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Until recently, pop culture was cheap. In the 1940s and ’50s, you could often pop down to the local bar and see a jazz virtuoso for the price of whatever you were supping. And in 1946, roughly 60% of the American population went to the cinema once a week and similar figures were reflected in other developed areas.

There was no means to provide home movies at the time, but records were starting to soar in the music world. Nevertheless, they didn’t sound quite right. In the mono world of early production, everything was front-and-centre, a watered-down version of the real thing—a shoddy facsimile of Carnegie Hall.

Then, in 1961, Enoch Light cracked stereo sound. Now, your record player could replicate the buzzing sound of the bar. With this breakthrough, the ‘enjoy it from the comfort of your own home’ revolution was underway, inadvertently landing a massive blow to civility in the process. 

Streaming giants and every other element that has led to the Cineworld bankruptcy is a ripple in the reverberating wave that light created. Now, people are all too happy to watch the latest blockbusters for a nominal subscription fee at home with a brew, pause breaks of their choosing, and no need to turn their phone off. 

The fact that all figures point towards Cineworld formally declaring bankruptcy is the signifier that this is most people’s modus operandi of movie watching. Home entertainment was for the privileged few in its infancy while the rest of the proletariat went to the cinema or rubbed shoulders in a concert hall. Now, it seems to be just the opposite. 

Covid-19 may well be a major factor in an economic sense when it comes to Cineworld’s problems, but in terms of the trend, it merely steepened the curve. Simply put, fewer people are going to the cinema, for myriad reasons, and it’s a minor tragedy. But it is also a nuanced one.

I spoke to a friend who goes to the cinema every Thursday about what the lure represents for him. “Well, obviously I love movies,” he began, “But for me, it’s also just a lovely chance to finally turn my phone, forget about work, and sit there peacefully for a bit. I mean there aren’t even that many films that are my cup of tea being shown to be honest”. It’s a notion that many of us can relate to. But it’s also, frankly, quite a depressing one. 

When you think of the jubilant statistic that 60% of people went to the cinema once a week in the first year of peace after World War II, you don’t just think of people slinking into their chairs and thinking, ‘Thank God, some peace and quiet for a minute’. You think of hats being tossed into the air when a hero gets away, young couples sneaking their first kiss at the same time Cary Grant pecks Aubrey Hepburn and gasps en masse as Alfred Hitchcock pulls off his latest shocking feat. 

However, it’s understandable that such fanfare doesn’t exist now. Once more, there are a million reasons, but two of the most prominent are that we’re used to them. Secondly, our lives are subsumed by external factors, as though we are eternally tethered to work and responsibilities via a device we glue to our palms, that it’s hard to get away from the grind in such a genuinely escapist fashion.

The problem for Cineworld seems to be that it has found itself between the two alternatives that could potentially remedy this lack of fanfare. The cinema’s peace is a boon, but the sofa is also pretty serene. Amid a cost-of-living crisis, the comfort of a three-price has also skyrocketed. Thus, if it’s a brain-numbing two hours you’re after, then more people than ever are content to stay at home.

However, if it’s the excitement of a night out and you’re paying top dollar for tickets and an extortionate pick ‘n’ mix, then why not knock that on the head and get cocktails and fancy snacks from a swanky indie emporium? This is a sort of paradigm for how we live now. Gone are the days when you’d hang up your work coat and casually swan off to see what was occurring. We barely have time for such frivolous exultation. We’d rather waste our hours for free at home and then cash out on something extravagant and social media post-friendly once a month.

Aside from these grand affairs, the casual entertainment we now crave is the mind-numbing variety, someone whispering to us in ASMR to calm our fried adult minds into a childlike state of classroom boredom. And then we talk about online oddities when we meet up. ‘Did you see such-and-such was trending the other day?’ or ‘Have you seen the guy who throws his phone into the sea thinking it was a fish?’—there is no way in hell that should be a sentence you recognise with definite familiarity. Still, the fact of the matter is that these are the water cooler moments of modern life.

In the past, when over half the people you knew had seen the same movie as you that week, the chat would’ve been focused on the moment Humphrey Bogart shot the other guy. These moments were ephemeral. Movies had a short run, and then they’d be gone forever. This was the reality in the minds of the folks who didn’t have a TV. They could only dream of the day that a three-hour film like Giant could be shown at home! This created a sense of immediacy, and people came together around these buzzes. People wanted to be part of the same thing, not through conformity but exuberant solidarity. 

Now, we are happy to go the opposite way and shun all the must-sees in favour of a bit of me time. An evening with the adult comfort blanket of that series you’ve seen a thousand times. That is simply a symptom of modern society. We have everything at the touch of a button, and the chore and expense of a slightly better alternative are usually too much when push comes to shove after a weary shift at work.

It says an awful lot that the highest-grossing movie of all time remains Avatar, a film that was hardly critically lauded but did offer something brand-spanking new. This innovation was the water cooler moment of modern cinema. Yes, even Avatar came from a bygone era compared to modern society. Still, it created the buzz of getting the proletariat talking, drawing us to it in droves. 

That is truly where the tragedy of Cineworld’s bankruptcy lies. It will either be bailed out or bought out in the coming months, but the portent it represents for cinema will remain. Lord knows, we often glorify the past, and you only have to look a few months before the heyday of cinema attendance in 1946 to see how thorny that is. However, the unifying eudemonia of people coming together to celebrate the life-affirming boon of culture is a triumph of humanity and a blow that will always be lamentable.

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