Movie Theater Deserts

Somebody writes an an article about food deserts every few days.

It’s a natural law that the world will stop spinning on its axis if a mainstream outlet doesn’t run a piece about the lack of grocery stores in American cities every few days.

Here’s what the articles sound like, just in case you’ve been living under a rock:

There are a lot of urban neighborhoods throughout America that don’t have good grocery stores… and that makes it hard for people to get healthy food… and so they have to go to bodegas instead… and bodegas don’t have any good food… and so all the poor people that live in these neighborhoods just end up eating garbage… and then they end up getting fat and sick… and all of this would be solved if there were some Whole Foods locations sprinkled around more evenly.

Ummm… yeah, okay… a lot of that is basically true… I guess…

BUT DO YOU KNOW WHAT ARE WAY WORSE THAN FOOD DESERTS?

MOVIE THEATER DESERTS!

A lot of the urban enclaves that people describe as food deserts have NO movie theaters.

I’m pretty sure Brooklyn’s theater desert is the largest. The amalgamation of neighborhoods made up by Ridgewood, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, PLG, Canarsie, Flatbush, and Brownsville — an area that has roughly the same population as San Francisco — does not contain a single movie theater. 

When someone asserts that a particular neighborhood is a food desert, they’re basically just making the claim that the available food options aren’t especially impressive. There are, of course, still places to buy food in these neighborhoods. Oftentimes there are even real grocery stores — small and spartan though they may be.

But WHEN I SAY THERE IS A MOVIE THEATER DESERT IN NEW YORK, I LITERALLY MEAN THAT THERE ARE NO MOVIE THEATERS IN A LOT OF THESE NEIGHBORHOODS.

And why does that matter? Why should anyone care about whether or not a neighborhood has movie theaters?

Perhaps the most significant benefit of movie theaters is their ability to promote a common cultural fabric. Watching movies together in a theater allows people to share a collective experience and develop a common understanding of a particular cultural artifact — and in turn, a particular social phenomenon. What’s happening in the world? What’s bad? What’s good? Which way is up? Which way is down? Good movies tell us this sort of thing, and bad movies force us to find out on our own.

A culture that celebrates and promotes movie theaters is a culture of cohesion and understanding — attributes in which New York (and America more broadly) is in critically short supply. In many ways, a movie theater culture is a monoculture.

BE VERYY SUSPICIOUS OF THOSE WHO INSIST THAT MONOCULTURES ARE, BY THEIR VERY NATURE, HOLLOW AND DEFICIENT. The alternative is a culture where nobody knows or cares what their neighbors are up to.

… And then… there’s also the therapeutic aspect.

Going to the movies is important because it’s one of the only settings in the modern American world where your attention isn’t constantly being wrenched in a thousand directions.

In a theater, you can be wholly immersed. You can, if only for a brief, merciful instant, escape the distractions of daily life. You can enjoy a short interlude from the constant bombardment of the digital world. You can disconnect from the jumbled noise to focus on one thing.

In this way, movie theaters are like big therapy clinics.

The lack of movie theaters in many urban areas means that people are deprived of these benefits. The cost on personal and societal health is incalculable.

go ahead! try to calculate it!!

You want to talk about a public health crisis? Yeah, there’s a public health crisis alright:

The lack of theaters is largely a matter of economics, of course. NYC rent is expensive, and streaming apps are stacked, and nobody wants to scoop the popcorn andchecktheticketsandsweepthefloorsandblahblahblahblahblah *pantomimes jerking off while droning on about all of the medlied and obvious ways in which movie theaters are a cash vacuum*

… Yeah, whatever..… Admittedly, the cinema game isn’t a good business.

But you know what else wasn’t a good business? Building Central Park! Building the Subway!

These things were built and are maintained anyway because they obviously enhance the city’s cultural texture and improve people’s quality of life.

…. New York City basically has unlimited money………. What if the city just operated its own chain of theaters? Boom! Problem solved.

And yet, movie theater deserts persist…