Is theatrical moviegoing the last, best hope we have for preserving our attention spans?
The multiplex is the only major public space left that expressly forbids mobile device usage, even as adherence is another story
Happy New Year! I hope you had a restful, rejuvenating holiday week. I rang in 2024 on a rather bittersweet note, attending the final night of operation for the 65-year-old Santee Drive-In Theatre in East San Diego County. Run by the same family since the day it opened in 1958, the outdoor twin was a box office powerhouse as recently as 15 or 20 years ago. But like so many other first-run drive-ins, the Santee had a tough go of things post-pandemic, with theatrical windows shortening to practically nothing, and so little box office love for non-"event" movies, the kind you wouldn't mind seeing on a drive-in screen rather than an IMAX. At least many of the old regulars turned out for one final New Year’s Eve double feature; I haven’t seen a drive-in so packed in many years. I snapped some photos to commemorate the place; R.I.P, Santee Drive-In.
I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions, but after mulling it over for the past few months, I have decided to embark on a little personal challenge for 2024. Beginning yesterday, I took every social media app off my phone. Now, if I want to go on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn, I have to sit down at my computer – the laptop must stay on its dock – and make a conscious choice to use them. The reason for this is not that I have an issue with social media itself; in fact, I have discovered many wonderful small businesses, discussion groups, and personal friends on these platforms over the years. But I do think that the impulse to “scroll” whenever we’re the slightest bit bored is progressively becoming one of our biggest societal ailments. Increasingly over the past few years, I’ve found myself reflexively reaching for my phone, repeatedly refreshing my social media feeds for no real reason or personal gain.
The tipping point on this issue for me, however, was not necessarily my own “scrolling.” Rather, the impetus was my personal observations of the uptick of mobile phone usage in movie theaters with each passing year. When I’m not the only person in the auditorium, I often encounter other patrons checking their social media feeds at some point during the show, despite the (laxly enforced) official rules on this matter. These moviegoers are usually – but not exclusively – younger people, and rarely does their decision to illuminate their personal screen and distract other moviegoers appear to stem from an unexpected, pressing issue at home. Well over a dozen times in 2023 alone, I witnessed someone whip out their phone to simply browse Instagram (and even videos with sound on TikTok!) during the feature presentation.
When “scrolling” becomes this pervasive in one’s life, it’s a compulsive behavior, not a natural reaction to a movie one may find boring. And while I certainly have never had the insuppressible impulse to use my phone during a public movie performance, repeatedly witnessing this behavior has forced me to really reconsider my own. How many times have I pulled out my iPhone in more socially-sanctioned settings – casual restaurants, baseball games, at the office – and engaged in exactly the same arbitrary scrolling? Countless. For the sake of our attention spans, and our capacity to appreciate our own surroundings, I think we have to do our best to resist device usage as a “filler” activity. Because what starts as a filler activity eventually becomes an intrusion – a bright, distracting light in a cinema hall.
Using the New Year as an opportunity to look to the future, I hope we, as a society, can begin to actively appreciate the multiplex as perhaps the last common place on Earth where mobile device usage is not allowed (at least in most of the West). Enforcement of this rule may not currently be up to snuff, as my experiences suggest, but with enough conscious effort, I think we still have a chance of saving the “sacred status” of theaters. Exhibitors will have to do a better job of policing, and other patrons may even have to do a better job of shaming (sometimes a dicey prospect in our current times), but this doesn’t seem like an insurmountable challenge. Alamo Drafthouse has rather infamously enforced a “no talking, no texting” policy for years.
In fact, as people like me begin to reevaluate the hold that mobile devices have on their lives, I think “devicelessness” has the potential to be one of the greatest virtues of public moviegoing. In my personal observations, it appears that the act of scrolling has become a great addiction for many – that people don’t necessarily want to be scrolling all the time, it’s just something second-nature that they do (not unlike smoking). Seeing a movie in a theater should theoretically give them permission to turn their device off; after all, they’re just playing by the rules. Virtually nowhere else accessible to nearly all citizens affords us that privilege – not on an airplane (just pay for Wi-Fi), not in a restaurant (only the ritziest will slap you on the wrist for using your phone), not in a hospital (just don’t make a voice-call). Sure, there’s live theater, but that’s nowhere near as culturally ubiquitous and affordable as moviegoing.
