Notes From A Reformed Movie Talker

Allow me to get out in front of this, before you get upset with me. I don’t talk in movie theatres anymore. I’m a respectable member of modern society. I don’t whisper, fidget, or look around. I certainly don’t check my phone. These days, I have even been known to throw the errant glare at people making noise. On very special occasions I, myself, have even been the dreaded shusher. I have gone in on this little shared social contract of ours; the one that states there are certain rules that we all got together a long time ago and agreed to live by, lest we be shunned by the community.

Prior to my rehabilitation, I had been shushed during movies, the likes of which, you would have never thought to be shushed in. The first few that come to mind are Manchester by the Sea, Lady Bird, and The Assistant.

From the moment the shush occurs, I go on a journey of the spirit. It begins with a deep sense of shame followed by irritation. When that wave settles, I enter a righteous indignation where I feel the need to continue on in my musings. As my mouth opens, then snaps closed, I coast, cooly, into a begrudging silence. In that silence, I must confront a singular truth: the reason I talk during movies is that I fundamentally don’t trust myself to enjoy the film.

In my defense, I was never talking about anything other than the movie. I was always engaging in the art and further enriching my experience with it. And in the process, of course, degrading the richness of others’ experiences. What do I think I am, the center of the universe?

It may have hurt the most when I was told to shut the fuck up during the screening of The Assistant, an indie film that is based on an amalgamation of men in the film industry, who were all cancelled not too long ago. I had worked for one of them very early in my career. My gasps and exclamations and asides were only to say, “This is me! This is my life! I really lived it! It’s all true!”

But that couldn’t be true unless everyone around me in the theatre could hear and understand that I felt I was more connected to it than they were. If this was a shared experience we were all having with the movie, people were projecting their own lives onto it, as one does with art, than my experience ceased to exist for some reason. Because I was the only one who could hear my thoughts, If I didn’t push it out of the conveyor belt of my mind, it would slip away and would have never been true in the first place. My own opinion wasn’t enough for me!

My friends, who had been aiding and abetting in my nasty habit for years, by giggling back at my comments, had all but given up on me. Over the years, I noticed the giggles turning into polite nods and then altogether just no reaction at all. I suddenly seemed like a mad woman, muttering to myself. I think often of the time in 2014 when my friends got up and moved rows because I was crying and exclaiming too loudly during Emma Stone’s death in The Amazing Spiderman 2. My outward musings were beginning to make me feel very lonely. So I stopped.

My inability to engage in self validation of my own opinions is something me and my therapist are still working on, but I’ve learned to keep it to myself. Therapy may cost 100 dollars a session, but movies are going for about 20 bucks these days. So I also need to save my insecurities for when it’s appropriate so as not to waste people’s money.

Everything I do is either a bid for connection or a ploy for attention. And more often than not, it’s both. I’m trying to reach out across the great beyond to share something, anything with the person next to me to see if they too, are sitting in the chair next to me, feeling all the same things that I feel. The youngest child in me that fears being left out of the game or the conversation cannot validate my own feelings about something and feel that they are authentic unless I know that the person next to me is thinking the same thing. After the movie ends, I rush to open Letterboxd and before I write my review, I’m checking to see what other people have said. I’m, in real time, triangulating my opinion about movies based on the populace’s reaction to the work and also based on what I think the reaction will be to my reaction.

I’ve always been motivated by the belief that what I think of a movie says something about me as a person and wanted to know, in real time, if I was a good person or not. I have now experienced an ego death of sorts. The less I talk in movies, the more I feel that the art you enjoy or dislike is no more a part of you than anything else that you have a passive experience with. Is my overall love for movies a huge part of who I am? Absolutely. However, I’m not so sure my opinion of The Substance is any more a part of me than my eye color or my allergy to tree pollen.