One of the biggest problems I have with getting into contemporary movies is the robotic delivery of the dialogue. It's usually monotone, which also means low monotone (a steady high pitch being too much of a strain), with a kind of husky or mumbling register, and a self-consciously slow-mo tempo. Examples by genre follow a bit further down.
The words in a movie are meant to be spoken and felt, not appreciated more abstractly by reading them from the screenplay. Speech patterns may not be the high point of the overall sensory experience of a movie, but take them away, and it drains the movie of any power. Speech is such a constant presence in a movie, not like if the handful of action sequences are boring or if a couple special effects look dumb.
It's like when you hear contempo pop music, Norah Jones for example, and you want to tell them to wake up before they start recording the song. It smacks of disrespect for the audience, like "I'm too bored and tired to care enough about you all to sound dynamic, pleasing, or exciting." Turn off the fucking microphone then, you retard.
And while 99% of the speech is mumbling, there's that 1% where they go for broke and turn to shouting or shrieking. I guess they're assuming that they've already put you to sleep with their ordinary drone, so they need to launch a full-out assault on your ears to get your attention -- you know, instead of having it all along.
Again that's what contempo singing sounds like -- mostly that quiet flat tone, with the occasional random brief burst of volume. I think Natalie Merchant started that in the '90s, but it wasn't as bad back at the beginning of the trend. Try making your ear swallow a song by Regina Spektor without spitting it back out.
When so much of a person's speech has no sort of natural inflection, and therefore sounds totally careless as to the context (each context calling for its own sort of inflection), the audience gets the message that the speaker is bored by everything and couldn't care less about others. So when they hear that odd random burst of volume, they interpret it as the boy who cried "wolf." Just some egocentric twit who felt a sudden impulse to whore for attention.
I wonder how much today's audiences respond viscerally to their entertainment. It seems like being presented with such cold, distancing, and unlikable vocal delivery, they'd get turned off. But maybe they're all borderline autistic and their brains are filtering out the acoustic/phonetic detail, and extracting only the syntactic/semantic information.
To document what's going on, I'm certainly not going to go through every popular movie from the last 15-20 years. Just one for each genre, since the trend is obvious enough. Mumbling does seem to play different roles in different genres, though, so each case is worth a separate look. I'll also include examples from an '80s counterpart that show normal human inflection, just to show how recent this change is. The clips will be movie trailers, since they include speech from across the entire movie, not just a snippet from one scene only.
Indie movies: Mumbling as outward sign of inner existential drift
Note to artfags: "ennui" is just "boredom" with a college degree, hence no more interesting and equally irritating as a character trait.
Trailer, The Puffy Chair (2005)
Trailer, Heathers (1988)
Action movies: Mumbling as nonchalant invincibility
The occasional flat-toned wisecrack shows stoicism and cockiness from a vulnerable hero in the face of real danger. Always sounding bored and unmoved shows instead that the characters themselves are aware of being written as indestructible faux heroes in a CGI explosion movie.
Trailer, A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)
Trailer, Die Hard (1988)
Comedy movies: Mumbling as makeshift deadpan
Deadpan is the use of an ordinary type of inflection (any of the many types used in ordinary situations), when an unusual type is called for. Mumbling doesn't sound like a familiar example of ordinary inflection, and so defeats the comic contrast between the expected unusual type and the actual ordinary type. It cheats and says, "We know we're supposed to be showing some kind of emotion, but we're showing no emotion at all," instead of showing ordinary emotion A when unusual emotion B is called for.
Trailer, The Hangover (2009)
Trailer, Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
Romance movies: Mumbling as impaired libido
When characters have so little inflection before they find each other, we don't believe they're all that excitable to begin with, and so not really driven as protagonists toward their romantic goal, nor having much long-term promise as a passionate couple -- which is the whole selling point of the movie. Decreased libido also shows up in the mumbling used to broadcast how not boy-crazy the girl is, and how "whatever" the guy feels about girls. And the occasional attempt to resurrect hall of fame mumblers Bogie and Bacall, wielding it as a weapon in a never-ending duel of shit-testing.
Trailer, Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)
Clip, L.A. Story (1991)
Drama movies: Mumbling as forced reminder of seriousness
Characters find themselves in a predicament, sometimes a frightening one, that will take some kind of personal growth to get out of. All that minimal inflection achieves is to keep reminding the audience of the seriousness of the predicament -- like, yeah, we get it already. Fatalistic mumbling suggests, though, that the characters will just stay trapped in their troubles. A fuller range of inflection suggests that the characters have personalities that are dynamic enough to work their way through their unfamiliar situation.
Trailer, The Sixth Sense (1999)
Trailer, Big (1988)
...And that takes care of the major genres. The others are more or less a mix of the above uses.