Choosing not to use your phone during a movie is also a liberating form of self-discipline. In 2023, there was an abundance of news headlines about school districts banning phones and prominent musicians and comedians forcing attendees to encase their phones during shows. While I have no doubt as to the potential benefits of these policies, they take the choice out of the phone user’s hands by putting the device behind (literal) lock-and-key. In a movie theater, you still have the freedom to take your mobile device out of your pocket during the feature; the worst punishment you’re likely to receive for doing so is a slap on the wrist from a fellow patron or the theater manager. Thus, to elect not to use it is to have power and freewill over the device. That sentence may strike some as absurd on its face, indicative of a completely infantilized society, but take a look around at any American city and you’ll be forced to concede that this is the cultural moment we’re living in.
Even more importantly, I feel strongly that regular moviegoing, free from the influence of one’s electronic devices, has the potential to be a great ongoing cognitive benefit for society. While it seems unlikely that many people – especially in their twenties and younger – will attempt a similar experiment to my New Year’s challenge and voluntarily restrict their mobile usage, turning off their phone for a few hours to see a movie feels like a realistic starting point. It seems to me, then, that movies have great potential to serve as a sort of detox for our overtaxed brains, a kind of fitness conditioning for one’s attention span in the modern era. Where else are we regularly forced to sit at the mercy of a complete stranger’s vision for two hours, distraction-free? The movies could indeed be our last, best hope for resisting the temptation to always be entertaining oneself more by swiping to the next website, video, or profile. You get the entertainment you paid for and no more.
My hope is that people can start to actively appreciate the value in this exercise, which is under-acknowledged at present. Yes, cinema is first and foremost an aesthetic medium for visual artists, but it’s also a state of mind. Sure, many will still popularly describe the movies as “an escape,” but they seem to increasingly be viewing their phones as a similar conduit, with social media drifting farther and farther from reality in the era of paid influencers. But social media, unlike a film, is not a finite experience, it is an ongoing one, particularly when rendered mobile. When we step into the portal of the cinema, we are hoping to come out a better human upon exiting it. When we step into the portal that social media is currently selling us, on a device that we carry around with us every minute of the day, we may never actually come out of the portal. I yearn for a future where movies and digital media aren’t seen as competing forms of entertainment, but diametrically opposed ones. The movie theater is where we go to give ourselves away to something bigger – a pastime rooted in empathy – while digital media should be more about facilitating real-life experiences.
Because digital media provides us the illusion of control (nothing could be further from the truth), giving oneself over to a more traditional, often linear form of storytelling is not easy for a good number of people. This is what, I suspect, lies at the heart of the seemingly endless current discourse surrounding “movies being too long these days,” which came to a head this past October with the release of Scorsese’s 206-minute Killers of the Flower Moon. While these complaints started long before many had even seen the film with their own eyes, how one could walk away from one of the year’s masterpieces with the conclusion that it was simply “way too long,” I cannot quite understand. But I sense that this has less to do with Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker’s creative choices and more to do with the contemporary attention span, significantly (but hopefully not permanently) altered by mobile device usage. Do you remember people complaining about Titanic being way too long in 1997? Did this even occur to patrons of Lawrence of Arabia in 1962? Certainly some, but not nearly to the extent that we’ve seen with Killers of the Flower Moon or Avatar: The Way of Water or Babylon. Ironically, part of the reason movies are “so long these days” is because audiences have stopped supporting comedies in theaters; the consumer is driving this very market trend.
