Jim is observing the Labor Day weekend. Well, not really -- Labor Day has largely lost it association with the spirit of the 19th century working class that inspired the holiday (safely removed, about as far as you get calendar-wise, from the subversively leftist implications of May Day). What has only recently been lost is a notion of Labor Day as a punctuation mark of summer -- a festive long weekend that marks the end of vacation season. It has always been an unrealized fantasy of Jim's to take a week-long trip that straddled August and September, which has struck him as the height of cool -- or hot, depending on your generation, and the vicissitudes of weather.

But Labor Day simply isn't what it only recently used to be. College students, of course, have long been going back to school in August. But more and more primary and secondary school students are, too. Even those who aren't have sports -- and sports has become a Major Commitment in the lives of adolescents. Long gone are the days of common three-letter athletes and walk-on tryouts. Summer now ends with more of a whimper than a bang, no longer primo real estate in the economy of the season.


For those of us who perform paid labor in schools, Labor Day weekend is a hurry-up-and-wait moment. Seized with a sense that he'll never have a free moment again, Jim is currently trying to get a running start on non-immediate school-year reading, which means trudging through William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, and August Wilson's Fences, three literary works slated to be part of his team-taught interdisciplinary course built around the theme of freedom (these texts are to be part of a unit on freedom vs. equality this winter). Once school starts, it's hard to read books like that. But not as hard, perhaps, as one fears. Sometimes it's a relief just to get back to work.

Fadeout at the box office

An inveterate moviegoer savors a receding pleasure in the autumn of a medium

The following essay appears in the current weekly edition of the History News Network.

Everybody's a dreamer and everybody's a star,
And everybody's in movies, it doesn't matter who you are . . . .

--Ray Davies (of the Kinks), "Celluloid Heroes," 1972

Sometimes, when I drive into the parking lots of multiplex theaters, I imagine some future anthropologist trying to make sense of their bizarre presence: big concrete boxes in a sea of asphalt, scattered across suburban landscapes. The discerning observer will see that these apparently functional boxes were not quite the same (though perhaps comparably perplexing) as retail stores. Though commerce clearly took place in their front lobbies, they were divided up into compartments with seats facing a large screen in which some kind of presentation commanded collective attention. That anthropologist may reasonably speculate that these unprepossessing spaces served a function similar to provincial churches, which wouldn't be that far off: moviegoing has always been at least in part a matter of transcendent longing. It would be otherwise hard to account for what otherwise might seem to be an irrational practice of people congregating to sit still and stare at a screen for hours at a time.

My imagined anthropologist was always working at some distant point in the future; I never imagined -- until recently, that is -- that a ritual so central to my existence would become remote and perhaps even bewildering in my lifetime. This notion crystallized for me last month on a prematurely autumnal Saturday afternoon when I went solo to catch 500 Days of Summer before it disappeared from theaters. (I'm among those charmed by Zooey Deschanel -- who was presented, rightly, as a true movie star -- even if I regarded the movie as something of a lost opportunity to confront the narcissistic dimensions of love.) The big surprise, I realized in retrospect, is that the theater wasn't empty. I've come to take for granted that it would be. I haven't quite gone to a show where I (or my family) are the only party at a screening, but I've been close.

It wasn't always so. To be sure, I've sat in many an empty movie theater over the years, but that's a matter of percentages, as I am an inveterate moviegoer -- I won't say cinephile, because that would excessively dignify fare that ranges from Saturday morning B-grade Disney flix with little kids to Saturday night popcorn movies with big kids, along with Oscar contenders, foreign films, and art-house documentaries with my wife, friends, or by myself. I used to worry a lot about sold-out shows (and upon discovering that I was too late, to buy tickets for another show and then slip into a front seat at the sold-out one). That hasn't been a problem in a long time. The last time it was, about six months ago at a tiny art-house theater heavily patronized by senior citizens, serves as the exception that proves the rule.

This is, of course, anecdotal information. Yet I think it matters not only because it's a discernible shift in the experience of a regular moviegoer, but more importantly because it seems to comport with what's happening in the film business generally. Box office receipts have been somewhat stable in the last couple years, but that in large measure is because prices have gone up steadily, pumped up by gimmicks like 3D glasses that tack a few bucks onto the price of a ticket.

Of course the most important development, one that's been going on for about 25 years now, is the gradual shift in movie-watching from an experience that takes place in theaters to one that takes place at home (and, increasingly, on portable screens). It's now conventional wisdom in many quarters of the movie business that opening a film in theaters is really just part of a larger marketing strategy for DVD sales, licensing for broadcast, and other ancillary sources of income. Indeed, theatrical exhibition may lose money for films that go on to make healthy profits.

The increasingly privatized quality of movie-watching is part of a much larger transformation in the history of popular culture. To be sure, pop culture has long had a personal dimension in the realm of the written word, which displaced a once-vibrant oral tradition in pre-modern societies. But theatrical performance, broadly construed, was always a collective enterprise both in terms of production as well as consumption, as were sports and musical performance. Now, all these phenomena are widely experienced in relative isolation (the iPod listener on the subway is an ironic illustration of the point). Video games, which straddle the two, empower individual players to manipulate the circumstances of their experience, and as such are surely seen as an advance on older forms of pop culture by their enthusiasts.

It's important to note that all these forms of entertainment always have a social dimension. Even at home, you play a game or movie or song in the knowledge that others have seen or are seeing and hearing the same thing. This has also always been a big part of the joy of reading a novel, for example. But none of these activities are quite public in the way moviegoing is. Or, if I may press the point, as democratic as moviegoing has always been at its best.

The fact that the world is changing doesn't mean that it's changing for the worse. And in a way, it's only appropriate that movies, which mowed down earlier forms of popular culture (or, in the case of vaudeville, swallowed them entirely), should now be overshadowed and even cannibalized by newer ones. I just want to make clear that the act of leaving the house and joining a group of strangers to watch strips of celluloid, itself increasingly obsolete in an age of digital projection, has been one of life's great pleasures. Don't let it disappear without savoring it while it lasts.

For more on the possible future of moviegoing, see my post on deluxe cinemas.