Seat on the Aisle Beats One on the Sofa

The end of the Bijou? And just when I’m eligible for the senior discount?

Ain’t that the way it goes.

As if my PMI -- Personal Misery Index -- weren’t high enough, now comes the disturbing prospect that moviegoing may fade to black as an American experience.

The threat, according to “Sixth Sense� director M. Night Shyamalan, comes from proposals to make DVDs available when movies open in the theaters. Those months of waiting for home viewing would vanish.

Some would cheer that news, but Shyamalan fears it would draw the curtain on something important: Americans going en masse to the movies.

I agree, and not just because I’m too cheap to buy a DVD player.

In ways that we seldom think or talk about, Shyamalan suggests, being part of a community of moviegoers is one of the social ties that bind.

Some may dismiss that as mush, but imagine other collective experiences. Imagine an empty Angel Stadium during a playoff game because everyone is watching on TV. Picture empty church sanctuaries across the country because all services are piped in to homes and we choose to forgo the crowds.

Obviously, both of those same-day options are already available and many people take advantage of them. Just as obviously, others opt for the communal enjoyment of being at the ballpark or the added enjoyment of worshiping in large numbers. And I think we’d all agree that society would lose something if those options weren’t available and everybody stayed home, and nobody went to the ballpark and nobody went to church.

That’s what Shyamalan seems to fear -- the expansion of a stay-at-home society where the masses no longer congregate to take part in something like the artistic experience of the movies.

Maybe he worries needlessly.

Studio heads once feared that television would kill the movie business. It didn’t, and perhaps having same-day DVDs available on people’s big-screen TVs won’t dry up the moviegoing scene, either.

Just like baseball and church, why not let people decide if they want to patronize the events with their attendance?

Why not let people decide for themselves if it’s not worth the trouble to leave the sofa when they’ve got a 60-inch plasma screen 10 feet away?

If that happened in large enough numbers, Shyamalan argues, theater owners would be out of business. He raised that prospect last week at a theater-owners convention, warning that the simultaneous release of DVDs would “crush you guys.�

He rightly sounded the larger theme that America also would lose something.

“Art is the ability to convey that we are not alone,� The Times quoted Shyamalan as saying. And while that sounds abstract on first reading, he went on to say that watching movies with others in theaters lets us “become part of a collective soul.�

Full disclosure: I’m as solitary as they come and fully appreciate the joys of not having a loudmouth sitting next to me at a ballgame or the theater.

But for those times when I want to be part of a crowd or experience a big game or a much-anticipated movie, what if there were no place to go?

Yes, it’s a hassle if I’m behind Tall Guy or near Chatmeister, but that’s offset by the times the audience laughs as one or cheers at the end.

I hate to date myself, but I’m conjuring up the image of watching “Jaws� in a theater full of people in 1975 -- after we waited in a line that stretched around the block -- and shrieking with the hundreds of others when the shark first appeared.

I’m not saying I celebrated that moment when it happened. I probably didn’t give it much thought.

But sitting here and imagining moments like that no longer being possible gives me the creeps.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at [email protected]. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.