Everyone knows the embarrassment at laughing at the wrong time in a movie theater. When I watched Revenge of the Pink Panther on its first release in 1978, I roared with laughter at the trailer that preceded it announcing Ralph Bakshi’s forthcoming Lord of the Rings. Knowing Blake Edwards’s proclivity for parody, I assumed the trailer, which I should say in my defense showed not a single image from Bakshi’s film, was a fake. A cartoon version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic directed by the man who’d brought us Fritz the Cat (1972)? It’s still not surprising to me that I laughed so hard, though in retrospect it’s no more surprising that I was the only person in the packed theater who did. Everyone else in the theater, it seemed, turned to glare at me as if I’d escaped from a horror film.

Laughing at inopportune moments in movies reminds you that even if you think you’ve been watching the movie as a purely private experience, the rest of the audience constitutes a normative community that doesn’t include you. And this sudden sense of exclusion is a profoundly embarrassing experience that makes you want to say, “Just kidding! Who was that? It certainly wasn’t me!” Watching movies is ideally a communal experience that bonds each of us with a wider audience.

I first became aware of this when I took my son to a program of classic cartoons the year he turned three. The first film was Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). Every time something funny happened, like McCay throwing Gertie a pumpkin to eat that shrank in the distance to the size of a pea on her mouth, the audience would laugh, and then David would laugh, and then he’d turn to me and say, “What funny?” Over the course of the film, a highly distinctive rhythm gradually developed: first the audience would laugh at something; then, after a pause, David would laugh; then, after another pause, the people around us would snort in amusement over his delayed reaction. My takeaway from this experience, other than the resolve not to take David back to a movie theater anytime soon, was his recognition, even before he could understand the movie, that the people around him formed a community he really wanted to join, and the willingness of at least some of them to accept his unusual reactions to the experience not as a distraction but a bonus indicated that they really wanted to welcome him into the community.

If you wonder about the relevance of any of these anecdotes to movie-watching in the streaming age, when moviegoing has been largely superseded by movie-summoning, I’d remind you of a description attributed to Alfred Hitchcock of the scene in Vertigo (1958) in which Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) inexplicably vanishes from her hotel room in between the moment when Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) sees her from outside the hotel and the moment after he bounds up the stairs and discovers the room empty. Hitchcock reportedly called this an icebox scene, whose logical flaw he has said to have indicated “hits you after you’re gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox” (“Fridge Logic”). For Hitchcock, no movie experience was complete without the icebox talk between people who’d just seen the movie together and wanted to reflect on it or pick holes in it together after their initial immersion in its story. My wife and I have logged thousands of hours watching movies and television programs at home, but when she’s away, I never bother to turn on the television. In the absence of the communal experience promised by our icebox talk, what would be the point?

The history of different accounts of audiences’ reactions to fictional texts is largely a history of the growing acknowledgment of the importance of the differences among those reactions. Wayne C. Booth, who famously proposed the term “implied author” to describe the figure who “chooses, consciously or unconsciously, what we read; we infer him [sic] as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man; he is the sum of his own choices,” argued that “even the greatest of literature is radically dependent on the concurrence of beliefs of authors and readers” (74–75, 140). For Roman Ingarden, “when I understand a text, I think the meaning of the text. I extract the meaning from the text, so to speak, and change it into the actual intention of my mental act of understanding, into an intention identical with the word or sentence intention of the text. Then I really ‘understand’ the text” (32). Wolfgang Iser echoes Ingarden but moves further toward embracing multiple reading experiences when he proposes that:

the literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the esthetic: the artistic refers to the text created by the author, and the esthetic to the realization accomplished by the reader. From this polarity it follows that the literary work cannot be completely identical with the text, or with the realization of the text, but in fact must lie halfway between the two. (274)

All these theorists postulate single readers responding in isolation from each other, though their readings are presumably informed by the cultural presuppositions they share with other contemporaneous readers. The assumption that reading is essentially a solitary activity persists even in Claire Monk’s empirical analysis of heritage film audiences, which concludes with the assertion that “there is not a single, cohesive audience for period films—nor even for the narrower and more contested category ‘heritage films’—defined by neat, static boundaries or stable shared characteristics which distinguish it from the wider—and nominally more ‘mainstream’—film audience” (167). Even though she is discussing watching television programs rather than reading books, Monk still conceives of this experience as solitary rather than communal; the survey of 58 questions on which her research is based (184-92) includes no questions about whether respondents typically watch, or prefer to watch, heritage films alone or with others.

