The movie theater I once worked at years ago closed for good recently. To anticipate longtime readers’ follow up question, yes. It was the location notorious for high strangeness that’s been featured on this blog before.
But whether or not it really harbored ghosts, that defunct theater has joined other once-prominent institutions like the arcade and the mall among the specters of America’s vanishing past.
Related: A Ghost for the Offering
Now, in their hipster-adjacent way, the guys at Red Letter Media have made a video remembering the movie theater and plumbing the causes of its demise.
Watch it here:
A few creative choices in RLM’s video that pop out at the viewer:
- Its title is “The Death of Movie Theaters”
- The series is called Beyond the Black Void
- Mike indulges in a lengthy aside to wax philosophical on graveyards.
The whole mood and tone of the video is indicative of Pop Cultish nostalgia curdled into nascent Y-ilism.
But despite being stuck inside the Overton window, RLM have enough awareness and professional experience to notice and capably analyze film industry trends.
Here are some of the key insights they made in the above video:
- The movie theater’s dominance as people’s primary way of seeing films is in steep decline, if not already over
- This decline is not due to sequelitis or too many reboots
- While the Corona-chan crackdowns played a role in theaters’ demise, they weren’t the sole cause of death.
If you pay close attention and read between the lines, you can discern the main culprit amid Jay and Mike’s tap dancing on the edge of acceptable opinion.
Our hosts point to eroding cultural cohesion as a contributing factor in the movie theater’s decline. And their observations resonate with anomalies noted in every other branch of the entertainment industry by seasoned pros.
Corporate pop acts like Taylor Swift are said to outearn stadium-filling bands of the 80s, yet most people over 18 would be hard-pressed to sing one of the former’s songs from memory. And even though working actors who once made comfortable livings are now moonlighting with Uber, 84 of the top 200 grossing films since 1939 came out post-Ground Zero.
Related: “Hollywood Is in Shambles”
Mike even prepared a chart to help us visualize how lopsided that distribution is.
Related: Who Killed Rock and Roll?
How to reconcile the apparent paradox? Simple. The entertainment cartels capturing increasing shares of an ever-fracturing market is what you’d expect to see if the overall population was rising while the former monoculture was splintering. Which both are.
As mentioned above, we see a similar pattern surrounding the death of the shopping mall. The mall’s downfall likewise had its red herrings, like big box stores and online shopping. But the mall and the movie theater share the same ultimate cause of death.
Diversity.
Related: The Idea of a Mall
RLM called out disintegrating societal cohesion as a reason more and more people are shunning group social activities.
Well, we’ve known for years that rising diversity leads to a corresponding drop in social cohesion. It comes with the territory.
In hindsight, the idea that people don’t want to congregate with a bunch of strangers they don’t know or trust is only natural. It’s only controversial because the powers that be decree it.
That’s why remembering the movie theater, the mall, and the arcade so their memory can be passed down is a civic duty of generations X and Y.
Never forget what they took from us.
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Brian,
An interesting post. Here’s my modest analysis: the industrial revolution’s massification of life is dead. And similar to the post Alexander the Great successor states: entertainment,publishing etc will integrate elements of massification as they evolve separately.
xavier
‘Massification’ is a term I’ve not heard. Can you give us a brief definition?
Brian,
I used a Romance language term of art assuming it’s common in English. Sorry.
Massifaction refers to production becoming available to everyone but with a homogenation effect. Taste, architecture,culture, etc all having a sameness with the originals as skinsuits.
Concrete examples; brutalism/international style; tourism in London, Rome and Paris. Etc.
xavier
I’m going to a movie today. Jesus Thirsts the Miracle of the Eucharist. I feel pretty confident that the other theater goers will be well behaved
I think this should be paired with Devon Stack’s takedown of the movie The Beekeeper because he notes through the entire review that movies are being made more retarded (not even so much dumber, but actively mentally damaged) because they need to play for the lowest common denominator first. They are not made for the majority of normal people anymore. There is no way to gauge what would attract them because the social cohesion to bring them together just isn’t there anymore.
Related, but when they brought up that originals used to make more money than IP rehashes until that changed, my first thought was how it might be very possible that this preference has changed again and the populace would rather have quality original films, but Hollywood, as just mentioned, simply can no longer offer that to the masses.
Because you can go on about how there were also remakes and sequels in the 1970s and 80s, as Jay tries to do, but you can’t tell me where the 2024 equivalent of originals on the level of Predator, Dirty Harry, Goonies, To Live & Die in LA, The Exorcist, The Running Man, Ghostbusters, The Longest Yard, Lethal Weapon, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Hoosiers, Back to the Future, Poltergeist, Evil Dead, Rocky, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Driver, Road House, Death Wish, Tremors, Escape from New York, Videodrome, Commando, The Warriors, Night of the Creeps, First Blood, Streets of Fire, or Gremlins, are. Even remakes like The Thing, Monster Squad, and The Blob are entirely different from the originals, not winking subversions. Hollywood is making NO original projects on the level of those films. They simply aren’t, and I don’t know why this point keeps getting ignored.
The issue is the audience they want and they product they supply are incongruous with each other, and that’s only going to get worse as social cohesion does.
