smacks of pretentious social climbing

”Any idiot could write voice-over to explain the thought of a character.”

[Originally posted on this film dialogue blog] 

So says screenwriting guru Robert McKee (Brian Cox) in the reflexive Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002). In many ways he’s right; by granting the audience direct access to a character’s thoughts, voice-over avoids the need to carefully craft dialogue and performances to convey the same information discreetly. As Mary Ann Doane (1980) notes, it gives the voice ‘the privileged mark of interiority, turning the body ‘inside-out.’ Calls for more subtle dialogue can be seen as a response to the use of voice-over, which as Michel Chion (2006) notes resurged in popularity in the 1990s.

In fact, voice-over is the single aspect of dialogue with a well-developed body of literature. Much has been written about distinctions between the disembodied voice of the documentary voice-over, that of a character-narrator, and a voice-over that only become attached to a visible body at a particular moment. In ‘The Silences of the Voices’, Pascal Bonitzer (1986) associates the embodied voice with subjectivity and a lack of knowledge, while the disembodied voice typically conveys universality and knowledge. In her gendered analysis of the voice, Kaja Silverman (1988) suggests this synchronization is more fully enforced with female characters – that there are ‘very high stakes’ involved in the alignment of the female voice with the female image. Considering the position of the audience, Silverman make a crucial distinction between their relationship with the internal-monologue voice-over, and the voice-over that consciously tells a story. While the latter is ‘undemocratic’, pulling rank on other characters and the viewer, the interior monologue ‘constitutes a form of auditory mastery’ by transforming the private into the public.

VO and Genre

The association of voice-over with particular genres or sub-genres – film noir; horror; adaptation – has encouraged discussion of its stylistic and narrative function. As Bonitzer points out, the marginal anxiety of the disembodied voice can be used for narrative effect. The Scream series cleverly plays on this by having a single, sinister telephone voice attached to the every killer (a voice-altering machine in the first conveniently explains the premise that is used in all four films).

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Nonsense and Jargon in the Science-Fiction Film

[Originally posted on this blog on film dialogue]

Siegfried Kracauer (1960) requested that the content of film dialogue be secondary to its aural qualities.

‘[S]tripped of all the connotations and meanings [words] appear to us for the first time in a relatively pure state. Words presented this way lie in the same dimension as the visible phenomena which the motion picture camera captures.’

In order to hear the voice’s ”pure acoustical characteristics,” foreign accents, nonsense sounds and technical jargon can be used ”to release the analytic mindset into a more feeling mode.” Sarah Kozloff uses the science-fiction genre to shows that while such techniques can create memorable, aesthetically rich dialogue, they can just as easily fail. First an example of what works:

A Clockwork Orange: ultra-violent and ultra-verbose

Dialogue is a memorable feature of A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) adopts the made-up dialect of Anthony Burgess’s novel and equals (if not exceeds) the visual style in terms of impact. Alex (Malcolm McDowell) doesn’t just have a penchant for ”ultra-violence”, but for reversed synthax, alliteration and all around terseness:  

Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit? 

 Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures! 

What you got back home, little sister, to play your fuzzy warbles on? I bet you got little save pitiful, portable picnic players. Come with uncle and hear all proper! Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones. You are invited. 

Kubrick also makes a feature of dialogue in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) – characters seldom speak, but when they do it’s with a flat coldness. In Blade Runner (1982), Ridley Scott also used neologisms and poetic diction, along with the marked silences: 

Tears in Rain speech in Blade Runner: I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those … moments will be lost in time, like tears…in rain. Time to die.  - Roy Batty

But, overall, the speech in sci-fi has attracted negative attention. In Screening Space, Vivian Sobchack argues that heavy reliance on pseudo-scientific jargon is stultifying, while Susan Sontag describes the dialogue’s ”touching banality” as ”wonderfully, unintentionally funny.” The blogosphere comes to the same conclusion with the 10 Greatest Unintentionally Hilarious Lines from Science-Fiction including “Imperial Battleship, halt the flow of time!” (Starcrash); ”Inspector Detector suspected foul play” (Speed Racer) and ”But I was going to Toschi Station to pick up some power convertors.” (Star Wars)

References / Image Source: 

All screencaps from bloodybrilliantmoviecaps

Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Dialogue and Sound’ in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality; Princeton University Press, 1997 (originally published 1960): 102-133

Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1988) 146–222.

Susan Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster,’ in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) 437