First Madagascar, then Venice. We stopped by MI5, picked up some drinks and headed to the casino. But suddenly a fight broke out, gunmen appeared, and we all dropped to the floor. Not my average Friday evening.
I recently became one of 120,000 to experience Secret Cinema’s Casino Royale. It was a thrilling evening: a secret location, black tie and special missions, culminating in an immersive showing of the film, complete with live actors and pyrotechnics. It’s a format that has soared in recent years, perhaps because it consciously offers something not digital. Phones are sealed away and people have to interact. Instead of immediate and constant information, it offers secrets. And instead of a ‘purely digital experience’ it offers ‘touch’.
The experience of connection
Dutch missionary J.H. Bavinck wrote of Five Magnetic Points – five recurring areas in which every religion suppresses truths about God and replaces them with something else. What if we apply them to Secret Cinema?
We could take Bavinck’s concept of Norm to question the anti-Brexit stance of Secret Cinema’s Moulin Rouge or the Need for Deliverance to understand Secret Cinema as a means of escapism. For now we will focus on what he calls the Experience of Totality: that one can feel both ‘unimaginable insignificance and matchless greatness’ when connected to something bigger. It’s an experience of connectedness that brings ‘indescribable joy’, and yet ebbs away leaving ‘a sense of having been abandoned, a sense of loneliness’.
True connection to others is what digital culture promises, yet fails to deliver, so Secret Cinema offers its solution. As thousands gather, a bond is formed through the sharing of a ‘real’, multi-sensory experience that, much like a music festival, gives the individual a sense of significance in belonging to something greater. Yet Secret Cinema offers significance in two further ways: first, the individual is let in on the ‘secret’; second, they are transported into a story of fast cars, wealth, heroics, and beauty. It gives them an addictive joy that makes some want to come back again and again:
‘@secretcinema changed my life! Happy I came back a third time thanks to all the amazing people involved I will miss it forever #societyoflove’
The aftertaste of loneliness
However, the experience doesn’t last. Live Cinema researchers Kennedy and Atkinson talk about the concept of an ‘experience community’: ‘In our analysis of these events, this “experience community” is notably shallow and fleeting’. They talk of a residual online community after the event, but ‘once the run concludes … all public evidence of the “experience community” dissipates’. As Bavinck writes, the experience of significance and connectedness doesn’t last and when it’s gone there’s just loneliness. One blogger captures this feeling: ‘The highs you feel while you are there are literally euphoric and that is also why the lows you feel the following day are so hard to deal with.’
Where digital culture failed to give real connection, Secret Cinema ultimately fails as well. In a way, cinema has always tried and failed. So they added colour, sound, 3D and now ‘Live Cinema’, all to recapture that space between reality and performance into which the audience can escape and find connection in something bigger. But a couple of hours later, real life returns.
The source of true connection
There is a better story than Secret Cinema – Jesus’ story. His story is not here today, gone tomorrow. His story is not fanciful escapism but real-life drama: the greatest villain versus the greatest hero. And His story can become our story. For in Christ we find connection to God – the story of orphans finding a home in His family. And in Christ we find connection with each other, and with it support, friendship, enjoyment. What greater significance and belonging could there be?
Loneliness is a growing problem in our society, with young people feeling it the most. Maybe that explains why Millennials now place more value on experiences than goods. But experiences are a lousy saviour; what our young people need is Jesus. Then once true connection has been found in Him and His church, Secret Cinema is set free from a burden it cannot fulfil, and there need not be that crushing feeling the morning after.
