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My wife and I hadn’t been to the movies for a while, and we want to support our downtown businesses, and we’d heard so much about “Slumdog Millionaire,” and she’d had a lunchtime fill-in for her job who lived in Mumbai (the setting for “Slumdog”), so there we were in about the tenth row center, getting a perfect view of the screen. So we got the full impact of the movie’s stunning brutalities—not contrived action-adventure violence, but the sort that we Westerners would prefer to ignore.
But my wife was unable to follow the plot line because the sound was on so loud. Having been in this predicament before, I had brought earplugs for both of us, not to block out the sound but to limit it, filter it, make it bearable. That wasn’t enough, so I went back and asked the management to turn down the sound, which they did. It still wasn’t enough; she spent a substantial part of the evening with her fingers in her ears, and afterward swore she would never come to that movie theater again. Truly it was brutal.
So there goes another adult customer, and the movies take one more step to becoming adolescent entertainment. The only thing I can figure is that so many of the young crowd have damaged their hearing by cranking up their headphones and earbuds that what seems like an excessive level to us is just right for them. I wish I had a decibel meter to take to the movies, but even more I wish some sort of health inspector would do the same. The health of our hearing counts, too.
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