Sunday, September 02, 2007
I Hate Horror Movies
One can't help but wonder how couples survive when they have such incredibly different tastes in movies.
You see it all the time. The local video store littered with hapless couples, staring blankly at the wall, one or the other of them strangely silent, watching in horror as their partner picks up and reads the back of a movie that will soon become two hours of their life they will never get back. When I am single I watch these couples with a smug smirk on my face and load up with the kind of romantic comedies and humanistic dramas that a girl can only rent when she is without a life partner. "Haha, SUCKERS!" I think as I imagine those poor girls later that evening, trapped on the couch watching scenes filled with cops and guns and explosions and infantile humour and general idiocy. I realize that it is no more fair to force the testostorone filled boyfriends and husbands to watch hours of emotional sensitivity and beautiful cinematography forwarding plots of complex universal truths. In short, no matter which way they cut it, one of them is going to be spending the night in pain. These are the moments of my past when I have celebrated my man-less-ness.
Of course I am not currently man-less and my movie watching experiences have become tenuous nights filled with compromise. He either simply refuses or avoids and I spend the time in a private viewing with my MacBook or we watch one of his movies and I ignore the screen and focus on less violent images vis a vis my MacBook. (Thank God for my MacBook). In the grand scheme of things I don't think that this lack of common taste in cinema means much at all and I would be lying to say we NEVER find a movie that we both enjoy, but it does cause some stress. I remember an exboyfriend of mine ended up in a ball of fear one night (he was literally a ball -- he was laying on the bed in the fetal position) because he was convinced that our lack of common taste in movies was a Significant Sign that we were Not Meant To Be. Besides the niggling feeling that he was right about the Not Meant To Be part (trust me, that's a whole different blog post), I was able to talk him off the ledge that evening. Still, I couldn't help but wish I could meet a man whose favorite movies couldn't be found by googling 'stabbed in the mouth'.
Ah, well. Let 'em have their Chainsaw Massacre and reruns of CSI. Let the single girls revel in their dictatorship over the DVD player and let us 'coupled' folk plug the headphones into our laptops...
Long live the age of the Cinematic Feministic Revolution.
You see it all the time. The local video store littered with hapless couples, staring blankly at the wall, one or the other of them strangely silent, watching in horror as their partner picks up and reads the back of a movie that will soon become two hours of their life they will never get back. When I am single I watch these couples with a smug smirk on my face and load up with the kind of romantic comedies and humanistic dramas that a girl can only rent when she is without a life partner. "Haha, SUCKERS!" I think as I imagine those poor girls later that evening, trapped on the couch watching scenes filled with cops and guns and explosions and infantile humour and general idiocy. I realize that it is no more fair to force the testostorone filled boyfriends and husbands to watch hours of emotional sensitivity and beautiful cinematography forwarding plots of complex universal truths. In short, no matter which way they cut it, one of them is going to be spending the night in pain. These are the moments of my past when I have celebrated my man-less-ness.
Of course I am not currently man-less and my movie watching experiences have become tenuous nights filled with compromise. He either simply refuses or avoids and I spend the time in a private viewing with my MacBook or we watch one of his movies and I ignore the screen and focus on less violent images vis a vis my MacBook. (Thank God for my MacBook). In the grand scheme of things I don't think that this lack of common taste in cinema means much at all and I would be lying to say we NEVER find a movie that we both enjoy, but it does cause some stress. I remember an exboyfriend of mine ended up in a ball of fear one night (he was literally a ball -- he was laying on the bed in the fetal position) because he was convinced that our lack of common taste in movies was a Significant Sign that we were Not Meant To Be. Besides the niggling feeling that he was right about the Not Meant To Be part (trust me, that's a whole different blog post), I was able to talk him off the ledge that evening. Still, I couldn't help but wish I could meet a man whose favorite movies couldn't be found by googling 'stabbed in the mouth'.
Ah, well. Let 'em have their Chainsaw Massacre and reruns of CSI. Let the single girls revel in their dictatorship over the DVD player and let us 'coupled' folk plug the headphones into our laptops...
Long live the age of the Cinematic Feministic Revolution.
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