On April 4, I texted my coworker – we’ll call him Kyle for anonymity’s sake – on Sling: “Don’t close early at Highland, my friends and I are coming at 9:45pm. Thought I’d warn you.” This message was written with the naive hope that the theater would close early on the opening night of “A Minecraft Movie”, as if — by some miracle — every teenage boy in Highland Park would forget that the long-anticipated film was releasing that Friday evening.
I arrived at 9:20 pm, which I thought would be overkill, to find a line snaking out the door and down the sidewalk of Cleveland Avenue. During my four months working at Mann Theaters’ two 92-year-old locations, I had never seen more than five customers come in for a 9:45 pm showtime. Judging by the deer-in-headlights look on his face, I suppose Kyle had never witnessed a witching hour deluge quite like this either. His concessioner – let’s call her Alice – scrambled to prepare popcorn orders while being pelted with scorching hot kernels flying out of the popper that should have been cleaned and dried three hours prior.
After about a half hour in line, we finally found our seats. During previews, I felt morally obligated to help Kyle and Alice with the overflowing trash cans and untidy women’s room while off the clock.
The movie was bad – read the critique in a recent edition by Colette Lawler ’27*, who saw the film alongside me. As the rain of popcorn and freeze dried Warheads fell upon my lap, I learned what the future held for me in tomorrow’s shift.
With three weekends of cleaning trashed “Minecraft” auditoriums behind me, I can firmly say that I despise this movie. On a technical and artistic level, it’s creatively bankrupt, nauseating and narratively aimless. “Chicken jockey,” shouted by Jack Black exactly one hour, 10 minutes and nine seconds after the film begins, has been seared into my brain for the rest of my life. On a deeper level, the global rollout of this film and its seizure of the cultural zeitgeist are a Rosetta Stone for understanding young people today.
From the outside, it seems like yet another case of today’s youth being stricken by frivolous, and potentially dangerous, social media trends. Or, in taking a historical materialist approach, perhaps Minecraft Mania is simply an echo of the behaviors of previous generations. It’s Zoomer “Rocky Horror Picture Show”. It’s a call-and-response movie, an instant cult classic.
… Or maybe not. The film is widely successful, unlike most cult films – “Donnie Darko” and “Fight Club” were complete financial failures upon release – and “A Minecraft Movie” is well on its way to earning a total of $1 billion worldwide. Minecraft has cross-generational appeal and big-ticket celebrities attached. Its marketing team crafted a perfectly irritating yet quotable trailer to create TikTok sound bites and an ironic appeal for the film.
That being said, does its massive popularity despite its artistic shortcomings imply that kids these days are stupid?Are they bad at watching movies, if there is such a thing? Are they too irony-poisoned to be able to confront art genuinely?
Informed by my own experience as a movie theater employee and a fan of sociology, I argue that these kids and young adults are craving community. With each generation, we are moving further away from a world where our only means of connection was interacting with others in person or through non-instant messenger systems. The mobile telephone took remote household-to-household communication out of the home. Text messaging came too, but was then mediated by memes and reference comedy. Today, many young people rely heavily on the coded language of internet humor’s collective conscience.
Young people are united by the things they recognize from scrolling abrasive content at breakneck speed for hours on end. “A Minecraft Movie,” in addition to being an IP as recognizable and culturally ubiquitous as Mario, is just another thing from their phones.
In these ways, the stars aligned for Minecraft to provide an opportunity for youth to coexist in a space that is for them and influenced by them. Encouragement from profit-centered theater corporations, such as Regal, to “go wild” at select screenings only increased the burden on minimum wage theater employees to act as a food fight janitor, babysitter and security guard in addition to their standard duties. Warnings on doors were fruitless.
It’s important to note that, while I hate the film and what it stands for (which is profiting off of often underpaid employees** and socially starved children), I do not hate the kids trashing theaters. These children grew up in an isolated, hyper-individualized world that shames the genuine and valorizes emotional detachment. I understand them. I mentioned “Rocky Horror” previously because the heavy audience participation among its fanbase has resulted in some of my most cherished moviegoing experiences. Yes, it’s annoying to calculate the exact moment the “chicken jockey” scene will happen so that I can monitor the theater like a cop at a high school dance. No, we do not want trashing theaters to become the new normal.
Yes, we should support theater employees who may have to adopt new social roles to keep theaters safe and enjoyable. For all of this, we need a “yes, and” approach — as corny as that sounds — because we cannot punish the next generation for the predicament we have crafted for them. They yearn for a third space to be a kid and connect to other kids over a common interest. Without arcades or walkable neighborhoods, young people today are left without a sense of community, belonging or the purpose that can be derived from such values.
“A Minecraft Movie” is bad. It represents worrying trends in art and our social well-being. However, perhaps it can be read as an indicator of such things – as an opportunity to respond to this plea for help. Young people have not been taught to express their feelings candidly. Their desires for a better world may expressed instead in their actions: by a bored youth throwing a stick of butter at a stranger’s head because of his desire to release energy and be appreciated by his peers; by a child trying to film the “chicken jockey” moment to show the ensuing antics to their friends for a laugh; by participating in the trend to feel like they are a part of something greater than themselves.
*Colette Lawler is a Web Editor for The Mac Weekly
**Disclaimer: This does not reflect my feelings toward my own employer, Mann Theaters, but is instead critical of other theater chains, such as AMC, Regal or Marcus Theaters.
