I tend not to go to the movies anymore. Or, any public performance. If it’s not the incessant sniffing, it’s the talking. If it’s not the talking, it’s the phones that haven’t been switched off.
What happened to us?
Once we were a people able to behave graciously in public. That seems to have gone.
And technology — or at least our use of it — is to blame.
In the old days when we were somewhere, we were really there. We sat in our chairs and we watched what we’d paid to watch.
We were considerate to people around us. We tried not to tread on them when we climbed over them to get to our seat.
We didn’t talk. We didn’t phone people to tell them we were watching a movie. We didn’t text people during sermons. We didn’t record everything we saw.
I blame our inability to adapt our species to the cell phone.
The cell phone detaches us from our environment. Most of us are incapable of juggling two thoughts at the same time, such as talking on a phone/reading an SMS and being aware that we’re in a public place that other people might want to use.
Fifteen years of intensive cell phone usage don’t seem to have improved our abilities in this sphere, so presumably we’re hardwired this way.
Clearly, we were not designed for this kind of complexity.
Instead, we think that our cell phone is a kind of invisibility cloak and, underneath it, we are somehow excused the rules that others abide by.
But now there seems to be something of a backlash to the notion that our uncivilized behavior doesn’t have consequences.
Take Hugh Jackman.
Interrupted mid performance during a Broadway play by a ringing phone, according to The Guardian, he berated the owner — while remaining in character.
This wasn’t the first time. His co-performer, Daniel Craig, had a go at someone with a ringing phone a few nights earlier.
(Interestingly, the whole thing was captured on a camera phone. You can watch it here: bit.ly/laYhH.
That’s a whole other issue about why people feel compelled to record every thing they see, unaware that it initself is a distraction in a darkened theater.)
Fools though these people who leave their phones switched on are, you can’t help sympathizing a little with their predicament.
There you are, in a Broadway performance, barely six feet from two men my wife has admitted
she’d leave me for if either of them asked, and your BlackBerry starts tinkling away with that ringtone you thought was a good idea at the time, but now, ringing throughout the otherwise silent auditorium, sounds a little, well, silly.
Do you scramble around for the phone to try to turn it off? Or do you ignore it, look around at someone else—your spouse, maybe? And appear annoyed, as if it’s just a trick of the acoustics that the sound seems to be coming from your pocket/handbag/holster.
And then you see Jackman and Craig glaring at you from about six feet away.
I probably would have run out of the theatre at that point and never come back. I would have headed for the airport, moved to Laos, acquired a whole new identity.
The Guardian piece says this is now called “Doing a Patti Lupone” after the singer who stopped her Broadway show in January when a witless audience member persisted in taking flash photographs.
The offender was ejected from the show with Patti yelling after the group.
What she said (according to one account) is worth carrying in full as a kind of statement of intent: I have to say this: We have forgotten our public manners. And we have forgotten that we are in a community, and this is the theatre. And all of you, every single one of you except for that person, has respect. And I, and the rest of this company appreciate it.
Hurrah for that. (Though I might not have cheered had I paid big bucks for a seat that night.)
Here’s a list, by the way, of actors who won’t take kindly to being interrupted:
Now it falls to the rest of us to not let this kind of behavior go by unremarked.
Every time someone’s cell phone rings in a theater, we all need to make our feelings known.
But not just by “shushing”, but by loudly criticizing the owner’s choice in cell phone, hairstyle, clothing, head’s shape, anything that’s visible.
If we all do it, then maybe it’ll stop happening.
Let me know if you start doing this. And then I might start going to the theater again.
This story cannot be reproduced without written permission from the writer. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. You can reach him via email at jeremy@loosewire.org
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