That was splendid, Joseph.
Thank you so much, and thank you, Ander, for having me here.
Can I invite the people who are standing to sit down?
There are plenty of seats over here.
Here, I'll set yours outside.
OK.
Good.
All right.
I'm going to read a few pieces, and the first one
is "Confessions of a Shusher."
"I am a shusher, which is to say a self-appointed
sergeant-at-arms who tells noisemakers in the theater
to be quiet.
You take your life in your hands when you shush a stranger,
since he may turn out to be a touchy psychopath who
is reminded of an admonishing school teacher he detested.
But having been in the past a grade school teacher.
I cannot shake the idea that I am somehow responsible
for the correction of these breakdowns in the assembly.
My usual procedure is to start with a glare at the offender.
Glares are unfortunately quite ineffective when the noise
makers sit in front of you.
Even if they are to the side or behind,
a glare may be misinterpreted as rubbernecking.
I then proceed to clear my throat
hoping that this signal of civilized discomfort
will be understood as a reproach, and almost never is.
I then usually undergo an internal struggle
asking myself, 'Who am I to set myself up
as a policer of public behavior?
Can't I simply ignore the nuisance?
Is it really worth it to omit an ugly sound which grates
on my ears as well, which may distract others from the movie,
and may draw on my head some physical retaliation against
which I am ill-prepared to defend myself,
or else some unpleasant curse?'
These questions are merely a way of biding my time in the hope
that the problem will disappear by itself.
If it doesn't, I am compelled to graduate to stage two--
a good hearty Shhh.
Much as I might want to soften the aggressiveness
of this susurration, experience has taught me
that a tentative shush is a waste of time, too easily
mistaken for some private sigh.
But then even a lusty shush is frequently ignored.
Perhaps it is too comic sounding,
has too much of the sneeze about it, the hyperactive radiator
or the ready kettle.
In any event, a shush does not obligate its target
to recognize that he or she has been addressed
the way normal speech does.
What shushes do have in their favor
is that being such a universal signal,
they make the reprimand seem less a personal confrontation
and more of the bubbling up of a communal superego.
However, if the offenders continue to talk after several
shushes, perhaps even issuing some derisive mimicking shush
of their own as a witty riposte, then there is no choice
but to come out from behind the anonymity of the shush,
and heart and mouth escalate to a crisp verbal,
'Please stop talking.'
This is somewhat followed by, 'You're not in your living
room, you know,' if one is feeling pedagogically
self-righteous.
Whatever statement one makes is likely to produce
a furious twisting in the chair by the chief gabbler
to see what puritanical nerd has had the temerity to question
his freedom of speech.
It is necessary to return the fellow's look
with a cool, frowning stare of one's own.
Sometimes the shusher senses a small ripple of curiosity
among those nearby, like schoolchildren
drawn to a playground fight.
Their lack of support for law and order
is not the least irritating facet of the situation,
since you had thought you were intervening at least
partly for everyone's sake, and now realize that to them you
are merely one more lunatic releasing commands
into the indifferent dark.
By now the movie spell has been broken.
I sit boiling, feeling helplessly angry
and at the same time frightened of the offender's
potential rage.
If he falls into a resentful silence,
I can calm my heartbeat and tell myself
that I have struck a blow for moviegoers everywhere.
The problem is that the request to shut up
is often taken rather personally.
It seems to touch a sore spot in the requestee's dignity.
Particularly, I've noticed if the chief talker is showing off
for his date or his group of buddies,
he may continue to jaw all night as a point of machismo,
so that what had started out as unconscious rudeness graduates,
via shushing, to defiant policy.
At such turns I compose speeches to myself along the lines
of, 'We did not pay good money to listen to your asinine
conversation,' or 'How can we expect to have a democracy
if-- '
But I usually spare them the civics lesson
because by this point, I decide to write these people off
as hopeless morons.
I sweep up my coat and belongings, ignoring
the victorious hoots, and allow myself a slow censorious
abandonment of the row.
Perhaps a grain of guilt, I tell myself,
will lodge itself in their subconscious
and come to ripening next time.
It would be agreeable to report that the problem ends there,
but many times my newly chosen section
is also contaminated with talkers,
so that I may be forced to move three times in the course
of a feature film.
In doing so, I incur the risk of being mistaken
for a restless flasher, but it is a small price
to pay for cinematic peace of mind.
The crux of the problem is that I
want to watch movies in movie theaters
as they were designed to be seen,
and I like having the company of other bodies, other spectators,
around me.
But at the same time, I've become preternaturally
sensitive, during years of devoted film going,
to distractions.
Not just to the conversationalists,
but to the foot kickers or those who nervously cross and uncross
their legs behind me, each time pressing
into the back of my seat, the latecomer who
compounds the first fault by making what seems
like a deliberately elaborate coming to rest,
removing her coat slowly and rearranging her department
store bags, the doting parent who
keeps feeding his child sourball candy wrapped
in maximally crackling cellophane.
I don't even like to sit behind bald-headed men
because their domes reflect too much light
and detract from the screen's luminescence.
The fact that my own hairline has receded at a rapid pace
makes me hope that others are not so pathologically picky.
The truth is I can live with the kickers, the candy
unwrappers, the baldies, et cetera,
but I draw the line at prattlers.
