Roxie

I didn’t get to the cinema in 2010. Whereas I used to go at least once a week (I once even managed four films in one day, in four separate cinemas), now cinema and I, evidently, no longer see eye-to-eye. A fact which should come as no surprise considering how, for the last 29 years, I’ve harbored a steady upgrade of movie-delivery devices underneath my television: first a VCR, then DVD, closely followed by a satellite receiver and recently, Blu-ray. That’s nigh-on three decades of choice viewing films.

Back when I first started my relationship with movies mid-1970s, films hit the cinema screen then disappeared. Crowd-pleasing titles cropped up on television eventually; but when “Star Wars” takes seven-years to drop a screen size, that’s hardly what you’d term a transitional shift. No, cinema was where it was at, the singular home of the New; and if you liked a movie you crammed in repeat viewings before it left circulation. After which, a movie continued to accrue worth solely, but no less importantly, in the abstract - as memory.

These days, studios can’t wait to let us have it.

Again, as VCRs caught hold in the 1980s, a movie used to take perhaps a year to pass from cinema down through rental-stores to, eventually, arrive at retail. All consumer stages which required their own advertising budgets. Now, films get a single wham-bam marketing hit, albeit one lasting several months: we come up on pre-release, peak at the premier, then glide coddled down to retail (and, if you bought an Adam Sandler title, I’ll continue the drug analogy, by suggesting you experience a crashing comedown the day after).   

Yet, the half-life effectiveness of prolonged exposure to PR stimulation aside, this shift in our film habits had inevitable side-effects. Once, cinema was all about the unobtainable, with movies selling audiences across a bridge into fantasy. Be it the American Dream told Hollywood style; beauty or brawn for the love-sick; or, simply, happy-endings for lives buffeted on the ceaseless ups and downs of the everyday, cinema facilitated that which was beyond our grasp. Equally, you could no more own and hold a film than you would buy a cinema: once the lights were up and the usherettes poured in, the movie was off like a hooker in the night. It had, after all, been mere magic; a conjured trick of projected desires.  

These days film ownership is as simple as, and takes place while, we buy the groceries.

Which leads us to another nail in the coffin of the cinema--technology: Where once stereo systems were the conspicuous consumer item on show in our living rooms, and men bragged about wattage and amps, the vista of widescreen televisions now dominate.   

And if you consider, cinema was to film what the concert hall was before recorded music--the only place to experience what was unavailable to the home - you might also grasp the notion that cinema has done as well to hold out thus far: more through reputation, as the elitist’s way to watch film, than for being the ideal method. One, which according to investigation by Screen Digest --even despite the hype and attraction of 3D--cinema is no longer delivering. Even though we in the West (North America plus Europe) during 2010 spent 62 percent more cash on entertaining themselves than a decade earlier, we’re still spending 20 percent more of it on cable and satellite subscriptions. And you can bet your life it’s not for more channels.

No, inspired, I would wager, by our rather more immediate second lives online, where once a night in with a rental film had to be planned--go to the store, park, choose, pay and return home--now, we just hit our drop-down box of choice, and we’re in movie land quicker than you can find your car-keys.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to see cinema go. But at the same time, I quite like my sofa, and I loathe being the audience to some bovine grazing down a dustbin of popcorn while I get my film on. It’s just that, well, I’d argue that, as long as movies keep moving me regardless of screen-size, it remains free to park out on my drive, and the cat gets in for free, then I’m well at home with my film habit.   

Photo: Chelsea Mayhem