The couch feels softer than usual. The evening stretches longer. On the screen, a superhero in a blue cape cracks jokes so simple you can only sigh.

The special effects blink like a Christmas garland — too bright, but you can’t look away. Everything’s straightforward: villains are cartoonishly bad, the saved city shines, and the joke about underwear over leggings pops up for the third time in twenty minutes.

An hour and a half melts away without a trace. What’s left is a strange warmth. Like after binge-eating ice cream following a week of clean eating. Forbidden sugar sticks to your teeth. Nothing tastes better right now.

There’s something funny and at the same time suspicious in this simplicity. A feeling like you’ve been caught red-handed. Satisfaction mixed with a slight awkwardness even before the credits roll.

Morning pulls you back into the work grind. Coffee perks you up just enough to survive short chats by the coffee machine. A coworker asks straight up: what did you watch last night? The pause between you stretches like gum stuck under the table — resisting breaking apart.

The answer is ready right away. Saying the name of the movie about the funny big guy with laser eyes would be easiest. But your tongue picks a different move: just some… nonsense.

Your coworker’s already thinking about their tasks. They almost don’t care.

You stay inside that second — why is this little gesture more important than the whole comedy? Why do you even want to imagine the evening differently? Like pleasure needs its own passport with a visa from a strict taste committee.

If everything was about taste — you’d like it and forget it. But taste is trickier than skin or tongue; it’s also a look from the outside at yourself in the mirror of other people’s eyes.

Your list of favorite movies turns into a questionnaire for an invisible club: here’s arthouse for the respect of smart folks, there’s a top-rated series for kitchen talk.

Between these, a survival rule pops up: real pleasure is better hidden under self-irony (“just had a laugh”), or sometimes denied outright (“nothing interesting”). Because too simple is always dangerous for the image of a person with supposedly refined taste.

The easier the pleasure came, the harder it is to admit it out loud. Even if everyone around watched the same thing and laughed at the flat jokes, the collective disguise works perfectly — no one wants to be the first exposed.

Sometimes you notice: more time goes into defending cultural identity than into enjoying the evening itself. You pick a movie in advance “for show” — thinking not about yourself on the couch at night, but about yourself in the morning by the coffee machine among other cautious viewers.

The paradox: choosing painful arthouse for pride in front of a coworker is easier (and more usual) than laughing out loud at a simple comedy without the alibi of a “guilty pleasure.” As if your true reaction needs protection from your own future self.

Turns out, the question suddenly stops being about movies.

Does joy need an alibi too?