Silence isn’t just an absence of noise. It’s a tangible thing: heavy; sentient; alive. It can show us beauty in a smog-shrouded city-scape or death in the red sky of a savannah sunset. Through it we can commune with the majesty of God, or gaze into the eternal nothingness of His great echoing absence. It’s everything and nothing: a swallowing void into which we pour our deepest fears and the inexhaustible darkness of our collective imaginations.
It’s perhaps no surprise then that silence has traditionally found its greatest expression on the big screen. The cinema, with its pews arranged to face a window that looks out upon infinity, has always felt sacred and limitless: a place of wonder and worship; catharsis and contemplation; desire and dread: a holy cathedral to all that makes us ‘us’.
Cinema’s early audiences screamed as trains careened towards them from the other side of the screen; watched in a mixture of horror and wonder as workers toiled silently and hopelessly in the pits and caverns beneath the mighty husk of the metropolis; and giggled with glee as Keaton and Chaplin made an art-form of teetering precariously on the ledges of terrifyingly tall buildings.
Even when sound entered the medium, silence continued to steal all of the best scenes. Think of the absolutely staggering sequences that bookend 2001: A Space Odyssey; or the poignant and funny near-wordlessness that dominates the first twenty minutes of Wall-E, or the long, lingering shot on Jack Nicholson’s face as he sits by the asylum’s open window near the heart-wrenching climax of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
While cinema has always been the perfect conduit and capsule to conduct and contain the horror, majesty and beauty of silence, the TV was – in its early years at least – too small to hold it. TV was merely the noisy little contraption that chirped and chattered away endlessly in the corners of our living rooms. It sat there, yakking, chanting, warding off silence and its concomitant notions of death and infinity like a priest exorcising demons. It didn’t want to push the boundaries of the possible, or open our minds to infinity: it just wanted to distract us from the loneliness that marked our existence – and occasionally sell us cigarettes and washing powder.
It’s only relatively recently that advancements in technology, distribution and access have allowed TV to raise its ambitions and muscle in on the awe-game. While it’s true that TV can never compete with the sheer size and raw, herculean power of cinema, it’s also true that it doesn’t need to: TV incontestably plays the better long game. It can go further and deeper into the characters and worlds it creates, reaching into our souls and the darkest recesses of our minds and imaginations for weeks, months, even years at a time.
Our couches, arranged around the intimate half-dark of our living rooms, are our new sites of worship. The roles have been reversed: cinema is now the medium that seeks to sell us things in as noisy a fashion as possible – circus-style spectacles, franchise events, merchandising – while TV has become the portal through which we’re granted access to the whole beautiful ugliness of our humanity: to truth; to terror.
To silence.
A hush hits the box
Silence has a profound effect upon us precisely because it’s such a rare commodity in the blaring cacophony our modern lives have become. Human hubbub is ubiquitous, unbroken, and as addictive as it is wearying. Our homes thrum, hum and creak; our cities are non-stop symphonies of honks and thumps and clangs, and even the fabled semi-silence of the countryside is a myth belied by the daily background chitter of chirps, hisses, whines and trills: a city of hills and trees.
These days we actively seek out silence by going on retreats, but in our deep, primal past, silence was something to be retreated from; an unwelcome curse; a potentially fatal gap in our knowledge of the world and the moment. We scrutinised it for the faintest sounds of footfall, for the barest rustle or creak, never able to relax, perpetually wondering if it was our fate to have dinner, or become it. That’s why silence, when it comes, hits us like a hypnotist’s finger-click, snapping our senses to attention.
When writers and show-runners tap into this power it can yield striking results. Silence, when used sparingly and with purpose, can make a sequence or a whole episode stand out from the rest of the canon. It can highlight or strengthen a message; lend profundity to the smallest of gestures; or magnify a tone or mood, as the following examples show us:
Better Call Saul (and Breaking Bad before it) routinely lets its rich, luscious, uniquely-styled visuals say what needs to be said against a canvas of silence, in punchy and powerful sequences that are cinematic in both their scope and execution. The Americans, too, knows when to stop talking and let the music tell the story instead, most poignantly in its emotionally resonant series’ finale, ‘START’.
Patrick McGoohan’s wilfully baffling series The Prisoner used silence to amplify the strangeness of the village and highlight the hopelessness of Number Six’s predicament in its weirder-than-usual, highly atmospheric episode ‘Many Happy Returns’.
The Wire once pared down its dialogue to the point of near-silence to give us a memorably funny sequence featuring McNulty and Bunk solving a crime with only heavy, knowing looks and various whispered permutations of the word ‘fuck’.
No matter the reason it’s used, silence always has something to tell us.
