Will You Go to the Movies With Me?

The neighborhood cinema used to be a go-to place for date nights, friend hangouts, and various other outings. 

Today, though, the public theater has largely been supplanted by the at-home entertainment system.

What's more, some American towns have no movie theaters at all. 

In Commonplace, Jon Bishop writes that the city of Worcester, Massachusetts doesn't have a single movie theater.

Some reddit users on the r/WorcesterMA subreddit have corroborated this. 

On that forum, u/MattOLOLOL, wrote: "As to why we can't sustain a movie theater anymore, I'm not sure. I'd bet the pandemic was a big factor, but still, we're a city of over 200k."

Another user commented: "I think people just don't go out to the movies anymore." 

Whatever the case, this is profoundly sad. The movie theater, as documented in Giuseppe Tornatore's magnum opus, Cinema Paradiso, is an integral part of community life. Without it, we are relegated to our bedrooms to passively watch Netflix while phubbing on our smart phones. 

This privatization of movie watching, Bishop argues, has further eroded the American monoculture:

Along with the decline of the form itself, the collapse of moviegoing portends the continued collapse of our common culture. Going to the movies with family and friends and then talking about what you saw, perhaps over a meal, after the film was something a lot of people once enjoyed doing. And it was an activity that was truly democratic, as it was something the rich and the poor could do equally. And popular films also led to water cooler conversations.

The "water cooler conversations," that Bishop mentions, are simply harder to have today, as we are all watching different things. 

Michael Brendan Dougherty made a similar point in National Review last year:

There is a sense in which our culture has been frozen since the 1990s. The internet and paid cable TV really got to work on resegregating, silo-ing, and deconstructing what had been a common, mass popular culture. It was thrown to flinders as people bought multiple cheap TVs, and then Napster, the iPod, and the iPad tore it up in a BitTorrent. Eighty-three million viewers had once tuned in to see who shot J. R. in 1980; 76.3 million tuned in to watch Jerry Seinfeld and his friends put in the slammer in 1998.

Now, Seinfeld producer and writer of that finale, Larry David, has relitigated that episode in the finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which was watched by just 1.1 million people.

This is a troubling development...

While streaming Netflix and Hulu and DoorDashing food to your apartment is convenient, it is completely devoid of social connection. 

In fact, Bishop remarks that, with the advent of contactless delivery, we don't even have that brief face-to-face interaction with the person dropping off our meals. 

Everything has become decentralized, impersonal, and individualized. 

This trend, if it is to continue, will only compound our current scourge of social atomization. 

But, as I've said before, people - young people, especially - are yearning for a return to community. 

We see this in the form of hip dine-in theaters like the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn (this place is always packed with zoomers), and drive-in theaters, which are still present all over the country. 

Look, I understand that the times are changing - I don't mean to sound like a hopeless reactionary - but it's perfectly reasonable to point out the tradeoffs of "progress." Expediency, for instance, comes at the price of interpersonal interactions. We've seen this with the emergence of self-checkout kiosks. 

But, while we can't go back to yesteryear, we can keep some old traditions alive. 

So... will you go to the movies with me?