THE CINEMA HAS always been a communal experience at its heart. There is nothing like sitting in a dark packed house on the opening weekend of a big film and experiencing the audience jump in their seats, laugh or inhale sharply simultaneously. No matter how big your TV is or how slick your sound system may be, it’s something you can never quite replicate at home.
Being a collective experience does mean certain levels of societal etiquette are expected, but lately, it feels like those norms have gone right out the window. In fact, it sometimes feels as though, as well as a global pandemic, we’ve all gone through a collective form of amnesia on how to behave in public spaces.
From people taking off their shoes and putting their feet up on the seats and next to your head, to taking selfies, checking social media mid-film, and even bringing in a cooked roast chicken. It’s as if people have forgotten how to behave acceptably in groups anymore.
I’m a member of a large film group on Facebook and one of the members regularly posts images of his cinema snacks, which include, and I kid you not, things like the aforementioned cooked roast chicken. Boiled egg sandwiches. Chinese takeaways smothered in curry sauce. Things you might have at home, but would not in a million years think are acceptable snacks for the cinema. Mainly because the smell would be enough to turn your stomach, and the mess left behind would make a horde of hungry pigs look tidy. The poster in question probably does most of this for the reaction, but I’d love to say I’ve not witnessed behaviour like this in real life.
People are often quick to blame Covid for the drop-off in behaviour in public, but I’m not so sure. This decline has been on the cards for years, thanks to our overreliance on our smartphones and decline in attention spans; the pandemic just accelerated it. True, for a while there it looked like the future of cinema was in doubt as we all got used to streaming things at home in our jammies, surrounded by an endless supply of snacks, pausing things when we wanted, and tweeting our reactions in real-time.
Thankfully, the audience returned to the big screen, but many seem to have left their manners at home.
The cinema is never going to be a silent experience, of course. You’re always going to get a bit of low-level chat. You’re always going to get popcorn chewing, drinks slurping and people getting up and down to go to the bathroom. Those are just part of the deal, and you’ve got to accept them.
What’s not acceptable though is people being unable to sit through a film without checking their phone halfway through because they are bored or don’t have the attention span required to sit through a single narrative story over an hour and a half anymore. If you don’t like what you’re watching on the big screen then get up and leave, don’t start scrolling TikTok or check your notifications, or take selfies. And FYI, turning the brightness down on your screen to its lowest setting does absolutely nothing to stop it from catching the eye of everyone around you or behind you. All it does is distract others and take them out of the experience they’ve shelled out for.
And that’s the other thing, going out to the cinema is not a cheap night out anymore. It’s pricey as hell, especially when you factor in snacks and drinks, you’re often looking at the guts of €20 or more a head. That goes up exponentially when you factor kids into the equation. We took our two children to see Paddington 3 recently, and it was €50 for the four of us, and the two adults didn’t even have any popcorn or drinks.
And on the topic of bringing children to the cinema, look I get it can be a dirge to sit through some animated crap you’d rather pluck your eyes out with a rusty spoon than watch, but Jesus, can you not simply try for the sake of an hour and a half to get into the movie and share in your children’s joy rather than sit there and play Wordle? It only serves to catch the eye of every other bored, senseless parent in the cinema, who has also shelled out a fortune for their kids’ tickets and snack tray.
It’s not just cinema, of course. This obsession with capturing everything on our devices and the entitlement to play our various types of media at top volume has seeped into every part of society, where people treat communal areas like it’s their sitting room. Who hasn’t had the experience of paying out hundreds of euros for the gig of a lifetime only to have the misfortune of being stood or sat behind that bellend who has their phone out for the entirety of the concert taking videos they’ll never watch back, but insist on capturing in all their granny, shaky glory?
And don’t tell me you’ve not felt the vein pulse in your forehead when the person next to you on the bus decides to watch their TikTok’s at top volume because they don’t like wearing their headphones? I mean, I won’t lie, the other day I did enjoy hearing a tarot reading that was apparently just for me, even though it wasn’t my phone it was blaring out of, and I couldn’t even see the screen.
I get playing noisy content on phones is part of life now and I don’t expect places like public transport to be Buddha-like spaces of Zen, but it’s still not on to play your music, voice notes, or tarot readings at full blast either.
Niamh O’Reilly is a freelance writer and wrangler of two small boys, who is winging her way through motherhood, her forties and her eyeliner.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say