Sometimes it feels like there’s a new article every week decrying the death of cinema. I thought about that and decided, “why not make that feeling true?” So here it is, a weekly column chronicling the slow demise of the art form we love so much.
A few months ago, Press Play critic Matt Zoller Seitz stirred up a boatload of controversy with an article about the audience response he encountered at a public screening of From Russia with Love.
‘From Russia with Love is not unsophisticated. You are.’
It was a bold headline followed by a bold post, and then a bold follow-up after the glut of argument. It’s common to see criticism of films and filmmakers, and it’s common to see criticism of audiences being distracting, but it’s rare to see a critic outright state that audiences are watching movies in completely the wrong way.
I was in general agreement with Seitz’s piece, though I had some minor reservations. Thing is, he was talking about a James Bond movie. I like From Russia with Love a great deal, but it’s hard to deny there’s a campy fun to it, especially with some of its dated qualities. Now, maybe it doesn’t deserve to be treated like Troll 2 or The Room, but I don’t see a great deal of harm in approaching it with an eye for goofy fun.
Then, last week, I experienced something that shocked me to my core. The Cineplex Yonge & Dundas here in Toronto was playing Vertigo on the big screen. I decided to take in a late screening of one of my most beloved films of all time. I was surprised and pleased to see there were a fair number of other folks there to watch it. The more who come to love Vertigo, the better.
Things started going wrong almost instantly. Cell phones all over the place. People chatting, loudly, throughout. I could almost put up with this sort of thing, but then it all got exponentially more horrific. During many of the most emotional and intense sequences—the jump into the water, the stroll through the redwoods, the bell tower, the dream sequence, the transformation reveal, the ending—I heard that most awful of sounds: chuckling. That’s right. All kinds of people in the audience, watching one of the greatest films ever made, laughing ironically at the film’s melodramatic tendencies.
I ask you, what have we come to as a society when our pervasive ironic detachment won’t even allow us to genuinely admire a work of art like Vertigo?
Is it so hard to accept melodrama? Is it so unthinkable to submit to a heightened depiction of emotions? Is it such a crime for a film to be so unabashed as Vertigo in its tale of love, loss and obsession? It’s just sad.
Maybe the death of cinema isn’t anything to do with cinema at all, but a result of a culture too afraid of its own feelings to submit itself to true art.
8 thoughts on “This Week in the Death of Cinema: Damn Your Ironic Detachment!”
When I was a senior in high school, I had to take a class with freshman for Digital Video. The professor was an incredibly smart guy who knew all the ins and outs of the industry as well as many of the classics. He showed us four films that year: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Rebel Without a Cause, The General, and Bringing Up Baby.
And in each of the three screenings, the freshmen were all total dicks. I don’t care if it was a classroom, the whole experience of watching it with these youngsters was honestly baffling. They would make fun of the most trivial things, like the way a professor called out Jim Stark’s name in Rebel w/o a Cause, the way henchmen died in Raiders. And if they weren’t openly mocking the films, they were complaining about how they were either “boring” or “gay”, the latter insult being both reprehensible and yet totally expected from 14-year-old boys.
So yeah, it is most definitely a generational thing. My professor this year theorized that it’s because “most young people tend to feel superior to older movies”. At first, I thought it was an over-exaggeration, but reading this post and looking back at that moment in high school, it may very well be true.
Nice article.
People who laugh with ironic detachment at things in Raiders are people who don’t deserve to watch a film as great as Raiders. I mean, geez, that film is legitimately funnier than most comedies released these days. I hate humanity sometimes.
Wow, that sounds like a rough experience. I’m 36 years old and am pretty sure that growing up without such easy access to movies and the Internet has created a divide in moviegoing generations. This is a huge generalization and doesn’t apply to many young people who do care about film, but I think it applies in general. Your experience with Vertigo pretty much confirms that premise.
Young people (like myself) make me sick. hehe
Nice. I made sure to add caveats about speaking generally on it.
Yeah, we’re pretty much the worst. But seriously, I hate going seeing movies in crowds of people my age.
I had a very similar experience during the Hitchcocktober series a theater at the local university was running. I attended all 5 pictures: Rear Window, The Birds, Psycho, North by Northwest, and yes, Vertigo. The chuckling was a constant every showing, perhaps the most for North by Northwest. People have no sense of context, they seem unable to place the films to 50-60 years ago. They want current effects and narrative styles. We can’t win ’em all sadly.
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