The art of talking during a film
Oh really now, that's TOO much
There are two schools of opinion when it comes to talking during a film.
First, the riffers. For them, the movie at a movie night isn’t the focus of the night but fodder. Among the most jockeying of these people, a given film is like the prompt at an improv show. (They strongly suspect they’d have been great on Mystery Science Theatre 3000.) In larger groups, there’s a one-upmanship that borders on desperation:
This school sometimes even bears a weird kind of hostility to the film as film, as though they haven’t put on a film so much as it’s crossed into their line of fire, a scullery maid summoned to a high society salon to be ridiculed in Latin aphorisms. For the committed riffer, a film’s at best a silly folly, and at worst, puffed-up and deserving to be razzed to shreds.
Then there’s the vow-of-silence school. They treat movie nights like mindfulness retreats. For them the movie should be watched in the saurian silence of intelligence officers reviewing surveillance footage. Others’ laughter isn’t a spontaneous reaction: it’s a bray or brag. Any observations said out loud - the guess of a plot twist, catch of a reference - are really mating calls. Talk should be saved for the plenary at the end, which means after the end credits. Which also should be watched - read - and in a library hush. This school lives to hush. For them, the only difference between watching a film alone and in company is when the lights go up there’s a shifty assortment people there like in a murder mystery.
Both schools have it wrong. Yet neither is a middle road between them the way forward, some median acceptable amount of intra-film conversation. It’s not the amount of talk—whether there’s none at all or as much as you want. It’s how you talk during a film, which itself isn’t far removed from conversation skills in general - empathy, reading the room, following the rhythm - and to which there’s an art.
The crucial part to it is timing. In nearly all cases, talk should be saved for pauses in the film’s dialogue—you might be able to watch one thing and listen to another but you can’t follow two conversations at once. By watching enough films, you learn to anticipate the pauses and beats, and how long they might last. But every pause isn’t equal. Talking during a dramatic pause in a compelling film will be as applauded as a fart. And if the pause you talk in is during the film’s climax you risk turning even the most moving pathos to bathos. The hero’s about to realise the mistake that’s doomed his lover and him to death when your neighbour says, “Gary Barlow! That’s who he looks like!” Or worse: “How long is left?”
What if the whole film is a pause in dialogue? A silent film, a non-narrative documentary, however, isn’t a free-for-all to talk. (There is no quote-along version of Koyaanisqatsi.) The same goes for extended musical sequences. Who’d want to watch the star-gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey or the ballet fantasia in The Red Shoes with someone who brings you down from your rapture by talking too loudly, irrelevantly or much?
The content of your utterances isn’t irrelevant. (In fact it helps if it’s not.) At the non-verbal stage there’s the boo-hurrah stuff of immediate reaction to the film. Group-gasping, group-laughter usually enhances the viewing experience (unless it’s a war documentary). Put it this way: if everyone stifled their gasps or laughs it’d make watching the film like watching a stand-up comedian die on stage, i.e. it wouldn’t be neutral but actively detract from the experience. Verbalised reactions also usually enhance and not detract. The man in the audience for horror-thriller Midsommar who shouted, “Fuck me,” didn’t kill the tension (nor confuse the cinema for his local porn theatre), he ratcheted it higher. Making us laugh only added to the general hysteria, an emotion of terror as much as comedy.
As for more elaborate commentary on a film: off-the-cuff critiques, requests for clarification (“How did she get there again?”), voiced confusion if not full-on incredulity at the plot logic or magic, all these depend on whether the comments are actually enlightening. Ones that fail to be are at the level of the person who gripes, “Yeah like that could happen.” And even enlightening comments have to be pitched right. Sometimes too passionate a commentary can steamroll others’ reactions—nothing takes you out of a film than feeling like you’re stupid for enjoying or not enjoying it.
It’s that kind of condescension that makes de facto snarkiness a drag (except for when a film is so bad and/or is being watched for that reason). But there can be a sort of snarkiness that doesn’t condescend to the film or films. Even at its most irreverent it stays collegial. It’s the same way in which all good criticism is, even at its most exasperated, an expression of a love for art. Voicing your disappointment in an artwork isn’t in fact being a killjoy, it’s a sign you otherwise find joy in the medium, that you know art isn’t just a diversion or commodity and can be reasonably expected better of. Even meta-commentary on a film - thinking out loud where you remember an actor from or who they look like, recasting a foreign or indie film as if was being remade by Hollywood - far from being a trivial distraction attests to a love for the medium that’s as exhaustive as any worth the name.
A deciding factor in all of this is your context. This can mean the people around you: if you’re watching a film with others who’ve seen it before and often then talking won’t risk you missing a key development. Hence the rise of quote-along cinema screenings, where the group viewing is more like a parlour game, panto, or non-musical karaoke. But if there are people there who haven’t seen the film before then talking should adjust to make sure they get the best first-time viewing experience; even if they feel uncomfortable when the room turns to them at the end with a manic look, asking, “So, what did you think?”
Context also means where you are. Say you like to talk during a film, sometimes not even about the film, just about your day or the news or that dick at work; you might even text or play a video off your phone—after all, you are in your living room. Except wait, it’s not your living room, is it, it’s a cinema: those aren’t sofas, they’re rows of seats, the blobs around you aren’t trinkets from Habitat, they’re other human beings trying to have a night at the movies without having to listen to you chat. When silent films were replaced by ‘talkies’ it wasn’t your cue.
At the cinema the most talking ever civically acceptable, since we live in a society, is to mutter to your cinema-buddy at a volume only they can hear, since you can’t account for which school of opinion your fellow moviegoers might belong to. The exceptions are at screenings of comedies and horrors: during the first night of Get Out everyone burst into laughing cheers when Lil Rel Howery turned up, a reaction which (without spoiling it by explaining what conventions it played on) is one writer/director Jordan Peele must’ve been going for. Certain films are designed for group reaction. What group could watch Leigh Wannel’s The Invisible Man and not gasp en masse at that moment? And, sure, maybe Bergman’s The Silence wasn’t designed for its protestant pauses to be filled with audience participation. But a good comedy watched in a crowd can go toe-to-toe with a stand-up show any day for the frequency and strength of its laughter. (Contrast this with watching a comedy at home alone: the silence.)
Talking during a film can be one the best kinds of talk. A shared WTF, a well-timed crack, the hashing-out of alternative endings: this is talk not only prompted by a film but done best during it. And yet the film’s not being pilloried, it’s not in the stocks, it’s not the passing pedestrians a romantic couple riff about to each other. You’re not trying to outdo each other or the film. It’s a participant in the conversation—and that’s not “the magic of art!” pablum, I mean it literally. The better the film the more it contributes, for it’s been made to be got, to cause a reaction, non-verbal or verbalised. You and your friends talking, the film, together form a positive feedback loop. Knowing how to watch a film properly doesn’t then always have to mean ‘in silence, with unbroken focus.’ There are ways of talking during a film - with balance and proportion, structure and spontaneity, following decorum and earning when to be irreverent - that have the qualities that mean it’s not totally a glib figure of speech to call it an “art”.
Of course if the film talks back that’s not art, it’s psychosis or Points of View.