A Quiet....

Last night I watched the movie A Quiet Place. As horror films go this was a good one with creepy, Venom-esque aliens and some top notch acting. The fact that one of my crushes, Emily Blunt, was in it also helped.

85% of the film or more, has no dialogue. The creepy, jigsaw headed monsters hunt by sound so everyone has to be very, very quiet. Cue elaborate “don’t make any noise” scenes that would test the stamina of an SAS recruit, and dramatic jump scares.

The main thing I took away from watching this film was that sometimes being silent is much more enjoyable than making noise for the sake of it.

Being English, a race that have made small talk an art form, I have never been all that comfortable with long silences. My attempts at blending in over the years have resulted in a dissatisfaction with what’s going on around me and that has led to boredom in the long run.

Chattering has long been an established form of wasting time. We now have it online with social media and I’ve my suspicions that in a thousand years people’s thumbs will become more dexterous as evolution accepts the need to text like your life depends on it.

Last year I attempted something called The Great North Walk in Australia. I didn’t make it beyond the first phase but the day or so I spent hiking and the solitary night I camped by the river in Fairyland was sublime. Almost complete silence and beautiful countryside. 

Something I have lost touch with over the years is the ability to just be quiet and be at peace with life. There is always that belief, nagging at the back of my skull, that some noise needs to be fed into any situation in order to make things “normal”.

The stereotypical scenario of two people sitting near to each other in England is that the small talk will consist of…

“Hello”

“Hello”

“Nice day for it”

“Yes, lovely”.

If one of them is feeling especially bold, maybe they’ll say something risqué like “Think we might have rain later”.

I’ve been a small and medium and big talker for most of my life. I grew up believing that silence was off putting to others and you had to be audible in order to be socially acceptable. 

Problem is that along with talking comes a whole host of other “rules” that are hard to follow, adaptable and prone to change without notice. Are you talking too much? Can other people understand you? Are you using too many big words? Are you patronising? Etc, etc.

There has always been that trigger response within me to chatter away and not really do much constructive other than fill the air with noise to avoid a potentially embarrassing silence.

I have realised recently just how much I like the peace that comes with solitude and just being able to walk around and look at nature without engaging in banter. 

A Quiet Place was a film that showed that a family able to use sign language, could survive an alien apocalypse due to their skills at silent physical communication. It wasn’t meant to illustrate the joys of keeping your gob shut but the scenes of the family walking, fishing or just being together were more profound due to the lack of dialogue.

Communication isn’t easy at the best of times. That is, real, true communication that actually says something. While I was a small talker I was sometimes unable to say things that actually mattered such as “I love you”, “No I don’t like that” or even “Please leave me alone now”.

Small talk can be a way to keep social discomfort at bay by allowing people to talk in a non intrusive and friendly manner without either side feeling awkward (the Brits specialise in weather chat, the Yanks in geographical links e.g. “London? Oh my sister went there in 1993”). However it can also prevent anything “real” being said as we are so used to dancing around the words that come out of our mouths that, like Netflix, we simply stream a colossal amount of information that most of the time is ignored.

Less is more, as someone once said.