Put your phone away and be quiet in the theatre. Evolution demands it
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Version 0 of 1. Last Sunday night, during the New York City Ballet’s performance of Romeo and Juliet – right around the famous love scene in the orchard – someone several seats to my right opened and noisily began to consume a large packet of Twizzlers. Aficionados of Shakespeare and Prokofiev will be aware that this isn’t a standard element in the tragedy’s plot; if it were, it would presumably have been entitled Romeo and Juliet and Someone Eating Twizzlers. (And who knows how things might have turned out for the star-crossed lovers then?) After several minutes of Twizzler-munching – accompanied, even more astonishingly, by a low rumble of conversation – I enacted the standard British-person protocol for such situations: first, get angry but do nothing; then get angrier, but do nothing; finally, become gripped with white-hot rage, before ultimately casting a Meaningful Glance in the wrongdoers’ direction. Fortunately, my not-so-British companion escalated matters to “Shhh!”. Then, when that failed to work, she informed an usher at the intermission, who lectured the noisemakers so forcibly and successfully (and even fetched a more senior usher, to do so again!) that recalling it still gives me a frankly troubling thrill. I may be uptight – OK, I am uptight. But I am not, of course, alone. Few minor modern irritations seem to drive people so wild so reliably as talking, texting or chomping during films or other performances. Cinemas in the Alamo Drafthouse chain famously kick people out, sans refund, for talking or texting; the company made a splendid pre-show announcement using a real voicemail left by a patron furious at being ejected. A few years back, in a PR stunt, one London cinema deployed volunteer ninjas in skin-tight bodysuits to pounce on talkers. And last year, in Florida, where things all too frequently seem to get ramped up to horrifying extremes, came the worst possible outcome: a retired police officer shot and killed a fellow moviegoer, apparently after he refused to stop texting. Let’s be clear: you really, really shouldn’t eat and talk at the ballet. (Pleasingly, for members of the uptight community, food and drink is completely banned in the auditorium in question – so just trying to eat quietly won’t cut it.) Still, given the wide variety of problems worth getting angry about, there’s something strange about just how angering such violations can be. Indeed, the smallness of the infraction somehow makes it worse: to get so close to perfect silence, only to have it punctured by the crinkle of a wrapper, rankles more than someone having a sustained coughing fit. Similarly, people make loud noises on public transport all the time, but the snip-snip-snip of passengers trimming their nails is so maddening that New York has included it in a new poster campaign encouraging courteous behavior on trains. In their 2011 book Annoying, the science journalists Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman identify another key ingredient of annoyingness: unpredictability. Irregular noises seize the attention much more aggressively than predictable ones, so that the silences in between become as stressful as the sounds themselves. There’s a good evolutionary rationale for that, they explain: the unexpected snap of a twig ought to stand out, as a sign of potential danger, from the hum of cicadas or the babble of a stream. And other noises are simply designed to annoy. I’m not such a monster that I’d complain about a screaming infant on a plane or a train, but to feel annoyed is understandable: if babies’ cries were pleasant, they’d be useless as a way of signaling hunger or distress. Ultimately, though, I suspect that the annoyingness of the theater boor derives from the attitudes their noises imply. My ballet nemesis, it seemed to me, was advertising her disregard for anyone but herself; the person having a coughing fit, by contrast, clearly isn’t doing so by choice. (I’ve often wondered if this is why public displays of affection are similarly galling: to be present while two people do things they’d usually only do in private is to be treated like a piece of furniture.) What’s really irritating is the implict refusal to participate in the collaborative undertaking, based on mutual respect, of maintaining a smooth-running society. Or maybe the problem is me? I’m reminded of the essayist Tim Kreider’s insightful observation that anger is fun: Although we may consciously experience it as upsetting, somatically it feels a lot like the first rush of an opiate — a tingling warmth on the insides of your elbows and wrists, in the back of your knees … Once I realized I enjoyed anger, I noticed how much time I spent experiencing it. If you’re anything like me, you spend about 87 percent of your mental life winning imaginary arguments that are never actually going to take place. … And that’s even before we get to the undue pleasure I took in seeing the offenders chastised. True, eating Twizzlers at the ballet may be how society begins to unravel; but feeling exhilarated while watching authoritarian ushers enforce the law may be how totalitarian regimes get off the ground, and I’m not really sure that’s any better. |