My old grandfather Percy lived by the mantra that “talking is silver and silence is gold”. At least that’s what he tried to instill in us wide-jawed grandchildren who were constantly exposed to his furrowed bushy eyebrows trying with pure telepathy to get us to calm down in our wild games. Every time we were having the most fun, his wrinkled face would appear in the crack of the door and he would roar in just one word, CLEAN UP! And it always happened at the worst time when we cousins had just turned the toy box upside down and had the most fun. The old generation was brought up with children being seen but not heard and I can imagine that my generation came as a bit of a shock to those old people who were used to snickering and bowing to adults and tipping the occasional cap. I was born in the late seventies, you know the time when there was still respect for our elders, for teachers and above all strange adults who could sometimes roar if they thought you didn’t behave like a child. It was the time when parents actually nodded gratefully to the person who had just scolded their little wild-brained child and did not at all engage in a heated debate about the fact that he had offended their poor little thug, but instead actually vented that the kid had shut up and calmed down a stranger’s tear-off.
They used to say that it took a whole village to raise a child and maybe there was something in that. Today’s kids, on the other hand, are raised to be seen and heard just about all the time and their parents are apparently perfectly happy with that, because whenever I enjoy an expensive dinner at a good restaurant that isn’t spelled Mc Donalds, a family like that always shows up. You know the ones who let go of the reins completely out in public so that you actually wonder how they are at home. It’s always the ones with way too many kids who just smile happily as their blonde-haired kids run and chase each other between the tables in the restaurant and scream loudly from the bottom of their lungs while mom and dad calmly eat on without a care in the world. Probably because the kids are finally on the other side of the room and they themselves can enjoy some peace and quiet. They don’t seem to see all those other customers irritably sawing their piece of meat extra hard so it squeaks against the crockery or pouring way too much wine into themselves, hoping it will muffle the sound of the obstinate little dwarfs’ lively play on the floor just below by their table legs . We have become a very lively society, there is sound everywhere and silence has become a bit of an endangered species.
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On the bus you can no longer close your eyes and just enjoy the journey and relax, because in the seat next to you is a girl watching the latest episode of The Walking Dead and she misses everything called headphones and generously shares the sound of when a undead moans and smacks into a hysterically screaming woman. In the classrooms at school, it is anything but quiet and quietness is a word that is also in danger of extinction, we never remove those who disturb, but the well-behaved students have to gracefully take their books and look for another place in the hope of a little silence. On the beach, the gang play Two Towels Away for King and Country on the big portable speaker and suddenly the rest of us are forced to listen to their lackluster music that sounds like Smurfhits No. 89. Every time the relatives or the family get together, the conversations are constantly interrupted by a kid who wants to show a funny clip from YouTube. You smile, dutifully watch a video that mostly consists of other loud idiots doing stupid things, and when you’re about to continue your conversation, you’ve forgotten what you were talking about. All this I take. You have to swallow and breathe ten times while in your head you try to silence that angry Maize who really just wants to roar out KÄÄÄÄFTEN! Because that’s how it looks now, that’s the world we live in and if you want silence, you have to pack a bag and head out into the forest because it’s quiet there. But there is also a place that is sacred and it is spelled Biografen. Or quiet and silent. It is a definition. Because of course there is always the occasional whisperer a few seats away.
You know that lost thing that never follows the plot and always has to whisper a lot of questions about what’s happening on the screen. Who is it that has died? Why has she died? Who is to blame? Mostly questions that the person in the next chair cannot answer. Then we have the donkey who always has bags of chips with them, those disgustingly loud bags that they try to eat in without making too much noise but the more carefully they try to insert their hand the louder it sounds and each bite of the crispy chips sounds like if a beaver has broken into the parlor and at this moment is loose on a fine oak log. Or the asshat who forgets to turn off the sound on his cell phone so in the middle of the film’s most exciting part, some onion ring tone from the leitmotif to Rocky starts echoing in the salon and it takes the lightweight two minutes to fumble and turn it off. You can still take this, it belongs at the cinema. That and having someone with a microphone frill in front of someone who has a length you’ve previously only seen in the Guinness Book of Records so all you see of the long-awaited film is the left corner so you have to close your eyes and pretend you’re listening to an audiobook. But now this sacred palace of silence is threatened by Millenium babies who have not been taught sense and etiquette. The TikTok generation that thinks all waking hours are for being seen and heard. Livestreaming his opinions for everyone to hear in places other people paid dear money to be entertained, and not by his TikTok video but an action flick with Chris Pratt.
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It all started when Zara Larsson, you know that singer who was a bigger hit in the US than in the country Köttbulle, made a TikTok video in which she advocated a more practical cinema and where the rest of us who want to go to the cinema just to see a film in silenced can go home. And I must say that the sentence “If you want to sit completely silent as a fucking rock, go home!” made all of Majsan’s inner angry demons scream out loud and want to give someone a visual kick in the vagina. Because Zara really thinks that the whole point of watching movies with others is precisely to sit loudly and discuss and analyze characters and plot. And the worst of all is that the director Ruben Östlund backs up this bimbo in her opinions. But no Zara, that’s not the point. You go to the cinema because you have longed for a film for a long time, you don’t want to wait for it to be released on streaming and you want to enjoy the action of the film. You want to sit in the dark and munch on your popcorn and be drawn into an exciting plot. You go to the cinema for the porky sound and for the giant screen. You go to the cinema for the atmosphere, for the cozy factor. What you don’t go there for, however, is to listen to guns who loudly and narcissistically sit and talk about this and that and who don’t understand that you are ruining the moment for the other 300 people who are sitting in the same salon and who have actually shelled out a few hundred bucks for fun and who doesn’t want to know what exactly you think about the movie. Analyzing the film, that’s what you do when the lights come on and you get up, brush away the popcorn and slowly leave the theater with your company.
Because just as disrespectful as it is to sit and chatter in a theater, at an opera or a stand-up show, it is just as disrespectful to disturb moviegoers. Then the question is whether Zara thought it was just as obvious that people loudly stood with their backs to her and talked while she was on stage and tried to sing playback instead of listening to her performance? Maybe those who were there to listen to her in particular should go home instead and buy a record and listen in the safe, quiet corner of the home? People should learn that there is a time and a place for everything, when to shut up and when to babble on. And at the cinema we can probably agree that you shut up once and for all. Nobody wants to know where you bought your shirt.
What do you think? Is it perfectly okay to talk loudly at the cinema or do you want to be able to enjoy the film wholeheartedly?
