Plague Cinema, Part 2

[Previously: “Plague Cinema”]

For movies, the time of staying in and streaming movies that seem either presciently relevant or therapeutically irrelevant is increasingly over. It’s time to see new things again. Or, as the trailer I saw for Tenet suggested, “big movies are back”.

I caught Tenet recently at an outdoor screening. As I noted in my piece on the film, the experience gave me back something lost since the pandemic, but it also made me feel as though, like much of the rest of the United States, moviegoers were now willing to ignore the very much ongoing nature of COVID-19. So much of society seems to want to imagine it’s over already. Philip Maciak writes in Slate that Tenet “will one day come to symbolize the stubborn, pointless insistence that the world continue on exactly as it had been before.”

The biggest contrast to Tenet is Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan, released for an extra $29.99 on streaming platform Disney+. Probably the biggest digital cinema release since the pandemic started, it follows through on a preexisting trend of expensive in-home rentals priced with the assumption that a high price tag is palatable when divided between the three or more people who will watch the film together. $29.99 is a lot, but it’s less than what my friends and I paid together for Tenet.

Tthe insistence of people like Nolan that films return to theaters as a way of returning to their truest, most primal form rings false to me. I love movies in the theater as much as the next cinephile, maybe more than most. The theater has been a place of refuge; during many of my worst moments, I’ve taken solace in the theatrical cinema.

But that insistence that movies return to theaters, especially big movies, is as much about vanity as it is about art. In the Venn diagram of Prestigious Movies and Theatrical Movies has always been the Big Movie (big movies are back!), films ranging from Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind to Titanic and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Nolan has comfortably worked within this overlap for years, at least since The Dark Knight. And without the theater, the Big Movie might die off, replaced by the Limited Series, television’s answer to the Big Movie.

In other words, what Tenet stands to lose with a home-centric release is status, not artistic value. It’s easier to send Mulan direct to streaming: it’s a family movie based on an animated movie from the studio that’s presented itself for decades as the Family-Oriented Movie Studio. The market for the film’s home release was already there: grab some microwave popcorn and watch with your kids on a comfy couch. The theater is secondary.

Dade Hayes at Deadline reports that cinematic bigwigs have implored Congress to save movie theaters. The letter, signed by (among many others) Christopher Nolan, certainly resonates in its picture of “[t]he moviegoing experience [as] central to American life”; I don’t want movie theaters to disappear, or to remain but become as scarce as 35mm prints are now. But if people like Nolan really want to keep movie theaters alive, they would do everything they could to keep moviegoers safe, which means leaving theaters as ghost towns — at least for the time being. It’s hard to empathize when theaters are seeking federal aid and trying to reopen amidst a deadly pandemic.

I still remember the morning after a gunman opened fire on a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. I had spent that evening seeing the film in a theater about a 15-minute drive from where the shooting took place; I woke up to a text from a friend wondering if I was okay, unsure of who had been at that particular theater and who had not been. It was tremendously destabilizing and it took years before I felt truly safe in a theater again.

COVID-19 is another form of destabilization, another conspicuous vacuum of safety, albeit a less individualized one. As much as we want to move past that destabilization, the safest thing to do is acknowledge that we can’t, no matter how good it would feel. Moviegoing is dangerous. Before Tenet played in that outdoor theater, I saw the trailer for the new Dune, featuring of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen in cinema: the words “only in theaters”.