In Defense Of: McCosh 50

If you’re anything like me — and I assume you all are (Who doesn’t watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns on LOGO nowadays, am I right?) — then you have multiple negative associations with McCosh 50. McCosh 50 seats you and 479 of your best friends in wooden contraptions that pass for desks but really hearken back to the days when undergraduates hung by their thumbs in professors’ underground prisons. These torture devices do their work slowly. The seats have a 0.11 percent gradient downward so that a student beginning his 50-minute economics lecture in a fully upright position will end dangling from the edge of his chair like Mufasa in his final moments. To counteract the design of the least-fun slide EVER, McCosh 50’s desktops maintain a 0.09 gradient upward, so that laptops, notebooks and peanut butter sandwiches alike glide toward your tummy while you free-fall at the rate of 0.001 inches per second.

It’s pure terror, I tell you.

McCosh 50 is also home to my personal nightmare: the economics department. After lasting a meager six weeks in ECO 100: Introduction to Microeconomics, I still can’t walk into McCosh 50 without my PTSD acting up. I suddenly find myself drenched in a cold sweat, my left eyelid twitches, and I start vomiting profusely, just like that time I took the midterm. Clearly, McCosh 50 carries some negative connotations for students like me who have stress nightmares about Econ, Bridges, or not getting into Kiddy Lit. Oh wait, that actually happened.

We’ve established that McCosh 50 is not the most positive learning environment, in that one must fight gravity and an overwhelming sense of impending doom to make it through a class period. But the room has one redeeming quality that invalidates all these arguments. A single advantage that crushes my complaints into whiny dust. The achievement that bitch-slaps my grievances in the face. I think you all know where I’m going with this: “Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.”

The film is the pinnacle of theatrical flawlessness. After over 100 years of film-making, we have finally discovered the formula for movie perfection — robot violence, hot girls and a plucky Shia LaBeouf. If you take issue with my analysis, I encourage you to think of a single movie that wouldn’t be improved by the addition of Decepticons.

I rest my case.

In “Transformers 2,” we find Sam Witwicky in college, forging ahead on the “long-distance relationships can work” train with Mikaela Banes. Sam begins to hallucinate Cybertronian symbols, which are super well-explained and not confusing at all, during his astronomy class in — you guessed it — McCosh 50. Over the next 130 minutes, Sam, Mikaela and the Autobots battle jive-talking robots in a massive death rumble to reassert robot race relations and comfort anxious viewers with the knowledge that murderous robots will never take over the world if Shia LaBeouf is there to say “no” super firmly. And to think, without McCosh 50, we would have missed Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots on steroids duking it out in three dimensions. I shudder to think it.

McCosh 50 may induce tears, nausea and mild seizures in one or all of us, but we can never forget what that room has put on the world stage. Fans worldwide wept with joy when “Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen” hit the theaters. Movie critics wept for a different reason. But even if your heart is literally made of stone, you can’t tell me that you didn’t tear up a bit when Sam Witwicky breathed his last breath (You know, until the Autobots resurrected him).