Common sense, courtesy not dead

In this election year, here’s one “political” (in a sense, anyway) issue you won’t see on the ballot. But it apparently has already been decided by overwhelming acclamation.

AMC Theatres — the national entertainment conglomerate that recently announced the purchase of Columbus-based Carmike Cinemas, followed by no small degree of shareholder and local stakeholder distress — has just done a swift about-face on a “Gone With the Wind”-scale blockbuster of a bad idea.

In a recent interview published in Variety magazine, AMC CEO Adam Aron suggested that the chain might consider making some of its theaters cell-phone-friendly. People using their electronic devices would no longer be considered an etiquette-oblivious imposition on fellow moviegoers, but an intrinsic part of the experience.

(Not that such casual encroachments of the socially clueless aren’t, sad to say, an infuriatingly familiar experience already.)

"When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don’t ruin the movie,” Aron told Variety, “they hear please cut off your left arm above the elbow. You can’t tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That’s not how they live their life."

According to a barrage of response — much of it, appropriately, on social media — most Americans clearly disagree. The negative reaction was so overwhelming that Aron immediately said AMC will pursue other options to attract more young viewers.

"With your advice at hand,” the CEO said in a statement, “there will be NO TEXTING ALLOWED in any of the auditoriums at AMC Theatres. Not today, not tomorrow, and not in the foreseeable future."

A couple of relevant points:

First, there’s an inherent, though no doubt unintended, class-action insult in the idea that this kind of imposition on other paying customers would meet with the broad approval (and, consequently, the profitably increased patronage) of the millennial generation in particular. Millennials can be and usually are as annoyed by such conduct as anybody else paying big bucks to see a movie in public.

More to the point, it doesn’t take more than the most casual observation to note that rudeness, boorishness and oblivious disregard for others — in movie theaters or anywhere else — are social dysfunctions that know no generational boundaries. (Odds say the last jerk you were subjected to who set his phone on speaker, put it on the table and imposed his squawk-box dialogue on a whole restaurant was not a teen or twentysomething, nor will the next one be.) And when parents take small children to age-inappropriate movies that have them screaming from previews to final credits, it’s not the toddlers we blame.

A recent Pew poll noted that 95 percent of Americans do not approve of people using smartphones (or dumb ones, for that matter) “at the movie theater or other places where others are usually quiet.” The same poll found theaters second only to places of worship as sites where such conduct is the most inappropriate.

The majority response to such a consensus is no doubt also multigenerational: Duh.

This story was originally published April 18, 2016 at 4:37 PM with the headline "Common sense, courtesy not dead."