Penn Holderness, professional, uh, person who makes his family help him ruin pop music tracks on YouTube, is bad. His videos are bad. His hair is bad. “All About That Baste” is the absolute worst thing I have ever seen in my life. Everything about him is bad. Bad bad bad. Also, he (allegedly) big-timed a showing of the new Star Wars movie like a big ol’ god damn asshole.
That last bit—which also is bad!—comes to us from a post on The Rant. The post’s author, Billy Liggett, claims to have shown up hours early with his wife and two of their kids to an opening-night showing of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, for which they’d bought tickets months in advance. They were among the first 30 parties admitted to the theater, he says, only to discover on entering that a group—Penn Holderness’s group, it turns—had blocked off “five or six of the premium rows—each 20 seats across and perfectly centered in the theater” to reserve them for a giant party that, if it was large enough to fill all those seats, cannot have been more than like 25-percent present at the time.
From his post:
Whoever got to the theater early that day had brought with them these “reserved seat” signs and duct tape (it might have been painter’s tape … but I wasn’t paying attention) and made a dash to get them up before the rest of us walked in.
This is in a theater without reserved seating. God damn it.
My friends, today I say to you that upright human dignity is a flower, and like any flower it must be watered if it is to flourish and not wither. This is not always a fun task! Sometimes it requires sacrifice, just like how watering an actual, physical flower can require sacrifice, if the weather’s really hot that day or whatever. If there are bees around! In any case, a grownup does not shirk this duty, which is the sacred birthright of free persons, just because fulfilling it is a drag. What I am trying to say, here, is that our friend Mr. Liggett ignored those bullshit homemade “reserved seat” signs and claimed some primo Star Wars-viewin’ real estate, and by God that was the right—the only—thing to do.
Not surprisingly, the seat-reservers were a bunch of assholes about it:
“Yeah, this isn’t reserved seating,” I said.
“We’ve been here since 8,” the older guy replied.
“Yeah, and you got good seats,” I said. “The other 80 people in your group aren’t here.”
They sought out the manager. I motioned for my family go come join me, but two of the guys in the group sat on each side of me, to prevent my kids (ages 6 and 4) to join me.
Chump move! That is a chump move. I hate these people. Your responsibility as a lover of justice is to hate these people. They’re like ISIS! How are they different from ISIS? They are not.
Eventually our man had no choice but to withdraw; the seat-reserving scum were preventing his family from joining him, and the spineless theater manager made clear his unwillingness to help. And then, shortly before showtime, in strolled Penn Holderness himself to take the seat—right “in the middle of the pack,” according to Liggett—he had not earned by arriving early enough to claim it for himself. I am no historian or whatever, but I am pretty sure this is Stalinism.
Now, does his choice seat and revolting quasi-celebrity prove that Penn Holderness was the mastermind of this dastardly shit? It does not. A commenter under Liggett’s post claims that “a local CEO” purchased a block of tickets, and that the seats were held for “employees who had to work.” This seems a suspect explanation, given that Penn Holderness rather famously left his previous career to become a self-employed YouTube atrocity, and thus is not a late-working employee of some “local CEO.”
Even so, even if the “local CEO” story is baloney, it could have been his brother-in-law’s idea, or some shit. Fine. Maybe Penn Holderness was but a pawn in this heinous scheme. Maybe he was framed! It’s possible.
He still ruined Star Wars, though. How, you ask? With this:
Penn Holderness ruined Star Wars, and belongs in fucking prison.
[The Rant]
Illustration by Sam Woolley
Contact the author at albert.burneko@deadspin.com or on Twitter @albertburneko.