The limits of "You have to see it on the big screen!"
We tend to talk about one type of theatrical experience, but my favorite post-vaccine screenings suggest a much wider range.
The last movie I saw in a theater before the pandemic fully shut them down was Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, on assignment as a contributing reporter for a New York Times piece called “The Last Picture Show? Moviegoers Cautiously Take a Seat.” At its heart, the article, written by Dave Itzkoff, was a piece of cultural anthropology: Who are these weirdos still going to the movies? Don’t they realize the world has turned upside down?
That was Friday, March 13th, 2020. I would not see another movie in a theater until May 29th, 2021. And in the span of a year, the entire culture of movie-watching had changed, like audiences had gone cold turkey on a lifelong habit. Streaming wars escalated. Release windows collapsed. The idea of living rooms across the country having equal access to new movies at the same moment they hit theaters went from a fringe-y independent experiment to the expected norm. Now, the established practice of touring an indie film through theaters and markets slowly, with an as-yet-unknown streaming release date, is a massive controversy, worth editorial space in The Gray Lady and a world-beating Substack newsletter. Never has the demand for an Apichatpong Weerasethakul movie been so high.
For me, returning to theaters has been strange and unsettling, even beyond wearing masks in the dark, which can make you feel like a bit player in a science fiction movie. I’ve had to pick up the old habit again, reacquainting myself with the thing I’d always loved. Half a year later, I’m more or less back in the groove, that time away has forced me to ask the same question that others have been asking rhetorically: Why should I bother with the hassle and expense of going to a theater when I can watch a movie on a giant flatscreen television in the comfort of my own home?
The question makes me bristle, frankly, especially back before we had to think about COVID variants and vaccination rates. And yet, it must be asked, just as it’s been asked for decades, because this isn’t the first time theatrical moviegoing has faced a threat from television. In the early 1950s, studios responded to TV by developing new formats like Cinerama, early 3-D, and, more successfully, the horizon-wide splendor of CinemaScope, introduced to dazzled audiences in the 1953 sword-and-sandal Biblical epic The Robe. More recently, the rise and fall of digital 3-D—pioneered by the immersive world-building of James Cameron’s Avatar but fatally degraded by murky conversions of 2D to justify up-charging ticket prices—was an attempt to give HDTV owners an experience they could not have at home. The challenge to bring people back to theaters is greater than it’s ever been, not least because the pandemic that shut them down is hanging around indefinitely.
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Since I've gone back to the movies, I’ve thought often about why it’s still ideal to see them in a theater. When Hollywood types stump hard for the theaters—Tom Cruise’s “secret” viewing of Tenet in London—or when any of us mortals say "You have to see this on the big screen," we tend to talk about the same small subset of movies, usually studio behemoths. But that’s a limited and destructive way to talk about the theatrical experience. A screening of The Card Counter (more on that in a bit) proved to be revelatory for me: We should be talking about the range of different experiences you can have in a theater, not just the spectacles.
To give you an idea of what I mean, here are my four most cherished trips to Chicago theaters since getting vaccinated:
4. Touch of Evil (May 29th, Music Box Theatre): For months, I talked about beelining to the multiplex on the first day I was fully vaccinated, joking to friends that I’d be happy to see whatever piece of crap that Hollywood had deigned to release that week. (There was a time when I used to catch double features like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and My Father, The Hero for no other reason than to be “in the know,” so there’s clearly no limit to my depravity.) But then I surprised myself. The rituals of not going had calcified more than I’d have ever expected, and it felt strangely imperative that I choose the right occasion to return. So when Mubi announced a “Back on the Big Screen” series at my favorite theater, Music Box, with 35mm prints of the great Orson Welles noir, plus Days of Heaven, Ran, Suspiria, Playtime, and others, it felt like a more meaningful return to me than slipping out to the Regal for Spiral: From the Book of Saw.
