Big screen energy
Wrong and right reasons to go back to the cinema
One of the fairer points raised by the recent phenomenon of simultaneous hit films about an atomic scientist and a girls’ doll known colloquially as ‘Oppenbie’ is that cinemas are back.
Some vindication then for those who’ve always insisted the home-viewing experience can’t fill the boots of going to the cinema. Beyond marketing spiel, though, what do people mean when they say a film has to be watched on the big screen?
Two not necessarily mutually inclusive things. First, watching a film with picture and audio magnitude that in almost all cases dwarfs even the nerdiest home cinema set-up; and second, watching a film in public, with the public.
The big screen camp sometimes has the same kind of smarminess of musos who think if you don’t own the White Album on vinyl or didn’t see Prince live can you truly say you’ve listened to them? Their champion is David Lynch complaining people who watch a film on their “fucking cellphones” think they’ve basically watched it (“Get real!”), a clip since turned into a fake iPhone ad. Sticklers always get stickled though: Lynch himself has succumbed to shooting in digital whereas the next level in oneupmanship is to vaunt watching films on a big screen on film.
As for cinemas preserving the communal experience of films - watching with a large audience, not just a movie-night with friends - it’s easy to conflate the enjoyment of watching a film en masse and what facilitates your judgement of how good the film is. Yes, as with theatre, watching en masse can make you laugh even more at a funny film, thrill even more at a thriller.1 And as with theatre there’s a civic value in experiencing art with strangers. But a communal experience can’t make a bad film better in and of itself, nor is it necessary for whatever qualities it has to be discernible. A film is good or bad watched alone or in a crowd.
And that’s not even getting into how bad the communal cinema experience can be. Across demographics, people saunter into screenings halfway through the first reel as though a film’s not worth arriving on time for, or they sit scrolling through essential social media with their screen brightness set to moon-advert, or maybe they spend the film just having a chat. Whenever during a screening of House of Gucci Lady Gaga appeared in a new outfit a young person in my row had a fit of clicking and pointing then declared: [extreme Peckham arriviste voice] “So fierce.” And at the same cinema sozzled old people watching Tár applauded “Oh brilliant” each time Cate Blanchett was harsh to somebody young. (They fell a bit quieter during the last scenes of the film.)
Neither is that getting into how not everyone can afford, access or has the time or freedom to go to their nearest cinema. So I appreciate why ‘You have to watch it on the big screen!’ isn’t as stirring as it’s meant, why it comes across more like ‘Look at the screens on that!’
We could leave it there if we weren’t living in the days of tit-for-tat. Not a sex-for-second-hand-clothes programme but the modern law that each annoying trait must have its equally annoying reaction.
To provoke the pro-cinema snobs there are those who lean in to how unsuitably they watch films, particularly ones considered cinematic. They watch them on their “fucking cellphone” at 1.5x speed with subtitles to boot. The first time they watched Gravity was on a plane—on Ambien. They watched Apocalypse Now on a 50x50 pixel tile in the mosaic of other open windows on their laptop, “as the director intended” as the punchline always goes.
But isn’t it its own kind of philistinism to say all big-screen preference is snobbery or gatekeeping condescension, that no film really has to be watched on the big screen? Not least because cinemas do offer more than just the quantitative differences of screen area and audio volume.
The first qualitative difference is that a cinema-size screen gives details space to be noticed as intended. Among such choices I’d never noticed on TV and only noticed because I was lucky enough to see these films projected are: tears like the one Philip Baker Hall sheds before his mini-stroke in Magnolia; background effects like the rain in the door during Neary’s breakdown in Close Encounters; subtle colours like the nib of the floating pen in 2001—red to remind us of the hominid’s bone weapon from the scene before, that all tools began with the weapon, that the pen is the sword.2
Another qualitative difference is impact. Watching Koyaanisqatsi, for instance, at the cinema isn’t some excessive indulgence, like skydiving on acid or playing Fifa on a cinema screen or listening to Beethoven with eyes shut and speakers by your ears like Alex DeLarge. The film’s slow- and fast-motion, its melding of grand music and images, the force of their associations are understood in the full way the director intended when watched at a cinema. Chops-busting aside, what the “director intended” in most cases is to maximise and not obscure the impact of their choices. It’s like an unspoken version of the musical terms a composer signposts their sheet music with, or what a playwright puts in a script besides dialogue—not stage suggestions but directions.
