The best seat in the house

None of us have been going to the cinema much for the past few years, because no movie is worth a dose of the fucking plague, but that loss of the communal thrill has been hard for everyone.

While it might take some time, we'll all go back there again, and we all have our favourite places to sit in their local temples of celluloid. I never really understood the tendency for movie audiences to crowd down the back, turning the big screen into a smaller thing, but I can't talk. Even after decades of serious film watching, I'm still not sure what's the best seat in the house. 

For years and years, I thought the only place to sit was the very front row of the cinema, with the big screen stretched out across the whole fucking world. It was the only real way to be fully immersed in the screen, and you could vibe out the audience. Even though you get that close it was easy to miss tiny details, because you'd have to physically move your skull to see some parts of the screen, but I use to enjoy seeing the grain of film, and every crack and whisper-thin hair on the print. 

It didn't always work out, especially when you were trying out a new movie house, and found the screen was unforgettably close and suddenly you're on your back up the front watching some stupid fucking thing like Warlock: The Armageddon, and getting nothing but a bad neck pain from it.

I steadily moved back over the years, and now think the fifth row from the front is the best place. If it's a new cinema where you don't know if your knees are going to be pushing against the screen, or a vast and hollow space with seats spread out generously across it, you usually can't go wrong with Row E.

It's still close enough to bathe in the glow of the big screen, and it certainly helps to not have a lot of people in front of you, because there's always less chance of some inconsiderate fucktard sitting on his phone for the whole movie.

There's always room for variations. I do still like sitting right up the very back when the big local theatres play film festival movies, because you're right at the top of a cavernous space and can have the sound booming across the void between you and the screen. And sometimes you just gotta sit wherever the fuck you can fit, especially with so many films spacing customers out.

The perils of parenthood mean I can't get to the movies as much as I used to, never mind the coronavirus. But if my church is cinema, I will always try to pray right up near the front, to get as close to it as I can, without breaking my fucking neck.