When I tell my friend that I’m writing a piece on cinema dates, he gives me a sideways look. “They’re a good third date,” offers another. Associated with awkward firsts and emotional disconnect, the cinema date is considered by some to be a romantic faux pas – it’s what you do when you don’t know what to do. Common complaints include it’s too dark and you can’t talk. The screen might be a welcome distraction if the date’s going badly, but if it’s going well, the film may just as easily be an aid, with jokes and jumpscares becoming opportunities to edge closer. A teenage story from my partner echoes this sentiment: “I once missed so much of a film snogging that I went to watch it by myself the next day. I did want to see it, after all.”
In the dark of the cinema screen, romantic incompatibility can become particularly obvious. Travis Bickle horrifies his date, Betsy, when he takes her to a porn theatre in Taxi Driver. “You’ve got to be kidding – this is a dirty movie,” she exclaims. She leaves early into the film, leaving Travis to walk back into the night alone. There’s two cinema dates in (500) Days of Summer: the first a spontaneous, puppy-love decision, the second a late-stage harbinger of a waning relationship. Summer suggests seeing The Graduate, a film that shaped Tom’s outlook on love through “a total misreading” of it. We see their faces as the iconic ending plays: Benjamin and Elaine on a bus, having escaped her wedding, realising their uncertain futures. Tom is unfazed; Summer is struck. The light from the screen illuminates her tears. The difference in response is obvious, and hints at a relationship that is ultimately irreconcilable, confirmed by Tom when he asks, a little oblivious, “What is it – the movie?”
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In these instances, the cinema setting enhances the romantic and filmic misreadings that take place. When Betsy runs into her cab, Travis is left in the wanton green glow of the porn theatre. Travis and Tom are both, whether physical or metaphorical, left in a kind of fog: how could she? The cinema date isn’t a first choice, maybe, because going into the dark doesn’t help when things are already uncertain. First dates necessitate an environment that is uncertain by design. What happens, the uncertain lover might ask themselves, if I like the film, but my date doesn’t? What if I like the film more than the person?
Despite the what-ifs, the cinema date persists. I know a few couples that swear by the BFI, ordering their tickets in-person to keep mementos of their dates. Last summer, I wandered into a pub on a single-street village and spoke to an older local about his first ever date: going to see Grease with a classmate at fifteen. For him, the cinema date was a no-brainer. It was the pictures. It was what every teenager did. It was all you could do. While his memory of the romance and the girl faded, he remembers the ending clear as day.
So the cinema date still offers us something – but what? How do people build a connection when they can’t talk to each other? I knew I felt a certain way about my partner when sitting in the front row for a Yorgos Lanthimos film made us more excited by the prospect of being closer to each other. Watching someone enjoy something you enjoy, affirm a feeling you’re feeling, stimulates in a different way. All those aspects of the cinema date that some might consider constricting – the embryonic dark, the sticky floors, the silent audience – allow for an alternative means of connection, ideal for ascertaining the depth of your connection to someone. In the absence of a conversation, another kind of romantic language takes over. The affective conditions of the cinema take us somewhere preverbal.
In her essay ‘The Cinema’, Virginia Woolf suggests the existence of a preverbal, primitive quality to the cinema experience, “some unknown and unexpected beauty” lying underneath the technical spectacle. When we go to the cinema to see something we’ve never seen before, we’re opening ourselves up to the possibility of being moved by something entirely unknown. In this way, the cinema makes magic of uncertainty. The cinema date simply introduces another unpredictable valence into the mix: a romantic connection that has yet to be tested.