The Cost of Being a Grown-Up During the Pandemic

Arclight Cinemas' flagship location, on Hollywood Boulevard, before the pandemic

When news broke this week that Decurion Corporation, owner of Pacific Theatres and Arclight Cinemas, would shutter its locations, I initially laughed. Corporations like Decurion have participated in the contracting entertainment market for decades, until just five companies now control most of Hollywood, and one company, Disney, controls a one-third share. Did another corporation get too massive to withstand economic setbacks? LOL, whose fault is that?

Almost immediately, though, testimonials began emerging from Decurion’s Southern California market base. People mourned, not the big-ticket Hollywood movies they watched at Pacific and Arclight, but the memories they shared of other people. First dates, chance encounters, and more: people love these cinemas because of the people there. The facilities and their products seem almost ancillary to people’s love of these cinemas, deriving from their human experiences.

Decurion’s closure removes another place we can meet people we don’t already know. As urban designer Jeff Speck writes, the suburbanization of America has narrowed the number of placed we’re allowed to enter without prior invitation. If you’re too old for school, your opportunities to meet new people are generally limited to shopping malls and houses of worship. But those places subdivide people according to shared faith or buying habits.

Cinemas, by contrast, opened new vistas. Sure, the movies were mass-manufactured by Hollywood dream factories, but consider the images of moviegoers from the 1940s and 1950s, the years when American religion was calcifying. People wore their finest to the cinemas, because moviegoing was an opportunity to be in public. It meant an ironically unscripted opportunity to participate in society. Until recently, opening-night lines were still a destination.

Multiplexes swallowed locally owned cinemas after the 1970s, just as malls swallowed locally owned department stores, and Barnes & Noble swallowed local bookstores. Yet even as the business dynamic became more concentrated and inflexible, the experience remained valuable. Cinemas weren’t just places people saw movies; people saw those movies together. I’m old enough to remember the 1990s Star Wars rerelease, so this communal experience still happened fairly recently.

Americans are losing places where we have freedom to be something other than our work. Market consolidation means narrowing other opportunities: without local businesses, we’re losing street theater and guerilla culture, arts and experiences that aren’t subsidized by corporations. We’re losing opportunities for grown-up spontaneity. And it’s happening because opportunities to be an unmediated adult are not profitable.

...she just held up her finger without making eye contact. “I’m not at a good stopping point,” she said. I stood there in silence for another two or three minutes as she finished her chapter, completely unbothered. It’s one of my favorite memories of her, six years later

— elan gale (@theyearofelan) April 13, 2021

Speaking purely anecdotally, I’ve lost count how often I see one question written on Internet discussion boards: “How do you make friends as an adult?” Sadly, the answer is widely documented, if not widely known. Your friends are the people you spend the most time with, so you make friends by spending time with other adults. Night classes, volunteer activities, and cultural events are where grown-ups go to make friends.

Closing cinemas are, therefore, symptomatic of a larger loss: places we can meet strangers, without being steered by algorithms. We can stream movies and TV digitally; we can’t stream humans. Multinational conglomerates absorbed local businesses, then digital marketing and the pandemic submarined the conglomerates. In their place, we’re left with Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook, which are valuable in their place, but lack mass. We’re left with no place at all.

I mustn’t forget myself: Pacific and Arclight are for-profit corporations too, and they sell movies from for-profit Hollywood studios. Like other chain stores we've lost since 2008, Decurion is a brand, not a friend. Yet notwithstanding their flaws, they offered opportunities to meet people and have our own experiences, opportunities increasingly neglected when algorithms decide what options we even get to see. Decurion is imperfect, but serves a role.

After the pandemic, we’ll have choices to make. These include individual choices about how much of our personal money to spend locally, but also society-wide choices about how much consolidation we consider acceptable, how much wealth we permit CEOs to accumulate before they threaten society. As half of Earth’s internet ad revenue moves through two corporations, Facebook and Google, and one-third of digital commerce goes through Amazon, these questions matter.

Because when chain cinemas close, kicking more power to Jeff Bezos and Reed Hastings, we aren’t just losing companies. We’re losing opportunities to meet strangers, broaden our horizons, and have grown-up experiences. It sounds hyperbolic to say our worlds are getting smaller, but that’s the evidence we’re getting from the anecdotes around Arclight and Pacific. They aren’t places, they’re memories, which we’ll never get back.

Just as important, we’ll never have chances to make new memories.