Reposting an old one today, from a past series of “Paragone” (i.e., rivalrous weighings of the merits of different artworks and artforms)—on going to the theater vs. going to the movies, waking vs. sleeping, solitude vs. collectivity, etc.
In a recent “Writer’s Diary,”
observes that “there’s something about theater, the physicalness of it,” that feels like an “antidote” to the disembodied forms of scapegoating that flourish on the internet. “More of the whole body/self gets invested in evaluating the fictional characters of a stage drama,” he writes: “if it’s decent; it’s not a two dimensional representation—a meme—that can be instantly consumed and commented upon.”He is right. I am just as interested, however, in the contrast, the contest, the paragone, between the theater and the by now all but equally traditional genre of film. Movie-watching and theatergoing are alike in that both are communal; but they are so in different ways. (I here omit discussion of watching television, which Jon Askonas has observed to have been itself communal, or at least familial, in the time of broadcast dominance, whereas the rise of subscription-based streaming has transformed TV-watching into a mass private consumption more akin, in this bare sense, to the reading of novels—and one increasingly vested, I might add, in this fading age of “prestige” television, with the same sanctimony that has long since swaddled that practice. The communal stupidity of peasants having undergone its reformation, the secret perversions of the sanctimonious must themselves be sanctimonious. How else to distinguish them?)
Not all movies are anaesthetizing, some great ones not at all. That movies can be anaesthetizing is, however, regularly attested by experience—whereas it is all but impossible to imagine the same in the theater. This has nothing to do with any difference in propensity toward sentimental drivel, at which both forms excel, and which much theater sells at a premium. Still: you can relax watching a movie, whereas watching even the worst play is exhausting. Because you doen’t really “watch” plays, do you? No, you “see” a play, for which you “go to the theater.” Living voices echoing in space bring it to presence, along with its inhabitants, all “waiting with bated breath,” ready “to hear a pin drop.” The peculiar exhaustion of seeing a play live stems, first, from one’s sharper consciousness of the presence of the other spectators, who are irreducibly there, milling about during intermission, spoiling things by laughing at the wrong times (and, yes, at times, fusing themselves, like a flame, into a singular silent chorus). Then, of course, there the actors. One is forever on the verge of seeing a beautiful thing destroyed.
More than any investment in the fiction and its moral stakes, it is one’s witnessing of something others are laboring to bring about, where one’s witnessing is itself an assistant in those labors, that gives theater its suspense and makes the final applause a reprieve.
All of this is alien to cinema—which, even among a hundred other people, is not an experience of conscious membership in a community, but rather, as everyone knows, of private dreaming and miraculous shared waking. “Was it the double of my dream / The woman that by me lay / Dreamed, or did we halve one dream / Under the first cold gleam of day?” The dream, one’s deepest desire, one’s most fervent wish: to find that it was halved would be, not to have witnessed the rending, the sparagmos, of the victim on the stage, but rather to find oneself patched and mended, Osiris-like, recovered from a privacy one could not hope to have shared.
Yeats’s poem leaves uncertain whether he is justified or disappointed in his hope. What it recognizes, however, is that this is to be a restoration at the hands of one other, one Isis. Watching the movie was an experience of the nullification of community; its reconstruction is an affair of pairs. This is why couples go the movies: that, sleeping together, they might trick themselves into believing they also dream together.