But there is another way of going to the movies (besides being armed by the discourse of counter-ideology); by letting oneself be fascinated twice over, by the image and its surroundings – as if I had two bodies at the same time: a narcissistic body which gazes, lost, into the engulfing mirror, and a perverse body, ready to fetishize not the image but precisely what exceeds it: the texture of the sound, the hall, the darkness, the obscure mass of the other bodies, the rays of light, entering the theater, leaving the hall; in short, in order to distance , in order to “take off,” I complicate a “relation” by a “situation.” What I use to distance myself from the image – that, ultimately, is what fascinates me: I am hypnotized by a distance; and this distance is not critical (intellectual); it is, one might say, an amorous distance: would there be, in the cinema itself (and taking the word as its etymological suggestion), a possible bliss of discretion?

- Roland Barthes, Upon Leaving a Movie Theater

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Jacques always came early to the movie theater to secure his favorite spot. He loitered in the lobby an hour early, and when the doors opened to release the audience from the earlier showing, he pushed against the crowd and moved along the back wall until he came to the farthest seat from the door in the very back. He settled in promptly as the credits were rolling and people were scooting out from the rows. An employee in a blue trademarked polo and black pants hustled in and began to sweep up the mess. When the tail rolled in front of the lens and the projector snapped off, the young boy approached Jacques. “Are you here for the 4:30 showing?”
Jacques nodded and provided his ticket, but the boy didn’t look. He simply nodded with a smile and went on with his work.
It was a habit of Jacques’ ever since he was young to sit down for a movie as soon as possible. Though he was by no means an angry or bitter person, he despised having to stand in line with the people with whom he would view the films. He avoided conversation with fellow moviegoers. He averted his eyes of the strangers who would eventually fill in the spaces around him. Since he loved the cinema for its darkness, he despised the light of the lobby. Even in his seat, he kept his hood over his head until the movie began and the lights went out completely.
Like most people he knew, he wore the biggest coat to the theater so he could bring his own snacks without detection, and once the boy finished up his sweeping and left the auditorium, Jacques began to empty his pockets like an airplane passenger at a metal detector, displaying each treat to himself and appropriating it to a proper space: the left cup holder held his chocolates, the right cup holder held a liter of cola, the crevice between his legs held the popcorn that he made at home and stored within a large Ziploc bag, and his two open pockets on the outside of his jacket held bags of sweet and sour candies.
After a while, people began to file into their seats, most of them taking the rows further up, closer to the middle. Jacques felt content to know that nobody could sit behind him; nobody could intrude upon his isolation.The lights went down, the soft whirr of the film projector fired up, dust mingled in the funnel that stretched across the screen. Jacques removed his hood and slid down in his seat as if he were reclining in a bed. He opened the wrapper to his chocolate, and as soon as the enormous RKO tower began to spin on the earth, he began to eat.
Jacques’s appetite was surprisingly voracious. What began with picking apart the segmented chocolate became large mouthfuls, biting off large, undivided pieces and eating the bar like a sandwich. The amounts he tore from the foil paper were usually so big that the milk chocolate would liquefy before he could actually finish chewing. Jacques spent so much time with the snack that he was hardly paying any attention to the male lead eyeing the legs of a young secretary on screen.
He licked his fingers thoroughly of the mess and moved onto the liter of soda. Jacques didn’t want to disrupt the film or draw any attention to himself, so he took extra special care when unscrewing the cap. He shifted the top in small, measured increments, carefully exerting just enough force to let the carbonation release slowly. It took forever, but it was worth the silence. When at last the hissing died down, he removed the cap. As he sucked on the bottle, he looked back at the film. The two characters were now in a large apartment. A dead man with a pair of scissors in his back lay on the bed, but that didn’t stop the female lead from singing as she changed into some clothes.
Was this a musical? Jacques thought. He tried to remember the trailer, but as the cool and tingling sensation of cola coated his throat, he failed to draw up any recollection of musical numbers. Jacques remembered some violent imagery, which would account for the victim lying on the bed, but soon began to wonder if he was thinking of a different film, which he remembered by what was probably a film regarding World War II.
When Jacques rested the soda, he discovered he had drunk more than half of its contents. He put the soda back in the cup holder and began to plan how he would save it for the rest of the film. Popcorn wasn’t the best way because he had applied a good deal of butter and salt, which would only dry his tongue out. Jacques finally surmised that best bet was to eat the sweets. He pulled the bag and box from his coat pockets and opened them both. The bag crinkled as he ripped at the sides, which made him grit his teeth as he anxiously lifted his head to see if anybody was looking in his direction, but in the darkness, he couldn’t tell really where anybody was looking.
