Psycho. #47

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Hi Caspar,

I saw a lot of discourse to kids and teens doing memes and things while watching A Minecraft Movie and, while I would consider sitting in there being in the ninth circle of hell, I don't quite understand the big reaction to it. It’s a kid's movie, sounds like kids are enjoying it as kids would. What do you think? Have we gotten too used to there being no clear delineation between films for adults and children? Am I not being considerate enough of the parents that have to sit through it?

Regards

Thank you for sending “regards”! I accept them gladly, and return them. I would expect somebody who appends regards to their question to me, Caspar Salmon, about matters cinematic, to have something of a stern opinion on the subject of film-going propriety — and yet here you are, foxing me with your apparent openness to the idea of children fucking up a megaplex. What multitudes you must contain!

I think your question has really much more to do with ethics and etiquette than with film; it pertains to film, in this specific instance, but in fact what we need to contend with is something else entirely. Let me first get the business of describing the Minecraft brouhaha out of the way. If you aren’t a child or the parent of a child, you might not know what Minecraft is; I am a parent to two kids, and am therefore able to tell you that it’s… I dunno, man, I think it’s like Lego but on a computer? You can build, like, an onion house if you want, or create an invisible palace in mid-air or something — I don’t know. My children tell me about it quite frequently, and I drift off and say, “Does it?” and “Did you?” and “And then the bad guys can’t get you in there, is that right?” and then drift back off again. All I know is that my 7-year-old builds stuff out of ‘obsidian’ on there, and obsidian is resistant to explosions. ANYWAY. What’s happening is that all these kids are going to the cinema to watch the latest marketing cash-grab — and at a certain point of the film, when a character played by Jack Black points to some video game character or other and utters the phrase “Chicken Jockey” (the character is riding a chicken, don’t ask), kids are enjoined by a viral TikTok trend to shout and jump and throw their popcorn all over the place. Many cinema workers have been tearing their hair out over it, and opinion writers have also furrowed the old brow. What does it say about cinema? About society? Hmmmmmm? Come, come with me dear reader, as I dig a little deeper!

My hunch is that, as I said above, this issue isn’t really to do with film. It seems to me to be a quite knotty question of phones, manners, politics, child-rearing, the public sphere, attitudes to art, and the age-old question of generational discord. Let’s deal with that last bit first. Older generations have doubtless considered young people to be rude and feckless since the dawn of time; the idea that, this time, the new lot really have gone too far with this fad of theirs and the world really will cease spinning, is nothing new. Of course I hear contemporary music and think to myself, “How tinny this is! How shallow! This isn’t a patch on the brilliant music of my own youth, such as ‘The Sign’ by Ace of Base!” That isn’t because new pop music is crap (although it is), it’s mostly because I’m out of the loop, my ears can’t hear the thing that others do. I don’t speak the language. That doesn’t mean that somebody who does listen to this hideous bilge I have to endure in the gym is going to leave school without any A-Levels or start shitting in the street.

What needs to be ascertained is when the new thing that the kids are doing is actively a bad thing. I remember that in the 80s, when I was a kid, people argued vociferously that listening to one’s Walkman would lead the new generation straight to hell; a lot of that thinking was clearly alarmist, and yet the effects of shutting oneself off to the world around, and focusing on one thing instead of everything that had been available before, must not have been zero. There must have been some impact on our understanding of our common experience and our role in the public sphere.

Doubtless some people reading that paragraph will think to themselves: oh, god, if only, bring back headphones, please! For we are now, seemingly, in an epidemic of people watching TikToks with the sound on or bumping their music in public. Indeed the Liberal Democrats floated the idea of fines for such antisocial behaviour just this week. The question of phones is one that, I think, goes beyond the familiar arguments about the youth being bad; screens are addictive, and we have constructed a world in which we now communicate with each other and rely on these machines almost constantly. Some kid getting a bit of screen time doesn’t seem a great evil to me; but having a totally un-boundaried relationship to screens, and an uncritical view of the impact of technology on the world, our minds, and our wellbeing, is certainly problematic. This is in large part a question of education, I think. In the restaurant where I moonlight as a waiter when I’m not making millions of pounds from my thriving writing career, I observe two types of antisocial phone user: one is older people, who take loud videocalls; and the other is younger middle-aged people who pass a phone or iPad to their kids to silence them for forty minutes so they can chat with a friend. This seems to me unhealthy, even as I understand the impulse; a child needs to be taught how to exist in public, and it’s the role of adults to model that behaviour for them. 

Phone use now hampers commercial cinema-going, in Cineworlds and VUEs; even at the theatre, three weeks ago, someone in the row before me had to be told to get off her phone by a roving usher, after messaging all her friends and taking photos in plain sight. This is a question of education now; much like the movement against AI, it involves swimming against a tide which says that since this thing has now started, it may as well be put up with. What both combats entail is sticking up for the humanity that constitutes us. Looking at one’s phone in the cinema isn’t merely a harmless youth pursuit — indeed, it’s not just young people doing it — but it breaks a fragile bond that connects us, one that cuts to the heart of our connection as humans. Particularly at a time when our lives are already so dehumanised by conflict, by technological advances, having respect for art and for moments of introspection that make life worth living, is more than a question of protocol. 

Back to Minecraft! In part, the trend seems to be fine — after all, the movie-going experience is generally able to hold strong in the face of various trends, and I don’t believe this Minecraft thing augurs a wholly new type of hellish interactive filmgoing. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in times before, became a new type of moviegoing experience, disparaged by elites I’m sure, which brought in different audiences and relied on a kind of filthy grindhouse vibe; maybe it’s alright for the kids to have their fun. I’m only thankful that, as you say, I haven’t had to be there to witness it. But the question of the interaction of phones and videos with cinema; of littering and befouling the public place, and of thereby showing disrespect to cinema workers — these are wider considerations, and my fear is that their endpoint is a world in which we are unquestioningly subservient to technology, and forget our commonality. It seems quite thoughtless to me to encourage that behaviour — or at least not to accompany it with a healthy debate about living together. In the same way that I ask my children not to shout or put their feet up when they go to a cafe, it’s reasonable to ask for different codes of behaviour in different places: at school, at work, at the theatre, in church, at the library. The odd infraction can be borne, but a wholesale rejection of those codes won’t do. 

A movement against phone usage for the young is building, from parents who realise how much it has fucked us in the head and wish to shield our kids from the worst of it; I don’t know yet if that will take off, or if we will eventually come to some wider societal reckoning about phones and the internet. In the interim, I think it’s broadly fine for cinema to be a bit uppity and protectionist about itself, and try to put up some defences against the oncoming tide. Let the kids have their fun! But not too much! 

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