One thing I love about older movies: Less talking!
Movies from the 90s onward have a higher blabbering rate.
Unfortunately people have copied what movies taught them. These days people talk like every gap of silence must be filled with words.
This is not a positive development.
Speaking = creating. Your word has power. If you’re filling the empty canvas with constant driveling and gossiping it gets crowded and nothing specific is ever created.
Your felt sense of aliveness comes with experiencing, not conceptualizing. It’s the difference between map and territory, menu and meal, thought and action. A Bible verse says
“Be still and know that I am God”.
This implies you can’t know God if you don’t give yourself space to sit, feel and be silent.
Nor can you know yourself or know others if you’re always opining.
People know me as a speaker. But in daily life I’m silent most of the time. When I coach students, I’m listening 90% of the time. There’s a reason we have two ears but only one mouth.
If you wish to develop strong presence, don’t waste your energy by pointless by over-speaking.
Since the early 2000s they (the people making “entertainment” in Los Angeles and New York) have also introduced high-pitched inflection that makes statements sound like questions. In a 1950s movie the statement might be “I appreciated her greatly”. In a 2015 movie the same statement sounds like this: “I was like totally into her?”
Compare English back then and now and you realize they’ve created a human that is less sophisticated, less present, less clear, less strong.
Excessive use of the word “like” creates another layer of insecurity. Things are never the way they are but “like” them:
“I was like can’t you come to my party? And he was like I gotta study. And it was like cloudy and I’m like wondering if we’re going to cancel the party”.
Below is a scene from the 1968 movie “Bullitt”.
What do you notice?
There’s no talking throughout the entire scene!
Instead you hear the car motor. You almost FEEL it. If the actors were constantly brabbling and shouting “OH my God. This is like SO cool?” it would drown out the feeling of the motor, the screeching of the tires, etc. The absence of talking or even a music score, makes it feel like you are personally present, which is good story-telling.
