5 ideas
A tropism is a tiny involuntary movement of attraction or recoil, like a plant turning toward light, that passes through a person before any thought or word forms. These movements happen in the instant of contact with another person and decide how the encounter goes, but they are too fast and too faint to be named, so speech covers them over as soon as they occur.
Every ordinary exchange runs on two levels at once. There is the audible talk of politeness and small facts, and beneath it a silent sub-conversation of probing, retreat, domination and appeasement. Read an encounter at this lower level and a trivial chat about the weather or a relative's health becomes a real contest between people.
People reach for clichés and received phrases because shared formulas protect them from exposing what they actually feel. The same formulas also serve as pressure: a banal remark, repeated insistently, can pin the listener down, demand agreement, and punish anyone who shows an inner life that doesn't fit the script.
One sketch follows a group of women in a tea shop, eating pastries and trading gossip about relatives, marriages, illnesses, money and servants in stock phrases such as 'that's what I told her.' Under the cozy talk, the sketch shows them endlessly chewing over the same few worn subjects, with a mix of greed, anxiety and complicity that holds them together. It stands as a concrete case of sociable small talk working as a shared compulsion rather than an exchange of information.
To make instantaneous inner movements visible, the sketches stretch a split second into a long passage and replace named emotions with physical images: oozing, sticky substances, tentacles, cringing, flattening against walls. Characters are left as anonymous 'he', 'she' and 'they' without backstory, so attention falls on the movement itself rather than on personality or plot.