A Few Thoughts About Airplane Movies

In-flight, must be right

Years ago, jet lagged and bound for home, I settled into my economy seat and put on the first movie that came up alphabetically on the in-flight options—2001: A Space Odyssey. I napped for the next hour or so and woke up when the drink service began. As the flight attendant handed me a coffee, he looked at my seat-back screen, smiled, and then with sarcasm that his French accent pushed to disdain said, “as it was meant to be seen.” 

I looked around the plane. Everyone else was watching something with either Captain America or Will Ferrell in it. 

I’ve heard plenty of friends and fellow critics talk about “airplane movies,” but nobody seems to have the same definition. Sometimes the term means a movie whose only cultural legacy is that it appears on in-flight menus waiting for someone to be bored or curious enough to watch it. These movies do not exist on the ground. If the term is used positively, then it’s a backhanded compliment; the movie is one a viewer wouldn’t watch unless they were stuck in a metal tube with nothing else to do for a few hours, but once they gave it a shot, they found it more enjoyable than sitting in silence. It’s cinema’s version of Stockholm Syndrome.

The captive nature of a flight gives clearance to watch anything the airline offers, free of the need to keep up appearances. For almost a decade, this meant watching Marvel movies. After the 2001 incident, I noticed that, on every flight, most of my fellow passengers watched the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I joined them. I don’t know that I would ever have seen Tom Holland as Spider-Man if I didn’t have family overseas. The plane was a place to catch up on what had begun to feel like cultural homework. 

If a plane movie is homework, it can’t be a very challenging assignment. The cinematographical crimes of compressing Kubrick’s masterpiece to the size of a head rest aside, there’s something about a flight that pushes against the highbrow. The plane, like the airport, is a liminal space in society where typical rules don’t apply. Before every flight, I download a few titles on Mubi or The Criterion Channel to my laptop, but my aspirations remain in the overhead. The plane is a place where Fellini’s Satyricon is no match for a Shrek spinoff. Besides, I’m too nervous on a plane to watch something from my own device. Here I feel almost Victorian—what if there’s nudity, violence, or other visual strangeness that will make my seatmates call the steward? “Sir, Buñuel is for business class only.” 

As Marvel’s fortunes (and quality) waned, I noticed more passengers watching Oscar-nominated movies on planes, especially around winter holidays. This, too, is a type of homework: The Academy Awards are still the one time when a large audience pays attention to movies, and a well-traveled viewer can have an opinion on the proceedings. 

On my last trip, I played catchup, too. I watched Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which I’d been meaning to see since it was new but couldn’t find on a streaming service I subscribed to, followed by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, because I have a longstanding obsession with the Turtles as a cultural phenomenon (evidence here, here, and here) and because I was visiting my niece and nephew, who had told me they liked it. I’d read good reviews of each movie, and was pleasantly surprised at both. I regretted not making more of an effort to see them in theaters.

Both Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret and Mutant Mayhem reminded me of another type of movie experience—the second-run theater. This is how I saw most movies in the first half of my life, at a steep discount a while after they left the big multiplex. In my experience, this was the best way to see a movie. The buzz had died down, the ticket was cheap, and the ambiance was purely about the movie. There were no bored teenagers, no awkward first dates, no one looking for the cachet of the new. It was low stakes.

There’s little that’s enjoyable about flying now. The airports are a mess, ticket prices are maddening, and it seems like the baseline level of rudeness is a little higher (shameless line cutting abounds). But the mutual understanding that we can pass the next few hours together in silence, enjoying a movie we could’ve seen months ago, makes even a crowded plane feel like a comfortable social space.

Just be careful reclining your seat.