12 — High Cinema

There are 40 cinema houses in this city, 25 single-plex, 10 double-plex, 5 triple-plex. Sums up to a total of 60 screens with about 4 shows per day. All in all, we get 240 shows in a single day. Each screen averages about 300 seats, which leads us to a total audience of 72,000. Assuming a safe margin of 10 bucks for each ticket sold, we will have a total revenue of 7.2 million for every day’s screening. Exclude from this the commission of 80k per month for 40 operators, we have about 4 million in profits every single month.

Only a few months after the launch of a movie that made us all rich, we had to leave the city. No one apart from us knew the secret behind the film’s success. It felt as though we had pulled off a fine-fine robbery. It was a gentle swift move that dropped hard-earned public money right onto our palms. We gave them hopes of entertainment but offered nothing but doses of an alternate reality. No one knew what was happening behind the hidden façade of the cinema, because it wasn’t just cinema, it was high cinema.

The idea was simple in theory, difficult in execution. We had to screen low-end, dirt cheap, third-grade films that were shot in a week’s time by some gathered novices. It required minimal effort along with shedding some bucks here and there to produce some shit shows that were passed off as artistic masterpieces. This was possible only when doses of stimulating drugs were delivered to the moviegoers by way of the ventilation duct. The drug was moderately addictive. It induced numbness along with a minor release of serotonin that kept the masses coming back for more. They could always remain hooked without really knowing that they were hooked. The doses were carefully calculated, not high enough to doze them off, but high enough to keep them high. The sales kept rising; the shows remained full. Demand was excessive, and our supply started expanding to every cinema hall in the city. All we could do was raise the prices. Hundreds of bucks were shed by pseudo-art fanatics every day of the week for buying a single ticket of the hourly matinee shows which ran throughout the day.

Induced artistic appreciation held a steady command on the business until the whole conspiracy was blown up by Mrsu, one of the cinema owners who caught his projector operating man mixing drugs in the air ducts. Mrsu tortured the operator and got to know about the whole scheme. He then went on to blackmail us, and so was discretely killed. The death of Mrsu caused riots in the city as he belonged to the elite conservative class, while the operator was a member of the left-wing communes. Our names stood clear however but the fight between the two communities lasted for months. We were forced to leave the city.

We didn’t have any reason to come back, it was too risky to conduct business in a city that had turned hostile. But we were still hungry for the money. After parting ways for some time, we decided to reunite, this time in a small town a little too far from our original sin city, with only five cinema halls to begin with. It was the perfect testing ground for new endeavors. We had better drugs, worse films, and plans for experimentation. We started small and kept it that way. Sure the money was less, but we had before us quiet and peace, the simplistic pleasures of keeping the town engaged in watching shit cinema on and on till the day lasted.

Soon our latest operations gained popularity from the nearby citizenry, and also pulled the attention of Mrsa, another bourgeois cinema owner, operating most of the cinemas in the neighboring big towns. Mrsa had no idea about our past and was simply attracted to our exponential sales that too in a fairly small town. On meeting us, he complained that his cinemas were shutting down because most of the town folks were not finding it entertaining enough. Many of his city folks were flocking to our small town to watch the kind of cinema we served. He continued to rant about how much he was investing in bringing in classy cinema to the brute commoners, but none of them appreciated his efforts. His grief was made evident by the disclosure of all losses he was running into. He wanted a chance to see the movies that we made. We couldn’t protest. Our theatre was set up with the same film that had been running for many months now. All doors were shut. Mrsa was seated as the sole viewer. The movie began and fumes of the drug bolstered the air, hitting him as sharp nausea. We shut down the place for three days and kept Mrsa high enough — for far too long.

Mrsa soon turned insane and went on a killing spree to assassinate many of our town's commoners, one fine massacres eve. The town folk retaliated by holding him captive, executing him publicly, and burning down all his cinema operations in nearby towns. The only source of entertainment that was left then for about tens of thousands of odd commoners were the five cinema halls, still operated by us. We realized the possibility of making our whole service an elitist affair and shooting up our profits, but instead, we chose to expand our reach through an extensive cinema network spreading across every one of the nearby towns. We simultaneously kept upping the prices bit by bit until we were able to return back to the 4 million per month revenue figure.

Everyone in the region was now a successfully converted, ever-consuming customer. But every success came along with its fair share of problems. The people somehow were falling into the traps of passivity. They were now spending their limited time and money solely watching films. After shelling off all their daytime watching movies, the remaining fatigued night left them incapable of work. They couldn’t earn money and thereby couldn’t watch the movies. When they weren’t watching movies, they stayed fairly clean, started working again, started earning money again, and once they’d saved enough, they’d again visit the theatre. This was a cycle that was continuously witnessed everywhere. For a few days of the week, the town fell defunct in sync, while for the remaining few days, the town worked themselves hard in sync.

We ourselves were tired of working seven days a week. We also were steadily losing patience with the erratic behavior of the town folk and mutually decided to tune their cycles in a way that exhibited greater consistency. We thereby let go of our money-mongering instincts and restricted the cinema viewing experience to only two days a week where every person was completely high and inactive, while for the remaining five days they could work hard without distractions. We started calling those two days Mrsa & Mrsu, honoring the dead gentlemen who were sacrificed in way of our pursuits. Henceforth, a new system was born, a perfect system was born.

Our work was now restricted to only two days, while for the remaining five days we found ourselves bored enough. Enough to start getting high on our own supply. The town could have been left productive for all seven days of the week, but it was our greed that compelled us to make them spend whatever they earned, for the greater part of the week, within just two days. That way, we could spend whatever we earned within two days over the remaining five days of the week.

These were some fair share of ills that we committed but never realized their extremity along the way. But everything seems to be in harmony now. They are the balance and we are the counterbalance. That’s it. Five days, two days, how the fuck does it matter. They stay high when we work. We stay high when they work. It’s a perfect system as I said. Thanks to high cinema.