SPEAKING UP FOR PEACE AND QUIET
Whatever happened to keeping it down for the sake of the other people in the room?
You may have heard about the film A Quiet Place. Everyone’s talking about it because it’s hellishly scary and because the premise is clever and unimaginably awful: in order to survive, a family must keep absolutely quiet. If they make a single noise — so much as the tap of a Monopoly piece on a board — they are toast: breakfast for the sound-sensitive monsters that have taken over the world.
Anyway, it turns out that a 21stcentury audience can’t even keep quiet for the duration of a film about keeping quiet; a film that will not work if all you can hear is the person next to you slurping whatever soft drink he/she is having, or the couple behind rustling their popcorn while talking (I would say whispering, but that would suggest they lowered their voices).
At the screening I went to, phones went off (of course they did); someone was amused by something, and saw no reason not to share it with the friend three seats along; and a couple in our row moved just as the film started, clambering over us, it soon transpired, to get away from a man preparing to tuck into a nachos and dips tray snack (roughly as noisy and distracting as taking out a chopping board and tenderizing a chicken on his lap).
After that, several people arrived, well after the credits, and, instead of sneaking in quietly — mortified at turning up late to a film that relies on building suspense in the pindropping silence — creaked around, blinding people with their phone flashlights and generally behaving as if the lights had been prematurely turned out, before they’d had time to take their seats. It’s a miracle one of them didn’t just shout out: “Where the hell is H12? Can someone tell me? It’s dark in here!” They might as well have done it.
Then the shushing started. That would be me. And then the counter-shushing — because in the modern world, being shushed when you are talking in a cinema is met with the same response as if you had hissed: “Want to fight?” Later on, when things were getting really tense and Emily Blunt was expected to give birth in silence, someone went to the washroom ... or to get more snacks.
Everyone knows it’s a sign of getting old when other people’s noise starts to irritate. But we may have to revise that maxim, now that no one can be quiet in quiet places, or even moderate their noise levels in places where it would be considerate to do so.
Keeping it down for the sake of others is an antiquated concept. In all the situations, where lowering your voice was once the norm — restaurants and cafés with tightly spaced tables, on trains and planes and buses, the rule now is that you speak as loud as you would while on a walk in a wind storm, certainly loud enough for strangers to hear. “Is Everyone Getting This At the Back?” is the new standard speaking volume and it doesn’t matter what you’re saying.
You could be talking in some detail about your controlling boyfriend (overheard recently in the local café). You could be discussing why the two of you aren’t going to sleep together (overheard in a tapas bar). You might be going through business strategies with an employee (café) and insulting everyone who works there using language that would make David Beckham blush, or sharing details of a nasty divorce.
The irony is that as other people’s conversations have got noisier, it’s also got a lot harder to listen to. No one on a neighbouring table ever talks about what to do with their narcissi bulbs, that’s for sure. And everyone, everyone has forgotten how to be even just quiet enough.
Everyone knows it’s a sign of getting old when other people’s noise starts to irritate. But we may have to revise that maxim, now that no one can be quiet in quiet places.