MovieChat Forums > The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Discussion > Incident at a showing of TDtESS

Incident at a showing of TDtESS

posted 3 years ago by CarolTheDabbler (570)
9 replies | jump to latest

Back some decades ago, I went with a friend (who was enrolled there) to see a screening of TDtESS in a lecture hall at MIT. The audience was, as you might guess, largely made up of people who loved the film and rarely got a chance to see it in those pre-home-video days.

But there was one fellow in the back row who kept jeering loudly at anything he considered illogical. For example, when the soldiers say they can't penetrate Klaatu's spaceship "even with a diamond drill," he hooted that they should have tried a certain other material, ignoring the fact that the movie had been made in 1951 and was set in 1951, so the other stuff hadn't been invented yet.

He got to be a real pain, till finally a fellow in the front row stood up, turned around and bellowed, "Shut UP!! Ain't you got no RESPECK!!?" The audience broke into cheers and applause, and the heckler wasn't heard from again.

[–] strntz (12231) 3 years ago

Sheldon Cooper was there???

[–] Satan2016 (25525) 3 years ago

Universities are full of Sheldons.

[–] liscarkat (18388) 3 years ago

Dude who stood up is my hero. I wish I had the balls to do that in a theater.

[–] CarolTheDabbler (570) 3 years ago

Yup, he did what just about everyone else there would have liked to do, but was too tame to actually do. I guess that's the stuff that heroes are made of!

[–] strntz (12231) 3 years ago

My wife and I saw The Passion of the Christ when it first came out. We had been forewarned by every review that it was a grim movie (2 hours of an assbeating basically) and that people left the theater in complete silence. My plan was to stand and applaud as the house lights came up but the film was so somber, I just couldn't do it.

[–] R_Kane (15828) 3 years ago

A number of MIT students do not rank high in social skills.

[–] CarolTheDabbler (570) 3 years ago

I take it you mean standard etiquette? The fellow's skills were quite effective in this case, albeit not to Miss Manners' standards.

[–] R_Kane (15828) 3 years ago

No. I was aiming lower. I live in Boston. I know folks at MIT. They are brilliant, but often they have more than their fair share of narcissism (your friend undoubtedly excepted) and less than their fair share of good sense.

I stopped using the term “common sense” years ago, when I realized that sense had become uncommon.

And I have been referring to the heckler all along in my replies. The guy who shut him down is Aces in my book.

So is Miss Manners. Always has been.

[–] CarolTheDabbler (570) 3 years ago

OK, now I see what you were getting at.

I'd be more likely to call the heckler's behavior rude and obnoxious, but those could often be synonyms for narcissistic, I suppose! I don't know for sure whether he was an MIT student, though. All the guys I knew there were really pleasant and down to earth, but they were grad students, which might be a somewhat different breed from undergrads.

Yeah, I like Miss Manners. She's a breath of fresh air in comparison to predecessors like Emily Post.