You see basically the same picture by looking at the range of facial expressions. Today it's 99% blank -- vacant, mopey, smug, pouty, etc. -- and 1% kabuki mask, where before people showed a normal range of expressions. Now they look distancing by default, and we don't believe them when they briefly deviate by donning their kabuki masks. Before they were believable from beginning to end; some of them you could even relate to. The functions served by blank-face in each of the genres is the same as for mumble-voice.
Again, it makes you wonder how autistic the audience is today if they don't notice, or don't care, that the faces they're spending the whole movie staring at are completely devoid of normal emotional expressions for 99% of the time, and the other 1% are drawn with all the subtlety of pre-school refrigerator art.
These major failures wouldn't be so bad if we were reading a book, where only our own imagination is responsible for hearing the dialogue and seeing their expressions. But in a medium that you're supposed to have a more visceral response to, it's crucial to have speech and body language that you can connect with.
The "quiet, loud, quiet" dynamic is often attributed to the Pixies, then popularized by Nirvana. I like it, it gives a sense of contrast and build-up. Being flat all the time is boring, but I'd rather be bored by Norah Jones (or even Low) than annoyed by the electro-drum-machine shit in music today (many of the songs even seem to include an air-raid horn, or something like it). Even to take a totally different genre, I prefer Slayer's "South of Heaven" and to a lesser extent "Seasons in the Abyss" to "Raining Blood" because they don't charge right out the gates.
ReplyDeleteDid you mean to include L.A Story as a contrast? Earlier you indicated those would all be from the 80s.
Remember Ben Stein from Ferris Bueller's day off?
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"And the occasional attempt to resurrect hall of fame mumblers Bogie and Bacall, wielding it as a weapon in a never-ending duel of shit-testing."
ReplyDeleteYeah, romantic comedies always show the couple trying to out-snark each other.
I saw the same thing in old 50s movies. The men were always too rough-and-tough to like girls and treated them condescendingly ("girls are yucky"), or vice versa. I think I mentioned the one movie where John Wayne spanks the female lead...
its flipped to the other side in recent times. Now, the female leads are hardcharging careerists who don't have time to deal with moronic men.
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"Again, it makes you wonder how autistic the audience is today if they don't notice, or don't care, that the faces they're spending the whole movie staring at are completely devoid of normal emotional expressions for 99% of the time, and the other 1% are drawn with all the subtlety of pre-school refrigerator art."
ReplyDeleteIt effected me, but I didn't notice it consciously. Yet now that you describe the phenomena I'm seeing it in all the movies. I expect most people are the same way.
Afterall, attendance at the movies has gone down for the last 20 years. Part of this is the cocooning trend. Yet much of it must be that movies simply are getting worse. And people are noticing that.
Hardly anybody remembers any of the movies from 1930-1960, with rare exceptions. Same with music from the period. Its like a cultural no man's land.
1990-? will be viewed the same way. Something like Lord of the Rings will become the equivlanet of "Quo Vadis" from the 50s(never heard of it, have you?). All those damn superhero movies will be the ridiculously long historical epics from years before.
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The king of monotone-acted movies for me is the Star Wars prequal trilogy. Maybe Lucas was innovating, in a terrible, terrible way.
ReplyDeleteHardly anybody remembers any of the movies from 1930-1960, with rare exceptions. Same with music from the period. Its like a cultural no man's land.
ReplyDeleteThing is, like with music, people watch and appreciate 1930 - 1960 (e.g. blues! "traditional pop music"! [apparently started getting covered again in the 1980s] even all that 30s swing bullshit) waaay more than the music and movies of the 1900s - 1920s.
That was even the case in the 1980s. 1950s reruns were watched then, and 1950s music listened to then by certain people while the 1920s period was much more absent from cultural memory. agnostic might think the 20s movies were so great and exciting, and that the music was, but no one living in the 1980s seems to have cared about it.
Hopefully, after the next generational shift, that'll be the way with all the (boring, dated) 1960s - 1980s stuff in the future. If we have a new wave of exciting stuff, finally we can put a bullet in the head of all the sad and dated 80s revivalism (reruns of boring done to death shit like Indiana Jones and Star Wars and Predator).
You're ignoring the obvious, which is that in the '80s, the '50s were just over one generation more current than the '20s, and had an entire domain of media to recycle that the '20s didn't -- TV.
ReplyDeleteAnd that still didn't stop the Jazz Age revival beginning around the mid-'70s and lasting through the '80s.
The '50s revival was much more limited -- first, only the late '50s survived. TV re-runs are not a revival, and were not that popular anyway. Nick at Nite showed mostly episodes from the '60s, not the '50s, e.g. Dennis the Menace, The Patty Duke Show, My Three Sons, etc. I Love Lucy was the only big one from the '50s.