Kyle Meikle has encouraged scholars to devote closer attention to adaptations’ myriad audiences by asking, “What if—hypothetically—critics acknowledged different but equally tenable attitudes that adaptation audiences can take towards the adaptations they watch, read, or play?” (Meikle). In response, I’d propose ten different kinds of filmgoing communities. This list is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. Several of the communities I identify overlap with each other, and some are clearly more important than others for audiences of particular movies. But I hope the list will provoke further discussion of the wide possible range of specifically communal responses to movies.

1. The most obvious of these communities is one I have already noted: live communities in the moment of first experiencing a film that foster and depend on simultaneous responses that replicate each other. One of the most important reasons that filmgoers still go to movie theaters is the promise that they will laugh or sob or gasp or scream together with other like-minded fans whose reactions amplify and affirm their own. The goal of this audience is heartfelt and unqualified disagreement, and the stakes, as I’ve noted, can be high—not only for outliers who laugh alone in the theater, but for outlaws who violate the consensual decorum, which can vary a great deal from one audience to the next. Can you talk during a particular movie? Can you text? Can you check the time on your phone, or will its light be too distracting to the people around you? We all have our favorite hate-stories of social infractions at movie theaters. When I watched Run Lola Run (1998) during its first American release, the person behind me greeted every scene in which the heroine started running by confiding in her companion: “Look, she’s running again”—and because there were many such scenes, there were many such comments.

2. Stories like these remind us that not all audiences want to be swept off their feet into an immersive experience they share with those around them. Some audiences are more like flâneurs, browsers at a buffet who want stimulation but not immersion because they also want to pick and choose, and their primary communities, which may include the friends who phone and text them during the screening, are not necessarily the people sitting around them. We might say that the bonds among these flâneurs make them into communities of passersby whose commitment to their chosen communities is deeper than their commitment to any particular film or filmgoing experience.

3. Sometimes filmgoing really is a solitary experience—not because we’ve gone to the movies alone, but because we particularly want the rest of the people in the theater to ignore us. Historically, these anti-communities of one were most common at what used to be called adult theaters. The 1991 arrest of Paul Reubens, the actor best known for playing Pee-wee Herman, when he was caught masturbating during a triple bill of Catalina Five-0: Tiger Shark (1990), Turn Up the Heat (1988), and Nurse Nancy (1991) at the South Trail Cinema in his hometown of Sarasota, Florida illustrates the high risks involved if members of this anti-community were observed by legal authorities (Plunkett). Patrons of adult theaters never scanned the audience for familiar faces when they first arrived on the theory that sometimes the community that makes you feel safest and most accepted is the community in which everyone pretends not to notice everyone else.

4. The era of adult theaters came to an end with the widespread availability of Beta and VHS videotapes. As Greg Walters has noted: “With the release of the first VCRs in the mid-1970s, adult filmmakers saw an opportunity to tap into a new market of consumers eager for the convenience and privacy of watching films at home. […] In fact, it’s estimated that adult films accounted for as much as 80% of all VHS sales in the early days of the home video market” (Walters). Now that everyone’s who’s interested in watching porn is watching it at home—no longer on videotapes or DVD’s, but most likely online—it can assume a leading role in an active foreplay community for interested couples, and maybe trios and quartets, a community for which the experience of watching is merely a prelude to the more physically engaging experience they hope will follow.

5. Sometimes this experience unfolds when people rewatch a familiar movie together as part of a bonding community, sometimes nudging each other as beloved scenes approach, sometimes shouting or cheering at those scenes, sometimes interacting with the movie even more elaborately. Audiences in the know have developed a ritualistic script for reacting to repeated screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), showing up in the costumes their favorite characters wear, interpolating lewd questions and comments, throwing rice or toilet paper at the appointed moments, and sometimes bringing their uninitiated friends along with them so that they can invite them into the community in the know even as they make fun of them for still being less than full participants.

6. Sometimes a very different experience unfolds in sharing communities in which a friend or mentor shows a familiar movie new to someone else that’s not Rocky Horror specifically to encourage, watch, and comment on the newbie’s reactions. In conversation, John Alberti reported giving his film students the assignment of watching a movie with someone else, preferably a family member, and report on the resulting interactions. His satisfaction with this assignment indicates the importance sharing communities have in developing his students’ abilities to reflect on their own reactions and their ties to the other audiences who’ve joined them.

