Martin Scorsese Says Audiences Are Ruining Movie Theaters
If you’re like me, heading to the movies for the first time with a friend is an anxiety-inducing experience. Within minutes of the lights going down, you may discover, to your horror, that your friend is a movie talker. This is something I simply cannot abide. Not to mention, I feel it reflects poorly on me. It would be like bringing a friend to a science conference and then realizing they’re a flat-earther.
In my opinion, and what I used to hope was the majority’s, you get your riffs out during the trailers, and for the feature presentation? You keep that trap shut. If it’s a horror movie, I’ll allow a timely “oh hell no,” but that’s it. Unfortunately, especially post-pandemic, maybe when people got used to running their mouth in their living room, theater etiquette seems to have taken a serious step back — unsurprisingly, given that etiquette in general is coughing blood these days.
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It makes for an uncomfortable place to be, where on one hand, we’re being yelled at for killing the movie theater. On the other, I don’t like forking out close to 20 bucks to hear a movie with the “stranger recording voice messages” audio track enabled. If you feel the same way, you can rest easy knowing you have some serious cinema royalty on your side.
Longtime movie critic Peter Travers broached the subject with Martin Scorsese in an interview for his site The Travers Take, and according to Travers, he zeroed in on a nerve: “I asked the maestro why he doesn’t see movies in theatres any more, and he went all Raging Bull about audiences who babble on phones during the movie, leave to order snacks and vats of soda, and keep up a noise level loud enough to drown out the actors.”
I can’t say I disagree, except on the matter of snacks and soda. The movie theater is the only place where drinking two 32-ounce sodas is allowed, and I’ll never in my life give up flooding my system with Pepsi in the dark, hydrating the goblin inside me. Phones, though? As far as I’m concerned, hand them over at the door like you’re entering a SCIF.
Or start showing movies exclusively in Faraday cages.
