The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex Read online

  ‘The ticket machine doesn’t recognise my card so I need to collect my tickets from you. Manually. Meaning, you hand them to me …’

  ‘No,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, you’re in the wrong queue. You need the automatic ticket machines. They’re back out there. In the foyer.’

  He gazed at me, past me, through me, toward the next person in the ever-expanding queue.

  ‘Next!’ he drawled, with a surprising sense of urgency, if it is indeed possible to drawl urgently.

  ‘No, hang on,’ I said, moving my entire body to block the vending window in an attempt to regain control of the situation. ‘I know the machine is in the foyer because that’s where I went to with my card, which the machine doesn’t recognise, which is why I am here now, and why I have been standing in a queue for the past twenty minutes.’

  The attendant looked at me as if I was the very stupidest life form on the planet, his gaze a mixture of patronising condescension, stultified lack of interest and utter ‘I’m-not-being-paid-enough-to-have-this-discussion’ irritation.

  ‘Well, you’ve wasted your time because you’re in the wrong queue. You need the automatic ticket machine which is …’

  ‘OUT IN THE FOYER! I know!’ I almost screamed. ‘But the machine does not recognise my card and so apparently I have to come here and get you to …’

  I stopped dead in my tracks. I was suddenly filled with a vision of a great gaping void: an infinite chasm of despair and hopelessness into which a mere mortal may stumble and find themselves falling forever. This was presumably the void of which Nietzsche was thinking when he warned us that ‘when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks back into you’. Right now, the abyss was indeed looking back into me, apparently eager for me to get out of the way so that it could look long into the person standing behind me in the queue who probably wanted two tickets and an industrial-sized vat of popcorn. I thought of Sisyphus heaving his boulder up a hill for all eternity; of Brutus, Cassius and Judas being endlessly devoured by a three-mouthed devil in the innermost ring of Dante’s Inferno; and of Marvin the Paranoid Android parking cars on Frogstar World B after being abandoned for ten million years by Arthur and Zaphod and Ford, left to wait while civilisations waxed and waned around him. (The first interview I ever did was with Douglas Adams and the star-struck experience has stayed with me ever since.) And, most importantly, I thought of the need to get this conversation over and done with as quickly as possible and without resorting to unpleasantness. I took a deep breath and started afresh.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s start again. I’d like two tickets, one adult, one child, to see the two forty p.m. performance of The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, please.’

  The attendant looked at me with the expression of one who has just voided his diarrhetic soul into the pre-distressed pants which he had somehow failed to raise above the level of his thighs. Then, with the sloth-like movement of a massive oil tanker lumbering its way round in a circle in the middle of the North Atlantic, he turned his head to look at the clock on the wall behind him, which now said 2.46, and then back toward me.

  ‘It’s started,’ he said, like the fourth horseman quietly announcing the arrival of the apocalypse.

  ‘What’s started?’

  ‘The programme. The two forty programme. It’s started. Six minutes ago. It’s two forty-six …’

  He turned, slug-like, to look at the clock once more.

  ‘Two forty-seven. The programme started seven minutes ago. The two forty programme. It’s two forty-seven now. So the programme’s …’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know, the programme’s started, but the film won’t be on yet, will it? You’ll have half an hour of trailers and adverts and annoying anti-piracy notices first, won’t you. What time does the actual film start?’

  Zombie boy said nothing. Instead, he looked down at his hands, seeming momentarily surprised to discover that he had opposable thumbs. Frankly, I was surprised too; from his general appearance he didn’t appear to be able to hold anything as fiddly as a comb, or indeed to be able to pull up his own trousers. In evolutionary terms, he was conclusive proof that Darwin had been full of shit, and we were all heading back toward the primordial soup.

  He looked at me again.

  ‘The programme started seven minutes ago,’ he repeated without a trace of irony. ‘Eight, now.’

  I contemplated strangling him, but decided against it – there were minors present, and the sight of extreme violence can scar the young.

  Apparently.

  ‘Right, I don’t care about missing the start of the programme,’ I said.

  ‘Just so long as you know.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That it’s started. The programme.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I understand. But I still want to buy two tickets.’

  ‘Even though it’s started?’

  ‘Yes, even though it’s started.’

  ‘Right, how many tickets do you want for the programme … that’s already started.’

  ‘Two. One adult, one child.’

  ‘How old is the child?’

  ‘Well, she was eleven when I started queuing but she’s probably sixteen by now,’ I quipped.

  Big mistake.

  ‘Sixteen is “adult”. So that’s two adults for the programme that’s already started …’

  ‘No, she’s not sixteen, she’s eleven. It was a joke …’

  ‘You said she was sixteen.’

  ‘No, I said she was eleven but we’ve been waiting so long she might as well be sixteen …’

  ‘Sixteen is “adult”.’

  ‘But she’s not sixteen, she’s eleven.’

  ‘Then why did you say she was sixteen?’

  Why indeed? Why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why?

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

  And that was it. He’d won. I had apologised. It was all over. He had the upper hand. I was in his world now, playing by his rules. He shimmered with victory – somnambulant yet shimmery. Weird.

