Eliza Janssen rails against the threats of bad timing, censorship, and social judgement when it comes to distracting oneself with an in-flight movie. Here’s why the sky is such an imperfect place to take in a film.
Picture this: you’re flying from, say, Sydney to London. That’s almost a 25-hour flight. You settle into your cramped middle seat, juggling that scratchy free blanket and pillow, already exhausted by the invasive bustle of airport security and check-in. Let’s be generous and say that you manage to sleep for a solid eight hours up front…how the hell are you meant to stay entertained for the remaining 17?
Your airline probably doesn’t offer Netflix, but if you did? You could watch The Irishman five times in a row. On a wee, dimly lit screen, brilliant dialogue heard through tinny headphones that barely drown out the numbing white noise brrrrrr of the cabin. Just as Scorsese intended!
Back in 2019, Marty begged viewers to watch his latest masterpiece anywhere other than their phones (“an iPad, a big iPad, maybe”, he kindly allowed). But I’d argue that in-flight entertainment is an even worse facsimile of the proper cinema experience. What is it that makes the chore of trying to enjoy some kino at 40k feet so difficult, so tiring, so utterly vibeless? Let’s break it down.
Flight Plan
Failing to choose the right mid-air distraction can start your long-deserved holiday or saucy lil business trip off on entirely the wrong note. If your flight’s any shorter than an hour or so, you’re 100% getting blue-balled out of seeing any film’s big climactic finish: better stick with a few chapters of your trashy airport book. Or just stare out the window at the existential majesty of the clouds and land below. Five stars and two thumbs up, an enduring classic.
On the other hand, you also don’t wanna waste a potential new fave film on the groggiest, stinkiest hours of your flight. Save that cerebral, challenging new A24 triumph for when you’re not being distracted by crying babies, pesky flight attendants trying to keep you watered and fed, and the stench of a hundred people’s recirculated farts.
Of course, there are some contingencies that simply can’t be predicted. Much like how your parents always happen to walk in when you’re watching the sole sex scene in any given film, pilots have a keen spidey sense for butting in with announcements just when your movie reaches its most pivotal, intense moment. I don’t care that we’re going down, Pilot Jeff!! I need to know that Air Bud wins the big game!!
Then again, you could always choose the right thing to watch by peeping on the screens of those around you…
For Your Eyes Only
I’ll never forget the moment when, during a 2019 flight, I stood up to shuffle to the bathroom and saw practically every single passenger screen playing the same Live Aid scene from Bohemian Rhapsody.
From where I was standing, it looked like roughly 80% of the strangers around me had plonked their bags in the overhead compartment, noticed the crappy biopic’s thumbnail highlighted on their screens as the top ‘New Release’, and all hit ‘play’ at the same time. It was a real glitch in the matrix moment, or, more cynically, a bleak embodiment of how human will is an illusion and all of us are mindless sheep preprogrammed to enjoy Rami Malek bouncing around in some fake Freddy teeth.
If you dare to watch something more risqué or graphic that the airline has, for some reason, included in their in-flight library, expect to feel like a social pariah. You might wanna watch a steamy 80s erotic thriller or torture porn schlockfest on your personal screen, but be put off by the possibility of the folks around you getting a graphic sneak-peek. I once tried to get clever by downloading my own entertainment, but shielding my laptop screen from the virgin eyes of my row mates, or any innocent, hypothetical kids seated behind me, proved too nervewracking. Nobody should expect to glance over at 13A’s lap and see the 1973 Danish sexploitation horror movie The Sinful Dwarf: I know that now.
“I’ve had it with these monkey-fighting films on this Monday-to-Friday plane!”
Finally, and in my mind most egregiously, the film you end up sitting through on a plane might not be the one you saw advertised and raved about on land—not in spirit, anyway. I’ve never seen what’s apparently the best bit of Kingsman: The Secret Service, since the swear-free version I watched in transit was heavily edited for graphic content. I’m not a huge fan of the movie, to be fair…but maybe I would’ve rated it better if I’d seen more than a well-dressed Colin Firth enter a church, and then exit it ten seconds later, covered in blood for some reason. Whuh?
On my most recent airplane viewing experience, I tried to watch both No Hard Feelings and Joy Ride: two well-reviewed raunchy comedies only recently out of cinemas, which were made entirely nonsensical by the airline’s censorious neutering. You’ll often get a pre-film warning that “this content has been edited from its original version for length” and/or “content”, but at which point are we just watching a Frankensteined botch job of something that was made to be shocking, transgressive, exciting?
The most famous example of this PG-ification is the above sanitisation of Sam Jackson’s iconic rant in Snakes On A Plane, replacing his catch cry of “motherfuck” with two bizarre substitutes that no English speaker has ever organically uttered. Which brings me to another question: how do films that are about planes—crashed, hijacked, disappeared à la Manifest, etc—get hacked up when they’re exhibited on in-flight entertainment? It’d definitely suck to fall asleep during Flight or an episode of Lost, and wake up seeing a terrifying prophecy of your vessel goin’ down.
For what it’s worth, QANTAS has said that none of their in-flight programming is ever edited or censored…save for footage of commercial flights crashing. Fair enough. And their Project Sunrise flights will apparently treat customers flying non-stop from East Coast Australia to spots like London and New York to schmick 4k OLED displays. Does the cinema of the sky then become preferable to watching something like, say, The French Connection on your dinky home TV, where Disney+ has snipped out some of that classic film’s most incendiary, graphic moments? Cinephiles might finally snap and book an international flight just to see their faves streaming somewhere, anywhere. And with a teeny cup of tomato juice as a free movie snack to boot.
My best advice? Watch something distracting but not too thinky; something you wouldn’t ordinarily pay money to go see or stream. If you’re travelling internationally, watch something from the country you’re visiting, as a sweet way to get started on your cultural immersion. And if all else fails, just recline your seat backwards directly onto some poor sucker’s kneecaps, and think about how you got privileged enough to whinge about the free entertainment offered with your insanely expensive ticket price.
