Annoying Hipster Audience

I had an awful experience at a screening of one of the greatest films noirs ever made, Double Indemnity. It was at Doc Films at the University of Chicago, a film program that shows a wide variety of films. The film was great, as I remembered it, but the audience... The audience was filled—nay, infested with hipper-than-thou college kids.

Throughout the film, they laughed. Constantly. Admittedly, there are funny parts, which I think were intentionally funny. Combine the black humor of Billy Wilder with the hard-boiled dialog of co-screenwriter Raymond Chandler, working from a James M. Cain novel, and you have a recipe for some pretty dark humor. Especially funny are the first meeting between MacMurray and Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson's diatribe about how Dietrichson's death couldn't be suicide. I laughed along with them during those parts.

But these people laughed at everything: at the narration, at closeups, at musical cues, at just about all of the dialog. They laughed through the murder scene, which is so wonderful in the way the camera stays on Stanwyck's face. They laughed at the scene where Robinson becomes convinced that it was murder, and Stanwyck is hiding behind the door in the hallway (a door that had to be put on backward, opening out instead of in, so that Wilder could shoot the scene). They even laughed when MacMurray shot Stanwyck and laid her body on the couch.

You know the type. They greet the world with what they think of as ironic detachment. Everything is a joke to them. Every situation presents an opportunity for them to establish their intellectual superiority. They're incapable of meeting anything on its own level. Rather, they're incapable of letting anyone see them meeting anything on its own level. Individually, I'm sure that many of them would have enjoyed the movie in a manner respectful to the rest of the audience, but collectively, they had to put on a show for each other.