World Domination Plan

My day began on a bus into Manhattan, only to realize in the Lincoln Tunnel that I didn’t want to deal with New York, and so stayed on said bus on its return trip home. It ended with the scent of a stranger’s vagina wafting at me in a crowded New Jersey movie theater.

One lesson I am unable to learn in life is that if you wish to enjoy anything, don’t do it in public. Music, movies, masturbation… all these things go from ‘pretty cool concepts’ to ‘what the fuck is the point of this’ when partaken-in around others. That said, I thought it would be awesome to see ‘UP’ 3-D alone at the 11 PM showing. It was sold out when I got there (along with almost every other movie), and so I resigned myself to see ‘Drag Me to Hell’ with the friends I actually drove in with.

I thought I’d found the perfect seat, nestled between white 12-year-old girls with blackberries and a crowd of urban youths trying to impress each other, but whom seemed at least mostly sober. I was confident that if and when I freaked out at the cell phones or chatter I’d only be mocked and not beaten up, which constitutes the best movie experience I’ve had in months.

But something happened. Drama erupted among the 12-year-olds halfway through the trailers, and the whole row of them left. Six seats to my left were now wild cards. I began to quietly panic.

During the final preview a couple asked if these seats were taken. They seemed respectable enough, and I said they were available, and then kind of giddily went on to explain what had happened and why these 6 seats in an otherwise packed theater were open. They looked at me weird and said thanks.

Then the movie began.

I didn’t notice it at first… because it takes so much mental energy to separate the verbalized thoughts of the 200 people around you from your own, that your peripheral vision begins to fade between the millisecond reprieves from cellphones lighting the room at all sides of you.

But then I noticed. The couple next to me were one person.

Now at first I didn’t mind. The last movie I saw I was next to a couple fighting the whole time, until the girlfriend decided to stop talking and began emailing her friend on her blackberry, which happened to be angled at me in a way that I believe she intended me to read the whole ’story of the fight’ so I could take her side when the theater let out. So I now found it only slightly odd to notice a giant bulge in the girl’s pants, which turned out to be her boyfriend’s massive fist.

And then it started hitting me. Bad vagina…

…

There’s no need to describe it. We all know what that is like, well except maybe for Shaun who may be reading this. What was weird was that I couldn’t pin it directly to this couple, as I think someone was competing with her scent from somewhere behind me. I wanted to turn around to see if someone else was fingering their girlfriend (or themselves, or their own ass), but I didn’t want it to look like I was trying to half-kiss the guy that was behind me and one seat over, who during the whole movie was leaning forward and commenting into my ear. Some of his comments were funny, like when loud noises were freaking out the protagonist and he came to the intelligent solution of “why don’t that bitch just put on her iPod?”, but generally it just threw off my equilibrium, having someones mouth in my ear.

There was nowhere else to move to, and I really didn’t feel like waiting in the lobby for everyone else to get out, as I had no other way home. So I began pretending that it was only body odor. And then I began pretending that it was part of the movie… trying to use the scent to immerse me deeper into the experience.

Even after the hands were out of the pants, the scent kept growing, taking on new forms. I think it may have picked up the smell of the nacho cheese and hot dogs of the people in front of me, as well as the weird smell of other people’s mouths as they screamed and shouted at every new camera angle. At one point I even tried ‘leaning forward’ to see if that would put me into a less direct path of the scent.

But ‘Drag Me to Hell’ was good. It was different than what I think ‘UP’ will be like, and it made me happy that I saw it now, while I’m still in my 20’s, because if I’d seen it when I was any older, I might’ve had a heart attack during it. I didn’t expect it to be good or funny, as I haven’t liked much of anything from Sam Raimi after the first 2 Evil Dead movies, but it was truly immersive, frightening, and somewhat humorous.

Amen.