Courtesy

John Rogers has a thought-provoking post over at Kung-Fu Monkey today, concerning the vexing topic of ill-mannered people talking on their mobile phones, or amongst themselves, at the cinema. His solution to the problem is to employ ushers (and presumably train them in the art of quiet negotiation.) It's not a job I'd like to tackle - my experience is that people can very quickly turn nasty, if not aggressively violent, when you suggest to them that their behaviour is perhaps not quite right for the circumstances.

I don't go to the cinema much, mostly because it's a long way away and doesn't have an online or phone booking system. You can buy tickets ahead of a performance, but only if you can get to the cinema whilst the box office is open, which kind of defeats the point. It also has only one screen, so choice is rather limited.* On the plus side, the Commodore Aberystwyth is still relatively civilised, once the lights have gone down and the film has started. And it's cheap - two tickets and an ice-cream each for myself and the Horse Doctor and we still have change from a tenner.

But the last couple of times I've been there (and don't ask me to remember the names of the movies**) the experience has been marred by noisy misbehaviour of some form or another. Other cinemas I've been to recently, in Ipswich, Perth, Dundee and Edinburgh have been much worse. Most often it's the asshat with her (yes, usually her) mobile phone clamped to her ear; sometimes it's kids arsing around.

Now I can remember being a kid, sneaking into the cinema to see movies I was too young to watch. Mostly it was for the thrill of getting away with it, rather than a desire for cinematic experience, though I did see some classics. Q - The Winged Serpent, anyone? I also remember my fair share of mucking about, especially when I was out with a bunch of friends. We were thrown out of Purple Rain, which in retrospect was probably a good thing. The antics of adolescent boys I can more or less put up with at the cinema - it's a rite of passage thing, I guess, and if you ignore them, they stop doing it soon enough. Where's the fun in goofing about if you've got no audience?

But the telephone talker? The armchair critic? The gossips? People who talk and talk and talk right through the movie, regardless of stares, polite requests to stop, being pummelled into a bloody mess of broken bone and gore***. Why are they there? What's the point in paying to go to the movie, then sitting there blathering on the phone, or with your friends?

With the teenagers I suppose it's because there's nowhere else they can go. At the cinema they can sit together with a bag of popcorn, a coke or whatever and have a good old natter. They can't do that in a pub because they're underage, or they don't like the smoke; they can't do it in MacDonald's because that's too far out of town and they get moved on if they're not buying anything; they can't do it at home because their parents have kicked them out of the house for a bit of peace and quiet, and who wants to hang around at home anyway? That's too uncool. In the summer they can hang around on the promenade, but if it's cold and wet, then the nice warm cinema only costs three pounds fifty to get into.

But that doesn't explain the adults who seem hell-bent on ruining the cinema experience for everyone else. And my last two bad experiences in the local cinema both involved adults. Not misbehaving teenagers, not drunken students, not even parents with no control over their unruly hordes of children, but twenty- or thirty-something adults.

I've ranted before about the lack of common courtesy these days, particularly in the case of shop-assistants. Talking through a movie as if you were watching it in your front room rather than in a cinema with a couple of hundred other people is, I think, symptomatic of the same breakdown in civilised society. It's not so much that people are ill-mannered; I don't believe for a minute that the woman jabbering away nine to the dozen on her mobile during the quiet bits in Batman Returns**** deliberately chose to have her conversation there and then. I suspect that she was totally unaware of what she was doing in terms of its effect on everyone else around her. She was, in the purist sense of the idea, completely selfish.

This is what a large section of society, at least in the West, has come to now. We are geared up for instant gratification, sold an idea of rights and freedoms without ever being asked to consider the responsibilities and personal restraint that must accompany them. We take things for granted so easily that we forget to think about them at all.

I suspect that a lot of the hostility these people show when you approach them with a polite request to curb whatever antisocial activity it is they are pursuing stems from being suddenly confronted with the realisation of just how crass and stupidly they've been behaving. No one likes to be called a jackass (though I prefer the term asshat - don't know why, it just makes me smile) and the implication, when you ask someone to stop doing something because it is annoying other people, is that they're stupid for not realising.

Or of course I could be making the mistake of thinking the best of people. It's perfectly possible that some cinema-goers are so stupid that they don't realise they can be heard when they're talking; so thick they don't get that all the other people surrounding them have come to sit quietly and enjoy the movie; so asinine that the repeated requests for everyone to switch off their mobile phones simply don't register in their tiny cognitive box; so brainless that they really think the whole world is just an extension of their living room; and so shallow and meaningless that they can't exist without the continuous reassurance of the voice at the other end.

Surely if such people exist, then culling them is a kindness. Even with clubs.


*There is another cinema in Aberystwyth, at the Arts Centre, which does allow pre-booking by phone or online, but it tends to show an eclectic mix of contemporary art-house movies and old classics
**It's a game we play whilst waiting for the movie to start, trying to remember what we last saw there. I should get out more often...
*** but of course, being British and reserved and polite, I can only dream of doing this, and of the cheering and applause my actions would bring from my fellow movie-watchers.
**** I knew I'd remember one of them eventually.