While two-hour movies are a perfectly fine place to start, I think moviegoers need to stop dreading longer films and start to embrace these experiences as an active liberation from the often oppressive pace of daily life outside the cinema. A common rebuttal is that most movies “don’t need” to be more than 120 minutes long, that a story can be efficiently told in two hours. I’ll refrain from tackling the artistic side of this debate and simply say that I think this comment stems from the false paradigm that we always need to spend our time efficiently. Call it what you want – capitalist hegemony (“time is money”) or simply another outgrowth of our short attention spans. But if we can’t comfortably sit with our own boredom for five- or ten-minute stretches and indulge an artist (especially one of Scorsese’s stature) the privilege of taking what they feel is the necessary amount of time to share their vision, who have we become? As far as I’m concerned, “movies are too long these days” is just another way of saying “I am at the mercy of my attention span, which is impaired.” It’s time to appreciate films – especially long ones – as one of our most viable pathways out of this very trap. This is one of the many reasons why I have begun to embrace Indian cinema, which routinely features running times over 150 minutes, as much as I have in the past year.
While I have always celebrated the pure, distraction-free experience of seeing a movie in a theater, I’ve had my own struggles with watching films at home. Not necessarily in the form of the addictive scrolling that plagues so many today, but rather, constantly reaching for my device to answer certain questions that arise during the viewing process. Who shot this? What’d they shoot it on? Oh, that story element is interesting, I wonder if that’s factually accurate? Who’s that actress – have I seen her before? I start to Google and instantly the spell is broken. But I have a hard time resisting when the phone – or the iPad, or the laptop – is so accessible. This is a big part of why I largely opt for theatrical releases over movies and TV at home; I don’t feel like I’m beholden to my device in a theater. But I hope that in 2024, as I work to retrain and condition my own attention span, that I can start to enjoy more films and even series – uninterrupted – at home, especially given that my repertory/revival options in theaters are much more limited in San Diego than they were in Los Angeles.
At this point, maybe I’m rambling on longer than many have accused Killers of the Flower Moon of running. But the blog is called Danny Baldwin Rambles, so you were warned. I also didn’t take away your phone first; in fact, you may be reading this post on it. This is all just to say that, when we think about theatrical moviegoing heading into the future, perhaps we need to start thinking a little less about artistic and commercial trends, and more about cognitive ones. Maybe the trick to breaking new ground, regaining cultural significance, and ultimately thriving financially is not for Hollywood to try to compete with new media, but to remind audiences of what new media cannot give their brains and souls. Yes, it often seems like audiences are incredibly resistant, as evidenced by the rampant cellphone usage in today’s megaplexes. But if Gen Z is really disproportionately moving to smaller cities in the South, rather than coastal metropolises, partly because they appreciate the slower pace of life, then I suspect there’s more hope for this cause than we might think.
My prediction for 2024 is that, in the midst of another toxic and divisive election year, Americans begin to realize that they need more time away from their devices. The movie theater offers the perfect respite.
I completely agree with this whole argument! I went to see a Hannah Gadsby comedy show (amazing and hilarious) last year, and they required everyone to put their phones in these locked pouches that would only be unlocked after the show while leaving. It was so lovely to be free of any temptation to check my phone, and of course it was great to not have to see other people pulling out their phones to take photos or videos or just scroll on social media and text. You mostly mentioned the scrolling and texting, but at live shows and concerts I would say even more annoying is when people just hold up their phone for long periods taking videos they'll never watch and that take us all out of the experience of the moment. So I do think pretty much all events, from movies to plays to comedy shows to concerts, should have the no-phone policy.
As far as the length of movies, I agree overall but with an important caveat. We need to bring back intermissions! Indian films are all really long, but they also always have an intermission. Titanic had an intermission. 2001: A Space Odyssey had an intermission. Lawrence of Arabia had an intermission. I would venture to guess that all movies over 2 hours 30 minutes had an intermission until somewhere around the year 2000. For some reason the practice vanished, and the only American movie since then I can remember having an intermission was The Hateful Eight in its 70 mm "Roadshow Edition." I think if Killers of the Flower Moon had an intermission, way more people would have seen it in the theater, and it would also reduce people's issues with being away from their phones for so long. What if we had a no-phone policy while the movie is playing, but phones were allowed during the intermission? I think that would work well. Intermissions also cut down on people leaving the movie to go to the bathroom at random times, which is distracting, since people would know they have that opportunity halfway through the movie. What do you think?