I rarely walk out of movies. Somewhere deep inside, I suppose I consider the contract between artist and audience so sacred that I can't help but uphold most of my own end even when the artist or artists are failing miserably to live up to their own.
That unspoken contract works like this: I, as the audience, promise to offer my suspended disbelief for ninety minutes or more, while the artists promise to present me with interesting characters who behave more or less like real human beings, who face threatening challenges, who struggle and evolve, and who bring their conflicts to some kind of meaningful resolution, for good or for ill. Not such an unreasonable deal, right?
Well, not everyone lives up to this contract. Lots of times the artists fail in one or more of the areas I listed, and lots of times I withdraw my suspension of disbelief before the movie is over. But I almost never walk out before the end, because I believe there's always something to learn from a movie—even if it's only learning what not to do in your own stories.
In fact, as I think about it, I can only remember one movie that I've walked out of, and that was Fled, and I didn't even walk out of that until about ten minutes before the end of the film. The pointless violence and mayhem that were filling in for an honest climax to the story finally became too much for me. It's not even that it was offensive violence. It was just pointless and dumb—and all the more so, because I had seen it all before in so many other bad flicks, so many other times. But still, I stayed with that movie almost all the way to the end. I stuck it out.
My former flame ██████ walked out of a movie once, though—and I think she was pissed off that I didn't come with her. The movie was Glengarry Glenn Ross, and ██████ walked out because she found the excessive use of profanity offensive. I found that ironic in the extreme, because she certainly wasn't afraid to use the word "fuck" herself if she took a mind to—and she definitely wasn't afraid to act the word out. I think she ended up wandering into another theater and watching The Lion King.
(All of which reminds me of a joke, if you'll indulge me. A panhandler, begging in the street, asks a well-dressed businessman if he can spare a little change. "'Neither a borrower nor a lender be,'" says the businessman with his nose in the air. 'William Shakespeare.' Miffed, the panhandler says, "Oh, yeah? Well, 'Fuck you.' David Mamet.")
This wasn't nearly as distressing to me, however, as the time I had acquired tickets to Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at Pioneer Memorial Theater in Salt Lake City, and took ██████ to see it. By the end of the first act, she was insisting that we leave—and at intermission, that's exactly what we did. Now, if I rarely walk out of movies, I've made a habit of never walking out of a play, but there I was, trailing along behind good ol' ██████ as she fled from a theatrical experience that required her to engage any portion of her heart or her intellect.
This and countless other incidents should have clued me in to the fact that ██████ was entirely wrong for me. But I never walk out until it's too late, until I've seen so many derivative repetitions of the same awful dysfunction that I finally have to move or be buried beneath the numbing pointlessness of it all.
I think maybe it's time I learned to walk out earlier on people who aren't living up to the unspoken contract between us.
