There is a disease in the heart of cinema, and that disease is the Q&A. More cinemas are putting them on than ever, partly as a response to the rise of online streaming, in order to “add value” to their offering – and audiences are lapping it up. Q&As with directors and cast sell out in minutes to people consumed with a burning impulse to ask why there are no nice characters in the movie, or what it was like to film all those hot scenes. Why? Who would willingly put themselves through this hell? When will we wake from this nightmare?

Imagine if other art forms enacted the same depressing, bathetic rituals as film-makers do with the Q&A. If, at the end of a gig, the lights came up and Dave Grohl and the rest of Foo Fighters came back on stage to sit on stools and take a few softball questions about lyrics and feedback from Lauren Laverne, before a microphone was passed into the crowd for concert-goers to ask why I’ll Stick Around was omitted from the setlist, or if the band have any words about the passing of David Bowie.

The Q&A is a sorry staple of literary festivals of course, but imagine if everybody in the audience had only just finished reading the book, at exactly the same time, with no intervening period in which to formulate a decent, critical response to the work. The Q&A is that rare addition to the filmic experience that diminishes it wholesale. No amount of charm or film knowledge can rescue a moderator ambushed by one of the types who routinely turn up at Q&As. There’s the Incompetent, who begins asking a question before the microphone is handed to them mid-question, so that all the audience hears is, “… and I just wondered if you have any thoughts about that.” There’s the Mature Student, who relates every aspect of the film to their own life. There’s the Local, who frequents the pub you see in the film. And, most distressingly, the Film Bore, who delivers a question about aspect ratios, or the clear influence of De Palma. And what all these questioners have in common is that, almost to a man, they are men.

The people answering the questions aren’t much better. A film’s director is perhaps the last person we should be asking about their film. Not to put too Barthes a point on it, but the director’s intentions are always irrelevant to the film’s success, and asking about them occludes a proper critical analysis of the work. Similarly, do actors really have any insights into the film’s artistic merit? I think modern audiences are keen for answers, and we too readily assess a film on what it does, rather than how it does it. This could explain why actors win Oscars for portrayals of real-life people: we evidently see the work the film has put in to recreate events, rather than having to think about its artistic choices. In that sense, the director does provide an answer – but the questions are wrong.

But the Q&A’s chief ill is that it removes the spectator from the very particular dream space that only films can occasion. The succession of images that are still floating about as so many evanescent moments and memories in your mind at the end of a movie will always be catastrophically disrupted by an earnest discussion about the audition process.

The answer should be, I think, to start more film clubs in order to generate discussions that can bring about a critical exchange of ideas. But, as long as Q&As keep making money for cinemas and film-makers, the disastrous pretence that they are interesting will continue.