The Romance of the Theatrical Experience

In this era in which historically-minded observers regard the "Age of Movies" as behind us we often speak of the "romance" of the theatrical experience as having shaped how we once enjoyed movies, and as doing so much less today.

In what did the specialness of that theatrical experience consist, especially in that earlier age?

One key element was that audiovisual media was a rarity in that time. In the Golden Age of Cinema we had radio, but TV for the most part was a little-used novelty. To enjoy sound and picture together was thus a rare treat, enjoyed on average once every couple of weeks, as part of a crowd seated in a great hall in a movie "palace" where, with the lights turned down all attention was fixated on the flickering image on the giant screen at the front of the chamber. That combination of a sense of special event, group experience, lavish surroundings, the darkness focusing attention on that image up front gave it all a dream-like or hypnotic quality.

The elements did not all come together in that way every time. Even when they did they did not suffice to save a bad movie. But all the same, it was a distinct experience, one which people got enough out of that they did it again and again, spending far more money on trips to the movie house than they do today--while when people were really and truly affected and moved by what was on the screen it made that much more of an impression on them. And when they experienced genuine cinematic greatness movies really were magic.

We do not have that today, cannot, because of the ubiquity of audiovisual media that makes anything we want to see so conveniently available everywhere, and usually enjoyed in a less focused, "magical" way, perhaps distractedly as we sit on a commuter train or bus. Even when we go to the theater the multiplex is not the old movie house, while the crowd we are with will not turn off their damn phones during the show they paid twenty dollars a ticket plus concessions and other expenses for, and what we are most likely to come to the theater for is bombast intended to shock the nerves rather than spellbind the consciousness. (Thus do movies remain part of our lives--all as the Age of Movies is past.)

As one sympathetic to the romantic view of the old theatrical experience I do not deny that we have lost something in this. But I also think that very few of us would go back to that older world, any more than most would elect to dispense with the other conveniences the last eighty years of technological change have afforded us.