Be honest, do you REALLY enjoy popcorn? Oh come on. It truly is the most awful goo. Tastes like polystyrene, niggles its way into dental cavities, makes you flush and sweat acne. And you know what? Every weekend I guzzle bucket-loads of the stuff. By Sunday morning, I've chomped through so much salted mulch my tongue has acquired the colour and consistency of fetid cardboard. Only one solution, obviously. No more Saturday nights at the movies.
In nutritional terms, you can't stoop much lower than cinema nosh, the culinary equivalent, surely, of a Robin Williams sentiment-fest. The arrival at multiplexes of allegedly "savoury" alternatives - burgers, hot-dogs, chip'n'dips etc, hardly redresses this yawning quality deficit.
Now, instead of merely courting tooth decay and high blood pressure (all that cola, not good), you get to flirt with your cholesterol level. More positively, some theatres (well Virgin in Dublin) have begun to sell beer. Which is nice. Pesky licensing laws being what they are, though, you can't actually bring your swill into the movie with you. Boo hiss.
Resistance is futile of course. On entering a cinema foyer, most of us will
immediately be seized by an almost Pavlovian compulsion to snaffle down tubloads of lipid saturated munchies. Even those who consider splurge-snacking entirely superfluous to the matter at hand, i.e. watching a film in conditions of relative calm, find themselves hard-pushed to repulse the day-glo flytrap that is the cinema snack bar.
Perhaps unsuprisingly, the cinemas are all for in-theatre guzzling. How much do you reckon a drum of pre-popped corn costs? We're talking Godzilla-proportioned profit margins here. Dublin's three UCI theatres alone shift approximately 650,000 bags of popcorn a year. Throw in the ubiquitous vat of cola (three sizes: huge, ridiculous and you've got to be joking), an occasional luxury icecream (Ben & Jerry's and Haagen-Dazs are currently slugging it out for cinema foyer dominance) and stand back while profits rocket through the roof. Just like Bruce Willis in Die Hard II. UCI estimates that snacks account for 30 per cent of yearly revenue.
"The smell of popcorn is part and parcel of what the cinema-going experience is all about. When an audience comes and catches a whiff - they know they've arrived," says Matt Connolly, a manager at Virgin Cinema in Dublin.
A snack bar sales will vary widely from movie to movie. Po-faced "indie" offerings tend not to draw in hordes of greasy-chinned hotdog munchers. Lurid "chick flicks" such as Titanic and Scream on the other hand, do. Older people generally don't gorge on sweeties, so films that appeal to greying mum and dad archetypes will often precipitate a downturn in business. Kids, oddly enough, consume less munch than adult cinema-goers. Presumably they'd rather not squander their entire weekly allowance on a single fleeting orgy of sticky-pawed excess. A carton of cinema popcorn typically retails at £2 to £3 - you'll get an awful lot of Taytos and cola bottles at the cornershop for the same price.
Weekender couples are the biggest spenders. One whiff of melted butter and they've gone all slack-jawed. "The guy buys himself an enormous pot of popcorn and then, because he doesn't want to share, he'll buy her a smaller one. It's really funny, they all do it," says one Dublin cinema attendant.
The other thing about cinema food is that it's so ebulliently, unapologetically loud. After all, isn't the whole point of the movie-going experience - the warm, chocolate-infused darkness, the morally enfeebled escapism peddled by your average blockbuster - to suspend belief? And into this snug, velvety hidey-hole they turn loose a mob of unreconstructed gobblers, dribblers and slurpers. Those of you who have ever endured a pummelling at the hands of a clutch of goggle-eyed pre-pubescents overdosing on artificial sweeteners and caffeine, while attempting to ponder the existential quandaries of say, the light sabre duel at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, will appreciate my frustration. Actually, cinemas don't have to resemble temples to unchecked consumerism. One theatre at least has broken with convention by refusing to stock the usual wonkafest of sugar and caffeine-ridden temptations. Instead, The Kino in Cork offers mugs of coffee and carrot cake. Then again, it mostly screens arthouse movies.
"Our audience wants to be able to enjoy a film in peace. They don't want to have to put up with noisy eaters and popping sodas," says Kino manager Una Feeley.
"People are surprised that we offer proper coffee in a mug which they are allowed to bring into the cinema. They say to us, `Hey - what a novelty. We're actually being treated like adults'."