This summer two very different blockbusters — Barbie and Oppenheimer, also known as Barbenheimer — have brought astonishing numbers of people back to cinemas, some for the first time since before the pandemic started in 2020. Alas, many of them have not been behaving with Perfect Propriety. Perfectly Proper people take note of the impact their behavior has on others. That’s basic consideration, and one reason we haven’t yet erupted into civil war. That’s even more important in a space where people want to concentrate, like a cinema. So for National Cinema Day today, here’s a few tips for a Perfectly Proper Movie Show.
First, and most important, put your damn phone away. You’ve come to the cinema to see a movie. See the movie. Be with the movie you’re with, not social media videos, and not video chat with absent friends — especially with the volume up. Light from your phone seriously distracts people around you, not to mention sounds your device makes, and sounds you make at your device. Stop it at once.
Along with that, no selfies after the movie starts. Etiquetteer knows how important it is to document friend group activities, but doing so during the Main Event — the movie — is totally rude to people around you.
Keep your shoes on and your feet down. You’re not at home, and no one needs to know about your feet, or their odor. Yes, those armrest gaps in front of you are mighty tempting for footrests, but that’s not what they’re there for. Etiquetteer might look the other way if you prop your knees against the back of the empty seat in front of you, but you are only tempting fate.
Carry it in, carry it out. All those giant-sized popcorn and beverage buckets, all those candy wrappers — if you brought it to your seat, for heaven’s sake bring it back out and throw it away in one of the trashcans. Those poor ushers have enough to do as it is, not to mention what it would be like for the audience for the next feature.
And finally, quiet please! Of course you sometimes need to whisper a comment to your companion, but others in the audience are not, Etiquetteer guarantees, not interested in your running commentary, whether it’s about the movie or not.
Watching a movie in a cinema with a room full of strangers can be an absolutely wonderful experience. Etiquetteer will never forget the hysterical enthusiasm of packed houses for RoboCop and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, among others. But Etiquetteer especially remembers a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious at some point in the 2010s at the Harvard Film Archive. In the movie something happens to Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in a wine cellar, and to hear the last five rows of theatre gasp in unison right before it happened — well, that’s what makes going to the movies so special. And we lose out on those experiences when we text and talk and trash all the way through.
Etiquetteer wishes you many magical and Perfectly Proper screenings.