Maybe though this is still more a matter of enhancement. You can more or less get what there is to be got in Koyaanisqatsi on a laptop; it’ll come across harder is all. And yet, according to Camille Paglia, what’s unique about cinema as a medium is inextricable from what’s unique about cinema as a venue. Because what we see on a big screen is larger-than-life, literally and figuratively. Especially other people: as such, they have the tutelary impact on us of statues or monuments; it’s how the people on screen can do to us what those on stage used to do in ancient times with their masks and exaggeration and stylised acting.
In ‘Acting it up on the small screen’, an article from 1979 by Angela Carter, she worried TV was getting too much like cinema:
Nevertheless, one test of the viability of television drama as television is whether or not it would look better on a big screen. If it would, then it’s lousy television. I would have thought this stood to reason, due to the limitations of the form creating the aesthetic of the form. But sometimes one suspects television drama is made for preview theatres rather than transmission.
Now you might think no one heeded her warning and believe the new canard that modern TV is our cinema. (Hence the arms race in TV picture resolution: 4K, 8K, the Magnaphallix 302-inch screen replacing the 301.) This is the received wisdom anyway. In fact TV remains by and large, even with its most prestige shows, expensively visualised audio-drama. Not a few friends who work in TV have griped how their producer notes are always fretting about any prolonged silence on-screen or visual-only storytelling, how they always have to cut straight to dialogue. So you’re not even getting the cinema experience at home you believe.
The payload, though, of Angela Carter’s critique is “the limitations of the form creating the aesthetic of the form”. Films aren’t just information which can be had the same in any format. Art isn’t just information, it’s sensual thought, in Nabokov’s words—information that’s format-dependent. Watching a film on whichever small screen - TV, laptop, phone - doesn’t lose you some intangible essence the cineastes maintain exists but can’t define beyond criteria more to do with class and cultural capital. In a very real way, watching a film on your phone is like going to a concert with fingers in your ears.
You’ll get quite a bit of it, but not all of it—how could you? And why wouldn’t you want it all? You’re doing yourself a disservice by not getting it in its best form - with all the details in their ideal presentation - that is accessible and available to you. Forget enjoyment, you’re even making it harder for yourself to judge how good it is. Would you trust the rating of someone who watched a film on a rollercoaster?
No doubt there’s been a post-Covid grade inflation in positive reviews of new films out of a collegial motive of getting people back into cinemas.3 And watching your tenth pseudo-trailer in which the cast cajole the audience about their latest adaptation of The Railway Children or whatever because it, too, has to be watched on the big screen will test even the staunchest pro-cinema ally. But there’s no good film you watched alone on a small screen you wouldn’t have appreciated more on a big screen with the right audience, appreciate here meaning both enjoy and rate. Because sometimes critical judgement is format-specific too.
Vice versa, theatre isn’t more fun experienced alone - ask anybody who’s pity-watched a show at the Edinburgh fringe - but that’s more to do with the chilling lack of feedback for the performers.
See Ursula K Le Guin for an opposing view that instead of the stick, club, weapon being our first tool it was more likely to have been the pouch or carrier bag.
The last-ditch survival efforts of some cinema chains is to offer the home-viewing experience outside the home - booze, hot meals, cushions, ‘private’ seating sections - at ticket prices reaching theatre or even opera levels. Unlike the opera, you don’t go there to be seen but to pretend no one can see you, in your slanket with your burger.
I'm fascinated with questions of how different art forms are properly received, so this is a welcome and thought-provoking essay—thank you! Your first footnote leads me to wonder about the ancestry of the cinema. Is it, in fact, derived mostly from the stage? If so, I agree with your point, since there's nothing worse than watching a stage performance with a miniscule audience (the painful experience of Emma Stone's character in "La La Land" being a good dramatization of the feeling). However the fact that the screen mediates the experience of the actor's performances—not to mention the fact that animated films exist—leads me to posit that the cinema derives much of its expressive power, and its aesthetics even, from the world of visual art. I've never heard anyone praise the visuals of the theater with as much adulation as they do the cinematography of directors such as Malick or Scorsese.
Unfortunately, for me, I will probably still watch most of my new movies at home; I'm squarely in the middle of the parenting years and time and money are both at a premium. We have a tradition of taking the kids to the cinema for the first time on their fifth birthday, but after that, opportunities to see films on the big screen are rare. We watch a lot of movies at home, though, and the oldest ones are just beginning to be old enough to want to see new films in the theater—so that's fun.
The cynic in me believes the whole Oppen-bar-hiem-bie thing was synchronized for the specific purpose of getting people to talk about the movies as cinematic experiences, thus driving interest in seeing them at the theater, and thus raking in money for the cinemas. Perhaps . . .