Hello, I do not like people who talk during movies.

especially strangers

(Editor’s note: I'm trying to learn to hit publish on newsletters before the inner monologue yaps away and I endlessly pursue perfection to the point of immobilization.)

I saw Evil Does Not Exist last week, a meditative film about nature and humanity’s role within its (avoidable) destruction.

I accidentally called it Evil Within at the ticket booth.

It stars plenty of handsome men dressed quite nicely in dark indigo chore coats chain smoking cigarettes. It made me want a cigarette(s). It’s a quiet movie. Subtitled, even. Some (philistine) may even call it slow.

I can understand feeling bored through it, but it’s not boring. I went alone with the expectation of no one else sitting in the theater. There were eight, but two stood out and they sat three seats to my right: a man and a woman. The man was chatty. Overly chatty.

He was also loud which made his partner sound as loud and their joint presence dominated my attention. It was an 80/20 split when I first heard the man; then it slowly flipped to a 20/80.

(The left number here indicates the movie screen. The right number is my right ear. The totality is the percentage of my attention. That’s just something I’m pointing out to myself.)

There’s a scene in which the main character points out wasabi leaves to someone wandering the forest with him, and the man to my right says to his partner, “That’s wasabi? I thought wasabi was like a pea. I didn’t know it was a leaf.”

I figured he was talking about edamame, which is soy.

The woman he was with agreed and said something I couldn’t make out but I still heard. It’s hard to define the volume of how she spoke but it was like the kind of low-fidelity exhale a small dog can give when lying down and breathing at your side. Or like when your significant other has a nightmare and mutters in their sleep that there’s someone with a gun or a child who needs a dollar or something and they’re asking for your help in the waking life but you think it’s really cute and you can’t help but smile and say “I love you’ back and no one is getting the validation they need but it’s okay anyway. It was trustworthy, is my point.

Going to the movies alone is an underrated ritual that I’m afraid surely won’t exist 30 years from now, not because no one will do it, but because in the future, when Disney produces every movie worth seeing in theaters, I won’t. I love submitting to the motion picture, but it’s a conversation pit for others. It’s the purgatory between work and bed. It’s the church of Dasani and Skittles.

I swear to you that every crinkle, every swipe of pant, movement and motion, reverbed into my right ear and only mine and it was so goddamn loud. No one else in the theater seemed to hear them but me. I was the only one under a distressing barrage of fabric strokes. I think they kissed at one point, and like all mouth sounds, they’re strikingly louder than any other natural motion in the human body language.

In 2018, I watched A Quiet Place in a similar setting, alone, surrounded by five other strangers plus a couple, except it wasn’t that couple who spoke the entire movie but a movie trailer. The entire 90-minute runtime of A Quiet Place was soundtracked to many 2-minute and 30-second replays of the Bohemian Rhapsody trailer. Whoever worked at AMC that day didn’t shut the door when the movie started and let in the noise of Bohemian Rhapsody for a very long time. Because I suffer from (often severe and) ridiculous social anxiety (and depression and intense spotlight effect of everyone-is-looking-at-me-right-now-and-this-is-a-bad-idea), I didn’t shut it. The couple in front of me didn’t either. Nor did the top-left corner man or the bottom-right corner teen boy. So the five of us sat there in silence, listening to Queen on repeat until the movie was over.

Ah.

Sometime later while watching Evil Does Not Exist I stood up and said “Are you FUICKING kidding me? Shut the fuck up,” under my breath, except it wasn’t under my breath because I realized everyone else in the theater had slooked at me, including the couple to my right, and they shut up, promptly. Everyone else just glared, and I moved four rows to the front of where I was, and it got quieter. I think the couple got the picture, at least for 20 minutes, because the guy started talking again when the citizens of this beautiful mountainous Japanese town were having a town hall about invading glampers. 

Anyway, it was a good movie. See it.