Is it just my luck to attract them, or have today's movie
audiences declined across the board in their capacity
to keep silent.
We can always blame television for altering movie viewing
habits.
A good many people who attend movies today do
seem convinced that they are sitting in their couch at home.
Others must believe they are in the bedroom,
as they snore or make love.
You would expect that young people who have grown up
in the channel-hopping, short-attention-span era
would be the worst offenders, but the noisiest
from my observation are elderly couples who
keep comparing notes on what is happening and why.
Maybe hearing loss makes them talk louder
but it is also as if submission to the film experience
were a threat to their couple bond.
And in the end they choose togetherness over immersion.
Audiences of the 1920s and 30s were famous,
indeed, they were criticized for such
by intellectuals for their mass somnambulism
as the lights dimmed.
Today's audiences are like patients hard to hypnotize.
They resist the oneiric plunge.
Accustomed to seeing modest sized images
and the convivial, lamp-lit surround of family life,
they do not fully participate in the ritual of sudden engulfing
nightfall.
And today's theater owners further dilute the darkness
by letting in considerably more ambient light,
usually for security reasons, and scaling down the grandeur
with smaller multiplex screens.
The result is an uneasy suspension
above the film narrative, the equivalent of a light sleep.
Audience chatter has also been affected
by a shifting perception of when a movie actually begins.
I was sitting in the movie house recently
waiting for the show to start.
I like to get there early to absorb the atmosphere
and compose myself for the descent, and in front of me
were two women having a discussion about apples,
Granny Smith versus Macintosh, fresh versus baked.
It was one of those tedious conversations you cannot help
but eavesdrop in on.
The lights lowered, the coming attractions started,
the women chatted on.
Now, they were discussing which restaurant they would go to
after the show.
While coming attractions can be fascinating cultural artifacts
and, in any case, I have a fondness for that tantalizing
promise, but I recognize that they are in a sense only
advertisements, and so the audience has the right to talk
through them, resisting these solicitations with skeptical
remarks such as, 'They couldn't pay me to see that one.'
However, the titles of the feature film started to appear
and the women continued conversing.
'Should they go to a French bistro or eat Chinese?'
But you will say, it was only doing the titles.
Only the titles?
I am curious who is in the cast, who
wrote the screenplay, produced it, and even if I were not,
I would still think the labor of these collaborators
deserved a respectful silence as their names pass
before my eyes.
Then there was a choice of typeface, no small matter.
Above all, the title sequence often
introduces the key visual and musical leitmotifs in the film.
One school of criticism even argues that the title sequence
is a miniature model, encoded of course, of the movie to follow.
All right.
I see I haven't convinced you about the significance
of the title sequence, but surely you
will agree that the first shot of the film
is highly important in arousing your expectations,
as important, say, as the first sentence of a novel.
Yet the women kept talking.
This particular opening shot panned
across the rooftops of a Sicilian city,
huddled in the landscape, establishing
the drama's largest social context,
while at the same time, expressing
certain aesthetic choices, camera movement, angle,
lighting, that allowed us to sense
the tempo at which fate would be distributed to the characters.
It was a particularly engrossing, well-composed,
mood-setting shot undermined by the chatter of my neighbors,
and I felt I had no option but to shush.
One of the women replied, 'Nothing's happening yet.'
Mood, location-- this was nothing?
It was only during the first dialogue sequence
that they decided something was happening
and finally fell silent.
I want to make the distinction here
between what I regard as justifiable audience
noise and the kind of chatter I am describing.
I did not expect utter silence in a theater,
nor do I necessarily want it.
Comedies obviously gain from being seen
in a packed, roaring house.
If I am at a horror movie and during a frightening sequence,
some teenagers start yelling, 'Watch out!' or 'Oh, gross!'
it's in the spirit of the occasion.
If my fellow moviegoers rejoice at the chainsaw dismemberment
or its so-called street slime being blown away in Death Wish
11, I may fear for their souls and their politics,
but I do not fault them for improper audience behavior.
They are still reacting as a public to the events on screen,
and are swept up in the drama.
What I cannot accept is the selfishness of private
conversation.
Even when nothing is audible, from a nearby tete-a-tete,
but a whispering buzz, the mere knowledge
that my neighbors are not watching
with their full attention dilutes and spoils
my own concentration.
For all that one is still a crowd member,
moviegoing is essentially a solitary process.
To refuse that solitude is to violate
the social contract that should be written on each ticket stub.
If indeed movie audiences of today chatter
more during films than they used to,
I can only surmise that it is something
to do with, on one hand a spreading fear of solitude,
and on the other, an erosion of what it means
to be a member of the public.
There have been times over the years
when my role as a cinephile and swain have come into conflict.
I've had to make it clear to my date,
however much I may have doted on her, that I actually
did want to watch the movie.
I have made it clear to the gabblers around us as well.
Although one woman who was a perfect lady,
and to whom I was especially devoted,
hated my shushing which she found an embarrassment
and a breach of manners.
One time I went so far as to shush her
when she was talking to a friend who
had come with us to the movies, and afterwards she
let me know with uncharacteristic directness,
that if I ever did that to her again, she would break my arm.
She was right, of course, or at least I
pretended she was right, because I
knew that if I attempted to defend my quixotic position,
it would only make things worse.
Nobody loves a shusher."