The Worst Person in the Movie Theater

everyone become more serious movie watchers NOW

Every week I ask my guests the one thing they would do to make movie theaters better, so we can convince those with reservations to go back to watching movies the way they are meant to be seen. The number one issue everyone wants to fix, without question, is the increase in phone use in theaters. The proposed solutions range from implementing tech that cuts cell service inside the theater, to confiscating phones at the door, to a more radical approach:

15 Questions With Mads Moriz

But I’m here to tell you there’s a bigger enemy we need to be uniting against. Yes, something worse than the guy browsing SSENSE during your screening of Decision To Leave. While that’s a huge and annoying problem, there are at least some ways around it ruining your entire experience (switching seats, holding leg at a specific angle to block the bright phone screen, etc.). What I’m talking about today though has no workaround and is spreading like a virus: Audiences laughing not with but at the movie.

There are different ways to interpret that so let me expand. There are exactly 3.5 reasons to laugh during a movie and 2.5 of them are fine. The other one should be punishable in court. I’ll illustrate:

1. You laugh when something funny is happening on screen

As America’s sweetheart (and Love Island S7 winner come Sunday) Amaya Papaya said, you are allowed to laugh when you think things are funny. This is obviously fine and normal behavior and not the issue at hand.

2. You laugh when a shocking twist or jump cut happens

Laughter is a natural response to shock or fear. I laughed through the majority of the new Final Destination through sheer panic and shock. This is also fine and a fun time at the movies for everyone involved.

Final Destination: Bloodlines dir. Zach Lipovsky, Adam Stein

2.5 You laugh when a dialogue is absolutely, absurdly terrible

Now this is only half a category because a lot of people confuse bad dialogue with an earnest moment. So here’s a helpful example. In Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker when Poe says: “Somehow, Palpatine returned”, it is okay to laugh (and I bet J.J. Abrams laughed, too). Because that is a line that signals to the audience that the film has given up and laughter is the only appropriate response. So, that should be the baseline for how bad a line has to be to make it appropriate to laugh at.

3. You laugh when there’s an earnest, intimate or uncomfortable moment happening

This is who we’re at war against. I’m immune to a lot of nuisances that may arise in a movie theater solely through exposure therapy, but this will ruin my day in an instant. This is essentially the grown person equivalent to kids laughing when they see two people kiss, but worse. It extends to any moment of intimacy, earnestness or uncomfortable emotion expressed on screen.

The last time I encountered this behavior was at the Pride & Prejudice re-release at an AMC. The laughter started almost immediately from a group to my right, though I first gave them the benefit of the doubt thinking they were just excited the film’s back in theaters. Quickly though it became clear that the only way these people could deal with watching earnest human emotions play out was by giggling through them. Tell me why there was so much snickering when Lizzie was reading Darcy’s letter?

Funniest scene of the 2000s according to people at my screening (Pride & Prejudice dir. Joe Wright)

A few months prior to that I saw Trap. Now this is a movie that gets sillier by the minute and surely has a lot of chuckle-worthy moments. But when we start to make fun of every line out of every character’s mouth, what are we even doing here? I’ve heard from so many friends that the beauty of Trap is that it’s smart enough to know it’s silly, yet it was impossible for me to reach that understanding when even the most straightforward scenes played out to a score of mocking laughter.

If you thought this behavior is exclusive to multiplex audiences you’d be wrong, which brings me to my final piece of evidence. If you were at the Mulholland Drive screening at the Egyptian Theater sometime last year, you should be eligible for financial compensation. Now this is in no way an easy movie to “get”, but that’s precisely why you need the silence to slip into the dream-like state required for it. Not according to 1 out of every 5 “cinephile” at this American Cinematheque screening who had a lot to chortle about, apparently.

credit

Meeting uncomfortable moments on screen with ironic laughter to distance yourself from that discomfort is, frankly, loser behavior. You’re deliberately taking yourself out of the moment you paid $18 to sit in, and I find that so performative. What’s worse is that laughter is contagious, so now there’s a bunch of people laughing instead of trying to digest what’s happening on screen, and the whole room’s experience is ruined.

My biggest issue with this entire phenomenon is that it requires effort on the offender’s part. When we laugh at something genuinely funny it’s a reflex, our body reacting before we can even intellectualize it. When we laugh because we decide that something on screen is too sincere, earnest or “pretentious”'; it’s a deliberate decision that says “I think I’m better than this movie”. And isn’t that more pretentious than anything?

“I think you’re robbing yourself of a really important part of life if you can’t allow yourself to be truly overtaken by a movie without mediating it with laughter.” (Marie Solis for NYT)

What it all comes down to is this: Going to the movies is only meaningful when you commit to being fully present in the theater. The minute you decide to put that cynical distance between you and the film - whether it’s by checking your phone or mocking the film - you’ve already wasted your time and money. Every distraction should be put on hold when you’re in the theater. That’s literally the best part of going to the movies: It’s an escape from the world. It should also be an escape from our tendency to mock anything we can’t consume effortlessly - whether that’s a surrealist piece of dialogue or two people being intimate.

I’ll end on a constructive note - this is another reason why we need theaters to build spaces people can convene in after the movie. Save literally everything for after and laugh all you want over themed cocktails, or spare us all and go back to watching movies at home.

in summary