Neil Calloway outlines how cinemas should deal with etiquette rule breakers…
2014 seems to be the year of cinema rage. Earlier this week, a US film festival screening of Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner was interrupted when one viewer asked another to turn off her mobile phone. She responded by giving him a faceful of pepper spray. This follows the altogether more tragic news that a man was shot after a confrontation during Lone Survivor earlier in the year.
Obviously the people involved are in the wrong and crossed over a line. For a start, who thinks when they’re going to the cinema “right, I need my wallet, keys, 9mm handgun”? In a cinema, the violence should be kept on the screen, not in the aisles. Having said that, those that play with their mobile phone during a film should be treated with nothing but contempt, and kicked out of the cinema.
In 2003, an Irish cinema was inexplicably banned from using a device that blocked mobile phone signals, a year later French cinemas began experimenting with doing just that. Good on the French, I say.
To be honest, talking during a film is a far greater problem than someone addicted to Candy Crush playing with their phone during a boring rom com they’ve been dragged to. My parents took me to see Jurassic Park when it came out and it still rankles that my mom spoke during it.
The sort of people who talk during films are the sort of people who don’t go to the cinema very often. They’re used to sitting at home in front of an ITV drama asking “what’s he been in?” “what just happened?” “I’m just going to the toilet, can you pause it?” They bring this attitude – fine in the privacy of their own home, into the public space of a cinema, where rightly, people get annoyed. I used to think you could avoid this by going to the right sort of film, at the right sort of time. However, having seen a preview of The Imitation Game at the BFI last Saturday, where people only usually annoy me when they ask pretentious questions during Q&As and been annoyed by the couple behind me talking, and the news that a screening of a sedate Mike Leigh film shown at the AFI in Hollywood was livened up by pepper spray, I’m not so sure now; the problem has reached epidemic proportions. Something needs to be done.
I have to admit I have spoken during a film. Last year, watching Spring Breakers with a friend, I said three simple words – “shall we go?” I do not apologise for this at all and do not regret it. The only other time I’ve found talking during a film acceptable is when, during one of the Star Wars prequels, two young children got out of their seats and acted out a quick light saber battle; it made me realise who the films were aimed at, and moaning about Jar Jar Binks said more about me than the film.
However, these are exceptions and I would vote for any party that said they were making talking during a film a criminal offence. Every so often there is a new story about some heroic actor, appearing in a play, who breaks the fourth wall and berates an audience member for using their mobile or talking. Sadly, that cannot happen in the cinema, so we have to police them ourselves, and here’s how you do it. You stand up, walk over to the perpetrators, put your hands on the seat in front of them and the back of their own seat, lean over, and say “Can you be quiet? Some people are trying to watch the film.”
It’s polite, you have the literal and the moral high ground because with “some people are trying to watch the film” you’re implying that they are not. Try it, it works. You’ll be a hero to everyone else in the cinema, too. No pepper spray required.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future installments.
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Originally published November 16, 2014. Updated April 15, 2018.
