Yesterday provided a couple of scary moments when I realised that I have now turned into exactly the sort of adult I used to hate as a kid. Basically, I've skipped the mid-life crisis and gone straight to grumpy-old man.
The most profound of these was in the cinema watching The Golden Compass. Now, with hindsight, watching a PG rated movie at 14:00 on a Sunday afternoon is probably not a good idea if your tolerance for human nature is not in the realms of, oh, say Mother Teresa... but even so. This was the situation - when we got into the screen we were nearly the first one's there. The only others were a mother and three girls (aged 10ish). My heart sank immediately but I thought, well how bad can it be. The first worriying sign was when they all went running around the (nearly empty at this stage) cinema, ostensibly to count the seats (why!?!). This continued pretty much until the screen filled up and the trailers started. At this point they settled in to chucking food about, talking, and bouncing around in the seats - this continued (although to be fair, at a lower volume) right through the film, coupled with 6 visits to the toilet. Jesus, how much coke have you got to drink to need 6 visits to the toilet?
After the film finished and the lights came back up the seats next to ours looked like a bomb had hit a popcorn factory. I wish I had taken a photo - there was crap everywhere, popcorn, sweet wrappers, food, drinks cartons... enough e numbers to get a sloth doing the electric boogaloo.
So here's the question. Have I always been outraged by this sort of behaviour? Actually, is this sort of behaviour acceptable? Is it just kids being kids, and is it expected that whoever cleans the cinema is actually getting paid to clean up stuff that's wantonly been chucked around. Is it morally acceptable for us (by us I mean western society) to have so much that food is thrown around, almost like a toy? Is it acceptable for me to take the high moral ground? I can remember going to the pictures with friends and my behaviour was far from angelic - was I as bad or, even if not as bad when does behaviour cross the line between kids being kids and being anti-social? What was most scary was thinking that things weren;t like that in my day - always a dangerous game projecting the values of one generation onto another...
Anyway - it didn't really spoil the film. If anything it was an interesting diversion and made me think a bit. Re: the film, I think I got a lot more from the books but as I can't remember them in much detail the film was good as a reminder that they are one of the most interesting things I've read in years... Enough of a reminder for me to re-read them at some point (something I can't ever see myself doing with the Harry Potter books). Like Harry Potter I seem to remember the books got alot darker as the story progressed so it'll be interesting to see how the films deal with that.
Now where did I leave my slippers?
No comments:
Post a Comment