  ‘So, two tickets, one adult, one child, for the two forty programme of Charlie St. Cloud, which has already started.’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘Standard or premium seats?’

  This was an interesting question I had already encountered online but which, to be honest, I still hadn’t really resolved. It seemed to me that, at the prices they were charging, all seats ought to be ‘premium’. After all, wasn’t this the whole point of the anti-piracy thing they kept ramming down our throats: the idea that the cinema was the best (not to say the only) place to see a film, and watching at home on illegal download would be doing a disservice to both ourselves and the movie; in the long run we would all suffer. And yet here was an admission that some seats in the cinema were better (and therefore pricier) than others, leading one to conclude by default that the still-costly pleasures of ‘standard’ seating might not actually be up to the same high standards accorded by one’s own couch. I can’t be the only one to have thought this – if all the seats aren’t premium, then why the hell am I paying so much for them? Moreover, in a world in which ushers are apparently considered an unnecessary extravagance, what’s to stop me from simply paying for a ‘standard’ seat and then sitting in a ‘premium’ seat once I get inside the spectacularly unpoliced auditorium? The answer, of course, is nothing, as I had previously discovered after having paid through the nose for premium seats only to find some unchaperoned upstarts blithely sitting in my seats, solidly refusing – in the absence of a higher authority – to move. And why should they? They’d already paid enough to get into the wretched cinema, and frankly they wanted to be able to see the film from a reasonable vantage point. Otherwise, they could have just stayed at home and downloaded it illegally. Which, to be honest, was starting to look like a surprisingly attractive option.

  Back at the ticket-office-cum-fast-food-stand, the attendant was still awaiting my
reply.

  ‘Standard,’ I said firmly. ‘Left-hand side by the aisle. F8 and 9, in fact.’

  ‘Those seats are taken.’

  ‘Yes, I know. They’re taken by me. Those are the seats which I bought online but for which I have been unable to collect the tickets from the machine in the foyer because it does not recognise my card. So instead I am buying them from you.’

  ‘You can’t buy them from me because they’re already taken.’

  ‘Yes, taken by me.’

  ‘No, just taken. I can give you G16 and 17.’

  ‘Is either one of them an aisle seat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are they on the left?’

  ‘No, they’re both in the middle.’

  ‘I see. So when I said I wanted two seats on the left, one on the aisle, that didn’t really make any difference, did it?’

  He said nothing. The seconds ticked away. Minutes passed – I couldn’t stop them.

  ‘OK, you win again,’ I blurted. ‘Just give me G16 and 17 and we’ll move once we get inside the cinema.’

  The attendant looked outraged. ‘You can’t move, sir, its allocated seating. You have to sit in your allocated seat.’

  ‘Which I will of course do. Unless, that is, the clone versions of me and my daughter (in whom you seem to have placed your faith) fail to show up, in which case I’ll keep seats F8 and 9 warm for them.’

  ‘The ushers won’t let you do that, sir,’ said the attendant, sounding increasingly like HAL the computer from 2001 telling astronaut Dave Bowman that he couldn’t open the hatch for him and he was going to have to die in space after all. Clearly he’d gone to DefCon 1, and I had to up my game accordingly.

  I leaned toward the kiosk window, my breath condensing on the apparently bulletproof glass, lowered my voice conspiratorially, and whispered, ‘But there are no ushers … are there?’

  He looked back at me in silence, with what I fancied was an expression of unspoken horror shot through with shock and awe, and garnished with a sprinkling of reluctant admiration. I had spoken the unspeakable, named the unnameable, mentioned the unmentionable; like Charlton Heston telling the starving masses that ‘Soylent Green is people!’ only quieter. Much quieter. ‘But it’s alright,’ I continued in hushed tones. ‘I won’t tell anyone if you won’t. Now just give me the damned tickets.’

  A moment of electricity passed between us before normal service was resumed.

  ‘You want drinks or popcorn?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes!’

  My daughter, silent up until now, was suddenly eager to get involved. We’d had this discussion before, at home and in the car, but clearly an agreement had not yet been reached. See, the thing is, I hate popcorn. Not the taste or the substance of the foodstuff itself, which is every bit as yummy and nutritious as exploded mushroom clouds of super-heated dried grain smothered in salt and/or sugar plus a cocktail of super-poisonous chemicals (Google ‘popcorn’ and ‘chemicals’ and check it out – you’ll be shocked) and packed in cardboard can possibly be. As a child I used to surreptitiously chew those Styrofoam worms in which fragile electrical appliances are packed for shipping, and taste-wise there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between them and the buttered delights now sold in vast quantities in cinema foyers around the world. Certainly the overall effect was the same: much munching, zero nourishment and an overpowering need to quench your thirst with whichever carbonated brand of tooth-napalm came most easily to hand. To my mind, popcorn has always been a bit like heroin: the first hit makes you want to throw up (apparently), but also leaves you with a craving to quell the nausea by ingesting industrial amounts of the very thing which made you sick in the first place. Cigarettes are the same – or so smokers tell me – ghastly, but in a moreish kind of way. The only real difference between the consumption of popcorn, heroin and cigarettes is that the purchase of a pack of 20 is a much faster and more efficient way of getting your money straight into the hands of highly organised murderous bastards than fencing it through drug dealers or fast-food franchises. Tot up the number of people who’ve been maimed, killed and generally ravaged by cigarettes over the past 50 years and compare it with the statistics for drug and obesity-related fatalities; the only sensible conclusion is that, where fags are concerned, the tax benefits must massively outweigh the human tragedy. If only the government could figure out a way of putting VAT on smack.

