Everyone Is Screen Creeping These Days
From TikTokers to Laura Dern.
We travelers are a nosy lot. And it makes sense—if travel is predicated on curiosity, then of course we’re going to want to know what our seatmates are reading on a train, or watching on a flight. I, for one, love to get to know the person sitting next to me by taking a look at their in-flight entertainment choices. Are they a viewer of classics, watching Titanic for the tenth time? Are they a film snob opting for the foreign titles? Or are they simply rawdogging? My interest isn’t limited to my row either. I love to peruse as many screens as possible while heading to the bathroom, hoping to catch a dad watching something like Challengers.
I’m not the only one who possesses this harmless habit. Thrillist’s star travelers, from Bob the Drag Queen to Laura Dern, all say they’re guilty of the behavior, and some go beyond mere curiosity. Dern in particular says she sometimes watches someone else’s movie in full, without sound. “I get so invested in these movies that I've never seen,” she told us recently. “I just watched the Bob Marley movie on the plane and knew enough about his amazing life that I kind of filled in the blanks, but I watched it without sound.”
And sometimes, it’s a person’s succession of movie choices—and how much of each they choose to watch—that can reveal a lot about them. Dern tells the story of being transfixed by a passenger sitting in front of her, who went from watching 10 minutes of Ratatouille, to 10 minutes of Inside Out, to 10 minutes of a Cassavettes film. “By the end of the fourth film that he watched for 10 minutes, I thought, okay, It's a film director, and he's American. “Anyway, he got up and I was right about him. I emailed him after the flight a list of everything he watched. It was so creepy. But I love it. That’s what I do.”
The TikTokers are doing it, too, because, sometimes, your own screen is just too close. Or, you could put the same movie on, but it wouldn’t feel as illicit. “I think he put subtitles on just for me,” TikToker Brittany O’Brien says of her fellow passenger. In one particularly funny instance, a TikToker messes with an unknowing seatmate in a game of Guess Who.
So ubiquitous is this behavior that it deserves to have a name, as we at Thrillist have taken to calling it “screen creeping.” It can be applied to all kinds of transit situations, from peering over at your neighbor’s Kindle read on the subway, to having a wandering eye on a plane. Some might say this is out of pocket behavior. Others might say that to be curious about your fellow traveler is to love your fellow traveler.