7. Although this last kind of community may sound marginal, it’s clearly distinct from all those immediately retrospective icebox communities Hitchcock is said to have noted, communities comprising two or more audience members who’ve just seen a movie for the first time together and want to use it not to educate each other but to learn more about each other and their own reactions. Icebox talks may well begin, as Hitchcock suggested, by picking holes in the movie that were obscured during their experience in the extended moment of watching it by their emotional reactions to gripping situations. Ideally, however, they lead to bonding agreements (“Yeah, that Southern accent was terrible”) or productive disagreements (“Yeah, I heard you laugh. Why did you think that was funny?”). In the days when movies were dating fodder, the goal of these discussions was to serve as laboratories that encouraged members of these communities of two to express themselves in ways that allowed them to get to know each other better. Awkward as it might seem to ask the date who’d just watched Citizen Ruth (1996) with you how they’d feel if the pregnant title character got an abortion, it would certainly feel more awkward if you skipped the movie, went out for dinner instead, and asked your date as soon as you’d finished ordering: “So how do you feel about abortion?” Now that my students tell me they don’t go on movie dates because dating isn’t really ‘a thing’ anymore, I suspect that much of this getting-to-know-you energy has been replaced by micro-communal affirmation. Couples and friends are happy to talk about the movies they’ve just watched not necessarily because they’re discovering that they share the same opinions but because they enjoy the camaraderie that comes from those instant shared memories, as if they’d taken simultaneous trips to different neighborhoods in the same tourist destination and wanted to compare notes.

8. Icebox communities who conduct more or less good-natured postmortems on the movies they’ve just seen can readily be distinguished from fan communities that allow like-minded audience members to share their passion, in person or online, in solidarity with other equally devoted fans. Arguments among serious fans about the motivations or backstories of Marvel superheroes can certainly be serious themselves—I’m sure they’ve broken some friendships among fans who couldn’t back down from their cherished beliefs about Black Widow or Tony Stark—but their goal is to bond fans by fostering a special kind of closeness that separates the fan community from outsiders who just don’t get it.

9. Moving still further from the filmgoing moment reveals critical communities that bring together audience members who are remote from each other in space and time. These communities typically involve power differentials that divide each community into listeners and speakers, from newspaper movie reviewers to podcasters to social media bloggers and vloggers who share the implicit claim (i.e. “I have the right to speak because I know something you don’t”). The information social media give the speakers whose platforms they provide about their listeners is mostly statistical (concerning how many followers you have, or how many of them approved or retweeted your last remark) and piecemeal, since speakers can only assess the comments their listeners bother to post. As a result, the conversations in these communities generally take the form of unidirectional monologues because most of these speakers have no more awareness than political candidates giving stump speeches of what their listeners think, and even less experience of who their listeners are.

10. The most notable exception to this model of one-way critical communities is classroom communities. Even though these communities are still marked by power differentials, at their best they urge every member of the community to listen and respond to everyone else, either in the moment or in written assignments later. Their ultimate goal is not to demonstrate, or even to get your students to demonstrate, that you’re providing the best possible interpretation of any given movie, but to develop more general skills that will improve the proportion of perceptive and useful things you’ll say the next time you’re talking about any movie, or really anything at all.

This schema may sound complicated. In fact, there are still further complications. The valence of communities in the moment can shift from moment to moment—for example, as couples watching a film together catch each other’s eyes, emerging momentarily from their immersion to assess what they’re thinking and how they’re reacting. Dana Burns told me that his wife watched French films with him, with the subtitles disabled for part or all of their running time, in order to actively help him learn French, in the process creating a community that doesn’t fit neatly into any of my ten categories. Laurence Raw, citing research by Sonia Livingstone and her collaborators (see Works Cited), argues that:

…the interpretive process was far more complicated in the information age. This process comprised four elements: information literacy (the ability to gather information, evaluate and communicate it to others); visual literacy (enjoying and deconstructing visual cultures); digital literacy (the ability to navigate in hypo-textual and convergent media; and multimodal literacy (an intercontextual approach to textual production)… Acquiring such literacies requires substantial content analysis as well as an understanding of the social, technical, and cultural milieus that a user inhabits. (Livingstone et al. 213, 214, qtd. in Raw)

Most classroom communities, even when none of our students are consulting their cellphones, are in fact myriad communities that include lectures, discussions, small-group exercises, and individual exchanges. Most teachers become adept at shifting seamlessly between these communities, and a great deal of this shifting is reactive rather than planned beforehand. In conversation, Erica Moulton has raised questions even about the different classroom communities fostered by different arrangements for the screening of movies. Scheduling screenings during each class, in separate time slots before each class, as an online group activity, or as assignments to be fulfilled outside class at students’ convenience changes not only the experience of watching the movies, but the experience of discussing them afterwards.

