something to discuss before they really know each other.
Point taken, and it explains why the movie theater remains a popular destination among the young–why, in fact, they are the only demographic group that still matters to Hollywood. For teenagers, theaters are affordable meeting places whose appeal has little or nothing to do with the aesthetic appeal of Film as Art. This suggests that as the median age of Americans continues to soar (driven by the graying of the baby boomers), the trend away from theatergoing will increase.
Needless to say–or perhaps not–I, too, will miss the uniquely enveloping experience my correspondent so beautifully describes. I think that was part and parcel of the original appeal of movies: the fact that we saw them on a large screen, sitting in the dark. And maybe that helps explain why the appeal of theatergoing has diminished for me, since the theaters of my high school and college days were smallish-screen multiplexes. The transition from a small multiplex screen to home viewing is pretty easily made. I’ve mostly made it, though I feel the tug of the old ways on the rarer-than-rare occasions when I get a chance to see a widescreen Technicolor western in a large theater. Such films were not made to be seen at home–and that’s the only place we get to see them nowadays.
I’ve been watching a lot of movies on TV in the past couple of days, by the way (that’s what catching a bad cold does to you), and it’s been interesting to see which ones work and which ones don’t. Black-and-white films shot in pre-widescreen aspect ratios almost always translate well to the small screen–even William Wellman’s Yellow Sky, a Gregory Peck Western whose early scenes are conspicuously landscape-driven. Widescreen color films tend not to work unless their subject matter is intimate, as in the case of The Cincinnati Kid, the Norman Jewison-Steve McQueen film about big-time poker players. And indie-type flicks, significantly but not surprisingly, always work: Amy’s Orgasm and Kissing Jessica Stein could have been made for TV.
Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to draw your attention to Cinetrix’s recent posting about the use of music in Magnolia, and why it’s smarter and more essentially cinematic than the fruits of “the so-called renaissance of the movie musical.” V. smart, v. much worth reading.