Requiem For Moviegoing

“It was never about a building.”

I’m thinking this now after reading the Arclight, Los Angeles’ famous cinema chain, will shutter its doors. The Arclight — and the Cinerama Dome attached to it — was too expensive, it rarely showed movies on actual film, and there was something about its cavernous innards that was a bit cold. It was also my neighborhood theatre and a place where I spent my movie money in the decade+ as a transplanted Angeleno. The service was wonderful, the movie projection was state-of-the-art, and it always felt, despite its size, to be a real place of human interaction and love for film.

When Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” was released in 2011 after years of waiting, I caught the first show opening day. The movie transported me from one end of the universe to the other. I learned a lot about life and humanity that morning, so much so that, overwhelmed with emotion, I sat in my seat crying for fifteen minutes after the lights went up and the cleaning crew was doing their thing. When I finally returned to earth, I noticed that one of the guys in the familiar burgundy staff shirts had plunked down next to me. He was just sitting there, saying nothing, letting me go through what I was going through, and when I wiped my eyes, he helped me up and I left. We said nothing to each other. He just did it.

It sounds perhaps silly when I recount it, but it was one of the great movie-going experiences I’d ever had. It was the movie, of course, and Malick’s powers as a storyteller, but it’s enlivening to think how that movie’s message of compassion — if there is even a message — played out in real life. It’s as if we took that space and made it holy.

Movie-going is important, and I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way. Yet, we are letting it die. I’m not saying this as a filmmaker worried about grosses or whether my film should be on film or digital. I’m not saying this against any streaming platform. I’m talking as a person who has spent a lifetime — an actual lifetime — praying to the movie gods in these kinds of cathedrals. I’m talking about having experiences that didn’t take me from life but brought me to it. I discovered what it meant to fall in love and keep that love close to me. The power of that light and sound has always reinforced I was never alone.

If we lose these spaces, especially to commercial whims, we lose a very important part of ourselves. Hearing stories around a campfire is an essential way our ancestors made sense of the world. We only replaced fire with electricity. The method and the meaning remain the same.
It doesn’t even need to be lofty like Terrence Malick. The Arclight was a place of pop prayers as well. To hear the sound of hundred-odd spectators gasp when the car crashed from one Dubai skyscraper to the other in the seventh “Fast & Furious” speaks volumes about how a great theatre presentation can unite us in a single thrilling moment. The Arclight treated the high and low arts as the same kind of meaningful communal experience.

If film is the common person’s art form — and it is — the Arclight facilitated that better than most.

Like I said, this was never about a building. It was about being with people and finding out in a couple of hours what our collective dreaming looked like. Strangers could be friends and loved ones would never leave. We could be brave and survive anything. We could be better.

I struggle with hope as a concept. It seems too ephemeral for its own good. I do, however, believe in movie-hope. The clarity of a big screen makes the impossible possible. It asks us to come together and feel something at once.

That kind of power lights cities. If it goes away, there’s only darkness.