With oil prices topping $130 a barrel, airlines charging a per-bag fee, and home foreclosures becoming more and more the norm rather than the exception, I personally try to escape this depressing reality with a visit to the local theater to see the newest drivel that Hollywood cares to throw at us. But it wasn’t until I had to pay for the movie and popcorn yesterday that I realized that the biggest scam artist isn’t big oil, but the big screen.

During the Great Depression, over half of all Americans went to see a movie each week. This was a time when one quarter of all men in America were unemployed. Soup kitchens were keeping kids and adults fed, droves of people were migrating West to do the jobs that no one else wanted (I guess the Mexicans realized that they were better off in Mexico and probably had better border restrictions to keep us Americans out…), and in the Midwest, tornados were carrying little girls to the land of Oz (the land, not the prison). And yet, the theaters filled every day and night to the crowds hungering to be entertained.

Now we fast-forward sixty-plus years, to a time when rotary phones have given way to iPhones, wax records to iPhones, and television to…iPhones. Gone with the Wind had an average ticket price of $0.05 in 1939, while Iron Manhad a ticket price of $8.50. That is an increase of only 17,000 percent. In comparison, a barrel of oil was about $15 a barrel at the time Gone with the Wind came out, and now, peaking around $150 at some point this year, it reflects an increase of only 1,000 percent.

I know that some may think that this is price-gouging, but I see it as a punishment fee for the same cookie-cutter drivel that they produce every year. (Hint to Hollywood: If you can only make another remake of an old film, then just stop and put your head down on the desk until you can think of something original.)

But once you are in the theater, the gouging only starts to cut deeper. That one-penny bag of popcorn from the Gone with the Windera has now escalated to about $5 a bag, an increase of 500-fold, and I’m not even going to talk about the soda. I think that the drink I got yesterday was more expensive than the gas I put in my car.

But I think the solution to my movie-viewing dilemma can be fixed by Congress holding hearing after hearing and demanding these soulless executives lower their prices, show more nudity in their films, or just make movies that don’t suck two hours of my life away. Boycotts can be effective, but we would need roving bands of people with bats, knocking us over the noggin to simulate the effects of watching some of the crap that we are boycotting.

But this could backfire if the boycott goes too long. If it lasted years, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie wouldn’t be able to afford their new New Orleans house for all their kids. Or even worse, with the flow of “Big Movie” money coming to a standstill, we could have a lack of scandals and weddings of the rich and famous on the covers of the rags that my girlfriend likes to look at when we go to the grocery store.

With movies gouging me, “Big Oil” just doesn’t look that big anymore.