As an aside, it still feels odd to fetishize 35mm the way that 70mm has been fetishized in the past (and, of course, still is in today). The format was, after all, how I saw every movie for the bulk of my life, and I had worked with it personally as a projectionist for years, from the platter systems of an AMC multiplex to the reel-to-reel of a college repertory house. When I first saw the restored Touch of Evil, in 1998, the 35mm presentation was not the selling point, but rather Walter Murch’s meticulous recutting of the film in keeping with Welles’ detailed notes. But I admit to being one of those terrible snobs who love seeing films projected: Beyond the persnickety details of resolution, those little scratches and splices and clusters of dirt around reel changes are a reminder of the grand illusion of cinema. Sitting in the front row at Music Box, staring up at Welles’ sweaty, grime-caked face—he’s like a human who has started decomposing before the grave—was a reminder of how much I’d missed the unique tactility of 35mm film.
3. The Sound of Music (Nov. 28, Music Box Theatre): My wife and daughters are big fans of this musical, and we’d always wanted to go to the annual “Sing-a-long” Sound of Music event at Music Box, but were always out of town for Thanksgiving. The moment we determined that we could not travel this year due to COVID restrictions, we snapped up some tickets and went to our first movie as a family since the pandemic started. There were delights I anticipated—the pre-show music by house organist Dennis Scott, the mask-muffled singing of Rodgers & Hammerstein classics—and other audience-participation gestures that were a great surprise, like small bags full of props that included a garland to wave during “Edelweiss” and a party popper to uncork when Maria and Captain von Trapp finally kiss. (One jokester set his or her popper off early in the film, when Maria kisses the Reverend Mother’s hand.)
The event was a treat, after a year of improvised family movie nights while theaters was closed. Seeing the kids laughing and singing and engaging in mass prop comedy is a memory I’ll treasure, but there’s a larger point worth making here, too. This is a specific and unrepeatable experience, tied to this theater in this city on this annual occasion. It seems to me that one of the many reasons people feel no connection to the multiplex—beyond the endless trailers and commercials, the distractions of talkers and cell phone users, the underlit or badly projected movies themselves—is that they’re just another corporate hassle to be negotiated, like getting herded through the drive-thru lines at a fast-food joint. They’re in every town and can feel more or less the same, depending on the amenities. The attachment to a place like Music Box, or other truly independent theaters, is more personal, tied to a genuine relationship with the community. Sometimes you have to belt out “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” to fully appreciate that.
2. Dune (Oct. 14, River East 21): Okay, so maybe seeing big movies big is optimal, too. As it happens, the press screening for Dune took place in the same house as the press screening for Dennis Villeneuve’s last film, Blade Runner 2049, and I’ll confess that I was bracing myself a little. Back in 2017, AMC had just installed this special Dolby house at River East, which had turned the theater into a kind of 4-D experience, with great rumblings of the soundtrack setting off actual rumblings in the seats, like a modern-day William Castle gimmick. It was an awful distraction for Blade Runner 2049—if you’re at all weary of the bass shivers in Hans Zimmer scores, this felt like an aural assault—but there seem to have been enough complaints about the aggressiveness of the effects that management has toned them down over time. Now it’s simply a modern theater with comfortable recliner seats and particularly excellent sound, which suited Villeneuve’s adaptation of the Frank Herbert doorstopper perfectly.
Among the slate of Warner Brothers releases dumped onto HBO Max on the same day as its theatrical release, Dune was the most contentious, for the obvious reason that the sheer enormity of Villeneuve’s science-fiction epic would not be well-served by home viewing. There were seven different ways to see Dune, according to our friend Sam Adams at Slate, and a chart was created to show how the image would break down depending on how you watched it. Villeneuve wrote an editorial in Variety decrying the HBO Max release, criticizing Warner Bros.’ “sudden reversal from being a legacy home for filmmakers to the new era of complete disregard,” and calling it a disservice to what he felt was the best film of his career. (Neck and neck with Arrival, I think.) There are plenty of large-budgeted Hollywood entertainments that play just fine on television—the Marvel Cinematic Universe is explicitly designed to interact seamlessly with TV—but Dune is another story. It aims to overwhelm you with the size and scope of Herbert’s universe, and it succeeds.
