Big screen energy

Wrong and right reasons to go back to the cinema

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

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 actually 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…