Ignatius tossed money at the cashier and literally lunged into the Orpheum, waddling down the aisle toward the footlights. His timing had been perfect. The second feature was just beginning. The boy with the magnificent photographs was definitely a find. Ignatius wondered if he could blackmail him into watching the wagon every afternoon. The urchin had certainly responded to his mention of a friend on the police force.
Ignatius snorted at the movie credits. All of the people involved in the film were equally unacceptable. A set designer, in particular, had appalled him too many times in the past. The heroine was even more offensive than she had been in the circus musical. In this film she was a bright young secretary whom an aged man of the world was trying to seduce. He flew her in a private jet to Bermuda and installed her in a suite. On their first night together she broke out in a rash just as the libertine was opening her bedroom door.
“Filth!” Ignatius shouted, spewing wet popcorn over several rows. “How dare she pretend to be a virgin. Look at her degenerate face. Rape her!”
“They sure got some funny people at matinees,” a lady with a shopping bag said to her companion. “Just take a look at him. He’s got on a earring.”
Then there was a soft-focus love scene, and Ignatius began to lose control. He could feel the hysteria overtaking him. He tried to be silent, but he found that he couldn’t.
“They’re photographing them through several thicknesses of cheesecloth,” he spluttered. “Oh, my God. Who can imagine how wrinkled and loathsome those two really are? I think I’m getting nauseated. Can’t someone in the projection booth turn off the electricity? Please!”
He rattled his cutlass loudly against the side of his seat. An old usherette came down the aisle and tried to grab the cutlass from him, but Ignatius wrestled with her, and she slid to the carpet. She got up and hobbled away.
The heroine, believing her honor to be in question, had a series of paranoid fantasies in which she was lying on a bed with her libertine. The bed was pulled through the streets and floated across a swimming pool at the resort hotel.
“Good grief. Is this smut supposed to be comedy?” Ignatius demanded in the darkness. “I have not laughed once. My eyes can hardly believe this highly discolored garbage. That woman must be lashed until she drops. She is undermining our civilization. She is a Chinese Communist agent sent over to destroy us. Please! Someone with some decency get to the fuse box. Hundreds of people in this theater are being demoralized. If we’re all lucky, the Orpheum may have forgotten to pay its electrical bill.”
As the film ended Ignatius cried, “Under her All-American face she is really Tokyo Rose!”
—From A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole (1980)