The Fifth Dimension
While TV’s early years may have lacked a certain artistry there were still plenty of shows that pushed the medium to its limits, and weren’t afraid to use silence as a creative tool. Many decades before the X-Files was even a government-sanctioned twinkle injected into Chris Carter’s eye against his will, The Twilight Zone used silence both to disturb and distract.
In its second season episode ‘The Invaders’ a lone woman in an old wooden shack-house in the middle of nowhere receives an unearthly visitor of unexpected dimensions: namely, a flying saucer. It’s so tiny it’s able to land undetected on her roof.
The only sounds that can be heard for the bulk of the episode are the woman’s screams and shrieks as she’s hunted, prodded, shot and burned by the proportionately tiny invaders, and the zaps, bangs and crackles of their tiny weapons as they do so. The woman’s very pure fear – and by extension ours – is amplified by the silence, which drifts through the house like a gas, slowly suffocating our senses and cutting off our usual reserves of comprehension and comfort. Our own fear centre takes centre-stage as narrator of the piece, imagining the very worst of fates within that oppressive cloud of quietness.
The silence occupies our adrenal glands just long enough for the rug to be pulled out from under us in the closing moments of the episode, turning the tables on we the human audience and the tiny invaders both, who are revealed – in a sublime twist – to be one and the same.
Last year, The X Files – a show that owes an unimaginable debt to trailblazers like The Twilight Zone – also dedicated an entire episode to (near total) silence. The snappily-titled eleventh-season offering ‘Rm9sbG93ZXJz’ used silence to inject novelty into the show’s decades-old format, and to magnify the horror of one of the foremost terrors of our age: the rise of the machine.
Mulder and Scully spend most of the episode’s run-time fleeing from a succession of remorseless automata through a patchwork landscape of re-appropriated sci-fi tropes, with barely a word spoken between them until the final scene. Throughout their running of the gauntlet we meet a vengeful electronic waiter, an over-zealous computerised taxi-cab, AI drones that swarm like angry wasps, and a HAL-like house with murder on its mind. Most of the words spoken in the episode are issued by machines and appliances, all eerie facsimiles of the human voice.
Their voice – which is really our voice – has been foisted upon them to unambiguously establish their status as the new slave class. But who’s really calling the shots here? It’s a smart, stand-out episode that not only works as a cautionary parable about our relationship with technology, but also as a commentary on the mistreatment of human workers in the service industry. We mistreat them to our detriment and at our peril.
However, the real horror in Rm9sbG93ZXJz doesn’t come from the machines and their ever-evolving sentience, but from our own species’ tacit decision to abnegate our existence to them. The silence is apt because it echoes and reflects our own silence in the face of the gadgets and gizmos that have rendered us mute. For proof of this abnegation look no further than the street outside your home, or around the room at your nearest and dearest. Or even down at your own hands.
If machines one day have a louder voice than their human creators, it will only be because humanity made the choice to surrender its voice to them in the first place.
Muted Mirth
Silence needn’t always have ‘something’ to say, or at least something profound to say. Sometimes it can be used simply to make us laugh. In the Frasier episode ‘Three Valentines’ the show’s ever-clever dialogue takes a back-seat to a one-man, one-act bout of classic slapstick. Niles’ efforts to have the perfect Valentine’s Night are wrecked by mounting misfortunes that rise to a crescendo of chaos and culminate in a messy and mirthsome moment of tragedy. It’s a sequence that stands out and lodges in the memory, and that’s no mean feat considering that the body of work it stands out from comprises eleven seasons of one of the greatest and funniest sitcoms of the last fifty years.
Depending upon who you ask, you might get different answers to the question: ‘Why should silence make things funny, or funnier?’ Niles Crane himself might advance a psycho-philosophical theory, explaining that silence builds tension, and laughter vents it, so if someone’s anguish and misfortune is played out against a back-drop of silence it will always provoke a larger laugh response, provided the audience doesn’t become too accustomed to, and thus too comfortable with, the silence.
Bojack Horseman, on the other hand, might tell you that the only silence he’s interested in is silence from people asking dumb questions, and where’s the nearest bottle of vodka?
Bojack Horseman leaned into its whip-smart visual humour harder than ever in its refreshing, razor-sharp and almost entirely dialogue-free third season episode ‘Fish Out of Water’. It’s visually striking, unique, laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly rewarding, with gags planted everywhere you look (Mr Peanut Butter on an underwater bill-board: “Seahorse Milk: Keeps your seahorse baby from crying. Take it from me, a childless dog”).
While silence is of course used to convey Bojack’s sense of himself as a perennial outsider, it also serves to bolster the episode’s punchline. And what a bloody punchline.