Still, the bag was stubborn, and only when he applied all of his might did the bag come undone, and with great force, spraying the small round treats all over the floor and rolling them down the inclined rows to the bottom. Jacques leaped from his seat and began to gather all of the pieces that he could grab, both trying to retain the runaway food and trying to hide from anybody who might likely be inquiring about the disruption with a stern glare. Jacques came up from crawling around on his hands and knees and took his place deep in the theater’s cushion.
Though he was able to relax once again, Jacques found himself troubled by a sweat brought on by exerting himself over his sweets and his anxieties. He slipped out of his jacket and tossed it over the back of the seat in front of him, and the air circulating through the auditorium cooled him down. He began to eat the handful of sour drops that he managed to salvage, setting each one on his tongue with care as the male lead in the film began fondle the female, her bare features becoming visible as the clothing faded away by a trick of the camera, then fading back into the scene. He sucked the sour flavor further back into his jaw.
As Jacques watched on, he found himself interrupted by the unflagging need to cool himself down. He flapped his shirt collar to blow air across his face but to no avail. He went to pick up his soda, but dropped it almost instantly. The plastic bottle bounced several times as the rest of the soda spilled onto the concrete floor and began to slither slowly beneath people’s feet. Surely, Jacques thought, the other audience members would realize their shoes sticking to the floor and trace the brown stain back to his seat. He thought himself found out. His body heat swelled anxiously as he stuffed the handful of confections into his mouth.
He hadn’t had the chance to chew once before a pain began tugging on his lower jaw. He opened his mouth and cried out briefly. The candies fell out, raining on the ground and racing once more to the bottom. Somebody from further below shushed him and the heat Jacques was experiencing grew even more intense. His shirt slid up his torso to reveal, in the dim light of the screen, a firm, rounded belly weighing down on his belt and lap. Jacques was frozen in his place. He ran his finger over the flesh, curious to know whose body it was and where his slender frame was hidden amongst it all. It was large and, strangest of all to Jacques, it bore coarse hair.
When at last he came to determine this figure to be his own, he panicked. He tried to stand but the new weight pinned him into his seat. A blonde female beneath a Vaseline lens began to blur across the screen entirely as Jacques felt his skull shift forward, headed by his lower jaw, which had grown a pair of sharpened canines. His nose, similarly, stretched and flattened against the bone, the nostrils becoming wide and receptive to the scent of oil-based butter, nacho cheese, stale and fresh popcorn on the floor, and processed sugar. His ears, fanning out, grew larger and pointed, but dimmer in hearing.
Just as soon as Jacques’ vision returned, his body lurched forward, causing him to fall against the seat in front of him, sending the chair’s reclining springs in a squeaking frenzy. “Keep it down up there!” A man insisted in a clearly audible voice.
Jacques’ back had been rendered stiff. He was hunched forward, clinging to the seat. He shimmied from the back to the armrest, and finally down to the floor.
In his bent position, Jacques’ expanded stomach bore stress in his waistline and belt, and so he worked to loosen them. He was only able to undo the notch in his belt before he started struggling to grasp the edges of his denim jeans. His fingers lost the flexibility of joints as his hand narrowed, allowing his middle and index fingers to move forward, while his thumb and ring fingers shrunk behind. He put his hand back on the carpet in the aisle and crawled out from the seat on his formed hooves. His feet, in a similar fashion, slipped out of his shoes and socks to reveal the symmetry of his mutations.
Jacques’ shoulders began to lose their form, disappearing into his fattened figure, and his arms and legs shrunk into stubbiness. His porcine tail, when it at last emerged, assisted the pig out of Jacques’ pants, allowing the animal to move more freely amongst the rows, his steps clacking against the hard flooring, picking up scraps below everybody’s feet and even attempting to steal from the tubs of popcorn set tightly in the laps of other moviegoers. All of the audience both gasped and marveled with equal parts fascination disgust at the sight of an animal in a poorly fitted plain white t-shirt that had somehow made its way into the theater. The pig eventually made his way to the front of the auditorium and onto the small maintenance stage, and there it remained with the partial image of a naked femme fatale projected onto its body until the management came to detain it.