How CE Jenkins Became a Serial Killer

    CE Jenkins   

        So I saw the Hunger Games today. And I hated it. Hate hate hate hate HATED it.

         Not the movie itself, mind you; thoughts on that will be forthcoming soon. No, what caused me to leave the theatre so angry that I may have incinerated a twelve-year-old bystander with the sheer force of my glare was not the film; it was the other people watching it.

          Maybe I just have myself to blame. Because the theatre in town is the only one within a realistic distance for someone who lacks a car or a decent pair of hiking boots, the midnight showing was already sold out by the time I bought tickets. So, being a reasonable person, I decided that 4:00pm the next day would be just as good. My thinking was that any college students would still be in class, and with any luck it wouldn’t be as crowded. Perhaps you can see the flaw in my logic already, because although most college students would be otherwise occupied at 4:00 in the afternoon, the hordes of crayon-eating middle-schoolers released from their pens across the street would not be.

          I could see the issue almost immediately; from the moment I arrived at the theatre there was a little pack of the creatures milling around out front. It was even worse inside; I spotted only three people other than myself who were over the age of 16, and almost everyone was a girl. Not entirely surprising, really—for whatever reason, the media had started comparing the Hunger games, a young adult novel about children murdering each other for sport, with everyone’s favorite broody-vampire series—and as a result, it looked like every pubescent female within a five mile radius had piled into the theatre that day. I fought down a sense of vague foreboding, telling myself that it would be fine; Oh, past self. How naive you were.

          The whole thing was a disaster. The person in front of me kept texting every five seconds, and had their screen set to brightness levels that could have been seen from space. There was a constant murmur of talking throughout almost the entire film—a couple boys sitting a seat away from me who couldn’t have been older than first grade spent the entire movie loudly narrating to each other what had just happened. For some reason this person kept randomly shaking their popcorn tub for five minutes at a time. People were coming in and out of the theatre like it was your mom on a Friday night (You see? You see what they’ve driven me to?). Worst of all, during the [SPOILER] single extremely chaste kissing scene that same first grade boy actually yelled out “Pervert!” [END SPOILER]. So instead of spending two and a half hours watching the movie, I spent that time fantasizing about throwing children across rows of tiered theatre seating.

         Now, I don’t normally get so intense about talking/texting in a movie. Normally I can just be that person who sits there quietly imagining how great it would be to ask them to stop. And I did politely request that the person put away their phone, which they did; but like a hydra, for every texter I cut down two arose in their place. It wasn’t just one person being obnoxious, it was the majority of the audience. And what can you do about that?

          A lot of times having a lively audience can be fun; they laugh at all the jokes, cheer in the right places, and applaud their approval at the end. Seeing it with an enthusiastic crowd can help you feel more passionate about the film too. But get a bad audience, and it can be distracting to the point where you can't even enjoy what you're seeing. It was impossible to get into the movie when I was too busy seething with rage over the people whose sole reason for being there seemed to be vocally mocking all the dramatic parts. Now, I love me a good vocal mocking, but honestly people? Just do it in the comfort of your own home, where there are no unstable film fanatics sitting two rows down to quietly plot your demise.

Or in the future, not so quietly.