The final stinger of Inside No 9’s first season episode ‘A Quite Night In’ fell somewhere in tone between the Twilight Zone’s and Bojack’s, but with an added barb of cruelty. Shearsmith and Pemberton, no strangers to the macabre and the hellish, confidently demonstrated with this episode that words aren’t necessary in order to craft something bleak, brutal, brilliantly observed, and – most crucially of all – incredibly funny.
You’ll definitely laugh at this episode: if only to break the unbearable tension of the silence.
The Sopranos and The Shield have nothing more to say
In life most of us abhor silence. We equate it with discomfort and awkwardness. We consider it dead air; a form of social suicide. I guess that’s why when some people come to re-imagine the world on television they leave it out.
Soap operas create universes where words pepper the air like automatic gun-fire. Some prestige dramas, especially those penned by Aaron Sorkin, advance the lie that our lives are an ever-spinning conversational whirlwind of whooshing dialogue and precision banter.
But real life is stitched through with – and often dominated by – silence, as anyone who’s ever been married will tell you. It’s normal, natural, perhaps even essential. David Chase knew this, and he let that truth bleed into the body of The Sopranos.
Chase described each episode of his show as a mini-movie, and that’s something that shines through in every aspect of the series’ production and presentation, from the award-winning writing to the exquisite cinematography to the pitch-perfect acting and directing.
Before its arrival in 1999, few drama series had been as cinematic in their scope or style. The Sopranos wasn’t burdened with antsy advertisers or interfering executives, and Chase was thus left alone to explore the full, gritty gamut of darkness, violence and silence in the hearts of both America and man.
Chase and his team would often linger on Tony’s hangdog expression, or gaze into, and sometimes through, his haunted eyes. Silence made Tony feel more real. One episode ended with Tony and his wife, Carmella, sitting across from each other at their breakfast table, suffering in the silence of the no-man’s land their marriage had become. And, lest we forget, the series itself was capped off with perhaps the most controversial stretch of silence that’s ever been committed to screen.
Shawn Ryan elected to end his great-and-gritty (and criminally under-appreciated) cop show The Shield on an ambiguous – but rather more conventional – note of silence, using it as a way to torture and imprison his anti-anti-hero (sic) Vic Mackey. While The Sopranos’ final scene is a masterclass in tension-building, and its climactic snap of silence a testament to David Chase’s brilliance, cunning and creative daring, it’s hard to shake the feeling that The Shield’s final scene in general, and its use of silence in particular, serves as a more fitting and affecting coda for its main character.
When you think of Vic Mackey, silent is perhaps the last adjective to spring to mind. Garrulous, manipulative, brash, swaggering, vengeful, cunning, bold, maybe. But not silent. Never silent. Much more than a gun, Mackey’s mouth was always his first line of attack – and defence, too; his mouth serving as both his baton and his shield.
Having recounted all of his many sins and criminal transgressions to Laurie Holden’s ICE agent in a bid to secure immunity from prosecution in the series’ penultimate episode, Vic had no justifications left to make, no lies left to spin. He had nothing left to say. More than that, though, he had no-one left to say any of it to. The members of his former strike team were either dead or in jail. His wife and children had escaped into witness protection – to be protected from him, no less – never to be seen again. He had turned in his badge. His former colleagues had turned their backs on him. Vic’s silence – both his own and that which surrounded him – was a manifestation of his isolation from everything he’d ever professed to love. It embodied and reflected his emptiness, his powerlessness.
You can see this in the final confrontation between Vic and Claudette. Vic sits across from Claudette in an interrogation room. She spreads photographs of Shane (former friend, accomplice and strike-team member) and his family on the desk in-front of them both. They’re dead. A murder suicide. Vic played his part in causing it, as Shane’s suicide note makes clear. Instead of using his gift of the gab to deflect blame and guilt, Vic sits, his grief, anger and loss rendering him mute. Finally, he explodes in anger.
As part of the condition of his immunity Vic has to take on a new job helping the government deal with organised drug crime. He doesn’t have a gun or a badge. He has a desk, where he’ll sit for years typing reports. No action, no duty, no badge, no power. Nothing.
For most of The Shield’s long final scene, Vic Mackey is alone in his new office. He’s completely silent. We don’t need to hear him talk. We can see it all in his face. He’s in prison. He’s in hell. He’s been personally and professionally castrated; reduced to human rubble. He’s become the very thing he’s always feared and hated: a faceless bureaucrat.
A siren wails outside his window. He opens a drawer in his desk, pulls out a gun and heads for the door. You know he’s smiling.
There you are, Vic Mackey. There you are.
Sometimes silence can say things all the more loudly for not actually saying them at all.
Hear, hear.