Popcorn and coke

Last week, Slate’s Bryan Curtis wrote an amusing essay on the natty, snob-o-rific annoyances that plague arthouse theaters. As a regular at several of the DC area’s independently inclined houses of cinema, I’ll second much of what he says.

Arthouse crowds are uniquely irritating, and while they’re not prone to the distractingly obnoxious preteen quarreling over cell-phones or who gets to sit by the hot girl, they’re certainly rife with their own brand of snooty, pseudo-intellectual nitwits. Audience members gab, scribble and fold newspapers throughout showings. There’s always a new girlfriend who’s been dragged by her moppy haired, thick-rimmed glasses-wearing boyfriend to a complicated movie and then insists on having him explain every scene, which, of course, causes her to miss more scenes and demand further explanations. The whole thing quickly degenerates into a Monday Night Football style play-by-play, in which the increasing annoyance of the soon-to-be-blissfully-single boyfriend is matched only by the puffed-up, intellectually superior rage of the rest of the audience. Curtis may mock the arthouse for its loner magnetism, but the only thing worse than a room full of movie-geek introverts is a cinematically apathetic girlfriend.

Curtis also mentions a legendary figure he calls “The Crinkler.” The Crinkler, he says:

…is a mythic art-house figure—perhaps you've heard of him. Or, rather, perhaps you've heard him. As the lights go down, he is the guy three rows back who crinkles plastic wrap, restlessly and maniacally, for the entire length of a picture. I have had the displeasure of watching two films that he crinkled through: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre at Film Forum, and then, a few months later, White Heat, the film noir, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. The ethical dilemma presented by the Crinkler is that crinkling doesn't have an obvious rejoinder. At Film Forum, a man seated behind me screamed, "If you don't stop that crinkling …" and then trailed off, as if his brain were unable to fully process the problem. The crinkling continued. It is possible, I suppose, that there is more than one Crinkler carrying plastic wrap all over the city, but the taste in movies (he seems to prefer muscular American cinema of the late 1940s) leads me to believe there is a single Crinkler, an omnipresent evil genius.

The article suggests this character may be a single individual, but if that’s the case, then he’s prone to travels between DC and New York. At a recent E-Street showing of The Passenger, I sat next to both The Crinkler and his equally crinklefied wife, cramped into my seat next to them as they passed and opened foil-wrapped chocolates, rooted through their bags (another arthouse staple Curtis nails), hacked and weezed (loudly and wetly), discussed the possible medications that were available from the wife’s bags, and generally found it necessary to comment quite loudly on the film’s action (or lack of, such as it were).

Curtis ends the article, however, with a mildly tongue in cheek praise of the multiplex, finding its acne-ridden, underage crowds to be somehow appropriately energetic. And while I travel to the multiplex often enough, I can’t say I agree. At a multiplex in Destin, Florida—possibly the worst managed theater I’ve ever known—I once reported what appeared to be a pool of vomit that had glopped out over the floor. The still-in-high-school staff gave it a look, proclaimed to me that it was “only coke spilled on popcorn,” shrugged their shoulders and left it be. Clearly adult films are littered with noisy, active kids. Adults regularly seem to feel that the characters on their screen desperately need their advice—“Yeah! Get him!”—or that their fellow theater goers need their comments—“That was awesome!” and “Oooh. He’s bad, isn’t he?” seem to be staples from such filmgoing announcers. Such are the perils of the megaplex. Call me pretentious, but I’ll take the huffy, socially-obtuse arrogance of the arthouse over popcorn and coke any time.