If you’ve been to movie theaters much in the post-quarantine years, you’ve surely seen a certain kind of pre-show message where a stars appears on screen to thank the audience for seeing their film the way they wanted it to be seen: on the big screen. (The funniest case for me was when a pre-recorded Margot Robbie thanked me for seeing her new film Babylon with an audience in a crowded theater. There were three other people there.) The new action-comedy The Fall Guy opens with one of those bumpers, with star Ryan Gosling and director David Leitch bantering about how they had you — yes you — in mind when they made the movie, and that they hope you enjoy it. It’s cute, it’s earnest, and it’s meant to get you excited about the blockbuster you’re about to see.
Except Gosling undermines the whole theatergoing experience by telling audiences that if they really need to use their phones during the movie, it’s fine — they should just try to sort of shield them in their jackets while texting or posting. No! No!!
Gosling is ceding ground in one of the great battles of our time: the war over movie-theater etiquette. Appeasement doesn’t work when you’re dealing with monsters! We cannot give the using-phones-in-theaters class an inch, or they will take a mile and bathe all of us in their horrid, disruptive, distracting glow!
It isn’t hard to see where Gosling is coming from with this tactical retreat in theaters’ great War on Phones. In addition to being charming, he’s being realistic, meeting modern theatergoing audiences where they increasingly live. Movie theaters are having a hard time luring in audiences, with so many people assuming they can just wait a few months and then watch a given movie on streaming from the comfort of their couch, phone in hand. When viewers who are used to engaging with a second screen at home go to a theater, they often don’t seem to see anything wrong with pulling out their phone to answer a quick text, check the time, or even record parts of a movie for a well-timed TikTok.
Eight years ago, the AMC theater chain came close to sanctioning phone use during their screenings, but thankfully decided against it. Phone use in theaters has become even more of a hot-button issue since the pandemic, as movie-theater purists (like me, hi) clash with barbarians people who want to watch movies the way they’re accustomed to watching them at home.
If you take it as an inescapable given that people are going to use their phones in a movie theater, as Gosling does in The Fall Guy’s pre-show bumper, it makes sense to request that they at least be discreet with their phone usage, rather than just sticking a glaring rectangle of light out there in the open.
And I will cop to having done the stealthy phone-check under the cover of my jacket on occasion, and I feel the correct amount of shame about this behavior. (My phone is on silent mode, obviously.) Real life happens — even in a place where somehow, heartbreak feels good. I get it!
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But there’s a big difference between the very occasional “Is there an emergency?” check and busting out your phone to scroll through Facebook or post pictures of the screen on Instagram while in a packed theater, watching a movie that everybody paid to see. It should be common sense that if you must use your phone in a theater, you should be as stealthy as possible — or even leave your seat and step out for a second if there’s a real emergency that you need to respond to before the credits roll.
But Leitch and Gosling’s take on the usual “put away your phones” PSA turns this common-sense exception into the new rule. AMC, Regal, and all the major chains have pre-show PSAs telling moviegoers not to use their phones during a movie. (Alamo Drafthouse remains pretty hardcore about it, thankfully.) But when audiences see The Fall Guy, that message will play alongside the film’s A-list star contradicting it, and saying It’s actually OK to whip out your phone during a movie, just be cool about it.
I would love for everyone to be cool about it. But we as a society increasingly lack the ability to be cool to other people. Those of us on team Cinema-Respecters are doing everything in our power to hold the line, and Gosling is moving the goalposts. What’s next? “If you have to take a picture, try to remember to turn off the flash?” “If you have to FaceTime during the movie, have your camera facing forward so your friend can watch the movie, too?” It’s a slippery slope.
I recognize that the war against open, casual phone use in movie theaters is probably a losing battle. But I beg you to ignore Ryan Gosling — at the very least, for Ryan Gosling’s sake. He’s great in The Fall Guy, and he and the stunt team worked really hard on it. When you walk into the theater to see The Fall Guy, pay attention to the movie, and let the other people around you do the same.
Perhaps it’s worth remembering that celebrities who took five minutes to record a gracious message to moviegoers aren’t, in most cases, sitting in those movie theaters themselves. Margot Robbie had no way of knowing I was one of only a handful of people who would be seeing Babylon. (A shame, because it’s a masterpiece.) And Ryan Gosling isn’t likely to be in a matinee screening, dealing with the cellphone light pollution he’s tacitly encouraging. Until he’s sitting next to us in the theater, suffering all the distractions he just said were basically OK, I don’t think we should be taking his advice on this one.
And if he is sitting next to us in a theater, he sure better not be on his phone.
