I HAVE, over the years, discovered that the easiest way to generate positive mail is to complain about bad behaviour in the cinema. Expound a fantasy in which you grab incessant chatterers and, after severing their tongues, force them to suck pathetically on bits of their own liver and, chance as not, whole postbags of supportive mail will tumble in your direction.
Most such missives (I'm looking at one now) bemoan the decline of manners and remember an era in which every punter approached the cinema in a spirit of expectant reverence. We were all like Woody Allen in Annie Hall. It didn't matter if the credits were in Swedish, we would refuse to enter a venue once the first frame had passed through the projector.
It's nonsense. Until the early 1980s or thereabouts, cinemas used to run films in endless cycles. When 101 Dalmatiansended, you'd get a few advertisements and a quick trailer or two. Then an elderly lady would haul a tray of choc ices up the aisle and the film would start again. You would be permitted to slump in your rickety, clickety chair when the film was well over. (Mind you, given the amount of chewing gum sandwiched between bottom and seat, there was often no alternative.)
In the choc ice years, films came to be regarded as entities that existed in continuous loops rather than as discrete units. It was accepted practice to arrive halfway through the picture (or later) and then endure the cycle until you reached the point at which you came in.
To argue that the cinemagoing experience was an undiluted pleasure in the olden days is to dabble in fantasies of the most outlandish hue. The average movie house was dirtier. The average seat was more uncomfortable.
The average snack had a higher concentration of rat droppings. Yes, the grand cinemas were rather splendid, but the regulation second-run venue was often more suitable for stabling donkeys than exhibiting movies.
Think, citizens, how lucky you are. Every screen you attend features beautifully comfortable, impressively spacious seats. You can buy limitless amounts of triangular snacks coated in promiscuous layers of unnaturally orange cheese. Every day is movie heaven.
However, just like those survivors of the Blitz who missed the camaraderie that accompanied the terror, I rather long for the sticky variety of the traditional cinemagoing experience. It is particularly sad that the old-school arthouse adventure (eating flapjacks in polo-necks between Personaand Salò) has been replaced by the nicely appointed, generously subsidised evening of comfort and relaxation.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want the managers of our arthouses to scatter Gitanes butts about the auditorium and grind Nescafé into the armrests. But the cinema world just seems a little too comfortable and unchallenging these days. These young people don’t know they were born.
