Selectively Furious
a trip to the cinema
July 5th to July 18th, 2022.
This week you’ll walk out of a movie, Virgo. You gave it a fair shot, you left thirty minutes after you had silently allotted the movie its third strike. This is not the first time you’ve stormed out of a movie, and from my comfy seat in the infinite cosmos I can tell you with absolute certainty that it will not be your last.
The emotions you feel when you exit a theater mid movie are complicated. On the one hand, you’re usually furious. However, beneath that fury lies a rabid sense of liberation that is easily confused with glee.
I can understand why a passerby could read your post-movie exit as joyful, but what they’re actually witnessing is more akin to an adrenaline rush or the satisfied feeling of enacting one's liberties.
It’s similar to the feeling you get when you vote—though this may not be the best example, since when you most recently voted you were given a sticker that said “Future Voter,” which can only mean the poll worker thought you were a child who tagged along with their guardian to the ballot box. I don’t like to get too prescriptive here, but I think it’s probably time to develop a more mature wardrobe.
If there were tradeable stat cards (a la baseball) about the frequency and location a person walked out of a movie, your card would say 3 times | Williamsburg. And it would use this photo for some reason:
You’ve walked out of 3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017); Vice (2018); and most recently, Men (2022).
You love to ask people what movies they’ve walked out of. Your motivations are selfish of course, it’s always fun to ask questions that, once turned back towards yourself, you’re able to answer with alacrity. Beyond your hidden agenda, you’re also genuinely curious about when people reach their breaking points, and there’s nothing more “I’ve reached my limit” than furiously departing a movie part way through.
Watching a bad movie makes the reality of your mortality inescapable. Sure, you move through each day with the knowledge that one day you’ll die, but only when you’re strapped in for one hundred and eight minutes (the length of every movie—except for the ones that are one hundred and twenty eight minutes) do you really begin to appreciate that you’re on borrowed time.
From my chaise lounge in the heavens I am puzzled as to why some categories of living appear to be under your constant, unrelenting scrutiny, while others skate through entirely unexamined.
Despite your propensity for seething movie exits, it takes you a great deal longer to extricate yourself from other contexts.
You used to get into the shower while the water was still off. Once you were situated in your cold little echochamber, you’d turn the water on and suffer immediate consequences. As all people know, it’s scientifically impossible to turn on a shower to the right temperature on the first try. So you’d get blasted with breathtakingly cold water until you gradually corrected course and finally settled into a relaxing shower. A puzzled lover once asked you why you didn’t just wait for the water to become a comfortable temperature before stepping inside. Somehow that had never occurred to you.
You always say that you’re “bad at seeing cause and effect” in yourself, which I think is a faux self aware way of saying you are always reacting; never thinking.
For example, if you would have thought about the three movies you walked out of — really thought about them — prior to attending, you would have come to the conclusion that there was no reason for you to be seeing them in the first place.
Much like a cold blast of shower water every single day, there is no reason you should have imagined seeing that movie about Dick Cheney (a loathsome creature) directed by a director whose work you loathe (but isn’t a loathsome creature) would have provided you with any possible degree of joy.
There’s certainly something to gain from furiously exiting a movie theater (I encourage anyone who sits through movies they aren’t enjoying to look into the econ 101 concept of sunk cost). It can feel amazing to dramatically draw a line in the sand. I would suggest, however, better vetting the content you decide to engage with in the future.
You could, perhaps, watch movie trailers with the same shrewd eye you watch the movies they come from. Some diligent forethought may save you from the clumsy, full bodied nervousness that comes from trying to determine if a movie theater door is just a regular exit or an emergency one.
When you plan events for your future, consider dipping into your well of self knowledge then, instead of waiting to access it until you’re absolutely furious and already reacting.
In the way that you know you get a headache if you don’t have caffeine immediately after waking up, you should know that a heavy handed Oscar bait movie isn’t going to dazzle you.
In the way that you know that you will never complete anything ahead of a deadline, you should also know that a movie about Dick Cheney (a man so evil that shooting his acquaintance in the face and chest doesn’t even make his top ten list of personal failings) cannot capture your interest (however deep your family ties) .
In the way that you know yourself enough to know you can’t be social more than twice a week, you should also know that a movie written and directed by a man isn’t likely to have searing insights into the societal burdens of toxic masculinity that—based on its name alone—you hoped Men would have.
Of course it didn’t provide interesting insights! Why did you think it would! You’re such a sucker for a trailer with a slow, spooky piano. If they throw in a little choral music they have you eating out of the palm of their hand.
When you’re looking for movies to watch or showers to get into, I implore you to remember who you are, what you like, and perhaps most importantly, what you loathe.