The movie theater I once worked at years ago closed for good recently. To anticipate longtime readers’ follow up question, yes. It was the location notorious for high strangeness that’s been featured on this blog before.
But whether or not it really harbored ghosts, that defunct theater has joined other once-prominent institutions like the arcade and the mall among the specters of America’s vanishing past.
Related: A Ghost for the Offering
Now, in their hipster-adjacent way, the guys at Red Letter Media have made a video remembering the movie theater and plumbing the causes of its demise.
Watch it here:
A few creative choices in RLM’s video that pop out at the viewer:
- Its title is “The Death of Movie Theaters”
- The series is called Beyond the Black Void
- Mike indulges in a lengthy aside to wax philosophical on graveyards.
The whole mood and tone of the video is indicative of Pop Cultish nostalgia curdled into nascent Y-ilism.
But despite being stuck inside the Overton window, RLM have enough awareness and professional experience to notice and capably analyze film industry trends.
Here are some of the key insights they made in the above video:
- The movie theater’s dominance as people’s primary way of seeing films is in steep decline, if not already over
- This decline is not due to sequelitis or too many reboots
- While the Corona-chan crackdowns played a role in theaters’ demise, they weren’t the sole cause of death.
If you pay close attention and read between the lines, you can discern the main culprit amid Jay and Mike’s tap dancing on the edge of acceptable opinion.
Our hosts point to eroding cultural cohesion as a contributing factor in the movie theater’s decline. And their observations resonate with anomalies noted in every other branch of the entertainment industry by seasoned pros.
Corporate pop acts like Taylor Swift are said to outearn stadium-filling bands of the 80s, yet most people over 18 would be hard-pressed to sing one of the former’s songs from memory. And even though working actors who once made comfortable livings are now moonlighting with Uber, 84 of the top 200 grossing films since 1939 came out post-Ground Zero.
Related: “Hollywood Is in Shambles”
Mike even prepared a chart to help us visualize how lopsided that distribution is.
Related: Who Killed Rock and Roll?
How to reconcile the apparent paradox? Simple. The entertainment cartels capturing increasing shares of an ever-fracturing market is what you’d expect to see if the overall population was rising while the former monoculture was splintering. Which both are.
As mentioned above, we see a similar pattern surrounding the death of the shopping mall. The mall’s downfall likewise had its red herrings, like big box stores and online shopping. But the mall and the movie theater share the same ultimate cause of death.
Diversity.
Related: The Idea of a Mall
RLM called out disintegrating societal cohesion as a reason more and more people are shunning group social activities.
Well, we’ve known for years that rising diversity leads to a corresponding drop in social cohesion. It comes with the territory.
In hindsight, the idea that people don’t want to congregate with a bunch of strangers they don’t know or trust is only natural. It’s only controversial because the powers that be decree it.
That’s why remembering the movie theater, the mall, and the arcade so their memory can be passed down is a civic duty of generations X and Y.
Never forget what they took from us.
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