— My name is Inigo Montoya.*
— As you wish.*
— Inconceivable!*

Yes, I watched The Princess Bride last week. Every summer, Gettysburg’s college-owned ‘art theater’ hosts a Wednesday night classic movie series. When it got started fifteen years ago, it was all Casablanca and North by Northwest and Rear Window. These days, under new management, the titles are dramatically updated. This summer we have Goodfellas, The Lost Boys and, of course, The Princess Bride.

Classic movies. Last month, in a library staff meeting, our children’s librarian talked about the success of her beginning-of-summer classic movie screening, The Sandlot. I’ve never even seen The Sandlot. Why? Because I was deep into my adulthood when it came out. Everyone else in the room, decades younger than me, waxed poetic about seeing The Sandlot as a child. I spoke up: “C’mon, can The Sandlot actually be considered a “classic” movie?” I’m embarrassed to say I made the quotation marks with my fingers.

“Yes, Jeff, I googled it, twenty-five years makes it classic.” I googled it too, and I couldn’t find anything about twenty-five years. But at thirty-seven years old, I’m willing to give The Princess Bride the ‘classic’ nod. And not just a classic, it’s a cult-classic, with a ridiculous following, so who am I to judge.    

Is The Princess Bride the most quoted movie of all time? In Gettysburg it started a week before movie-day on Facebook. I saw a photo of the band of thieves—three men, tiny, medium and huge—from the movie with the header “Leave Your Favorite Quote in the Comments.” My Name is Inigo Montoya…

I asked Susan if she would go. We’ve both seen the movie before. Once each, but I don’t recall if we saw it together. It came out in 1987, seven years before we met. Neither of us had positive memories of it. Over the years, as people quoted it in our presence, we subtly rolled our eyes, and kept our mouths shut. People who don’t like The Princess Bride are regarded in the same antisocial light as people who don’t like dogs (also me).

I wanted to give it another chance. I wanted to sit in a theater full of fans and see if I could figure out the appeal. But let’s talk about that full theater. In a theater, if someone sits between me and the aisle, I feel trapped, claustrophobic. This is an OCD response to my perceived losing control of a situation. Yes, I know it’s silly and unreasonable, but it’s the way my mind operates.

I’ve seen plenty of movies, concerts and plays penned-in like this. Typically, what happens is my Tourette Syndrome tics escalate. I crush my eyes together long and hard and often, and repeatedly reopen them to blurred vision. I scratch my forearms until raw and awake the next morning with scabs. I gnash my teeth together until they ache. To some degree, this is normal behavior for me, I do this stuff all the time. But at this elevated level, it becomes distressing. It’s hard to enjoy the show.

The simple and obvious solution is to get to the theater early and pick the seat I want. Which is what we did for The Princess Bride. Susan and I picked center aisle seats in the balcony. Since she knows my discomfort, she always lets me sit on the aisle. I’ve been to a few of these classic movies in the past, they draw a good crowd. The last one I saw was Bye Bye Birdie, pre-Covid, and I’d estimate the theater was seventy-five percent full, four-hundred-fifty people.

But this was The Princess Bride. Ten minutes before screen time, I knew it was a sellout. The place brimmed with people. As the planned seven-thirty start time slipped past, a man climbed on the stage and made an announcement. “We need your help. Everyone slide over away from the aisle and fill in any empty seats. We want to see how many more tickets we can sell. An usher hovered next to us to make sure we complied. “Hmmm, a social compact.” This was Susan. “It doesn’t seem fair since we’ve been here a half hour to make sure you got an aisle.”

I agreed, but what’s fair? The movie itself deals with this question… twice. At the start of the movie the character Westley says “Life isn’t fair, it’s just fairer than death.” Close to the end, Grandpa asks, “Who says life is fair?” I sucked on those nuggets of wisdom as I crushed my eyes together nonstop throughout the movie, disgusted with my discomfort, wondering if the guy who scored my aisle seat next to me could tell what I was doing.

My self-disdain continued through the rest of the evening when we returned home and broke open our laptops to see what terrible things happened in the world during the past two hours. In the morning, my foul mood lingered. Susan could tell something was bothering me, but when she asked, I swore I was fine.

The bootstraps guy within me responds to this situation with “F*ck it, if you don’t like it, just don’t go. And if you do, suck it up, don’t whine.” Life isn’t fair, and everyone deals with something. Tourette/OCD is my thing, and it aggravates me to realize I’m so high maintenance, so delicate, that I need special accommodations to enjoy a movie. But it still pisses me off that I showed up thirty minutes early only to get bounced from my preferred seat by the guy who showed up at the last second?

My discomfort aside, Susan and I both loved the movie. Walking out, she said she wanted to watch it at home with subtitles. She thinks we missed a bunch of great jokes. Goodfellas is this week, and I’m on the fence. It’s my favorite movie of all time, but I don’t want to repeat the seating debacle of last week. Susan won’t go because of the violence. My son Eli and I talked about going together, but he won’t understand what’s going on in my head when I get moved to the center of the row again. He’s likely to respond like the bootstraps guy.

What do you think? Should I have held my ground and stayed on the aisle? Should the theater recognize that the people who arrive early for aisle seats deserve to keep them? What would you do in this situation?

* These are the most popular quotes from The Princess Bride.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay