Attention all "18" - 24 year olds
No doubt a few teenagers are here, and I'm most interested in how your age treats the cinema, so just say "18" if you're under.
I'm curious about how the younger generation watches movies in the actual physical theater. I'm curious because I grew up in the 56k, Blockbuster, VHS era and I remember when going to the movies was an event with a sacred feeling to it. You couldn't download shit, you had to wait months or over a year for a movie to be released on VHS for rent. The theaters were the only way to access these movies. Going to see the latest hyped hit seemed to have more cultural power than they do in today's environment. In on-demand, netflix, torrents of today I can't imagine the movie theater holds the same sacred and rarefied place in young peoples hearts and cultural development that it did to my generation. It's impossible as it has been watered down.
I'm turning 32 years old and over the past 9 years or so I've almost completely stopped going to the movies in the theater, but the cinema experience was one of the most significant of my maturation. Going to your first rated R movie alone was a big deal. When a neighborhood kid with cool parents let you rent a rated R movie like Terminator 2 it was hot shit, you felt like you had contraband. This was before internet videos desensitized us to violence; horror movies still had their place in the culture, if you could get the brutal ones you felt wicked and sly; today they are genre schlock, callbacks, and irrelevant in comparison the the real gore that surrounds us online every day.
So, to the young, how would you compare yourselves to this attitude that the early Millennials feel towards movie theater culture? And what have been your cinema habits in recent years and during your formative years? Does my description of the movie and cinema experience gel with your own, or would you say the media culture of your youth changed the significance of the movie theater experience?