Mimes Muting Each Other on Zoom
One woman’s journey for a sound answer to a silent question
Even when Ellie Clauson eases back in her creaking wooden chair, at odds with the contemporary office of Zoom’s Vice President of Mimespace, she is still dynamic. “We were concerned since early last year,” she says earnestly. “Each month, our statistics showed escalating mime-on-mime muting that we had never seen before, and which we just couldn’t explain. I mean, you always see trends among user groups — archers with their frightening bullseye cams, or bankers’ heavy use of the Foreclosure emoji — but this was unlike anything we had ever encountered. Zoom has a very vibrant and growing mime community,” she says, failing to entirely suppress her emotion, “but we were getting no answers there. All of their major events and conferences — World of Mimecraft, Mimeapolooza, The Mimeathon — were all being impacted. I had to know why.”
Eliminating the Impossible
Others among Zoom’s senior managers chalked up the muting trend to background noise. Clauson knew better. “A mime home is quiet, as you might expect. Even their pets are trained from an early age to gesture for what they need.” Clauson’s view is supported by publicly available recordings of mime sessions which clearly show fish demonstrating a tank filter change and parakeets using their wings to mimic a cage opening.
Clauson counts off on her fingers the dead ends in her investigation. “Ambient noise wasn’t the answer. Zoombombing wasn’t the answer — most Zoombombers quickly become disoriented in a mime meeting and will typically exit quietly in under a minute. And these weren’t mistaken Mute All’s by hosts. No, these were specifically targeted mutes — what we call malamutes — from one mime to another. It was an enigma.”
Whatever Remains, Must Be the Truth
Clauson’s research took her to the Mimeschtag, the Museum of Mimes in Media in Munich. The museum is the repository of recorded miming through the centuries, from parchment storyboards of Greek mimes to Marcelle Marceau’s famous utterance of the only dialogue in Mel Brooke’s 1976 Silent Movie — the sole audio sample in the museum’s entire collection.
Clauson consulted with Dr. Hans Jive, the museum’s curator and an accomplished mime in his own right. Clauson recounts Dr. Jive’s insights:
Miming is ubiquitous. Many of your popular American television programs feature some wonderful performers, who have chosen to mime their characters dialogue to achieve a greater depth of feeling. William Shatner recognized this early in his career and has mimed much of his best work, to great acclaim. Most mime performances are generally dubbed over in English for American audiences.
What all mimes have in common is their innate desire to viscerally express what they mean, preferring a gesture to a picture or a word. Also, they greatly enjoy busking.
For all this, Clauson still felt no closer to an answer on her flight back to the States. “Yet,” she remembers, “one of Dr. Jive’s comments kept playing itself over and over to me — ‘preferring a gesture to a picture or a word.’”
And that was the clue. On returning home, Clauson poured over days and weeks of recorded mime meetings and online conventions. The answer was in plain sight, by not being there at all.
“Emojis,” Clauson says, unable to hide her satisfaction while her chair creaks in agreement. “In 182 hours of recorded meetings, not one emoji — not one! Which, of course, makes sense — a mime will no more use an emoji to say something than they would hold up a picture to tell you what they meant. It just isn’t done.”
“But what would they do?” Clauson continues. “If one mime is in agreement with another, they mute them. This is a new generation of mimes, and this is their version of ‘I hear you’ — only it’s ‘I don’t hear you.’ Mimes muting each other isn’t a community coming apart — it’s a community coming together,” she concludes grandly. “The mime future on Zoom is a bright one.”
Clauson’s future seems bright as well — in addition to her current position, she was recently made Special Attaché for Synchronized Swimmers. “They’ve already asked me about Little Mermaid and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea virtual backgrounds,” Clauson smiles. “We’ll see,” she adds, and then performs a flawless mime of a Disney lawsuit.