1. The Card Counter (Sept. 10, Landmark Century Centre)
At some point in the middle of seeing The Card Counter, I felt myself acutely aware of how little noise there was on the soundtrack. You get so used to a level of the ambient busy-ness in Hollywood movies, even during simple dialogue scenes, that hearing nothing feels a little awkward, especially in a film by Paul Schrader, who specializes in the sort of antisocial loners that would be halting conversationalists in real life. (Ditto Schrader himself, from what I gather.) The effect made me scooch up in my seat a little, as you would if you were trying to overhear the details of a private chat. The absence of distraction in sound and image can, in the right hands, intensify your engagement with a film.
It’s the simplest of all possible arguments for seeing films in a theater, but it’s worth restating: When you’re sitting in the dark, with only you and the screen in front of you, a film commands 100% of your attention. Seeing The Card Counter was a profound example for me. As a gambler with a terrible past as a torturer at Abu Ghraib, Oscar Issac is the classic Schrader archetype, “God’s Lonely Man,” condemned to spend the rest of his life in a psychological prison of his own making. And you’re right there with him in the theater, experiencing a kind of dread-filled intimacy as he sets about the rituals that define him, not unlike Ethan Hawke’s priest in Schrader’s First Reformed.
The likes of Tom Cruise weren't out there arguing that you must see The Card Counter on the big screen, because it’s not a nine-figure Hollywood spectacle. Perhaps that’s the reason why smaller films are having a particularly hard time gaining theatrical traction in our post-vaccination world. People feel more comfortable seeing them at home, because it doesn’t seem like they’re missing as much. But moviegoing is about intimacy, too, even if you happen to be singing “Edelweiss” with 200 other people around you. It’s precious time alone in public. And inside the world of a film like The Card Counter, the cathedral of cinema feels more like a confessional booth.
Your experience with <i>The Card Counter</i> reminds me of my first cinema experience back, <i>The Killing of Two Lovers</i> at the Landmark Century as well. I had similarly imagined I would return for a big spectacle movie, but opting for the smaller movie paid off so well—it drove home how much I had missed truly being able to soak in the silence and dark. And while <i>The Killing of Two Lovers</i> is a smaller movie and could work on a TV, I'm sure the foreboding mountains walling in that tiny town would not have been as formidable at home.
Side note on <i>Memoria</i>: I was perfectly fine with the release strategy when it was announced, sounded like a cool idea. Now? It's 2 weeks from release in NYC and Neon hasn't announced what city is next, let alone a short list of cities that are guaranteed to get it. Their website doesn't even acknowledge the NYC screening, you have to dig through their social media to find information. I guess in assessing the idea of the release strategy I didn't account for the distributor being apathetic and unorganized.
The last film I saw in a theater before the shutdown was GET SHORTY, a special screening presented by Barry Sonnenfeld at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn. That was March 9, 2020, more than a week before New York City shut down. Still, when I got to the sold-out screening and realized that at least two thirds of the seats were empty, I started to wonder if I hadn't made a stupid mistake. As much as I enjoyed that screening and discussion, there was a inescapable uneasiness to the evening, like we were in a war zone trying to pretend things were normal.
Since getting vaccinated, my girlfriend and I have seen plenty of movies, all at Alamo (either Brooklyn or the new lower Manhattan location that opened in October). The first five were A QUIET PLACE PART II, IN THE HEIGHTS, THE SPARKS BROTHERS, ZOLA and SUMMER OF SOUL, all of which I was happy to be seeing on a big screen, and which I'm sure benefited from the setting.
If I haven't ventured beyond Alamo, maybe it's because of the way that final 2020 screening took on epic dimensions in my mind. It feels safe there, as safe as anything is these days. (Being able to order drinks doesn't hurt either.) I can pretend things are almost normal in a movie theater in a way I can't while hunkered down watching something on TV in our apartment.
Of course, the flip side is, Alamo's safety protocols mean a theater is still never operating at more than half capacity. I worry about how long that can (and will) go on.