lights, camera, quiet.

I remember having a fight with my sister once(and only once!) in which she told me I was too finicky and stubborn, that I liked things "just so", to my detriment. I remember blustering and reddening and fighting that idea, but it stuck in my head for many months after. And I think that's because it's true. I am the postergirl for retentiveness.

Nowhere is this more obvious than when I go to see a movie at a theatre. I love everything about movies and the experience of seeing them. Getting caught up in this jumbo-sized fantasy world that may or may not portray real life. The smell of fresh popcorn. The cozy plush seats. The movie magazines you get for free at the ticket booth. Bathtub sized orange pop. And then, when the lights dim, and the opening credits begin, the hush of silence. Or not...

Sometimes, very chatty people go to movies. This is a fact. Now, a little chit-chat, a necessary clarification of plot or character detail here and there, really, not a problem. But then there are the literal observers, the ones so into the movie, they almost become one with it, giving a play-by-play of what's happening, to no one in particular;
"Oh my goodness, and now he's wiping his glasses with the shirt of his wife's lover, and he doesn't even know!"
"Look, there's someone lurking in the shadows, and oh, ohhhh, he's going to attack Al Pacino!"
"Did you see that? Did you see how she just threw that wine in his face? Fantastic. I could never do that."
These people are usually audible no matter where they are sitting in relation to you, so moving seats isn't much of an option. And asking them to not be so emotionally participatory would be mean, so I usually suffer in the silence of repressed frustration.

There are also the popcorn rustlers. There is, to be sure, an unspoken etiquette for eating popcorn during a movie. It's almost choreography with me. Grab a handful, look around quickly for withering looks from between hunched shoulders and eat. Grab another handful, repeat process as necessary. It's no one's fault really, that popcorn comes in such rustle-y paper bags, but a small awareness of the noise it generates is nice. I went to a movie once with my sister, and we sat about two seats away from one of the worst offenders of this activity I'd ever seen. Clearly, she hadn't seen a proper meal in several days, and this big bag of popcorn was the first real sustenance she'd been allowed. There it all was, acute rustling, spittle flying, speed and determination in every movement, an alarming lack of time elapsing between each re-grab. She even rifled through the creases at the bottom of the bag for errant kernals that had escaped her hunger-charged hands. My sister and I exchanged looks of disbelief and wonder. We were in the presence of a professional.

There are some endearing noise infractions, though. I don't want to sound like a complete grump. I do kind of warm up inside when the bad guy gets his dues, and the audience, so elated and feeling so served by the tidy and poetic justice only a movie can deliver, start clapping. The retentive me wants to shush them(they can't really hear you in there...) but I try to keep it to myself. I'm also warmed by the collective audience responses, laughs at the funny bits, sharp intakes of breath at the scary bits, lumps in the throat that we pass off as coughs at the sad bits. We're processing the same emotions at the same time, which is a unifying experience.

For me, the silence in a movie theatre, the embrace of darkness, the larger-than-life screen, this is the magic used to make us suspend real life and disbelief and be pulled in. And it's a bit of a curse that my suspension is as fragile as it is. I really don't want to be the shush-er. I don't want to be the turn-around-and-glare person. I don't want to be the inwardly screaming quietnik I seem to be. I know my intense need for total escape makes me a volatile movie companion. I have a ways to go before I inhabit a place of careless abandon and surrender. But maybe that's where the real magic of the movies begins...