“If we were in Los Angeles or Phoenix, the only reason to go to a movie would be to see it,” said Cecile Wehrman, a newspaper editor who, with members of the nonprofit Meadowlark Arts Council resuscitated the Dakota in Crosby [a small town in North Dakota], its plush interiors now a chic black, red and silver. “But in a small town, the theater is like a neighborhood. It’s the see-and-be-seen, bring everyone and sit together kind of place.”I don’t really agree with the first part of Wehrman’s assessment here – city-dwellers probably love to people watch if anything more than small-towners – but her second point makes a lot of intuitive sense. Everybody talks about how wonderful it is that we can bring so many things to our home, but I rarely hear people mention how subtly alluring public places are just for the fact that they’re public. (Maybe, Marxist Brandon says, because it isn’t as easy to make people pay for the privilege of simply seeing each other as it is to make them pay for gadgets.)
Tim Harford, in his book “The Logic of Life”, points out that public areas like parks can oscillate between two equilibriums – on days when nobody thinks the park will be full, nobody goes, and on days when people expect the park to be packed, people go – based on that simple human desire to see and be seen. The flimsiest excuse for a public gathering can be used so long as people know that everybody else will congregate at the same place.
The movie theaters in these small towns provide a that kind of focal point. It might just be a movie, but that small advantage can translate into the community-gathering point that I think most people want and need, even when they don’t really realize it.
