Tatyana and I were in the second row during yesterday’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood screening. Five or six seats from the left-side aisle. Just before the lights dimmed four 20something chatty casuals — two dudes, two pretty girls — sat to our immediate left. “Troublemakers,” I muttered to myself as they were chit-chatting from the get-go. They’d stop for a while and then resume. Delightful.
About 90 minutes in the guys got up and left for a long stretch. (What kind of moron leaves a major hot-ticket film for 10 or 12 minutes?) Then the girls started talking again, and suddenly I’d had enough.
I leaned over, eyeballed the main offender and said, “Would you mind not talking, please? Thanks.” She responded with an eye-roll look that said “well, if you want to be an asshole about it, I guess we could stop talking, yeah…I mean, if you insist…God.”
Then their boyfriends came back, and maybe five minutes later the women were yapping again. I looked over at the loudest of the two and gave her a look that said “really? I asked you nicely before and you’re talking anyway?”
The guy next to me saw my expression, felt the vibe and said “calm down…calm down.” A part of me wanted to go all Don Logan on his ass, but my death-ray look had been sufficient, I felt, and I wanted to stay with the film.
Then the calm-down guy, having decided that my facial expression wasn’t chill enough, said, “Jesus, you’re gonna make a thing out of this?” He hadn’t been around for warning #1, of course. At the time he and the other guy were probably chit-chatting with each other in the men’s room.
The women were the main culprits. In my humble judgment they were (and probably still are) nothing less than Don Logans-in-training. Incapable of basic empathy, listening only to their own whims, appalled that anyone would suggest that they consider the feelings of others.
Textbook definition of ASPD, or antisocial personality disorder: “People with ASPD can’t understand others’ feelings. They’ll often break rules or make impulsive decisions without feeling guilty for the harm they cause.”