There is a specific brand of existential dread reserved for the British provincial town, and Chichester—that quaint, suffocating bubble of cathedral-shadowed mediocrity—has just perfected it. Some unfortunate soul, possessing both too much free time and a catastrophic lack of taste, decided to spend over three hours of their finite human existence watching James Cameron’s latest exercise in aquatic CGI hubris, 'Avatar: Fire and Ash.' Their reward? Not just the intellectual malnutrition that comes with watching blue cat-people whisper about the 'way of water,' but a parking fine that costs more than the popcorn and the soul-crushing realization that the world hates them. This is the state of the modern West: we are being bled dry by parking algorithms while we pay to be bored by billionaires.

Let us dissect the anatomy of this particular failure. Cineworld, a company that has spent the last five years flirting with bankruptcy with the desperation of a middle-aged man at a nightclub, has apparently decided that its primary business model is no longer showing movies, but acting as a glorified bouncer for a patch of tarmac. They’ve shortened their parking limits, or perhaps they just hid the registration machines behind a pillar of indifference. Either way, the message is clear: if you are stupid enough to sit through a three-hour-plus James Cameron epic, you are exactly the kind of mark they want. It is a brilliant, if utterly cynical, tax on the sedentary. You enter the theater a customer and exit as a revenue stream for a private parking enforcement firm that probably has more employees than the cinema has functional projectors.

James Cameron is, of course, the silent accomplice in this petty theft. Only a man with his level of oceanic self-importance would demand three hours of your life to tell a story that could be summarized on the back of a damp coaster. He crafts these bloated monoliths of 'spectacle' that are designed to trap you in a dark room for the better part of an afternoon, blissfully unaware that outside, the bureaucratic vultures are circling your Volvo. The film itself is a metaphor for the experience: a high-budget, artificial environment where the rules change without warning and you end up feeling slightly robbed at the end. The viewer in Chichester complained that they had watched the previous two Avatar films without a problem. Imagine that: fifteen years of loyalty to a franchise about sentient neon lichen, only to be betrayed by a change in the fine print of a parking sign. It’s almost poetic, if you find the collapse of basic consumer trust funny.

On one side of this debacle, we have the corporate entity—Cineworld—which is so starved for cash that it has turned its parking lots into predatory traps. They didn’t 'warn clearly' about the registration requirement, because why would they? Clarity doesn't pay the dividends; obfuscation does. They want you distracted by the 4DX seats and the overpriced nachos so you forget that you’ve entered into a legally binding contract with a parking camera the moment you crossed the white line. On the other side, we have the consumer, a creature so habituated to the 'previous two films' that they assumed the world would remain static. It is the ultimate middle-class tragedy: expecting the system to work just because it worked back in 2009. Newsflash for the denizens of Chichester: the system is no longer interested in your convenience; it is interested in your penalties.

The parking firm, the 'penalty charge notice' (PCN), the registration plate scanners—this is the infrastructure of our current dystopia. It isn't a high-tech sci-fi world of flying cars; it’s a world of automated fines for staying forty minutes too long in a desolate lot while watching a movie about environmentalism. The irony is thick enough to choke on. You spend three hours watching a fictional race of aliens defend their land from greedy invaders, only to walk out and find that a very real, very greedy corporation has invaded your bank account because you didn't type your license plate into a sticky touchscreen in the lobby.

This is why everything is failing. The Left will scream about corporate greed and the 'predatory' nature of private contractors, while ignoring the fact that the victim spent their afternoon consuming a mass-produced product of the very Hollywood machine they claim to loathe. The Right will talk about 'personal responsibility' and 'reading the signs,' ignoring that the signs are intentionally designed by a suite of lawyers to be as unreadable as a doctor’s handwriting. Everyone is wrong. The cinema is a tomb for a dying art form, the parking lot is a trap, and the audience is a herd of cattle waiting to be milked. If you find yourself in a Chichester car park, staring at a yellow envelope on your windshield after watching a movie about blue aliens, don't complain to the papers. Just accept it as the 'Stupidity Tax' you paid for thinking that 2024 would be any better than 2023. You overstayed your welcome, not just in the parking lot, but in the illusion that things still make sense.