You’ve just spent 90 minutes seated in a room experiencing a piece of art that you know in your bones was truly magnificent. When the show ends, by the time your brain puts together the words to represent an intellectual understanding of how special it was, how unique, your body has already reoriented your limbs and you find yourself, inexplicably, on your feet.
You realize after the fact that everyone around you is standing too. You see the performer seeing all of you, taking it all in, and you’re pretty sure it really means something to them. You clap a little louder. You discreetly dab at your eyes, hoping no one notices. Your face hurts from smiling. As you leave the theater, the crowd is reduced to monosyllables: “Wow! Just… wow.”
But standing ovations don’t go that way anymore.
On Broadway, they’re practically table stakes. Some people in the orchestra do stand up to applaud—they’ve paid such exorbitant sums for their tickets they’d do anything to convince themselves they picked a winner. Once they’re all standing down in front, the ovation crawls to the back of the hall one row at a time. The people want to see the curtain call, which was carefully orchestrated to prolong precisely this response.
At the Cannes Film Festival, standing ovations are painstakingly timed and artificially extended. Although filmmakers can end them at any time, and some do, a longer ovation is promoted as the sign of a better movie. (Pan’s Labyrinth holds the record for 22 minutes in 2006. Last year, Sentimental Value got 19.)
Audiences have been trained by Broadway and the West End. They’ve been trained by press coverage upholding the Hollywood glitterati as arbiters of taste. They’ve been trained by social media to prioritize alignment with public consensus over their own experience of art.