BREAKDOWN ROUNDUP 2.18.26
Dead theaters, nuclear terror, metastasizing QAnon
My local Laemmle theater died. If you’re not from around here, Laemmle is the storied sort-of arthouse theater chain dotted around LA County. ‘Sort of’ because the arthouse format clearly didn’t work at their Claremont location. Over the course of 18 years, I watched a business struggling to adapt its programming to local tastes. For the last decade, the theater was merely another place to see big Hollywood films and Oscar bait. Film fare that drew Angeleno cinephiles—the Laemmle Playhouse 7 in Pasadena once celebrated ‘the Iranian Woody Allen,’ whoever that is—would’ve drawn crickets inland.
I have 18 years’ worth of weird little memories from this place. There was the time a man started violently snoring behind me (2008’s The Class), and the night a movie filmed in my neighborhood bored me unconscious (2018’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot). There was the night a literal cricket drowned out the film (2010’s The Ghost Writer), and the time the entire theater stank of shit (2015’s Tomorrowland; when the lights went up I realized it was on my shoe). I learned of a suicide in the theater’s lobby while taking a break from 2010’s Blue Valentine. I remember leaving the theater after watching 2008’s W two weeks before the election, digesting all the horror of GW Bush’s now-quaint presidency; when I turned on the car radio, I’d momentarily thought Obama had been shot. Over the years, the cinema tried to remake itself into a communal space, with revival shows and Q&A sessions. But many of my best memories from this Laemmle are of watching films in completely empty theaters. In hindsight, that seems like a clue to its closure.
Two years ago, I glimpsed a vision of how theaters could work as communal spaces. I caught a showing of Inside Out 2 (a worthy sequel) at the AMC Causeway at the Garden 13, in Boston’s West End, after receiving a large edible from ZypRun, a weed service I’d QR’d off a trashcan. A neat thing happened during the credits. The lights came on, but only as the twilight they use for pre-trailer advertisements. Everyone stayed seated, murmuring and checking their phones, as we all waited through ten minutes of names for any final post-credit Easter egg scenes. It was a vision of an alternate form of cinema, one where the theater was a comfortable public square where people can hang out and eat junk food and talk amongst each other; theater as civic space.
That’s not my prediction for movie houses, partly because I don’t see there being any movie houses 20 years from now (former Disney CEO Michael Eisner repeated this same timeline just two days ago). Instead, theaters may well evolve into interface metaphors, the same way telephone handsets and floppy discs survive as digital desktop icons today. In this future, “going to the movies” would be an immersive, three-dimensional skeuomorphic experience. These virtual theaters, accessed through AR, VR, or XR eyewear, would look indistinguishable from their brick-and-mortar ancestors, but would allow complete audience control. This experience could be communal, like the weird scene I saw in Boston. It could be a place where friends could talk openly without bothering other audience members. If these friends don’t like the movie, a quorum could instantly move to a different virtual theater, one that shows the same film with a different language, or cast, or ending.
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Although predicting anything 20 years from now feels iffy. AI 2027—the collaborative doomsday scenario predicting superhuman, existential threat artificial intelligence by late next year—could be off in its timeline, but the framework for AI-assisted human annihilation remains frighteningly plausible. Reading about AI developments, I frequently get the impression that the world will end before I hit 60.
Then again, I spent much of my adolescence convinced I’d never live to 20. Throughout Ronald Reagan’s first term, nuclear war loomed as an inevitability. Reagan believed in a Biblical Armageddon he himself had the means to execute. The Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in September 1983—the month I started high school—felt like a prelude to that Armageddon. I’ve met very few people who remember the fear of that week, which seems in keeping with the general erasure of nuclear terror from collective memory. I’ve written before about the profound unforced error of climate activists claiming global warming is, to quote Greta Thunberg (and paraphrase Bill McKibben), “the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.” But it’s taken me a while to recognize how fucking livid it makes me that even the memory of that fear in the early 1980s has seemingly evaporated in the space of two generations.
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This is emotional semantics, not rational thought, which feels appropriate for early 2026. All this week, I’ve watched posts on Instagram lamenting that the Epstein files have made QAnon-ers of everyone. But, of course, I no longer know how much of the real world is being tailored into the ideological bubble of my own feed. Or which posters are even human.