She’s talking again. She’s sitting behind me, a few seats to my left, and for the third time in the first few minutes of the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, she’s exchanging gossip with her companion at a normal conversational level.
I’ve twice tried to signal the need for silence with body language alone — shifting in my seat and turning my head in her direction — but she has ignored me. Now I have no choice but to speak. “Excuse me,” I say, turning toward her, “but could you please keep it down?”
“What?” she says.
“The movie is on,” I hiss.
“The hell with you,” she says.
She’s got a fur coat sitting in her lap and bright red hair. She’s white, and short.
She’s 75 years old if she’s a day.
Many people have stopped going to the movies in the past two decades because their fellow audience members seem unable to keep quiet during the picture. This unmannerly conduct is usually ascribed to teenagers — inner-city youths especially, who travel in packs and giggle-snort in ways that suggest they’ve done drugs or imbibed alcohol just before entering the auditorium. In cities, this obstreperousness has a menacing quality as well, as though the rowdy youths are spoiling for a fight.
This misbehavior has been the subject of cocktail-party sociology for years. Like: Kids are so used to watching movies on video in their living rooms that they don’t know you’re not supposed to talk in theaters. Or: The epidemic of fatherlessness has led to a fundamental lack of respect.
But in the past five years of movie-and theatergoing, by far the worst experiences I’ve had are with elderly audience members. This is especially true on Broadway, where ticket prices are so high that audiences are either bizarrely young (at Disney shows like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast) or predominantly over 50. The children are unquestionably the better behaved.
I’ve seen the wonderful revival of Kiss Me Kate three times, and each time I’ve been seated near senior citizens who think nothing of singing along with the cast. “Oh, I love this song,” a woman said as Marin Mazzie began performing “So in Love.” The lyrics go: “So taunt me, and hurt me / Deceive me, desert me.” The woman didn’t know the lyrics, so she chimed in with “Da da da, Da dya dum / Dum da dee, dee dya DYA” — building to a fortissimo as she went along.
Her ticket cost $ 90, so perhaps she felt as though she were entitled to join in. But then, so did mine.
The phenomenon is not limited to musicals. At straight plays, one is usually assaulted by the “What did he say?” phenomenon. At Copenhagen, a play about nuclear physics so boring that a friend kept himself awake by counting the floorboards on stage (67, he said), the characters talk about the development of the atom bomb in highly technical language.
“What did he say?” a gentleman in the fifth row asked his wife, almost as loudly as the actor, Philip Bosco, was delivering his monologue.
“Something about atoms,” she responded helpfully.
There’s a powerful scene in a play called Proof in which the daughter of a schizophrenic mathematician discovers he’s gone crazy again by reading aloud some gibberish from his notebook.
“What’s she saying?” asked a woman behind me.
“She’s very intelligent,” her companion explained.
When teenagers are acting up, they are heedless. When the elderly act up like this, you know they know better — but they just don’t care. They’ve lived a long time, they’ve served their country, they’ve paid their taxes, and they’re going to speak or sing or have a conversation whenever they please.
It can be frightening to be in proximity to aggressively outspoken teenagers in a theater — though in my experience they settle down if you ask them to — but the emotions evoked by rude oldsters are far more complicated. It just doesn’t feel right to shush your elders. But it doesn’t seem any fairer to have to suffer their rudeness. In fact, it feels as though you’re being taken advantage of. After all, when they were younger, they presumably had children whom they taught decent manners — and they presumably felt no compunction about shushing kids in theaters.
Is impending mortality such a burden that it justifies the suspension of common courtesy? Is the lack of concern for others ever acceptable? Shakespeare said the seventh and final age of man is characterized by “second childishness and mere oblivion” — not “obliviousness.” Sure, these seniors are not about to shoot or knife you, but how can you be sure they won’t hit you over the head with a cane if you ask them to be quiet?
JOHN PODHORETZ
