The Last Discount Theatre on Earth: A Plea for Better Reading and Writing
A World With Only Fast Thinking Is Dead Already
Today is the last day for the supporting subscriber discount, the last one for 2024. The original post had typos. Apologies.
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Around the corner from me there lives a unicorn.
It is a run down movie theater, without any 3-D glasses or recliners. It’s a true throwback to the times when the point was to shove as many people under the seats as possible, and not to make us particularly comfortable in the process.
I love it because they have early morning showings, and it’s been pretty fun to be able to take the kids at 9:30 in the morning to go watch a first run film complete with popcorn. The Big Boy theaters don’t open until lunchtime, but by then we’ve been able to come back home and get ready for the pool or to enjoy an afternoon in the air conditioning reading.
Going to the movies has always been an act of spectacle which hides a very simple proposition. The best theaters, like this one, lay the proposition open: they exist truly for one purpose, and that is to show movies. It’s not there to make you comfortable or to offer luxury snacks or to let you relax in a recliner.
It’s there to show you a story. That’s it.
In her recent article, Emily Sunberg hits the nail on the head when she describes the problem that is growing within Substack. It’s not a problem, unique to Substack, but really a problem endemic to any creative venture, which exist with an economic engine.
Some of the problem is this: aggregators, listsicles, and These Three Things pieces will always attract more attention than slower things. That’s not always the rule – there are Substacks which attract tens of thousands of readers and do nothing but fine grained disciplinary or industry specific kinds of work. But increasingly, there’s a lot of noise generated by writing which is word piling. It’s funny; it’s endearing; truth be told, you won’t think about it after you read it.
But back to the movie theaters.
The place around the corner for me is a very low frill experience. It knows why it’s there and it doesn’t try to be anything other than that. Some of the arcade machines are broken, and the claw machine never really generates prizes. The seats are very tight together and the snack bar is enough to call it a snack bar. It’s a very different experience than going to the cool place across town, which has rumble seats and recliners and an expensive snack bar and which you can watch movies in three dimensions for a few dollars more.
I have nothing against those places, except that they have forgotten what a movie theater is supposed to do: show movies. That’s it. In tying together an architecture of pleasure with the core function of showing movies, they’ve distracted people into thinking that moviegoing is about pleasure as such. This is bad for filmmaking and also for the business of theatres: people don’t go to the movie theaters because they’re looking for candy or the claw machine or a recliner.
Meanwhile, the cheap theater around the corner for me continues to have five dollar Tuesdays and unapologetically cram your butt into a chair and let you watch a movie. Here’s your seat in a dark and cool room: enjoy.
Ironically, the new theaters feel like the dinosaurs as opposed to the cheap theater. The new theaters seem to be the ones which will not survive because they built in a lot of extra stuff which has nothing to do with their core reason for being, and Netflix knows it. Amazon Studios knows it.
The big theaters have forgotten that what makes them tick is the movies and not pleasure. And when you lose sight of that, it’s just a matter of time.
In his Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman plays out when he takes to be the two primary ways of thinking. The first is more automatic thinking built for quick assessments, created by nature, culture, and unconscious processes. The second kind is the kind that we normally associate with thinking: rational judgments, discursive thinking, and evaluation.
The first kind is not bad. And yet.
Our brains are built for the first kind to keep us from having to make the same kinds of decisions over and over again. We develop paradigms, inherent biases, and prejudices which help us create mental shortcuts. There’s a reason, he says, that a person can remember what 2+2 equals without having to go through the mental map every time.
The danger with prioritizing the first kind of thinking is that it has a built-in propensity to laziness. It’s a smooth kind of thinking meant to operationalize our mental processes and help us not have to labor all the time, though there are times when labor is required. When you run up against something new or you’re having to pay close attention to a particular problem, the second type of thinking kicks in, the one we normally associate with thought.
The first type of thinking is what you see with the fancy theaters. In connecting the dots between pleasure and movie going, they do so by reinforcing the notion that movie going is about pleasure and not about the movies. Movies, by contrast, want us to pay attention to them and not sink into automatic thinking. Movies require us to pay attention and to do some work.
This first kind of thinking is what you see with the listicles and the aggregators and the content generation. It trades on a kind of quick thinking, which doesn’t ask much of us and reinforces along the way itself as a paradigm for what counts as good writing and good thinking. Because it is so common, and because it is inherently pleasurable, it creates an association in mind between thinking, quickness, and pleasure.
You can probably see this where this is going: man does live on fast thinking alone.
Our reading and writing should call for some work out of us, both in the process and in the consumption. There’s a real limit for our energy for sure. Again, this is why the first type of thinking is so good: not everything should be calculus. But this is why it’s up to those who would propose to be writers also proposed to be thinkers of the second kind, resisting the tendency that is already in our brains to assume that thinking means automatic movement. Thinking, for it to be capable of generating new insights, and new assumptions means that there has to be some resistance, some dissonance, some work.
The theater around the corner for my house is probably an exercise in Folly, but I don’t think so. I think it’ll probably outlast the cockroaches, if only because it keeps the prices low and knows what it’s about. People will continue to pay for the main thing that puts the main thing forward: the movies.
Likewise, I would love to hope that the art of writing might find its way similarly. But it will require getting lean, and not chasing the kind of writing that reinforces ease and luxury.
It will mean not having the rumble seats or the 3-D projector. It will require not playing by the rules of the big theaters or the content listsicles. It will require remembering that with listicles has to have something to aggregate, namely, thinking. Without good and slow thinking, there’s nothing to put into a quick Three Good Things kind of post.
So, ask for more. Ask for more from aggregation, that if it is going to aggregate, that it quit aggregating toward quick thinking and direct us back toward slow thinking. Asked for more from your own writing. Test yourself with your own reading. Stretch your limits, go slow, and see what new things happen.
Because otherwise, we’re just recycling the same quick thinking that we already know. We will literally be eating our own excrement and calling it nutrition. Let our fast thinking the interrupted by slow thinking, and let our quick writing and reading the interrupted by troublesome, slow writing and thinking. And let us above all support the slow stuff.
Because no one goes to the movies for the Milk Duds.