The Tragedy That Is the Death of the Small-Town Movie Theater

Where are our communal spaces?

One of the hardest things about growing up in a small town in the middle of nowhere — as I did, in my beloved hometown of Mattoon, Illinois, a place I still adore today — is that you don’t really get to leave. The comfort of having a home base, a universe whose mores and culture you grow up absorbed in and fully understanding, for better or worse, can be undercut by its inescapability. We had no museums in Mattoon, we had no college in Mattoon, we had hardly anyone in Mattoon who hadn’t grown up there. This is often the long and short of a small town: If it doesn’t exist there, it might as well not exist at all.

When you are young and hungry and ambitious and desperately curious about the world, like I was, like so many kids are, you look for any glimpses of the outside planet you can find. You look for that escape. And I found it at the movies.

Movies, Roger Ebert wrote, are a machine that generates empathy. Movies transport us to worlds outside of our own, to places we could never visit, to people we could never meet. They introduce us to cultures, to values, to parts of…