Selfish phone addicts have ruined the cinema ...Middle East

I am aware that I am in a very small minority, but January is one of my favourite months of the year. There’s all the clean slate/fresh start business, of course, but most crucially January sees the release of the year’s best films, due to the imminence of the forthcoming awards season of Baftas and Oscars. As a lifelong cinephile, January’s joyous celluloid overload suits me exceedingly well, which is why I chalked up eight visits last month.

My pleasure at hunkering down in the darkness with a bag of cinema chocolate (Cadbury’s Caramel Nibbles, since you ask. And, yes, of course I open the packet fully in advance so as not to rustle irritatingly when the picture is on) for total immersion in a new story has, however, been subject to an ever-increasing series of what I label micro-irritations, which are more and more related to technology. These are making this one-of-life’s-small-joys experience increasingly hard-going and have indeed stopped me from visiting my local cinema entirely.

I should perhaps stress that cinema is not the sole culprit when it comes to these infuriating interruptions; as a theatre critic, I reserve a particular loathing for people who disturb an entire row in order to go to the loo five minutes before the interval. Yet it is undoubtedly the cinema that has borne the brunt of some marked shifts in audience behaviour.

It all stems, I believe, from the pandemic, when entertainment was consumed in our own homes – and therefore according to our own (lack of) rules. All that time in lockdown isolation meant that we lost the art of being an audience member, part of a collective body which operated according to an unspoken set of rules.

Instead, we could start and stop films when we fancied, wander off to make a cup of tea in the middle of them and, above all, use our phones as much as we wanted while purportedly “watching” something. Given that I spent the lockdowns with my Mum, a child of the 1940s for whom watching a film remained a lifelong treat to be afforded respect, I thankfully emerged from those dark days filmically unscathed, and with my attention span intact.

Yet too many others appear to have had their behaviour patterns fundamentally altered – and not for the better. They have struggled to adjust back to the “old order” of subsuming individual wishes for the sake of the collective good and nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to technology. Phones ringing during a film no longer constitute the principal problem, but the lights from their screens most certainly do. Of my eight films last month, I struggle to recall a single one that was not subject to light pollution of some sort, even though I now solely frequent a handful of arthouse venues in central London.

Phones lighting up with texts or updates, smart watches flashing or beeping, audience members deliberately scrolling: the sources of potential disruption are myriad and ever-increasing. Even telling the time now seems to require a process just shy of the Blackpool Illuminations. With my old-fashioned wristwatch and phone permanently switched to silent (not to mention resolutely left in my bag when I’m at the cinema), I am starting to feel like a survivor from a lost world.

Why do so many spectators not understand the subtle damage that this endless intermittent flickering causes? It disrupts the mood of rapt attention that a darkened cinema so gloriously offers, ripping us cruelly out of our total immersion in the world of the story and landing us with an unwelcome thump back in the tumult of the present day.

How can anyone bear to have such a precious experience so egregiously spoilt, especially when they have paid upwards of £15 for the pleasure of being there? If you want to twiddle with technology, please stay at home with Netflix. As for me, I’ll be back in the cinema later this week, ever hopeful, but increasingly on edge.

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