By recreating classic movie moments that look so cathartic onscreen, Eliza Janssen hopes to improve her own life. This month, she takes a vow of silence—if only for a few days—to understand why characters obey and rebel against their inner quietude.
Fleabag: Season 1
”That’s when you know you’ve found somebody really special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence” — Mia Wallace, Pulp Fiction.
With that bro-y platitude in mind, I’ve been wondering if I can even be “somebody really special” to myself: to just sit with my own thoughts, and be totally content in the mental havoc. I don’t think I have more on my mind than anyone else—y’know, the work-life grind, a serious doomscrolling addiction, self-destructive COVID-era survival habits still directing most of my days—and yet I truly hate to spend any of my private time being truly alone.
My phone must come with me to the bathroom. I don’t have an appetite unless an interesting-enough YouTube video is cued up as mealtime entertainment. Seeing friends is great, but I always leave conversations wishing I’d said less, been more mysterious. That desperation to be distracted is part of why I love going to the cinema so much: trapped in the dark with other silent patrons, my fidgeting is irrelevant, invisible even, and my brain is programmed to escape only into that big widescreen void.
The movies themselves, though, feel like they’re getting more noisy and distracted. To accomodate web-media-obsessed attention spans, modern blockbusters feature shots that are on average far quicker than those in thrilling films of the past: from an average of seven seconds in 1950 to just three seconds from data gleaned in 2010. And muddied audio quality is a casualty of this focus on visual flash and bang, with sound editors and mixers basically blaming shorter production schedules and over-reliance on digital trickery for those lines you miss in big action movies.
It’s enough to make one yearn for the silent era, like Norma Desmond did in Sunset Boulevard: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces…Oh, those idiot producers. Those imbeciles. Haven’t they got any eyes? Have they forgotten what a star looks like?!”
Now Phoebe Waller-Bridge: there’s a star. I rewatched her series Fleabag recently (an existential cry for help in itself, really) and happened upon a sarcastic kind of answer to my attention struggles. Episode four of season one follows the chaotic titular protagonist and her tightly-wound sister Claire (Sian Clifford) to a wanky silent retreat in a British manor. It’s the perfect, pretentious setting for a character whose whole thing is blurting out the unsayable—if only to us, her fourth-wall confidantes.
I was earnestly curious about the benefits of shutting the f**k up for a few days in a community of like-minded, soul-searching strangers, so I booked a four-day retreat at an interfaith meditation and yoga retreat nestled in the Dandenong Ranges. But I also saw myself in Fleabag’s hopeless disregard for discipline, and worried that I’d sabotage the whole experience from the get-go: arriving at her zen getaway, she instantly demands the WiFi password, a blunder I couldn’t trust myself not to repeat. I turned my phone to Airplane Mode and checked in.
Friends and family had worried that the retreat would end up more like Midsommar. But as soon as I arrived, a very distinct “year 4 school camp” vibe set in, which made me feel juvenile and giggly right from the get-go. There were murals of kangaroos painted near the communal bathrooms, and all of our vegan meals were provided for us by a kindly hippie lady. For four days, four times a day, the group and I sat on buckwheat cushions and tried to empty our minds: a soft-spoken guide related metaphors about gold and cows and singing bowls full of dirty water to help us visualise the mental awakening we were all jonesing for.
Feeling my legs going numb, I thought about the elective mute characters I’d seen in comedies. From Paul Dano’s teen Nietzsche scholar in Little Miss Sunshine to the poor bastard who gets knocked out of his code of silence in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, they all burst back into the speaking world with a bellowed curse: their spiritual strictness played for laughs or pity, and ruined in one climactic moment. I was desperate to be one of them when our guru asked if we had any final questions or statements before the silence set in. Never before have I been so tempted to yell “bababooey”.
On Saturday and Sunday, though, the “sits” felt lighter, went quicker. On Monday I had a little cry during the afternoon session, and not just because I knew a new hour of Succession was out and I’d instead be spending it watching the back of my eyelids. Yes, I had sort of paid to be put in “a thought prison in your mind” as Fleabag’s irritating retreat leader puts it, but the cell was becoming an enriching place to be, even when it was emotionally challenging.
One confronting part of Fleabag‘s retreat is the men-only anti-sexism workshop going on in the neighbouring estate. Fleabag is amused by the gendered binary between the dudes therapeutically screaming at blow-up dolls, and her “women’s work”, of obeying a command of silence and washing the manor’s floors with a toothbrush. She makes her sister burst into laughter by realising aloud that “we’ve paid [the retreat’s managers] to let us clean their house in silence”. My own retreat was co-ed, and everyone there was lovely and respectful…yet it peeved me a little that the communal kitchen and cleaning duties were overwhelmingly done by female guests. After each meal, most of the guys would head outside to ommmmm at the sun while we wiped down their plates. I guess we can’t be expected to meditate our way out of all worldly behaviours.
But hey, that’s exactly the kind of niggling, pessimistic thought pattern I was trying to eliminate throughout this whole long weekend! We all made it through 20 hours of doing absolutely nothing, unlike Claire who abandons Fleabag and the retreat, leaving an ironic note explaining that she “just needs a bit of quiet”. It was a novel feeling to genuinely look forward to a bit of noise, and not just because I couldn’t handle its absence. There’s just too much vibey meditative music to hear, good convos to have, HBO dramas to watch. After this long weekend, I actually do feel more comfortable in the nothings in between. Ommmm.
