May 18th, 2012 by Jeff Simmermon



The general consensus is that The Avengers is one of the most massively entertaining and satisfying summer movies ever. I’m right there with the Internet hive-mind on that one, but my screening was extra-special — it featured a live brawl right there in the jam-packed theater.

Somebody sparked a blunt about halfway through the movie and smoked the whole fricking thing, Cape Fear-style.





Me and my buddy got there before the previews and had to beg for crappy seats together in the back row, up against the wall. So pretty much the entire theater sat there under this dense, low-hanging weed haze that just kept growing and growing through the whole thing.

Pot goes with comic book movies like peanut butter goes with chocolate. Or like pot goes with peanut butter and chocolate, really. But still, this is really something that should be attended to at home or in a park or something. It’s not like smelling weed at a rock concert, where it’s kind of expected.

It didn’t really bother me personally, but really – just the sheer audacity!

Tiny – and egregious – social injustices that don’t actually bother me personally make me completely nuts, just on principle alone. I’m kind of a Larry David that way, which may not be an admirable character trait. But at this point, it simply is, and it’s not going away. Just like Dr.Banner and the Hulk, I’m just trying to manage it.

We’re all part of this one fabric, a larger collective organism that succeeds or fails based on the grace and discretion of its components. And it makes me NUTS when people ignore that and just go off and do any old fucked-up thing they want to, regardless of what it does to the people around them. Somebody in there could have been trying to get clean, needed to pass a drug test, or gone to a movie specifically to avoid being around people that were getting wasted. So who is THAT guy to just blow smoke over the whole social quilt in there?

The haze grew and grew, all the way through the credits. Most people stayed in the theater anyway to see one of the stinger scenes Marvel buries in the credits to set up the next movie. The Avengers has two – the second one is right at the end when the lights come up.

Right after the first stinger scene, some guy jumped up and walked backwards down the stairs in the aisle to the main landing, yelling “hey man, hey man, you wanna go, huh, HUH? HEY MAN HEY MAN YOU WANNA GO YOU WANNA GO YOU WANNA GO” and repeated himself at least a hundred times. He feels the same way about the social fabric, I guess.

Then the dude that was smoking the blunt jumped up and answered back “AND WHAT NIGGA AND WHAT AND WHAT NIGGA”, also about a hundred times.

Really, it’s not so much the actual words they said as the way that they said them.

The guy with the blunt finally jumped out of his seat and ran down the steps to get into it.

He’s one of those guys that wears the waist of his pants down around his thighs with his drawers all hanging out in the back. I’ve always thought that look was mostly tough-guy posturing that might be a hindrance in an actual fighting situation. And it sure as hell was, because as he ran down the steps to meet his challenger, he stumbled on his pants and fell forward, chin out …

… and the guy that cared about the social fabric met that chin with a flawless uppercut.

They tangeld for a while, until the cops came. The blunt guy hiked his pants up and ran out the fire door. The cops settled everything down, all while the credits rolled. Then the second stinger scene came and somebody went “SSHHH, SHUT UP YOU GUYS!”

And seriously, everyone left in the theatre including the cop paused, turned and watched the movie for a minute while the final scene rolled, and then went about their business as the lights came up.

I felt like I was in New York in the late eighties. And man, what a satisfying in-theatre experience.