  Luckily the government have figured out a way of putting VAT on popcorn. Indeed, it was the ‘commonly quoted’ purchase tax case of Popcorn House Ltd in 1968 (come on, you must have heard of it) which gave birth to the very definition of taxable confectionery as being ‘any form of food normally eaten with the fingers and made by a cooking process, other than baking, which contains a substantial amount of sweetening matter’. The VAT-keepers’ guide goes on to explain that ‘taste and texture’ and ‘time and place of eating’ may also be taken into account when assessing whether an allegedly edible substance is a tax-free foodstuff or a tax-rich treat, with cinema popcorn clearly falling into the latter category. If I was the VAT man, I would personally add a further financial penalty for the ‘noise pollution’ caused by eating popcorn in a cinema auditorium, with revenues gathered from this lucrative income stream used to fund a string of retirement homes for the prematurely obsolete projectionists and ushers who lost their jobs when their employers decided that their primary business was not the projection and exhibition of movies but the sale of VAT-able fast food.

  A few months ago, after complaining on my BBC blog about the ear-splitting levels of extraneous noise that currently befoul the UK multiplex experience, somebody wrote in to suggest that cinemas should offer seat sockets, into which one could plug headphones. They pointed out that many venues are already fitted with induction loops and other such aids for the hard of hearing, and surely it wouldn’t be too hard to rig up a decent hi-fi outlet that would allow people to watch movies in peace. They could even bring their own headphones. This sounded like a smart idea, but headphones don’t give you the full surround-sound experience that has become such a big part of modern spectacular cinema. Moreover, the fact that I don’t want to hear people eating in the cinema (or talking on their mobile phones) doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t want to hear them laughing or shrieking or crying, or doing whatever else it is that movies are meant to make people do. Isn’t that a crucial part of the cinema-going experience: enjoying being in an auditorium full of people sharing the same emotions en masse? If you want isolation, then stay at home and get the movie when it comes out on DVD.

  Surely a far better solution would be for cinemas to employ enough ushers to allow them to do their job properly – part of which is telling people to ‘Ussh!’ when they start talking or rustling or munching too loudly during a performance. A few years ago, Richard Griffiths famously halted a performance of Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys at the National Theatre, London, to remonstrate with a noisy audience member whose mobile phone was proving a distraction to both the cast and audience. Yet only a year later I sat in a screening of the (disappointing) movie version of The History Boys at which an attendee had not one but two phones in his hands, using the glaring light from one to illuminate the screen of the other so that he could carry on texting. You remember that scene in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo where a character reaches down from the screen and pulls an audience member into the film? If only Griffiths’s imposing screen presence had been similarly able to break through the fourth wall and stick said patron’s phones where the sun don’t shine. But in the absence of such an intervention the film simply played on, spoilt by the selfish actions of one audience member who had no sense of cinema as a living, breathing medium which requires as much respect from its patrons as theatre. And why should he? Because as far as the cinema staff were concerned, no one seemed to care how he behaved. Once upon a time he would have been ejected from the auditorium. Now he was able to treat it as his own living room.

/>   Things do not have to be this way. I was particularly impressed by a recent trip to a massive multiplex just outside New Orleans where, for reasons which fail me now, I had to go to see the disappointing Farrelly brothers comedy Hall Pass at an 11 o’clock screening on a Wednesday night. The screening was surprisingly well attended, with the ludicrous laxity of the American ‘R’ rating meaning that several parents had brought along children who were: a) far too young to be up that late and b) far too young to be watching a movie which contained (according to our very own British Board of Film Classification) ‘strong language, sex references and crude humour’. The film sucked but the screening was great, thanks largely to the presence of a rather imposing usher who seemed to have been recently released from a steroid farm and who looked ready to use lethal force to suppress any improper behaviour. No one would have dared to take out their mobile phone or make noise with their popcorn with this man-mountain in the auditorium, and he promptly became my new best friend. Forget armed policemen, I want armed ushers! Coincidentally, someone else wrote in to my BBC blog to say that they worked in a UK multiplex, and the reason there were never any ushers around to police the screenings was because they were all too busy cleaning up all the spilled popcorn.

  Which brings us back to …

  ‘Regular, medium or large?’ Apparently, the attendant had decided to cut me out of the conversation entirely and go directly to point-of-sale contact with the 11-or-16-year-old with whom he hadn’t yet fallen out.

  ‘Large,’ she replied merrily.

  ‘Small!’ I shrieked, embarrassingly.

  ‘We don’t do small. Only regular, medium or …’

  ‘Right. Regular.’

  ‘I want large.’

  We settled on medium.

  ‘You want a drink with that?’

  ‘No, we have our own water.’

  ‘Did you buy it in the foyer?’

  ‘No, I brought it from home.’