Movie Theaters are Weird
The effort to capitalize on the Third Place by forcing a Third Place does not make a Third Place.
With the advent of an easily exploitable movie pass, I’ve come to rediscover the joy of watching flicks on the silver screen. But I’m not here to tell you how I feel about the new A24 or blockbuster. I’m here to talk about movie theaters themselves. Consider this: for every movie that’s not streaming, there needs to be a movie theater in some shape or form. And modern day movie theaters are conceptually strange.
Taken directly from Wikipedia, movie theaters are “…a business that contains auditoriums for viewing films for public entertainment. Most are commercial operations catering to the general public, who attend by purchasing tickets”. The rules are simple: buy a ticket, watch the movie, leave. There is a clear engagement loop in a movie theater, both as employees and as customers. You have already given your money; they have already rendered their services. Now go somewhere else. This creates a challenge for the bigwigs of movie theaters: with its function accomplished (you’ve now seen the movie) how else can they ensure you spend your money in the cinema before or after the film? By lingering, of course! To promote this behavior, movie theaters having recently begun to tap into the concept of a “Third Place”.
Established by urbanist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 essay The Great Good Place, a “Third Place” is any spot in a community that is neither your home nor work, but a rather a place you can frequent to be in public in a non or semi-commercial setting. In short, places you can “hang”. Think of your local café or bar. To be considered a Third Place, there needs to be a social component where your social battery can be charged, a place where you can be either anonymous in public or an active participant. Your grocery store is not a Third Place, nor is your laundromat – although technically they could be if you’re an odd duck. These are places that you cannot entirely force, nor assign value to. Places that, for the most part, run off vibes.
Third Places are spots you linger. Movie theaters need you to linger so you can spend more money. In the lens of movie theater design, there is a clear opportunity to tap into the sociological benefits of the Third Place in order to increase revenue. Movie theaters need to promote amenities in the way of karaoke or an arcade to mimic the organic nature of these Third Places. But movie theaters do not have the charm of the neighborhood bar nor the chillness of the café down the street. In the same way that corporations like Target will try to be “cool” and end up being ingenuine, the initiative to make movie theaters an established Third Place in our public consciousness comes off as phony and ineffective.
Herein lies our central problem: The seeds of a Third Place are planted in places like barbershops or the neighborhood dive because they happen organically. For movie theaters, it’s some top-down level of bullshit design in which the provision of amenities seeks to accrue capital by the “rule of cool”. Look, we have a bar! Look at our new arcade! We have karaoke! It is a capitalist wolf in community building clothing.
The kicker, of course, is that movie theaters already function as a Third Place, although not in the way that one typically experiences them. I posit here that movie theaters are not so much a way for neighbors to gather and contribute to a collective place-making but rather an unspoken exchange where everyone except the corporate overlords themselves share an inside joke.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever snuck food into a theater. It’s prohibited, FYI. Yet everyone does. I once saw my friend sneak an entire Five Guys burger in his coat. While this is an admittedly hyperbolic example compared to the Twizzlers or M&Ms you might bring, it only goes to show how open this secret has become. The workers are not really incentivized to stop you, so they don’t care. And the viewing public doesn’t want to say anything, because it would not only mean we are hypocrites, but most importantly, that we are narcs. Are you a narc? Of course not. We are protected by this unspoken social code.
There is an inverted display of power here. The corporate overlords of movie theater chains want their employees to imprison the thirteen-year-old bringing in Sour Patch Kids purchased at 1/8th of the cost at the bodega next store. The workers are empowered to act as enforcers in service to their employer. Subverting this contractual expectation (employees protect assets) is a class unity manifested through Raisinets warmed by your breast pocket. A value dissonance not through the workers and the customers, but through those who seek profits from over bloated concession sales and those who want a cheap and accessible way to spend the afternoon. It is this value dissonance, or rather, value alignment, that fosters the organic nature of a Third Place.
People do not like to be told something is cool or fun. They need to experience these things themselves, and to embody it organically. There is community in movie theaters, but that fire is fanned not through customers and employees, but through the dialectic of Corporate Executives <> Everyone Else.
Movie theaters need to stop trying so hard. No one is asking for karaoke or pre-movie brunch. Let people have their secrets with strangers. We’re doing fine.