At the Movies
By Maria Staack
When I was eight, I went to see Kung Fu Panda in the movie theater. Just as the movie began, I heard a soft burping sound from next to me. My brother had thrown up on himself. My dad rushed him to the bathroom as everyone in the aisle recoiled in disgust. I stayed in my seat, watching the movie with my friend and her mom. I blacked most of the movie itself out, but unfortunately the image of my brother sitting innocently with vomit on his shirt remains etched into my memory. To this day, Kung Fu Panda makes my stomach churn.
After that incident, I developed emetophobia: the fear of vomit or vomiting. It got so bad that every time I went to the movie theater I would have a panic attack and force my parents to take me home. At the time, I didn’t understand what panic attacks were; the words weren’t even in my vocabulary. I only knew that I had never experienced something more painful in my life. The worst of them happened at my friend’s birthday party. She invited everyone in our grade to see High School Musical 3. It would be—and I don’t say this lightly—the event of the year (it was 2008, in case you were wondering). I got to the movie theater and said goodbye to my dad, but after five minutes I felt like I was going to throw up and I couldn’t breath. I tried to wait for it to pass, but it didn’t. I ended up calling my dad on my friend’s mom’s phone and asking him to turn around and pick me up. Now, I will never be able to say I saw High School Musical 3 in the movie theater, and that seems wrong.
During a short period of my life, the movie theater was a space of trauma, but looking back on it, I can hardly believe that girl was me. Now that going to the movie theater presents a true threat to my health, I couldn’t be more heartbroken. Before the p*ndemic, I went to the movie theater at least a couple times a month. It was my happy place.
I spent my favorite birthday I’ve ever had at a movie theater. When I found out that Everything Everything would come out the day before my 17th birthday, I immediately began making plans to see Amandla Stenberg on the big screen. I hadn’t even read the book, I just loved Amandla. As soon as we sat down in the theater, my two closest friends and I realized that we were not the target audience for this movie. Everybody around us was either a middle schooler, or the parent of one. Throughout the movie, the girls next to us would squeal, or whine, “ugh, that didn’t happen in the book!” every five minutes. I couldn’t blame them, I acted exactly the same at the opening night of The Fault in Our Stars only three years earlier. However, due to the sheer unbelievability of every scene in Everything Everything, my friends and I laughed through the entire movie. At one point, an angered middle schooler turned and told us to be quiet, causing us to laugh even louder. It was petty, and juvenile, and awesome. At the movie theater, even bad movies are good when you’re with friends.
During my freshman year of college I often felt sad, lonely, and lost, so of course I went to the movie theater nine times in just the first semester. I let the characters on screen wash all of my troubles away. They became the friends I hadn’t yet found and told the stories I longed to make for myself. To sit in a dark room filled with people who neither know nor can see me felt freeing. I could laugh or cry as loudly or quietly as I wanted to. After many months, the movie theater in my college’s town has finally opened. I won’t be entering it in the near future, but I can at least smile now when I pass by and the marquee no longer contains a hollow, post-apocalyptic message about reopening soon.