Music was a bit more successful, including rockabilly / early rock as well as some doo-wop (e.g. "Earth Angel" in Back to the Future, and covered by New Edition for The Karate Kid Part II). But nothing from the earlier '50s, let alone back through the swing era.
Mid-century music didn't see a mini-revival until the swing / big band revival of the late '90s, and fizzled out pretty quickly.
All visual arts were the complete opposite of the mid-century, and consciously or unconsciously reviving the '20s and early '30s. The International Style was disgraced and exiled from both mainstream and even elite architecture, ditto for furniture and interior design.
The New Typography, basically the International Style applied to typography, had finally died off as well. Ditto the mainstreaming of Bauhaus graphic design in general that had enjoyed its heyday in the mid-century. Photography and Helvetica typeface was out, illustration and Broadway typeface was back in.
And of course the drab, pattern-free, monochromatic clothing of the mid-century could not have been farther from popular tastes in the 1980s.
Painting and sculpture from the '50s and mid-century generally were also at long least dead and buried -- abstract expressionism, color field painting, bla bla bla.
Unlike TV shows, nobody was watching '50s or mid-century movies back then. Noir was in its "neo" phase, visually somewhat like the original but thematically nearly the opposite. The atmosphere wasn't bleak, fatalistic, and mistrusting. The characters open up to and trust each other, while the femme fatale trope became subverted by making her not the destructive force you were expecting, but one of the few moral, altruistic, and maternal characters in the movie. E.g., Faye Dunaway in Chinatown and Isabella Rossellini from Blue Velvet.
Mid-century / '50s comic books were also dead, and those were a staple of pop culture back in the '50s. Horror, western, romance, etc. They were more in the superhero genre of the '60s and after.
...and this is just culture. Forget the rest of the zeitgeist -- the New Deal / Eisenhower liberal era, Space Age optimism, technocracy, Corporatism, etc etc. Not simply forgotten by the '80s, but kept from rearing their head.
That's how little of a '50s / mid-century revival or even persistence there was during the '80s or '70s. What about the 1900s - early '30s?
ReplyDeleteRagtime, the #1 best-seller of 1975, and adapted to film in '81. The Great Gatsby was filmed with major stars in 1974. Jay McInerney's novels show clear influence from Fitzgerald and Hemmingway, not Arthur Miller or Allen Ginsberg. Whit Stillman's Metropolitan is Fitzgerald's stories of young people, complete with glamorous Jazz Age atmosphere, not J.D. Salinger.
Music from the '20s was not well preserved because of the primitive technology used to record the original. Still, that didn't stop "Puttin' on the Ritz" from becoming one of the most iconic songs of the '80s, complete with Jazz Age revival music video, including performers in tuxedos and blackface make-up. None of the '50s covers reached such iconic status.
The spirit if not the letter of the dance craze of the '20s saw a revival too. Going out to a club for a night of dancing was absent from '50s pop culture and socializing, but had become mainstream again by the '80s.
Art Deco was being revived in architecture, furniture and interior design, product design, graphic design, typography, and clothing design.
Painting became figurative and striking again with Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Surrealism. And of course people still remember and appreciate painting from 1900 through the early '30s way more than mid-century painting.
Movies were more like the '20s than the '50s. Han Solo and Indiana Jones were more Douglas Fairbanks than Errol Flynn. Stylized set design came back in, and not in the bombastic Lord-of-the-Rings fashion of '50s epics. Deep focus was out, anamorphic lenses and shallow focus was in, a revival of '20s cinematography (consciously or not).
Horror and sci-fi movies were woken up from cheeseball, campy '50s junk to something engaging, exciting, even disturbing. That's a return to the classic horror movies of the '20s and early '30s.
Not only were the '20s movies not languishing, they were thriving, relative to what could be expected for movies that far back in memory. Metropolis had been forgotten during the mid-century, but in 1984 was re-discovered and popularly re-released. Its new soundtrack featured songs written specifically for the movie by major music acts of the time.
The drive-in theater concept was dead, and the megaplex was an attempt to revive the Picture Palace concept of the '20s. Now it's back to isolation with Redbox and Netflix.
Drive-in restaurants were dead as well. Mall food courts were like the automat of the '20s, before the drive-in concept was revived in the '90s and after (Sonic).
This is just off the top of my head kind of stuff at 5-6 in the morning, but there's more to be said. Saying that few people in the '80s remembered, revived, or reinterpreted the culture of the '20s is just plain old ignorant. The cure is actively choosing books to read on the relevant topics, rather than passively absorbing factoids from Wikipedia articles. Or looking to personal memory if you can.
