GODDAMNIT: Stop telling me theatre is better than cinema

Everyone has probably taken at least one drama class during their lifetimes – they’re quick, they’re easy, and they fill an elective credit. I took drama for all four years of high school, and I don’t regret it; it was relatively fun, the teachers weren’t bad, and the whole experience gave me a few easy A’s.

That said, however, there’s an intense, douchebaggy pretentiousness that seems to accompany any and every single drama scholar or fanatic, which I’ve never been able to shake. I still run into these types in college; the kinds of people who affirm, noses upturned, that the cinema, by its very nature, is a medium for amateurs who cannot appreciate the realism, the immediacy, and the nuance of the dramatic stage.

What a crock of shit.

Realism? At any time in your life, have you ever seen someone stand up and eagerly pace back and forth across a room whilst delivering a half-page monologue, waving their arms about spastically? Have you ever talked to someone only to have them look away as they respond, facing the nearest wall instead of your body? Really? Because ninety-nine percent of the plays produced on a yearly basis would have us believe that people actually do this. They’d also have us believe that people say everything they’re thinking, both to themselves and to their peers  -- theatre by its very nature is a medium of dialogue, primarily, so we’re shown a world where nobody shuts the hell up and are told to believe that this is the way people really act. Fuck that noise.

And yeah, there most certainly is an immediacy to theatre. That isn’t automatically a good goddamned thing. I saw a local production of Romeo and Juliet a year ago, and had the incredible lack of foresight to sit in the front row. My date and I -- and I’m not exaggerating -- were goddamned spat on at least twice during the performance by an overdramatic thespian who thought volume and spittle expulsion were a good substitute for actual talent. I don’t give a shit how much emotion you’re trying to infuse into a line; don’t sprinkle your audience with saliva. I went to see Shakespeare, not fucking Gallagher.

As for nuance, these drama kids are really talking out of their asses. Yeah, dialogue can have layer upon layer of meaning on it, but cinema has dialogue too; the claim that theatre as a medium is more capable of nuance than film suggests that the use of live lighting and mise en scene is somehow better than the subtlety afforded by the camera movement, editing, and other cinema-specific mechanics. But hey, who needs clever intercutting or subtle push-ins when we can hit half the stage with blue light and project some weird-looking silhouettes on the scrim, right?

I think the bullshit deification of the theatre arts comes from the fact that it’s pretty difficult to do. Every play has to be rehearsed over weeks and weeks, the sets have to be built, and every performance is live, so anything can happen. Simply because it’s hard to put on a play, drama teachers and theatre scholars therefore assume it’s intrinsically better. They resent the fact that anyone with a camera and a script can tell a story in a quicker, easier, and more efficient way, and so they bitch and moan about the loss of intelligence in the modern world in the face of cinema’s growing popularity. If you devote your entire life to something which you’ve expended an immeasurable amount of love and effort into, you get angry in your need to defend it.  Especially if it sucks balls.

You also get angry and pretentious and douchebaggy if nobody really gives two shits about what you’re doing, as is generally the case with theatre. Since no one goes to theatre anymore who isn’t directly involved with the whole drama scene (unless you’re a regular guy trying to show your girlfriend how deep you are, anyway), the theatre types become insulated in their own little world: years of masturbatory gladhanding and low ticket sales usually convince these guys that they’re the unsung heroes of the art world – cult heroes, fighting against a growing surge of idiocy in the form of filmed entertainment. It’s a bullshit, illogical, self-aggrandizing attitude which can only be eliminated when theatre becomes absurdly popular (which will never fucking happen) and therefore less cool.

This is why they all seem so goddamned happy with themselves when they’re on stage: it’s as if every line of shitty, overdramatic dialogue, every bit of exaggerated, unrealistic stage blocking, each serve as a single punch in a constant fistfight with the status quo. Nobody enjoys themselves in a theatre production more than the people onstage; how else could these otherwise vapid people find the pointless courage necessary to run from side to side onstage, projecting their voices as if they had epilepsy mixed with fucking Tourette’s Syndrome? Watching an inexperienced actor deliver a Shakespearean soliloquy is like watching an unusually strong mental patient masturbate in front of his caretakers; he’s the only one really getting anything out of the situation, and his witnesses are more or less powerless to stop him due to a mixture of their position and their own embarrassment about the whole situation.

Keep in mind that I’m calling these guys pretentious as a man who devotes a weekly article solely to the purpose of criticizing other people’s styles and social trends. We pretentious people can smell our own, and most theatre kids put me to motherfucking shame.  I’d envy them, if I didn’t want to punch them in the neck.

Outside of down-on-their-luck actors who need to pretend that they always loved theatre more than film in some half-hearted attempt at legitimacy, there’s no reason anyone should ever pretend that theatre, as a medium, is somehow better than film. It’s not outright bad as a storytelling form, but there’s nothing about it  -- save for those reasons drama kids love to make up and repeat to themselves ad infinitum -- to make it genuinely superior to the art of cinema. With that in mind, I suggest the following to every drama coach, and theatre kid I’ve ever met:

GODDAMNIT, STOP TELLING ME THEATRE IS BETTER THAN CINEMA.