Let's All Go To The Movies...

...in a theater.

The question of whether to watch movies on television or at home is now many decades old, with advances in home cinema technology answering objections from many theater-experience purists since modern displays can handle widescreen formats and surround sound in the living room can be very sophisticated. So, I’ll spare you another amateur rant about the director’s intentions and the superiority of the movie theater’s technology. That film directors, as opposed to those working in television, tend to imagine a theatre audience isn’t even the best argument for seeing a film at the movies.

There’s a good argument to be made that we all need to get out more. Two-thirds of Americans say they spend more time at home now than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic. We have re-oriented the U.S. economy towards streaming on personal devices and home delivery of consumers goods. This increases our exposure to online marketing algorithms, which are rapidly being enhanced by artificial intelligence, though foot traffic commerce is hardly immune to that.

But merely getting out doesn't capture why the movie theater experience is important. Last weekend, while the Renaissance Son attended a truly epic birthday party, the Scholar Wife and The Middlebrow went to the IFC Center to watch Anatomy of a Fall, which is a small budget drama told in English, French and German about a woman living in the French Alps outside of Grenoble who is accused of murder after the death of her husband. It deftly explores the intricacies of their marriage and the relationship between husband, wife and their son, who had been mostly blinded by a childhood accident. The details of the death are revealed according to the procedures of a French criminal court, so the audience largely learns facts the way a jury would. The storytelling is sophisticated and psychologically advanced.

For lack of a better word, there is a lot to trigger any couple of married intellectuals, particularly if they have creative ambitions to go with their practical obligations. The social constraints of watching Anatomy of a Fall in public are incredibly valuable to the experience. Writer/Director Justine Triet puts her audience through a lot — sometimes you think that Sandra Voyter, the accused murderer, might be guilty. Sometimes, you think she is a victim of the system. Sometimes you want her to be innocent and exonerated. Sometimes you want her to be guilty but to escape punishment. All of these reactions are provocative and worthy of discussion. But in a theater full of others, you have to keep them to yourself.

It is just too easy, at home, to remark on this or that — to talk over the story and then to rewind it to catch up on the missed points. Triet spares nothing in her presentation of a complicated marriage where both husband and wife are dealing with professional, sexual and personal frustrations. They love each other deeply but also live with each other deeply and when they fight, they cut each other deeply, often exaggerating or fabricating in the heat of rage and in exchanges where power swivels on a hinge. Triet’s feminism deals in radical equality.

The discussions that a real life couple will have after both taking in the entire movie are very different than the discussions they would have while interrupting the movie and because of the way Triet tells the story, many of those discussions would be rendered irrelevant by subsequent revelations.

There’s a lot to be said about the benefits of watching a story with others. Laughter is catchy. Anxiety and sadness can lead to collective catharsis and empathy. But what I realized about watching Anatomy of a Fall in a thankfully full theater is that the ethics of watching with others is that manners matter and that there is such a thing as freedom from the conveniences and prerogatives of being at home.