Perhaps you’ve heard them.
Chuckles, snorts, even outright guffaws emitted by your fellow moviegoers.
They ripple through the crowd when Nicole Kidman laps up milk from a saucer on her hands and knees in “Babygirl,” when Lily-Rose Depp contorts herself inhumanly in “Nosferatu,” when Mikey Madison is bound and gagged in “Anora,” when Daniel Craig is shooting heroin in “Queer” — maybe also when Adrien Brody does the same in “The Brutalist.”
Maybe it was you making those sounds.
“It was so self-serious, I could not handle it,” said Rob Truglia, a 34-year-old marketing consultant in Brooklyn, of his experience watching “Queer.”
The friends who had accompanied him to the film, a historical drama directed by Luca Guadagnino, didn’t find it nearly so amusing, he said.
He had a similar reaction to “Nosferatu,” the hyper-stylized vampire movie from the director Robert Eggers: “When Lily-Rose Depp’s character has the possessive episode, it was so over the top,” Mr. Truglia said. “It’s this beautiful woman foaming at the mouth and ripping off her clothes. The director must have been aware of the humor there.”
Not everyone is so sure. As some moviegoers yuck it up while watching this batch of critically acclaimed awards-season contenders, many of their seatmates are uneasy. Others are annoyed. Maybe even a bit judge-y.
That milk-lapping scene in “Babygirl,” some argue, is supposed to be erotic; “Nosferatu” is meant to be genuinely frightening; and while “Anora” may have elements of a rom-com, that fight sequence should be met with gravity.
In an essay for Angel Food Magazine, Marla Cruz, a writer in Los Angeles, described her disgusted reaction to the audience’s behavior during the scene in “Anora” when a henchman discovers the female protagonist “bound and bent over.” “I cried quietly in the back row of the theater, nauseated by the audience’s laughter,” she wrote.
Some moviegoers are wondering if their seatmates have simply forgotten their manners. With the dominance of streaming, many viewers may be discovering anew what it’s like to watch films among strangers.
“A lot of people treat the movie theater like their living room,” said Alexandra Coburn, a film programmer in New York who had a job at an art house theater when cinemas began reopening during the pandemic. “As employees, we were often expected to respond to or regulate audience members’ complaints about each other — about people bringing in their own food, taking their shoes off, talking, laughing at inappropriate moments.”
Jon Dieringer, the founder of Screen Slate, which publishes daily film listings for New York and the Bay Area, as well as articles and reviews, had a slightly different view. “On the one hand,” he said, “you could say people have forgotten how to act at a movie theater. On the other hand, you could say people have forgotten how other people act at a movie theater.”
Social media, which allows scrollers to experience parts of a film as memes before they watch them unfold in a theater, may also prime people to find humor in scenes they wouldn’t have found funny otherwise, irritating some of the more serious film buffs in an audience.
The “laugh epidemic” — a term used by a movie theater spokesperson to describe the trend — going around in multiplexes and art houses may be more than a pesky annoyance. That audiences can be so divided on what scenes deserve a laugh seems in keeping with the widespread polarization of recent years. To some, that’s unsettling.
“There’s this desire to say we can all agree on something,” said Linda Ong, the co-founder and chief executive of Cultique, a consulting firm that advises media, tech and entertainment companies. “We don’t want to be having disagreements on the things that are supposed to entertain us, like we do with politics.”
In other words, audience members yearn for the more communal days when they consumed the same mass media together and shared more or less the same interpretations of it, down to the laugh lines. That’s partly because our media landscape has become fragmented, Ms. Ong said, and the shows and films we watch tend to be highly specific to our tastes thanks to platforms like Netflix.
“I think what you’re also seeing is the result of cultural confusion about how to read things,” she continued, “and almost a fear of having the wrong reaction to something.”
Viewers may laugh because they’ve encountered a moment of ambiguity that leaves them unsure how to feel — and find themselves hesitant to commit to any one reading of a film. Adding to the confusion is genre collapse, a hallmark of postmodernity, that has defined much art in the last 25 years, according to W. David Marx, a cultural critic and the author of “Status and Culture.”
But while longstanding categories like horror, comedy and romance have become less rigid, audiences may expect to find the old conventions still in force when they sit down in a theater, rather than a mash-up.
“When you live in a world in which these rules of genre aren’t as determined as before, people are going to go into films not knowing what they’re looking for,” Mr. Marx said. “We live in this genre mélange where the consumer is expected to enjoy things across the spectrum, and artists are not supposed to work in a single lane.”
“Babygirl,” for example, has been billed as an “erotic thriller,” which may have left some viewers uncertain of whether — and when — they should be laughing. In her review for Slate, the film critic Dana Stevens suggested that the movie was more of an “erotic comedy” — or, as she put it in a phone interview, an “erotic drama with some comedic touches.” The point, she said, is that “Babygirl” and other recent films are engaging with many genres at once.
“What’s ‘Anora’?” Ms. Stevens said. “Is it a screwball comedy? A romance? A sociological study about class? It’s all of those things.”
The directors of these films have said as much themselves. When asked about the divisive scene in “Anora” between Ani and the henchmen, the director Sean Baker said that he knew it would be something of an “experiment,” to see who was laughing and who wasn’t.
“I guess we all understood that this film was always going to be a mix of comedy and pathos,” he told Screen Daily. “And obviously what’s happening with Ani in that moment is extremely serious and threatening, and what she’s dealing with is actually quite traumatic. Yet at the same time it’s also an absurd moment.”
That scene in “Babygirl” that has Romy, the high-powered executive played by Ms. Kidman, drink a glass of milk at the bidding of her young boy toy, eliciting giggles from audiences? “I think it’s very funny, it’s sensual, it’s ironic,” said Halina Reijn, the film’s writer and director.
Annoyed moviegoers may be making incorrect assumptions about why others in the theater are laughing. Some audience members might be chuckling because something onscreen is funny ha-ha; others may be laughing out of discomfort, surprise, or recognition; still others might titter to convey that they understood an obscure reference. Or maybe laughter is just contagious.
“Sometimes I just hear someone else laugh and then it makes me think, maybe that was actually funny,” said Jordan Linekar, a manager for scripted and unscripted content at Paramount who sees movies in Los Angeles theaters about every other week. “Or sometimes people’s laughs are really unique, and I laugh at their laugh.”
In the book “The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience,” the author Julian Hanich, a professor of film studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, defines 10 types of cinematic laughter. “In the darkness of the movie-theater one can hear aggressive, nervous, degrading, evaluating, embarrassed, shocked, disgusted, irritated, or contagious laughter,” Mr. Hanich writes.
Such are the side effects of being a voyeur among strangers.
Though it may be a human response to laugh — and to laugh for lots of reasons — some say that laughter can allow a viewer to avoid engaging with a film in a meaningful way when things onscreen get intense. Ms. Coburn said she noticed that audiences lately struggle to suppress snickers when films deploy melodrama, as in those directed by David Lynch or Douglas Sirk.
“People don’t know how to respond to that kind of mode anymore, because it’s so in your face and so saccharine,” she said. “I think you’re robbing yourself of a really important part of life if you can’t allow yourself to be truly overtaken by a movie without mediating it with laughter.”
At the same time, audience members who shoot the evil eye at people who do not share their own reactions may also be missing out on something, said Mr. Dieringer of Screen Slate.
“Sometimes when movies try to make us feel a complicated range of emotions they’re susceptible to being misinterpreted,” he said. “But I think that’s part of the experience of seeing films in movie theaters, and feeling those emotions not just about the film but about the reactions of the people around you. I think that’s what makes film-going really exciting.”
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