I was at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival the other night, sitting next to a woman who kept checking her messages on her iPhone. I would notice a light - a small competing screen - out of the corner of my left eye, and then ostentatiously put up my left hand, palm facing toward me, to block it out.
But it wasn't the light that bothered me so much as her inattention. The beauty of going to the movies, as opposed to watching them at home on Netflix, is the communal disconnection, the mass suspension of interest in the outside world, the increasingly rare thrill of a completely shared experience.
My neighbor's regular glances at her iPhone ruined the spell that a movie projected in a dark theater creates. They took her out of the moment, and they took me too, because I was unavoidably aware of her consistent shifting of interest. There was something more important to her than the images on the screen, and that fact made those images less compelling to me. She broke the moviegoer's unwritten pledge of allegiance to captivation.
