Observations on Movie-Watchers
Nothing ruins a classic film like the condescending cackles of the audience.
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By the standards of ordinary citizens, I am a committed moviegoer.
Despite the unpleasantness of modern multiplexes, with their ominously enveloping stadium seating and distressingly eclectic food and drink offerings, I remain susceptible to the vastness of the big screen, the aroma of popcorn, and, when a film is actually shown on celluloid, the flicker of the projector.
Yet you will seldom find me romanticizing the much-touted communal aspect of moviegoing.
When, in that notorious pre-show AMC multiplex ad, actress Nicole Kidman says, “We go somewhere we’ve never been before—not just entertained, but somehow reborn, together,” my objection is to the words “we” and “together.” Speaking for myself, I go to the movies with the notion of appreciating a work of art. I do not require the presence of a crowd to do so. By way of comparison, my enjoyment in reading Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust or in listening to a recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations would not be heightened if I did so as part of a group. Why, then, would my enjoyment in seeing a cherished film—say, John Ford’s Stagecoach or Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind—depend on an assembled horde?
To be clear, I enjoy seeing movies in the company of family and friends, but such moviegoing companions are likely to either share my tastes (why else would they have agreed to go?) or to be sufficiently polite to keep quiet if they don’t. For me, this is the decisive factor: I am perfectly content to see a movie among hundreds or even thousands of people, but I draw the line when some start to vocalize their objections, usually in the form of inappropriate laughter. To return to my earlier comparison, what if, when reading A Handful of Dust, someone was peering over my shoulder and made it known when he felt that Waugh had written an unpersuasive scene or an unfunny line?
Regrettably, I have gone to many screenings, particularly of older films, in which the audience has expressed its disapproval.
For example, I have come to quietly dread announcements of area revival screenings of Psycho. I dread such announcements because I love the film and I know that I will inevitably see it again—and I also know that, when I do, my fellow audience members will laugh and laugh at the psychiatrist scene near the film’s end—as they have at every screening of Psycho that I have ever attended. Perhaps the consistency of this response proves that the scene, a didactic and tonally unusual coda, is weak and lame, but even if the crowd is technically right in their judgment, their response has the effect of diminishing the film that surrounds that scene—of making the film seem small and making themselves seem big.
This is not an ideal way to experience art, even a popular art like motion pictures. The spectator should be willing to watch a film on a great director’s wavelength, not to sit outside it. They should be so swept up by his vision that they forgive or overlook his missteps—and certainly suppress their guffaws at those missteps for the sake of those of us who remain in thrall to his vision.
In my experience, though, audiences who react badly to a great movie are seldom in the right (even as they might be said to be in the case of the ending of Psycho). Often, their inappropriate laughs seem borne of confusion or discomfort. For instance, I remember a screening of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows—a despairing drama about a troubled youngster in Paris—in which a young woman sitting behind me kept chuckling in what seemed to be regular, five- or 10-minute intervals. For more than 25 years, I have wondered if she thought this bleak film was some sort of coming-of-age comedy—in which case she should have bought a ticket to Truffaut’s light-hearted sequel, Stolen Kisses. I remember, too, a showing of Stanley Kubrick’s horror film The Shining in which a not-insignificant portion of the crowd found the dramatic scenes depicting, or referencing, tensions in the marriage of Jack and Wendy Torrance (Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall) to be fantastically funny—or maybe they found the scenes strange and unsettling, as I did, but felt more comfortable floating above the movie rather than giving themselves over to it.
Many contemporary crowds seem to scrutinize old movies for what they perceive to be fake-looking special effects, such as the bird-attack scenes in another Hitchcock masterpiece, The Birds. Here, I question the good faith of the scoffing audiences with whom I have seen this great movie: Surely no one who attends a movie from 1963 about doomsday-by-way-of-birds would honestly expect that the special effects be equivalent to those in a modern Hollywood blockbuster, so those who snicker at such effects bought their ticket with the intention of doing so. This suggests that the spirit behind Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been applied too broadly: For too many moviegoers, laughing at a movie is the only reason for going to see it.
In my lifetime of moviegoing, I particularly lament the audience members who, upon seeing a trailer for an upcoming rerelease of Michelangelo Antonioni’s extraordinary film The Passenger, expressed audible amusement at the trailer’s voice-over. “The brilliance of Jack Nicholson, the beauty of Maria Schneider, the vision of Antonioni,” the trailer’s narrator said. Perhaps the line is a bit pretentious, but can anyone argue with its claims? To mock such solemnity reminds me of Anglicans who prefer modern language over Archbishop Cranmer’s ornate English in the Book of Common Prayer. Must we dismiss all gestures toward seriousness and gravity?
I take comfort in the counsel of the director Peter Bogdanovich, who, in his book Who the Hell’s In It, wrote of attending a screening of D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East at the Museum of the City of New York in 1958. Talk about a bad crowd. “The audience laughed at the film numerous times—their attitude very superior to the dated social aspects of the hugely popular old Victorian stage melodrama on which the movie was based,” Bogdanovich remembered. Yet the museum had a trump card: The star, the incomparable Lillian Gish, made a personal appearance after the film was over—and the laughter suddenly ceased. “Everyone applauded vigorously, to make up for their rudeness and because her work had been genuinely admired,” Bogdanovich wrote.
I only wish that the next time I see Psycho or The Birds, I could produce the Master of Suspense from behind the curtain.
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