What are you laughing at? This is a serious film...

The inability to take anything seriously is where the offence lies. Where the film everyone in the room has paid to see is reduced to a laughingstock by audience members.

Inappropriate behaviour in cinemas is a bad habit that has ramped up in recent years, and clearly I’m not the only one to notice. A survey last year found that a hefty 87% experienced rude or inappropriate behaviour from other audience members in recent times. The offences ranged from incessant talking (a classic annoyance) to obnoxious vaping (okay, that’s a little funny).

But it’s the laughing that gets me. The constant laughter. Why would someone attend the screening of a film about the struggles of an impoverished Belarusian family just to laugh? I must be selectively editing out the jokes in my head or something.

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Let’s take a personal, rather grating example. Attending a limited-run screening of The Power of the Dog in 2021, I was completely perplexed at why the couple in front of me found humour in almost everything a character did or said. This is not hyperbole. Everything a character did or said. It was most likely first-date jitters, I thought. Regardless, I still couldn’t understand it.

The Power of the Dog, which won Jane Campion the Best Director award at the Oscars, is a melancholic and emotionally in-tune film. It says a lot with little, painting an understated yet devastating portrait of rural wealth in 1920s Montana. The troubled alcoholic Rose is given an eloquent performance by A-lister Kirsten Dunst, her increasing pain and suffering being the catalyst for much of the film’s tension.

But for the couple in front of me, the idea of poor troubled alcoholic Rose was quite amusing. There is a moment when Rose is woken up, with the gradual visual reveal that she fell asleep clutched to a bottle of whisky. A tragic moment that intends to show the extent of how far her mental state has deteriorated, and how ingrained her alcoholism has become.

A different film must have been on screen for the couple in front of me because they thought this to be absolutely hilarious. Has destructive alcoholism re-entered the comedic sphere as something to laugh at? Perhaps I missed the part where Rose was set up as the drunken fool character.

Kirsten Dunst as Rose in The Power of the Dog (Image: Netflix) There is also the bizarre trend of cinemagoers seeming to have no idea what they are even in for. It is understandable why that couple might find themselves unaware of what kind of film The Power of the Dog is – it stars incredibly popular actors, was critically acclaimed, and was tipped for Academy recognition. Those are obvious reasons why someone might find themselves in that particular audience without knowing anything beyond the title and marquee names. But other times, it’s hard to understand how they even ended up in the seat in the first place.

Another couple became the subject of my ire (these can’t all be first-date jitters, surely) during a screening of Robert Bresson’s 1959 masterpiece Pickpocket. Bresson’s intentional flatness and direct dialogue are supposed to be disarming, and painterly as opposed to theatrical, yet the couple could not stop laughing at every single line, every bit of anguish trying to break a character’s solemn face. All worth a laugh, or twenty. Even the all-time masterworks of cinema can’t find any respect from certain audiences.

And last, but certainly not least, is the burgeoning trend of an audience member confused by the film they’re seeing, only to loudly exclaim how much they hated it as soon as the credits appear. Thank you sir, I was still picking up my heart from the floor until it was interrupted by your mindless angry rant.

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Most point to two reasons for increasing inappropriate conduct: the behavioural effects playing out post-pandemic, and the influence of social media. Both things likely have their impact, but for cinemas, it’s not quite clear-cut. And it’s not just cinemas dealing with increasing inappropriate behaviour from audiences, it’s also theatres.

With theatres, it’s easy to pinpoint the issue: the need to recoup losses from the pandemic has prioritised the sale of alcohol, naturally leading to increased inappropriate behaviour. But cinemas will need a team of behavioural analysts to get to the bottom of why audiences seem so confused and unable to actually engage with what they’re seeing.

But maybe I’m just a crank who can’t handle the way others enjoy things. Maybe my sense of engaging with film is so askew that I’m actually the strange one. I’m really not convinced that is the case though.