179. INFERRING THE END - Doom-Spiral or Fallacy?

The cinema nearest to me is part of a larger shopping centre. The other weekend, we went there for the third time in as many weeks. Oscar season. And once again the escalators up from the car park, and from the ground floor to the cinema, were not moving. We had to walk up them like stairs. No big deal. But once at the cinema’s lobby we, again, saw the sign posted up at the coffee concession. This Starbucks is permanently closed.

It had been nice when coffee first became available at the cinema, all those years ago. A good way of ensuring I didn’t fall asleep in front of the movie (even though it also meant I probably wouldn’t sleep well the entire night after we got home). But it had also felt like a bit of a weird addition given that there was another Starbucks within the same shopping centre, just downstairs. The survival of this particular branch had, therefore, always seemed dubious. So the first time we saw the sign saying it was permanently closed, it had a feeling of inevitability about it. Of course they were closing it. We were its prime customers and even we seldom ever used it. How did it make money? Also - we had noticed it was increasingly inconsistent in its opening for the last year anyway. Unreliable. Some days it was open, other trips it wasn’t. And they didn’t always offer a full menu. Cakes, especially, had stopped being stocked with any regularity for months.

We had seen the signs that things weren’t going well. That the wheels were falling off a bit. And we had made the inference - this place was going out of business. And the inference was right.

So we walked past the closed Starbucks without much comment. That the pick ‘n’ mix was out of bags, and the Baskin and Robbins ice cream concession was also closed, was a worry. No sign of permanent closure. Yet. But the start of those erratic inconsistencies that don’t suggest confidence that a business is doing great.

Again - it sort of makes sense. Who wants ice cream in February? And in the post-pandemic world, isn’t pick ‘n’ mix inherently grim? Still…we walked on by, clocking the closures but not over-thinking them as we made our way towards the screen.

I kept my jacket on during the movie, and had even brought a beanie with me. The last two times the cinema had been cold. Not the too-cold refrigeration of aggressive air-conditioning, but the unpleasantly damp cold of an unheated room in February. It was like the cinema had decided not to put the heating on in the hope that the warm bodies in their seats would make things warm enough. The same sort of cost-saving logic that brings us things like not wasting electricity on an escalator when people could walk, or not wasting staffing on a food concession that people aren’t really using. The only problem with the logic is that barely anyone was in the screen. Just like barely anyone had been in the previous two screenings where we’d first felt the cold. The large space was struggling to be heated by the body warmth of fewer people than your average Philosophy A-level group.

To be honest, I’m not even sure why we were there ourselves? It felt a bit like those zombies in George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, returning to the shopping mall they used to haunt back before they lost their minds. The cinema used to be a place for filmic reverence. The perfect dark, silent environment in which to enjoy a movie on a massive screen and immerse yourself entirely. But it’s been a long while since that was actually true. Nowadays the environment is frequently interrupted by the chirping of phones not switched to silent, noisy people chatting to each other, and even the lights don’t seem to go fully off, ensuring a safe pathway is lighted out so that people can go grab a drink in the middle of a feature - plot-points be damned. If you want the true reverential cinematic experience, turn off your phone, stream the movie at home, and switch off the lights. The cinema is a social space, but no longer a sacred one. We used to go weekly - even multiple times a week. Now we only go a few times a year. Mainly around Oscar season, when you want to see certain movies before the awards.

So there we sat. Cold, in creaking chairs that leant too far back. Chairs in clear need of repair, but the repairs not yet done. Watching a movie with a handful of others and thinking we’d be better off watching the movie at home.

There was no sign saying that the cinema was permanently closed…yet. But I felt safe in inferring from the cost-saving measures on the escalators, staffing, and heating, from the erratic, closed, and semi-closed concessions, the broken seats and the woeful audience that this business is not doing well. That it hasn’t been doing well for a while. That, perhaps sooner than later, the announcement would inevitably come.

Is this philosophy? Using reasoned inference to reach conclusions about the world?

Or is it philosophy to state the case merely as analogy to a blog that I increasingly find myself writing on a Sunday afternoon, just hours before the self-imposed deadline, grasping at straws to find something worthwhile to think about because, yet again, no reader submissions have brought anything in that isn’t just me, sitting in a room, doing it by myself? To dwell on how, like the blog, the cinema had an intended purpose once, but it appears to have outgrown it as the world has moved on?

Some weeks, as I look at the stats about Philosophy Unleashed’s readership, I wonder if the same can be said of this website? I began the thing in the hope it might spark some conversations. That people would comment on the posts. Disagree. Agree. Build. Develop. And - most importantly - that they would write. This thing was never supposed to be my blog. It was supposed to be ours. A forum for all kinds of different voices. Students, sick of the narrowness of the current A-level specification. Teachers seeking to go beyond the topics they’ve trodden for years. I wanted it to be a community - unleashing what philosophy could be beyond the dull borders of examination. Sharing ideas. Doing philosophy instead of being told what philosophy must be. But beyond its first year this has never been that. Although I know from the stats that people are reading it, they do not seem to read it with the regularity that demands the promised new post every Monday during term time. And when they do read it, they do not engage. Do not comment. Share. Discuss. And that worries me because this is not meant to be the gospel of DaN McKee (I have books and articles for that, as well as my own personal blog). This is meant to be a stimulus for discussion. Sometimes I post things on here that I do not even believe, in order to see what other people’s responses are. The silence, over the years, has been deafening.

Imagine a cinema no one comes to. Its owners paying to heat empty rooms and run escalators no-one uses. Screening movies according to the timetable posted outside even though no one is watching them. A fully staffed ticket desk and concession stand waiting to sell ice cream, pick ‘n’ mix and, yes, even expensively licensed Starbucks coffee, to customers even though no customers exist. At some point we might question the wisdom of those owners. Ask if what they are putting their energies, time and money into is worth it?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I can think of only one answer the owners could give: ‘It’s worth it because I believe that a world with cinemas in it is a better world than one with no cinemas.’

I guess, similarly, I believe that a world with this philosophy forum in it is better than one without it, even if no-one is using it. That the possibility that they could is what is important.

At the same time, I would never be surprised if the owners decided one day to shut the cinema down. That as beautiful as a world with it might be compared to a world without it, they realise it is not their sole responsibility to keep that world alive. That they have done their bit, and done it for longer than was ever needed. But that it might be time to move on.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.

My latest academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is finally out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here. (Though OUP wouldn’t let me make it open access without paying an extortionate amount so you will need either institutional access to the journal or to be a member of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain to read it, unfortunately).

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book.  Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com   

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