Although we form communities around movies of any sort, whether or not they’re adaptations, questions about the communal experience of moviegoing have a great deal to offer adaptation studies. Linda Hutcheon has defined the purview of adaptation studies as including three topics: the process of creating adaptations, the products created by this process, and the process of receiving adaptations as adaptations (7–8). Just as the second of these topics continues to dominate the field, the first has come to play a much larger role than the third. Reflecting on the communal experience of moviegoing can unlock new perspectives on the ways adaptations deliberately seek to create adaptive communities from like-minded, or at least mutually respectful, audiences even when the adaptations in question are not movies. What makes these communities adaptive is not that they’re all watching adaptations, but that they’re themselves subject to change, open to change, and defined by change. So studies of audiences’ experience by Ingarden and Booth and Iser are limited by the assumption that these audiences are atomistic and unchanging. The study of adaptation should include not only the study of texts that adapt, but the study of communities that adapt as they react to texts of any sort.

Many of these transitions may seem too obvious to require further study. Of course the perspective of second- and tenth-time viewers will change as they become more familiar with every detail of beloved films or share them with newcomers; of course people will talk differently about movies in classrooms than they do in their cars on the way home; of course fans will act differently when they’re actually watching the latest superhero movies than when they attend ComicCon. By the same token, some of these communities are likely to be mutually exclusive. The experience immersive communities and flâneurs seek from movies is not only so different but so directly opposed that they typically end up looking down their noses at each other. Masturbators seeking anonymity during the screenings of porn films will enjoy a very different experience from audiences who use these films as foreplay, saving themselves for the more communal pleasures they hope will follow. But most popular and academic discourse about moviegoing takes off from the assumption that the audience’s experience is rooted in an expectation of immersion during their first exposure to any movie and that any deviation from that experience (and the more disinterested or analytical experiences that follow) is precisely that—a deviation.

One limiting case is particularly instructive in this regard: the experience of authors watching movies based on their stories. Writing about Stephen King, Andrew Scahill observes:

There is an undercurrent of Frankensteinian anxiety in King’s early work about losing control of one’s progeny—an alter ego in The Dark Half (1989), a repaired automobile in Christine (1983), a child in Firestarter (1980) and Pet Semetary (1983). This author anxiety is writ large in Misery (1987), as King stand-in Paul Sheldon must reckon with “number-one fan” Annie Wilkes, who imprisons him and forces him to adapt his own novel according to her vision. In 1997, King would option a TV miniseries of The Shining more faithful to his original novel, arguably an attempt to reclaim meaning for a lost text. How do we conceptualize this act in the landscape of adaptation studies without thinking of the audience? What does it mean for the literary author to become an audience to her/his own work and to find it unrecognizable? (Scahill)

No matter how marginal King’s position is to the experience of most audiences for Misery or The Shining, Scahill’s questions suggest that King, frustrated when he felt excluded from the audience for Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of The Shining,reacted by attempting to adapt to new subject positions, new ways of reading and thinking about his own fiction. Audiences who are not King expect to make routine transitions from some communal audiences to others. Dating couples and students watching films for a course prepare more or less consciously to make these transitions to icebox talks or classroom discussions. But at any given moment in this transformational process, we identify ourselves as members of stable and cohesive, if not always coherent, communities. Solid as they may seem at any given moment, adaptive communities, like adaptive texts, are fluid. Nor are this solidity and cohesion merely illusory. Adaptive communities are defined by both their cohesion (except of course for the anti-community of masturbators) and their embrace of change. If all this sounds familiar, it’s because this is exactly how Hutcheon describes adaptive texts, which invite our productive oscillation between inhabiting and analyzing them, seeing them as both their own selves and as derivations.

Nor is the adaptiveness of audience communities a special case, for communities of any sort, proudly as they may boast of their endurance, are mutable. Much as we may hate to admit it, friendship circles and religious congregations and sovereign nations all have lifespans and undergo inevitable transformations into communities that may be as unrecognizable as Stephen King found Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. We do well to be mindful of these transitions and plan for them, just as we’d plan for elder care for our aging parents or ourselves, even as we continue to identify ourselves with communities we hope will endure for as long as we need them. Adaptive communities teach us that since change is inevitable, we should accept it, prepare for it, and embrace it, and that we should take due time to celebrate the adaptiveness of texts, individual audiences, and communities.

