The terror of silence

Last night, a man walked into the theater at MoMA. He recognized a woman sitting in front of me and they began talking rather loudly about a recent run of Fassbinder films. The woman had a lisp, as if she had no front teeth. She had them, I could see, but her consonants came out unformed. Sometimes they whistled.

I had gone to see Edward Yang's The Terrorist. The screening was sparsely attended. When the lights went down and the first title appeared on-screen in Chinese, the man sat up. "What is this?" he said. A round of shushing spread through the theater. "Am I in the wrong theater?" Shushing continued. He stood up. "I'm in the wrong theater!" He marched up the aisle.

Moments later, the woman got up. "This is the wrong movie," she said. People were annoyed. They shushed her. She walked to the back of the theater. As she left, she loudly asked where the other film was playing. Shushes followed her out the door.

As the film began, people around the theater began to unwrap candy. It was as if we were at the symphony. People turned to shush a person behind me. Way in the back, I could hear another group shushing a second offender. In the front rows, a woman rustled a plastic bag. A man shushed her. She kept digging. He got up and walked over to her. For a moment his head blocked the subtitles. After speaking to her loud enough for the theater to know he was talking to everyone, he sat back down. The bag rustled no more. No more candy was unwrapped.
Posted by eku at July 1, 2005 2:43 PM