Hemorrhoids Keep Me Away From Movies

Exhausted after ending a 10-day journey through an region bordering different ethnicities, I woke from a long night’s sleep and got ready to head to the cinema to catch a movie with a name I didn’t even know. I planned to go home afterward and watch Luc Besson’s new film “June and John” on streaming. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I suddenly felt something strange beneath me. I reached back and felt a soft, squishy bulge that was neither painful nor itchy.

I immediately consulted AI and a whole bunch of my doctor friends. The answer was clear: my internal hemorrhoids had prolapsed.

Life comes first! I dropped my plans on the spot and sought medical attention. It just so happened that my elderly neighbor had recently undergone hemorrhoid surgery, and she recommended her doctor to me: “She’s an exceptionally skilled chief physician, and as luck would have it, she’s on duty today and off tomorrow. You’d better go now.” As it turned out, my mother had been struggling with a similar issue. An hour later, the two of us—united in affliction—were lying in separate beds at the gastroenterology department of a hospital.

Unfortunately, my case was no joke—severe enough to require immediate intervention. After local anesthesia was administered, medicine was inserted where the sun doesn’t shine to nip the problem in the bud. The procedure was excruciating, and the doctor told me to play my phone to distract myself.

I happen to be someone who isn’t too concerned about privacy and has a flair for melodramatic oversharing. So I began posting live updates of my embarrassing ordeal on social media, adding captions like “Cherish every meetup. We never know how many more we’ll get,” and “I’ll never understand how some people take pleasure in ‘backdoor’ activities. I’m in so much pain that I want to die.” My goal? To earn a few laughs—and a little sympathetic chuckle—from my friends.

So, what exactly caused me to develop a piece of anal polyps and seven hemorrhoids—the largest one practically the size of an egg? According to the doctor, the causes were hereditary factors and prolonged sitting.

Well, it figures—I was behind the wheel for four to five hours each day during the 10-day journey. And at the five international film festivals I attended last year, I estimate I watched four to five films a day on average. Assuming each film ran about two hours, that was nearly 10 hours of sitting in theaters daily! Even outside of festivals, I’ve devoted a massive chunk of time either to the silver screen or my computer and phone screens. It’s no surprise, then, that my current predicament had been quietly brewing for a long time.

So, I joked dramatically on social media: “After what happened to my rear end, I’ve decided to boycott movies—and film festivals too.”

In a previous article I wrote about film festivals, I bragged that my record was watching seven and a half films in a single day. That was 15 hours straight in front of the silver screen, leaving time only for sleep and occasional fast food or snack breaks. Last year, I hit the six-films-a-day mark at Sundance, Hong Kong, Cannes, and San Sebastián. Many times, I was either dozing off in the cinema or nodding off while traveling between venues, so I couldn’t even remember the plot of the films I’d just seen—let alone offer any meaningful analysis or commentary. And of course, all that prolonged sitting was practically begging for hemorrhoids.

Some of my friends in the film industry don’t watch nearly as many films. A few of the more emotionally sensitive women I know might watch just one film and then spend days—or even weeks—processing it, during which they’re unable to take in anything new. I also know a director who rarely watches movies at all, fearing that other people’s stories and styles might seep into his own work. Once he has a rough concept for his film, he’ll send it to one of his encyclopedic friends who’s consumed a wide array of cinema, asking them to identify similar titles. Then he’ll speed-watch them just enough to avoid overlap—or worse, accusations of plagiarism. People like that, with their extremely selective viewing habits, probably never have to worry about hemorrhoids.

So now that I’m recovering from surgery, and am no longer able to binge-watch films with the obsessive intensity I once did, I wonder—will I become more like them? Will I watch fewer films, examine the limited pool deeper, and perhaps gain more from them?

I did consider paying my own way to this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The idea came up after an exchange student in France posted in a group chat, looking for someone to “cohabit with.” He said he’d found the cheapest apartment during the festival period, which cost just €50 a night per person, and was located close to the Palace of Festivals and Congresses (Le Palais des Festivals et des Congrès). After a full day of chatting, it turned out that he meant cohabiting in the same bed instead of in the same apartment. I’d assumed that we’d be sleeping on separate surfaces. With vivid memories of the architect Laszlo being assaulted by his patron Harrison in “The Brutalist,” and the gut-wrenching agony of my hemorrhoid surgery still fresh in my mind, I quickly and politely declined the offer. I said I’d decided not to go to Cannes after all. Of course, I was joking—the surgery happened long after the Cannes accreditation deadline. The real reason? I’m no longer a broke student, and there’s just no way I’m sharing a bed with anyone again. Deep down, I think I’m also not that passionate about festivals anymore.

A few years ago, I often noticed a friend who always sat in the very last row at various festival press screenings. He told me he had sleep apnea—he was afraid of falling asleep and snoring during slow art films, which would disturb others, or worse, trigger a sudden health episode. Sitting at the back meant he could stand up now and then and lean against the wall while watching. I also remembered something similar at the Venice Film Festival one year: during a screening, a man suddenly cried out to stop the film because the person next to him had collapsed from a heart attack.

Clearly, breathing problems, gastrointestinal issues, and even cardiac concerns have long accompanied the movie-watching experience. Some cinephiles and professional critics really do watch films with their lives on the line.

So, to help cinephiles avoid the threat of hemorrhoids, could festivals maybe offer just a few standing-room-only screenings? Or, like the Colón Theatre (Teatro Colón) in Buenos Aires, perhaps they could provide a standing area behind the seats for viewers who prefer to remain on their feet instead of their butts while watching films?

Of course, I know that’s another joke destined never to be taken seriously—after all, who can realistically stand through an entire Christopher Nolan epic for at least three and a half hours?