Brandon and I went to see Jumper at the Los Cerritos Center on Sunday. (Yes, even after I spent the entire day before in the theater, I willingly went back. Just don’t give me any popcorn.) We dutifully sat through the previews. (Yey, Indiana Jones!) The movie finally begun.
Just after Hayden Christiansen’s character trudged home soaking wet after his first “jump”, about 5 minutes in, the little lights through out the theater started to flash brightly. A voice came on to tell us that there is an emergency and everyone please calmly exit the building through the emergency exits at the end of the theater.
We got up and started down the stairs. The lady behind me was pushing up behind me, not quite pushing hard to enough to make her own way but definitely pushing. I whipped around.
“Excuse ME!”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I slipped.”
No, you didn’t, you overly panicky dramatic bitch. But whatever. We walked out the door and down the stairs outside the building.
Once outside, we didn’t see a stream of people exiting the mall. So, we went back in to get our money/tickets back. A blond lady pushed through the line of us who were queuing up to get our refunds, demanding that she gets a paper bag to breath into because she has anxiety disorder and was freaking out.
After that, she demanded a chair to sit down at the head of the line and some water but not the kind that the theater has because “I don’t drink that”. She told everyone within earshot that there was a bomb going off in her movie and when the alarm went off she thought it was a terrorist attack. (By the way, if you have anxiety disorder, why would you go see a movie that would make you anxious to begin with?) When the management offers to call the ambulance for her seemingly mounting symptoms, she refused but yet continued to discuss loudly that she can’t breath, that she needed water, that she was going to pass out, etc.
I can’t judge here, but I don’t know if people who would actually suffer such disorder would really make that big of a scene AND refuse medical assistance. But that’s just me.
The entire time, fear doesn’t even cross my mind. True, I was with Brandon so that was definitely an assurance. But still, the whole emergency thing didn’t bother me one bit.
It went through my head like this.
I didn’t smell smoke, so there wasn’t a fire. I didn’t hear gun shots or explosions, so there possibly wasn’t any AK-47 wielding mad men outside. I didn’t feel any movement of the building so that wasn’t an earthquake or the building wasn’t losing its structural integrity. I didn’t hear anybody scream so whatever it was couldn’t possibly be that bad. The exits were right there in front of me and they would put me outside the building which is only a few stories up, an easy escape.
And more importantly, my guts didn’t react to any of it.
There was no cause to fear. I wasn’t afraid.
But then there was all of these people pushing me down the stairs and this lady freaking the fuck out.
I wonder if in the real situation, who will actually survive the ordeal, me or them…