This is a short film by Ted Chung entitled A Thousand Words. I wrote a short response paper on it for my English class, and decided to share it here. Watch, read and enjoy. :)
We live in a busy world. Keep your focus, keep your head down, keep moving. With our jobs, classes, and personal dramas, there’s no time for small talk. There’s no time for big talk either; you ask the average person for their thoughts on the basic elements of our lives -- religion, politics, social responsibility, history, art, friendship, love -- no doubt you’ll get an answer. But in a world distilled to 140 characters or less, it will be small enough to fit on a nametag: Democrat, Republican. Catholic, Atheist. Lover, fighter. We read the menu, make our selections, and voilà -- a personality, ready and breathing, in thirty minutes or less.
Obviously, it’s not all that simple.
Ted Chung’s short film A Thousand Words, on the other hand, is simple. A wordless love story condensed to five minutes, it follows a man’s search for a woman with whom he’d never said a word. He first sees the woman while riding a bus, but when she departs, she leaves her camera behind. He takes the camera home, and while looking through the pictures, he discovers that she’d been watching him as well -- several pictures of him sleeping on the bus are in the camera’s memory. Using the other pictures as clues, he hunts down her apartment, only to find it vacated. He’s missed his chance. The film ends as the man uses the camera to take his own portrait, with his phone number included, and sends the camera back, ‘PLEASE FORWARD’ scrawled beneath the abandoned address.
The title points to the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” You can get to know something about another through just a few images, by watching, by paying attention. However, the last frame of the film brings to mind another question. After the man has sent off the camera, he sits in his darkened apartment and stares at nothing. He’s thinking. But what’s he thinking about? In my mind, he’s thinking the obvious. Why didn’t I say hello?
When I was a few months shy of fifteen, I took a summer class on literature with my favorite English teacher. At the end of the class, she lent me a book by Ray Bradbury. Within the first few pages of Fahrenheit 451, I found my paper twin in the character Clarisse McClellan. The story is set in the future, a future without books, without time, and without any human connection outside of the obligated. The main character, Montag, meets Clarisse one night while walking home from work. She’s new in town, and strange:
When they reached [Clarisse’s] house all its lights were blazing.
“What’s going on?” Montag had rarely seen that many house lights.
“Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking. It’s like being a pedestrian, only rarer. … Oh, we’re most peculiar.”
“But what do you talk about?” (9).
This is fiction, a lie, but the difference between fiction and lying is that fiction is the truth behind the lie. Fahrenheit’s reality is not our own, and yet it is.
Why is it so hard to talk to people? Why is it so hard to say hello? Within a day, you have a thousand or more opportunities to say hello, to make conversation, to get to know someone through their own words, yet we don’t seize them. Why?
Maybe the taboo starts when we’re young. We teach our children not to talk to strangers, and for the sake of clarity, we paint everyone we don’t know with the same brush. Strangers are people you don’t know. Strangers are strange. Strangers are scary. Strangers will bite.
Then it perpetuates as technology takes over. You would think we have even more opportunities to talk to someone, and in some ways, we do. Email, instant messaging, social networking, tweeting, texting. The list goes on. But now our communication is filtered through a screen. Relationships are electronic and stunted, missing that breath-to-breath connection that builds up our opinions and personalities. Real, meaningful conversation should be unedited, honest, and raw. But many times do you hit the backspace button, change your words, or change your mind? We are communicating, but we aren’t talking.
The first question remains: Why didn’t you say hello?
The man in Chung’s film is faced with an opportunity that many of us won’t get. He gets an insight into the woman’s mind, the truth that she was watching him too. He gets reassurance. The idea that it is okay to talk to this pretty stranger is what starts his search. But why wasn’t it okay before? Why didn’t he get up and say hello on the train, when they locked eyes? Why wasn’t it okay then? Why do we need an invitation?
We’re busy, I get it. We go from place to place, finish our to-do lists, go home, talk about what we did and didn’t do, and then we go to sleep. We’re busy. We’re scared. I get it.
Yet, at the end of the night, when the streets are dark and the air is quiet, my house lights will be blazing, and I’ll talk.
If I see you in the morning, maybe I’ll say hello.