The tweet attached above has started a trend that I find concerning and frustrating to talk about. It feels like we’ve been complaining about how people behave in movie theaters for as long as movie theaters have existed. Whether it’s George Costanza threatening to pulverize two annoying guys or my personal hero telling someone to turn their fucking flash off, we have always been fighting against people acting like assholes in public spaces. I want to talk moreso about the second behavior: the presence of the cell phone in the movie theater. I’ve been in many a screening where the person in the row in front of me will whip out their phone, brightness cranked up, a white flare moving through the empty spaces between seats and severing the connection between the eye and the silver screen. I said that guy in the Force Awakens video is my hero, because he is truly how I feel. I hate not feeling immersed, I hate being in a place as purposefully understimulating as the theater, a place that is meant to celebrate the confines of the moving image, and have that ceremony interrupted by someone who just doesn’t care as much.

This kind of behavior shows up in two primary ways. The disengaged person, the one who’s just checking their Facebook or sending a text, is easier to deal with. That person is being an inconsiderate asshole, but a quick reminder of the surrounded investment of the people around them usually mitigate that kind of behavior. Our habits while watching films have changed in the streaming era. We’re used to being able to check the phone or pause and go to the bathroom whenever we want, and that’s fine. Watch a movie how you want to in your house, I can’t stop you. What frustrates me more is the second kind, which is deeply connected to stan culture and the performance of cultural participation online.

An underdiscussed element of Wicked’s particularly asocial online fanbase is its succession from both the pop twitter stan culture of the Arianators and the natural progression of the performance of consumption that invaded movie theaters during the Barbenheimer phenomena last year. Barbenheimer incentivized going to the five hour long double feature and being engaged with the culture, yes, but it also incentivized signaling that cultural participation in very loud ways. Going to the theater in costumes, posting pics to Instagram, etc., the same kind of performance of participation that’s ruining concert etiquette. There’s a litany of writing and videos on this topic, where especially in the post-COVID era we’ve lost basic respect at certain kinds of concerts.

But we record concerts for the same reason we record the film we’re seeing at the cinema: to memorialize our presence in a place and time. When confronting strangers about this bad behavior, this sentiment will often come up. “I want to remember this!” They exclaim, relying on the power of their devices to contain such a memory. But these devices are not devices for memory, they are devices for capture and transmission. You do not acquire the memory for yourself, you project the state of being into another source. You disengage for the purpose of archiving. And that’s not a bad thing, but that’s not what the movie theater is for.

Wicked makes this an interesting case, as I think the American theater industry has the right idea when it comes to this stuff. Theater bootlegs, or ‘slime tutorials,’ were common in the tumblr era despite efforts by Broadway to keep their shows localized. It’s a complicated thing, because I do think people who can’t go to New York should be able to see a professionally shot and edited recording of a show, and that process has archival benefits as well. But I also think that people shouldn’t be recording a stage show on their phone, and anybody defending that kind of behavior has a bad relationship with art.

So, don’t give up this fight. Call out people who are being assholes. Make that George Costanza rant in “The Opposite” look like Bob Ross asking nicely. Embarrass these people, they deserve it. They can get on their phones and complain about you later. They don’t deserve to ruin your experience. You deserve better.