Aurora And What It Means For The Movies

Arguably, there are more important conversations to be had regarding the horrifying movie theater shootings that occurred in Aurora, CO early Friday morning—expression of condolences for family members of the deceased, gun safety, and how to deal with mentally ill criminals—but this entire situation can’t help but lead me to wonder: what does this mean for the movies?

Of course, for Christopher Nolan’s new film The Dark Knight Rises in particular, it means bad things. Very bad things. There’s no need to explain that blaming Nolan’s film for the violence is a stupid and incredibly narrow-minded way of dealing with this trauma; that much should be obvious to anyone reading this. But the blunt reality is that many people remain distraught with the film for quite some time and will likely not see it this weekend. In fact, one friend commented immediately after finding out, that he was going to wait “until that one comes out on DVD”…as if the shootings had forever altered the context of the film for him.

In terms of the movie world as whole, though, several commentators have already offered up the distressing insight that the movie-going experience will never be the same after this. While this strikes me as a bit of a blasé claim (what about the global movie-going experience?), I think that there’s some truth to this idea, at least in the context of the United States. Historically, if Aurora comes to represent the death of the traditional movie-going experience, then it will be seen as no more than the straw that broke the camel’s back.

After all, movie theater culture has been on the way out for a long time now. Stretching back to the introductions of the VHS in the late 1970s and the DVD in the mid 1990s and, finally, the digital age—with its swath of legal and illegal movie-watching services and options in the 21^st century—the traditional movie theater model has never faced so much competition. It’s a death that no coroner wants to call, but the film industry has been aware of it for quite some time. Ticket sales since 2002 have been on a decline despite an increase in U.S. population, while Netflix, for example, grew to almost 25 million subscribers by the end of 2011 after having only a paltry 670,000 subscribers in September 2002.

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What do we stand to lose from this transition? What do we stand to gain?

If we’re being positive about this shift in movie culture, then I’ll have to point out that a serious film buff gets more bang for his or her buck with a subscription based service like Netflix. Movie theaters—especially those showing 3-D films—more or less fleece their customers: when most showings are somewhere between $13 and $14 for a showing, a matinee showing for under $10 (or any price negotiated with the flick of a student ID card) feels like a godsend. In the long run, we save money by watching at home, not in the theater.

After the events of early Friday morning, it turns out that there’s an additional positive aspect: we’re safe. Movie theaters—unlike, say, train stations, tall buildings, airports, sports stadiums, concert halls, and any other large public-gathering place you can think of—have always been thought of in our culture as safe places. Which is, as lots of people have learned today, kind of an odd assumption. Why should a movie theater be any safer than a concert venue?

However, part of the allure of the movie theater since the inception of the industry has been that appeal to sanctuary. It would be a useless exercise trying to draw together examples from literature, music, and, obviously, film that has drawn on this idea of the movie theater as safe haven. How many protagonists have we witnessed seek shelter in those plush velvet seats? How many couples have we seen hunker down in the flickering darkness? There are simply too many iconic moments to bother cataloguing. You probably have a series of those scenes chasing through your mind right now.

If we’re looking to the negatives of this situation, I offer that it’s exactly that notion of the theater that we have to lose. There is no other ‘public’ experience that measures up to that of a movie theater. In my lifetime, not live theater nor musical concerts nor religious ceremonies—only movie theaters have had the ability to layer that fabric of non-awareness over my overactive consciousness. When we watch a film, we travel somewhere else. We exist outside of time. As Italo Calvino says (whom I could quote over and over again with regard to the cinema experience, thanks to his essay “A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography”), the movie theater “swallowed [him] up…in a suspension of time, or in the duration of an imaginary life, or in a leap backwards to centuries before” (Calvino 43). If there were anything in our society that could even loosely compete for the title of ‘time machine’ or ‘teleportation device,’ it would be the movie theater. Neither the television nor the computer, in my mind, come even close to offering the same opportunity as the movie theater.

For one, neither operates on the basis of a shared experience. It is the shared-ness that is crucial to film. Film toes a curious paradox in that way—it is both a wonderfully solitary and yet socially engaging experience. I am reminded of this whenever I go to see a film by myself: that moment when you laugh at a funny bit in a film and hear other people, perfect strangers, laughing at the same joke, that moment has a kind of magical resonance, an inexplicable kind of wonder.

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I offer this question to those who often watch television or films alone among the comforts of home: when was the last time you laughed out loud at a joke? when was the last time you gasped in amazement? or muttered wayward advice at a character? In my own experience, I find that my reactions are muted when I am alone with a film—the same level of engagement is simply absent. I would offer that, ironically, solitude in the film experience imposes a kind of self-consciousness. We know that we’re alone and we can’t help but wondering whom we would be reacting for if we laughed out loud. Simply put, it seems to me that there is less enjoyment in a solitary film experience than in a communal one. (The horror genre, I find myself admitting, is an exception to the rule. Horror films are as deliciously terrifying in the theater as they are alone in a one’s darkened [or lightened…] living room.)

So will we keep going to the movies? Or does Aurora represent the end of an era? Will the concept of the American movie theater recover from the wave of indirect bad press it’s on the verge of receiving? I can’t offer any answers. All I can say is that despite the recent tragedy and the security measures that will likely be implemented as a result, I will continue to go to the movies. Quite simply, there’s nothing else like it.