If audience communities, like all communities, are constantly adapting, their mutability raises several questions about specific adaptive transitions. My own scholarly and pedagogical interventions in adaptation studies strive to create communities, sometimes seeking to form these communities through a consensus of opinion, sometimes through shared questions that help us explore differences of opinion. What is, or should be, the relation between scholarly and pedagogical communities? The first typically encourages spontaneous, simultaneous, shared reactions; the second actively cultivates debate as well as, or instead of, shared belief. If successful scholarly and pedagogical communities oscillate between “normal” periods of consensus within a given shared paradigm and more turbulent periods marked by a “paradigm shift” between the hitherto accepted paradigm and the challenger apparently required by the discovery of new data the old paradigm cannot account for (Kuhn 10, 85), is there an ideal or normative relationship between these two impulses?

More generally, is there a master trope of adaptation comparable to what I’ve come to think of as the master trope of criticism—the word “we” that appears in the sentences about what “we all believe” that begin so many scholarly essays, which seek to end by demonstrating that we don’t or shouldn’t really believe those things after all? Are these two master tropes the same? Is disavowal, which is clearly at the heart of criticism in the humanities, at the heart of adaptation as well? Is experiencing adaptations as adaptations a necessarily critical response? Is it a necessary prelude to criticism? How does doing criticism add to or otherwise change what Kamilla Elliott calls “doing adaptation” (71)?

Since the phrase “adaptive communities” refers not only to communities watching adaptations, but more importantly to communities that adapt themselves to different circumstances, how does the consensual community of the movie theater transform itself into the icebox community that delivers quick takes on the raw material of the movie? How does that community transform itself into a critical community that prizes expertise? And how does that critical community transform itself into a classroom community that prizes learning and rewards sharpened critical skills? The limited research I’ve encountered on the relation between teaching and academic writing generally assumes that teaching comes first: it’s a staging or rehearsal area in which to test out the more considered opinions we’re willing to write about. How might we think differently about writing and teaching if we questioned this sequence and thought of writing (e.g., of outlines or class notes) as a preparation or rehearsal for the much more adaptive, and adaptation-heavy, practice of teaching? In short, which of our many adaptation communities do we prize most highly, and what are we willing to do to express and promote the values we find there?

This last series of questions raises one final question: is there any space that welcomes and actively fosters all of these adaptive communities? Very tentatively, I’d suggest that there is indeed such a space: academic conferences, where all ten of these possible communities are available to participants:

1. Most of us expect to react as part of a consensual group to screenings, PowerPoint stills, clips, and laugh lines.

2. Many of us enjoy touristy conference sites like Paris or New Orleans as flâneurs, passersby, or browsers more interested in the destination than in the conference.

3. Many of us take notes on particular presentations that we plan to keep private until we’re ready to publish our reactions to them.

4. Many of us deliver preliminary reports on our research that serve as foreplay or warmups to those essays.

5. Most of us hope later to bask collectively in our memories of movies we’re all familiar with.

6. Many of us plan to introduce unfamiliar movies to colleagues we hope will find them rewarding.

7. All of us take pleasure in bonding with friends in the social spaces conferences provide.

8. Most of us identify ourselves individually and collectively as acafans of adaptation, even if we don’t use that term, sharing our opinions and passions.

9. All of us present ourselves as authoritative speakers and receptive listeners to presentations.

10. And all of us inevitably negotiate our authority and our takeaways during the discussions that follow, staging areas in which we assert or practice or rehearse that authority.

It does not follow, of course, that any conference will succeed in promoting all these communities, or that every conference is invested in all of them. The Literature Film Association had broken with the Society for Cinema and Media Studies back when it was still the Society for Cinema Studies over a theoretical and methodological orthodoxy that it saw as amounting to intellectual hegemony. When a friend of mine told me a few years ago that he’d stopped attending conferences of the Association of Adaptation Studies because everyone agreed with everyone else, I was highly sympathetic, not because I felt that way myself, but because if I had, I would have stopped coming too. And despite my fond memories of the Popular Culture Conferences I’ve attended, I’m unlikely to return because its big tent is simply too big to foster productive discussions, although I found its many sub-communities, from Detective Fiction to Pornography, welcoming. My final point is not that any of these conferences is prima facie superior to the others, but that they illustrate distinctive approaches to community building and that, at their best, they do not simply anticipate but nurture the later communities on which our work depends.