A 34-year-old Los Angeles man was arrested Monday after he pepper-sprayed a fellow moviegoer approximately 40 minutes into a screening at the AMC Burbank 16 — because the other patron was using his phone — and the internet responded by declaring him a hero, an icon, and possibly the cinematic experience's last line of defense.
Matthew Ware was booked on suspicion of misdemeanor battery and released. He is reportedly at home, presumably resting comfortably, and possibly already planning his next outing.
The incident unfolded during a screening of the Andrew Garfield film "The Uprising" — which is, incidentally, a title that now carries some additional resonance given the events that followed. According to witness Joe Rodriguez, who shared the story to a Reddit forum for AMC loyalty members and watched it accumulate tens of thousands of likes in under 24 hours, Ware noticed a man several rows away using his phone with the screen brightness kept low. Ware asked him to put it away. The man, by Rodriguez's account, declined and "got smart" about it. Ware then deployed an aerosol canister with the decisive commitment of a man who had already done the cost-benefit analysis. Two other moviegoers reported irritation from the spray and were treated at a hospital. The phone user's status was not reported. Ware was found in the lobby by other patrons who chased him and by police who arrested him shortly after.
"The thing that stuck out the most was him saying that the guy on the phone 'got smart' with him. This was just a guy who was frustrated and lashed out because a guy was being rude at the movies." — Joe Rodriguez, witness, to NBC News
Rodriguez's read — that Ware was "just a guy who was frustrated and lashed out" rather than a self-defense situation — did not prevent a significant portion of the internet from responding as if he had single-handedly solved the crisis of public civic decay. "He did what we all wanted to do," was the representative comment genre, along with various takes involving theater lobby statues, national holidays, and whether the charge should be upgraded to a commendation. The irony that the initial viral reporting of the incident almost certainly involved many people looking at their phones while sitting in their own homes — or possibly in a movie theater — was not broadly acknowledged.
The Burbank incident arrives at a fraught moment for the movie theater industry's relationship with mobile devices. Alamo Drafthouse — a chain whose entire brand identity was built around an aggressive no-phones policy that ejected violators without refund and turned those ejections into marketing — reversed course earlier this year and began requiring patrons to use their smartphones to order food and drinks during screenings. The backlash was immediate and sustained. If Alamo Drafthouse cannot maintain a no-phones standard without abandoning its own flagship policy, the implicit argument goes, then the social compact against phone use in theaters may require... alternative enforcement mechanisms. Matthew Ware should not be those alternative enforcement mechanisms. But he is apparently the ones we are getting.
AMC Theatres has a published policy prohibiting phone use during screenings and requiring patrons to set devices to silent mode. The policy is displayed in pre-show messaging before every film. Its enforcement mechanism does not currently include chemical deterrents, though based on online reception to this incident, several commenters have suggested this gap be reconsidered. Matthew Ware faces a misdemeanor battery charge. The film he was attempting to watch, "The Uprising," stars Andrew Garfield and had received generally positive reviews before the September 15 screening introduced a subplot that was not in the original script.
The correct answer to in-theater phone use is not pepper spray. Matthew Ware was wrong to deploy a chemical irritant in an enclosed space because another patron annoyed him. Two people were treated at a hospital. These are not outcomes a reasonable society endorses. What the internet's reaction reveals — with 35,000 likes in 17 hours — is not that Ware was right, but that the experience of attending a movie theater has become so reliably degraded by phone use that tens of thousands of people's first instinct was sympathy for the man with the canister rather than the man with the phone. That is the actual news here. Matthew Ware was wrong. The movie theater experience that produced him is also wrong. These things can be simultaneously true.