Ah, the Odeon. Part of Birmingham film history, a shining beacon as you exit New Street Station – and always a mediocre time.

Oscar Deutsch’s monopoly of Odeons began in the Midlands, and has worked to manufacture art into a drained commodity ever since. The Odeon in Birmingham New Street is no exception, once being a jam-packed music venue until the late 1980s. Where once you could see The Beatles and Black Sabbath, you can now find an unknown stain and Sonic the Hedgehog 3. 
For me, Screen 7 in Odeon New Street represents the pinnacle of the Odeonic experience. Constructed in the early 90s, separated from the history of Odeon New Street’s other screens, I see Screen 7 as a site where movies fester; not fully dead, never lively. 

This zombified existence was confirmed to me while watching Halina Reijn’s Babygirl – a psychosexual saga of a CEO’s first steps into kink. The combined force of Babygirl’s sexual conversations and Screen 7’s anti-cinematic approach spawned some horrible mutation, both ugly and horribly real. I feel my experience as a whole is worth recounting a cautionary tale, both for Odeon New Street’s dingiest room and for the future of cinema as a whole. 

Unlike most movies I see, I feared expressing my direct interest in Babygirl – going alone felt like taking it seriously, and taking it seriously felt horrifying. A similar fear permeated Screen 7: only two (separate) people sat in the first four rows. Perhaps it was the BBFC-mandated 18 for Strong Sex that pushed people further back – to seem, perhaps, less interested in the concept they paid to see. 

The hesitance that on-screen sex causes in its audience is widespread, viral, uncontained to the dinginess of screen 7. It feels like a symptom of watching sex on the big screen that you (I) begin to analyse every disturbance:. every squeak of the chair, every cough, every rustle of popcorn, serves to expose each viewer’s choices. We yearn to escape the immersion of the sex scene, casting our feelings outward (laughing, chatting, looking around). Interruption is a key part of the cinematic experience, and the sex scene is perhaps its strongest proof. 

Screen 7 has its own, built-in interruptions – most notably, sewage pipes sprouting from front to back. Any titillating silences in Babygirl were accompanied by the faint trickling of unknown liquids (strangely enough suiting Cristobal Tapia De Veer’s score, itself littered with the abstracted noises of bodily functions).
The screen’s interruptions help foster an environment antagonistic to the movies the Screen displays. This is not cinema as spectacle, cinema as escape – this is cinema as a transaction of money and time. Like a hospital waiting room, or house party, the movie is just there – you can enjoy it if you want, but it’s not worth getting too attached to. Plenty of attendants took this memo, with a mild chatter continually underscoring the trickling pipes. A faint glow of phone screens similarly dotted the auditorium. 

One interruption stood out from the rest: from Babygirl’s opening scene (which finds Nicole Kidman and Antonio Banderas having rull-of-the-mill sex), one of the two attendants in the front row began… mumbling? Moaning? Grunting? Loud enough to notice, soft enough to remain indistinguishable, it was prime for the audience to target. This was no longer a movie about sex – this was a community-led silent debate on What To Do With the Front Row Moaner.

Mastubatory theatre experiences crowd the news cycles anytime they appear. From the infamous Emoji Movie Masturbator to A24’s promotion of the news buzz of a cinema stimulator in Love Lies Bleeding, Movie Theatre Masturbation tows the line between the grotesque and the fascinating. Their virality, like all fear mongering, threatens to turn a space of comfort into a constant risk; the cinema’s secrecy becomes a threat. It’s stories like these that help call for the social interruption of the sex scene: for its viewers to reiterate their awareness, at all times, of their context – of who they could be seen as. I played this game just as much, casting my own fears of alienation into those alone in the screen’s audience. 

Babygirl’s potential perpetrator interrupted beyond the sex scenes, constantly walking out of the screen, shaking his head, in a performance of “that’s it – I’ve had enough” (though his usual returns were more reserved, a confession – “you got me – I’m interested”). Leaving during my favourite scene of Babygirl – a scene where Harris Dickinson confronts Nicole Kidman to reassure the boundaries of her consent to a submissive position – our mystery viewer returned in time to see Kidman being – to put it bluntly – fingered. 

Here, red flags waved once more. The mystery mumbles resumed, building with Kidman’s moans, sending another chill across the room. Only this time, as Kidman’s moans increased, the mumbles clarified, into clear words:

“What are they doing? What is he doing to her?”

Slight relief, slight confusion – a wave of chat drifted through the auditorium. We were safe.

The only problem now? The questions wouldn’t stop. His repetitions – “why are they doing that?” – became their own problem. Whether a cover-up of his own feelings, or a naive call to the void of Screen 7 for assistance, we all refused to answer. 

The only solution to these beckons was a tactical counter-interruption, but to commit to shushing in this scene would be to confess: ‘I want to see Nicole Kidman moaning, I want to experience nothing but this’. Eventually, one noble Spartacus committed the sacrifice – a long, slow shush. 

Aghast! the brave act did not work. Still, the spirit of the attempt prevailed, and a hero delivered the striking blow: “Shut the Fuck Up?”.  Whether a question or a demand, the direct confrontation worked – right as silence resumed, Nicole Kidman had the best orgasm in her life.

While a triumph in every regard, this silencing served to reassert the boundaries of the modern cinema experience. Flittering conversations between friends remained throughout the remaining two hours; phone screens still glimmered like fireflies. The norm we returned to was, in reality, not far from the interruption of sex scene. My personal villain – the woman checking her phone every minute – carried on, uncaring, unimpeded. To demand a change in her would be to emulate Harris Dickinson: to try to be sexy by telling her what to do. She was, in that moment, immortal.

We seem to find ourselves, as a whole, more and more comfortable with resigning the cinema experience to these moments – to excuse interruptions if self-aware enough to eventually stop. A flickering phone screen triumphs over a continued glare. Fifteen 10 second conversations over a minute-long one.
I find it hard to convince myself to fight against these micro-interruptions in a space like Screen 7: that cold, damp atmosphere makes monsters out of us. The secrecy of the screen discussed in Roland Barthes’ ‘Leaving the Movie Theater’ is gone – we can now leave while still sitting down. It’s a fate worse than death for its movies, a dialectics before the film is done. 

While I can’t admit to any tragic feelings over “missing out” on an uninterrupted Babygirl, I do fear my experience’s implications – how many times do we let normalcy win? Will this infection find even our best, most independent cinema venues, until these unserious viewings take over? 
I left Screen 7 holding the door open for those who had turned my experience sour, almost toxic – but in the most mundane ways. I had been the submissive, dominated that night, not by a sexy young intern, but by the weight of an uncaring system of film-viewing. Unlike Nicole Kidman in Babygirl, I cannot blame my childhood, or ease this submission into my everyday life without a question of its societal implications. I must fight back, to pursue the orgasm of the perfect silence once more.