The art of talking during a film

Oh really now, that’s TOO much

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

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…