Hitchcock's "Marnie" is a beautiful film to watch in the first few rows of a packed house: heads turn from left to right as Tippi Hedron rides her horse, Forio, from one side of the gargantuan screen to the next. I watched a clip of Marnie on an iPhone once, excited at the prospect of seeing Marnie anytime, anywhere, however the miniscule screen only partially achieved the traditional moviegoing experience. Well written scripts, by their nature, long for transformation to expansive screens attended by a packed audience but in the golden age of living from small screen to tiny screen, the well-written script may have to settle for netbook residency.
The way we "go" to the movies has changed but the language remains in tact. From the advent of home box offices, higher resolution computer screens, and high performance smart phones coupled with higher admission costs, moviegoers have forged new spaces for watching movies. This mobile telepresence challenges what it means to go to the movies.
The movie theater's crisis is, interestingly enough, parralled in this summer's Christopher Nolan film "Inception," which explores one man's journey through dream states to retrieve information and overcome his past. Along the way, he, Mr. Cobb (Leonardo Dicaprio), must maintain the discrepancy between reality and dream states. A danger to Cobb's profession is pulling yourself from a dream state where you are the sole architect of your space, free to design buildings, bridges or cafes. Inception posits life is easier in a dream state because every construction and application is a direct product of the mind and the only reality of this new world is that it's not reality. Just as it is imperative for the characters to focus exclusively on the careful design of these alternate states of being, we the audience are are focused exclusively on this world too, and it goes without saying that we must be in order to keep up. As a result, the film sacrifices personal touches of character for the sake of style and design.
Like Inception, we are beginning to live outside of a reality we have always known for the sake of design, exclusively, but not limited to, the movies. This is evidenced through the way we communicate; we exchanged face to face conversation for the telephone and the telephone for texting, instant messaging, Facebook, My Space and Twitter. Before the internet became a place for public diary entries, living on a screen used to signify privacy: a place to keep private information, well, private. The screen is a place to come to life, socialize, make friends, have fun, learn and exist. It has become a place in reality for both socializing and entertainment. Francois Truffaut famously spoke, "Quand on aime la vie, on va au cinema," but today when one loves life, one pushes a button. Going to the movies means gathering around a Macbook Pro with a 17 inch screen, 3-D televison sets, iPhones and tablets, home entertainment systems and even watching a movie via Skype with friends in Chicago while you're in New York. This is a semiological check point in moveigoing history and, like Inception, this idea of "existing" in a cyber world is fascinating but comes at the cost of more personal and stimulating real world interactions.
Size does matter when it pertains to a movie screen. Whether you're watching the Ozark mountain world of Winter's Bone or the penis hungry predatory fish of Pirahna 3-D (spoiler alert), the visceral reactions that theatre screens promises are not matched in any gratifying or interesting way by an iPhone. Audiences never laugh louder, cry harder or jolt further from their seats than in the presence of other people at a movie theatre. Cinema is a shared art unlike a painting or poem that can be purchased by a single collector and admired. Film needs audiences and nothing compares to laughing out loud with a packed house and sharing in poignant onscreen moments. When Wes Craven's Scream franchise ripped through theatres, houses were packed with teens in the long white ghoulish masks and everytime someone was stabbed, audiences screamed together in a way they never would have at home alone. At the end of this summer's third installment of Toy Story, both kids and adults wept as Andy gave up his toys. This is all part of the "movie going" experience, one that doesn't require a data plan.
If one visits some of the great theatres in the United States, from the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles to the Cinematheque on 7th Avenue in Brooklyn, even The Neon in Dayton, Ohio, they will find that these theatres feel like a shrine to the event moviegoing used to be: before megaplexes became the equivilent of state fairs and audiences carved a niche elsewhere. I attended Rob Reiner's latest, "Flipped", at the Laemmle Music Hall theatre on opening weekend with no more than ten other people. The red carpets and old seats of the marquee were bittersweet; the once public realm of moviegoing felt like more of a pilgrammage to something lost.
Were he here, Hitchcock could see how his works exist on screens he couldn't have imagined. As he often said, "Always make the audience suffer as much as possible." Well Alfred, they are.
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