Popcorn Ruins Movie Theaters and I Think I’m Right

I was recently chatting with an alien that crash-landed on Earth. Besides some confusion that there are no nuts present in “donuts”, that human’s feet stink while our noses sometimes run, and the fact that “donuts” is also sometimes spelled “doughnuts”, we tended to meet eye-to-eyehole on most things. However, something they appreciated which doesn’t really butter my popcorn is popcorn itself. Being around others chowing down on popcorn while watching a movie unfortunately gives me great personal discomfort, and attending movie theaters is often painful.

I think that I have misophonia. It’s not on the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), and there seems to be healthy speculation about whether it derives from another mental condition (comorbid), if it can be genetically passed, and if it can be consistently diagnosed instead of other similar disorders. Whatever consensus folks who know more about this than I do come to, it is besides the point that I automatically yet furiously wish death on anyone who chews loudly. Blinding contempt aside, it’s a fun creative exercise to imagine how to murder someone in original ways, even though what comes to mind most often is strangulation, a boring and painfully unoriginal instinct. The phenomenon started happening more acutely when I was around 13 and has since been constant in my life. If you know me personally this has ruined your eating experience around me, thus being a bullet I seldom try to bite for how it changes what should be my friend’s unobserved and joyful eating habits. But I have no such empathy for you if you order popcorn at a movie theater, a morbidly evil act which proves Satan is real and you two shop at the same stores. Movie theaters, and the movie industry as a whole, have embraced and promoted the noisiest possible food to eat as their choice snack to enjoy, and it’s a pretty messy food at that too. The first ten minutes of any film is dominated by people ravenously shoveling popcorn from a bucket they could wear as a helmet into their cavernous mouths, echolocating with each other from across the theater in popcorn-speak that they are indeed raging assholes. Their hands, now coated in a film of oily trans fats and a lack of shame, are either being wiped on their pants, on what used to be nice seat cushions, or on the next pile of popcorn to repeat the torture all over again. My chagrin aside, why is popcorn a staple of movies, and why are movies a staple of popcorn? The answer is the Great Depression and human biology.

To sum up the origins of popcorn before pictures could move, humans domesticated themselves through maize/wheat as white settler colonialism dominated the natural and social worlds across every inch of walkable earth possible (We all know this!). However, an especially starchy-yet-hard-shelled variant of maize called teosinte was being selectively harvested and replanted in the area which is now Mexico as far back as 9,000 years ago. Brought to New England from Chile in the 1800s, it quickly became an interesting thing for people with nothing better to do than kick rocks and die of disease. Its explosive success came from its affordability, how fun it is to eat, and of course that aroma we all recognize today. However, although popcorn was revolutionized after the 1893 World’s Fair featuring the first popcorn machine, a mobile wagon which tossed the kernel in seasoning as it cooked, movie theaters in the 1900s would have none of it. To them, the messiness of popcorn which theater workers today can undoubtedly speak to, was not to be matched with their ornate indoor setups.

When theaters introduced sound in the 1930s and no longer required reading literacy, they became more accessible to more Americans, bringing the blue-collar appeal of popcorn one step closer to the the hallowed cinema halls. However, what finally bonded the movies and popcorn together forever was the Great Depression. Both popcorn and theaters were cheap yet pleasurable luxuries most anybody could afford at that time, and theaters eventually cut out the middlemen that were traveling popcorn salesmen by producing their own supply in-house. Once that move was made, theaters who put their chin up to the grotesque idea of making messy food for a wider audience would look down to see their theaters in economic ruin, while their popcorn-rich competitors spent all day counting their nickels. Not only were popcorn and movies now bound together, but each began to hold a vice grip on the other; The starch and unique snacking-action of eating popcorn pinged similar pleasure sensors in our bellies and minds as seeing a flick did, and a larger and larger percentage of popcorn consumption was coming exclusively from those venues.

Today, the connection between movies and popcorn is ingrained to the point of eating popcorn while watching movies at home, although that’s mostly thanks to popcorn companies successfully marketing their way through the television revolution of the 60s and 70s (hence, what would be a fantastic alternative for people like me is made even WORSE somehow). Microwaveable popcorn, introduced in the 1980s, turned what was at one point a struggling industry into one once again popping off, now in the homes of anybody with the newfangled technology. Tragically, the original low-cost appeal of popcorn which originally brought the two together in the first place is now a twinkle in the distance of time. Why? Profit of course! “Movie theaters make an estimated 85 percent profit off of concession sales, and those [popcorn] sales constitute 46 percent of movie theater's overall profits.” I believe it could be said that the tireless growth necessitated by capitalism has forced theaters into a bind of product versus profit. With only movie tickets and popcorn, how do theaters maintain annual profits to balance the books of movie studio demands and in-house costs? By jacking up the price of popcorn, then essentially acting as a donation to the theater which is complimented in turn with butter, starch, and annoyed Jackson’s across the world.

Theaters are trying all kinds of things to combat against home theaters and streaming, to mixed results. The sound systems are so loud that they are borderline brown-note-level extreme, and bars have popped up in AMC’s to both highlight an adult, social crowd while also giving me an excuse for loudly sobbing during “The Iron Claw”. Although different food options are another new strategy, I believe they all look like shit so clearly I should be drinking more. I don’t have an answer for this, but should I? Even if popcorn is marked up incredibly high, it is not too expensive if people continue to buy it. Even if it’s messy that doesn’t stop theaters being able to hire high school students who clean up their seats. And my frustration is a personal anguish that is far from what I believe a normal human being’s main concerns when seeing a movie are (There are dozens of us!). Movie theaters and popcorn are a match made in heaven, or for weirdos like me it’s a match made in a perfectly ironic, cruel hell.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-do-we-eat-popcorn-at-the-movies-475063/