The problem with Mike’s argument is, as Jay said, Hollywood stopped taking risks on original ideas. So it could be that audiences like warmed over versions of the same few plots better than inventive stories. Or it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy created by Hollywood shying away from doing anything other than rehashing a few big IPs. They essentially had a captive audience from Ground Zero until the end of the last decade. And that audience was growing thanks to the same unchecked immigration that’s destroyed social trust.
So, yeah, a lot more moving parts than Mike took into account.
We truly grew up during a time where what shouldn’t have existed, existed anyway. A convergence of social and technological conditions and momentums that are unlikely to ever repeat in anything resembling the same way.
It’s definite that nobody before understood the uniqueness of what we lived in, and extremely likely that nobody after will ever comprehend what we had and what we lost before we gained the authority to do anything about it.
I struggled to get through that video due to the aside on graveyards being “obsolete.” Even though RLM gave us the ultimate takedown of the pop cult (don’t ask questions just consume product and get excited for next product) they are at most two steps away from being pop cultists themselves. The idea that we should care about movie theaters at all after dismissing care of your loved one’s eternal souls is laughable. Though this does seem to be a problem particularly with Mike; on other videos he has obsessed with how to “fix” various modern franchises with others simply saying “why are we even obligated to make a new entry in the franchise?”
On another matter, it is interesting that there are several comments to the video pointing out that theaters in Japan are doing just fine. This ties into the idea that social cohesion is necessary for movie theaters to thrive, though the death cult has made a concerted effort to destroy Japan’s culture in the last decade.
Oh, RLM are Pop Cultists, but more on the Cynical than the True Believer side of Briggs’ Cult Compass.
Re: Movie theaters doing fine in monocultures, the same goes for China. I’d be interested so see how they’re faring in Poland, Russia, and Hungary.
Wasn’t Mike big into, “Make Picard gay” and critiquing Bill and Ted for “shoehorning” that they’re into girls and not each other? Mike was just a little bit further up the slippery slope than others. He’s a Gen Xer right?
He was born in 1978, so yes.
The spicy discussion behind one conclusion that diversity is the problem is what kind of people are allowed to make up a society by right?
There’s the mantra we aren’t supposed to judge based on skin color, but that runs afoul when certain skin colors identify with ideals and behaviors contra the society they live in.
The refusal to Americanize newcomers and an ever growing polarization among native born is a recipe for disaster. Then again, that’s likely the point for the powers at be. Being labelled a bigot is the only way this discussion gets avoided.
Good points. That’s why the whole “race = skin color” canard is a BoomerCon trope, and a losing one, at that.
Why go to a movie theater? We’ll leave aside that most movies coming out are absolute drek and that “cohesion” has already been mentioned.
1: Tickets+concessions are stupid expensive now. Compare this to streaming a movie and eating your own snacks at home. And, if the movie sucks, you’re not out a lot of money if you watched the dud at home.
2: 20-30+ minutes of ads and trailers (which are sandwiched, so you get a trailer, then a car ad, then a trailer, ad for soda, another trailer….then at the end, another ad to get concessions and turn off your phone)
2a: I wonder if Japanese movie theaters have the same amount of ads/trailers?
2b: Since theater-going is down, there are less eyeballs on trailers, meaning fewer people know what’s coming out…which leads to fewer people seeing a movie…
3: The experience sucks. I went to see Furiosa (don’t ask) and one of the house lights was “behind” a speaker on the wall, casting a nice shadow on the screen, along with a couple of pretty bad stains ON the screen itself. (compare to watching at home)
4: With ads/trailers and a 2.5hr runtime, you’re spending 3+ hrs of your time in line to get popcorn, in the theater, etc. At home, you can start when you want, pause when you want.
Just an observation, not necessarily a criticism.
Why is a site called ‘kairos,’ which refers to the appropriate time of the Holy Spirit, waxing nostalgic about citadels of commmercialism, malls and soul-sucking movie theaters and video arcades?
Is this site purely devoted to Gen X nostalgia? For what, precisely?
While responsibility for preventing misunderstandings lies primarily with the writer, if you think this blog is pro-Pop Cult nostaliga, you can’t have been reading it long.
Ignoring the past and pretending it didn’t happen, or refusing to understand why it did, doesn’t make for a better future. Refusal to engage with mainstream culture for nearing a century has been a disaster for Christians and said mainstream culture. It’s time to actually try approaching it instead of continuing to upturn noses while everything burns.
“In hindsight, the idea that people don’t want to congregate with a bunch of strangers they don’t know or trust is only natural. It’s only controversial because the powers that be decree it.”
100% agree with this. What people seem to have forgotten is that there’s a difference between in-group preferences and actual discrimination. Every single human being will naturally gravitate to those who think/look like them.
You see this with migrants as well; in the city where I live there are Turkish and Moroccan migrants clustered together in specific suburbs, creating these de-facto enclaves with a social dynamic that’s completely disconnected from everything else. It doesn’t surpise me many migrant kids often end up speaking broken Dutch, simply because they’ve grown up in an environment where it’s neither present nor encouraged.
In-group preference is something that just exists, and is a truth many people need to accept. To pretend otherwise leaves you with an increasingly fractured and dysfunctional society, one that (due to the dirtiness of ethnic politics) is constantly on a knife-edge and will be led by a government that will inevitably slide into authoritarianism in order to maintain any sort of social order.