prompt: earth, title: flavacolics anonymous in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Movie-theater butter, of course, isn’t actually butter at all. It’s “topping”. That stuff they put on popped corn at your local multiplex (if you still have one, if yours wasn’t put out of business by a streaming service, abandoned nine months a year and some permanently-temporary Halloween costume store for the other three) is mostly soybean oil and a slurry of butter-ish petrochemicals.

Not a drop of butter in the bag. I suppose there may well be some small amount of dairy-derived something there in the secret mix, “dehydrated milk solids”, to prop up the illusion but that is as close as we get. One butter-adjacent part per million, maybe per billion. Movie-theater “topping” as homeopathic butter. Movie-theater “butter” not as butter at all, rather as a memory of butter.

Yet it tastes better than actual butter somehow. It’s cheaper, less healthy, laced with ten thousand additives so that it won’t soak the popcorn as real butters would, so the product (as that’s what it is, product) will stay crunchy longer, sitting out waiting to generate sales. It should, by all natural and unnatural rights, taste worse. Acceptable, maybe, given the situation of being outside of your home where you can’t pop your own kernels or clarify your own fancy-schmancy imported Irish creamery butter, but it should absolutely pale in comparison.

That’s the trick, though. It doesn’t. It tastes better. Movie-theater butter, butter-esque “topping”, is some of the most delicious stuff made by human hands, better than most natural things as well. In the same way the hum of a Hammond B3 organ as the backing track of a classic rock ballad is more beautiful than any bird-song, any castrato chorus, than even the crack of a freak rainstorm soaking into a parched desert vista, arid clay earth breaking against the power of one single drop.

The thing is, we made it that way. And I don’t mean “we made it that way” in a “cynical human industrial food science way”, in a “test tubes and patents stolen by a company because a person was on-shift when they invented it” kind of way, even though that is incidentally true. We made it that way because it was part of a cultural ritual we had in America for a handful of years where it was part of something special. We used to, once a week, go into a big dark room with a bunch of strangers and collectively hallucinate brighter technicolor lives where we were all heroes and everything and everyone was beautiful and there were happy endings to be had. The soya goo and plastomolecular distillates were part of that communion and so we associated the two things together. That fake “topping” as our connection to those slowly dying ecstatic traditions.

A heart-clogging confabulation of industrial bean-sweepings and hopes transubstantiated by our imaginations and aspirations into something even better than the real thing. Movie-theater butter isn’t butter at all, though it’s perhaps unsurprisingly a damn good metaphor for Hollywood itself.

Last updated July 13, 2022