15. Popcorn, PVR Inox

Snax and the City goes to the movies

I went to the movies over winter break for the first time “in ages”… now that the kids are hooked on Peppa Pig, everything is “ages” rather than prosaic Americanisms like “a long time” and I have to say I love this development with all its exhausted, stretched-out vowels: is it too affected to say I love it HEAPS? Lol.

Anyway, I went with my mom, which is always so nice to get a fresh pair of American eyes on my life. To see all my little Anglicisms and Indianisms afresh. Yes, we all stand for the national anthem, yes, the volume is quite loud, sure, they’ll deliver a hot cocoa right to your seat, yes, every film has an intermission here, even the Western ones. The last movie I saw in the theater was Barbie so of course in the intermission I took selfies.

We went to see All We Imagine as Light. The film is, of course, wonderful: a delicate story about strength, full of quiet triumphs and despairs. What I liked best about it is the way that it plays contrasts not for binarism— city (Mumbai) versus country (Ratnagiri) or older versus younger or doctor versus nurse, but sets these next to each other so that each might be illuminated by the soft glow of the other, making not friction but more like a burnishing.

I am pretty game for most Indian cultural differences (or peculiarities or whatever) but I am not too fond of intermissions. I want to enter a portal and be held there. I never let my classes take a break midway, a surefire way to kill any building magic, and was gratified when reading Lynda Barry’s Syllabus and learning that she doesn’t let students even check their phones on the breaks. A sealed chamber is a transformative space. I always feel so dumb, stumbling out of the dark theater and into the gaudy lights of the mall. But it was midafternoon, and I was hungry, and so I went for it. Went for it fully— not just a tub of movie theater butter popcorn but a riotous mix of the three on offer: butter, cheese and caramel, proportioned according to what felt like the concessionaire’s expertise and shaken to mix with such confidence, thunk thunk thunk.

Intermission is the perfect time to get popcorn, now that I think about it, because you’ve sunk into the world of the film before your mouth gets so salted it begins to sore. To crunch through a week’s worth of sodium during the previews and then sit through the film with a creeping sense of nausea is suboptimal.

And of course the cheese-caramel popcorn mix is moreish. (There we go again, blame the commonwealth). OK, you could use less Anglophilic “addictive,” call this blend Chicago mix, sold, in typical American fashion, in a huge bag at Costco, a bag that will reduce by half and then disappear way too quickly. It’s a power move to get one of those huge Boy Scout holiday popcorn tins and remove the cardboard dividers between butter, cheese and caramel, letting the flavours collapse into an orgiastic, undifferentiated heap. Like the film suggests about opposites: they attract.

There’s a scene where the protagonist, hospital head-nurse Prabha, finally joins her fellow nurses for a movie. They are still in their uniforms. Most of the nurses wear a powdery salwar kameez, traditional Prabha wears a uniform sari. Earlier, in their locker room, other nurses teased Prabha that she never joined for movie night, never had any time for romantic stories, although of course the beating heart of the film is that Prabha is trapped in her marriage, a conjoinment that means solitude as sure as a sentence. But then, she goes to the movies.

We see her face in the reflected glow of the movie screen. She frowns, watching a love story she knows to be a myth, a narrative turn she must— tragically!— reject even when presented to her for real. I feel like there is something more to say about a woman’s face reflected in the light of a movie hall— though I couldn’t find it on TV Tropes and I am too tired to go reread Deleuze— except that I think it is an important counterweight to this idea of the normative male viewer presented by Laura Mulvey so famously. On film, we do see women spectate. In the movie theater, women spectators are doubly illuminated. Their hair is wreathed, angelically a metaphor too stale, from the light of the projector, their glasses glaring from the light of the screen.

Film is “all we imagine as light.”

The day that I went to the movies, the Indian Goods and Services Tax Council posted the results of their most recent meeting, including one oddity: regular popcorn would continue to be taxed at 5%, but caramel popcorn would be taxed at 18%, as confectionary. There were memes!

It makes sense, I guess. But still, reading about branded popcorn and loose popcorn and caramel popcorn and thinking about the social life of popcorn in India… popcorn as escape, as mostly-hot-air, as movie-magic, ACTII popcorn with its instructions to be popped in a pressure cooker, popcorn as a gift, 4700BC popcorn in a designer tin, street-snack popcorn, popcorn at the daycare, popcorn at the block party, a separate popcorn cart inside the movie theater offering branded popcorn in luxury flavours, like white-and-dark chocolate tuxedo popcorn, and the way that different lahi are being rebranded as “corn-free-popcorn” in the Global North, which shows that none of this flows just one way,

and I keep thinking of the nurses at the movies, the way none of them have gotten popcorn, I keep thinking of Prabha, mostly, the bags under her eyes, the way she held her rice cooker instead of a child, all these metaphors too perfect, hermetic, complete.

We cannot afford such sweetness.

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Hi again, all! I am deep in revision-land and miss just— writing. So please note, if you are new, that this is all under-researched, un-edited zero draft stuff. I need space to play and I hope that what the snack encyclopedia lacks it makes up for in that feeling of vitality that only desperate writing done at the expense of paid work can radiate.

Thanks for being here, I love you.