"Hopefully, after the next generational shift, that'll be the way with all the (boring, dated) 1960s - 1980s stuff in the future. If we have a new wave of exciting stuff, finally we can put a bullet in the head of all the sad and dated 80s revivalism (reruns of boring done to death shit like Indiana Jones and Star Wars and Predator)."
ReplyDeleteYou use the word "dated" way too much, like you're looking more for a brief endorphin rush from novelty rather than lasting pleasure from something crafted well.
Eighties culture is too unpretentious, engaging, and joyful to ever die, even if it's going through a lull thanks to the boring tastes of spazz audiences in the 21st century.
I only wish there was an '80s revivalism going on in the broad culture -- there'd actually be movies worth seeing in the theater, songs worth turning on the radio for, cars worth turning your head at, public spaces worth heading out to, and activities, especially group activities, worth participating in.
If the '80s were the neo-'20s, then the '80s won't see a broad revival until the 2030s, '40s, or '50s. But it's gonna happen, and I can't wait.
"Hardly anybody remembers any of the movies from 1930-1960, with rare exceptions."
ReplyDeleteA laughable comment. Are you serious? Perhaps you've never watched Turner Classic Movies, took a film course, or had parents who grew up in the U.S.
You could more truthfully say that hardly anyone, except of course culturally literate people, remembers films prior to circa 1930. But that's principally the result of the introduction of sound.
Any adult of say above 30 knows Citizen Kane, Casablanca, the Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, It's a Wonderful Life, Ben-Hur, Vertigo...
This list could be made much longer. Longer than the word "exceptions" warrants.
"Nick at Nite showed mostly episodes from the '60s, not the '50s, e.g. Dennis the Menace, The Patty Duke Show, My Three Sons, etc. I Love Lucy was the only big one from the '50s."
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point. Much of what modern audiences consider "50s culture" was actually early 60s - and was prolonged through the rest of the New Wave.
For instance, the Dick Van Dyke show was made in the early 60s. The culture it portrays - married suburban neighbors hosting parties for each other - didn't happen until the early 60s.
I don't recall the parents from Leave it to Beaver, for instance, hosting such get-togethers with the neighbors.
Ever hear of the Andy Griffith show? Ran from 1960-1968.
So once again, what are considered to be paragons of "the good old days" were really early 60s. And, "the good old days" of the early 60s, in reality, were prolonged until the early 90s. There are shows in the 80s and early 90s which showed a culture similar to early 60s, I'll look up some examples later on.
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To be clear, I'm not saying that there are not similarities and parallels, between the 1920s and 1980s*, just that 1980s folk really did not consume or care about actual 1920s cultural products, and I don't think they had any interest in the period. Fundamentally, they made rock not jazz. They did not want to dress like flappers or drive Rolls Royce motorcars. They did not really want to read too many Prohibition era novels. One video does not any kind of cultural appreciation of 1920s revival make. Even when there is not a technological barrier (clothing, books), there was very little interest.
ReplyDeleteThe 80s did different things, even if in the same spirit (which you give lots of examples of), the 20s cultural products were forgotten. The spirit may have been the same, but the old flesh was dead and forgotten, and new life was being born.
Like how there wasn't a Gothic-Romantic revival in the 1920s either, no matter what the similarities.
*are they as strong as you think? I don't know, it seems pretty impressionistic, hard to measure, thus confirmation bias prone, but not amenable to any other kind of approach (or else you'd have done that already)
You use the word "dated" way too much, like you're looking more for a brief endorphin rush from novelty rather than lasting pleasure from something crafted well.
It's really the Seinfeld Isn't Funny syndrome for me (I'm pretty sure you'd say it was never funny, since it was from the early 90s, but still, I think the point stands). Not really about the "endorphin rush", just that I actually do like new stuff, new culture being made and that if you watch something over and over again it loses challenge, suspense and meaning (yes, I know you don't believe in spoilers, but you can't just watch these movies over and over and have them have that much impact).
I don't hate the 80s stuff as much as want something fresh. I want the sad Generation Y nostalgic people who like something pathetic like Far Cry 3 : Blood Dragon (you can look it up, but its a current gamer thing - all pseudo-80s all lasers, all the time style that misses the point, all boring modern videogameplay) and are obsessed with Star Wars (and other old movies) to actually have new cultural products not to be embarrassing themselves and being pathetic all the time. I don't know if you can call their behavior revival as such - it's really widespread, seems like every 25-35 year old fucker is like this to some degree - more slightly pathetic obsession.
"They did not want to dress like flappers"
ReplyDeleteSure they did -- short, volumized hair was the one of the most popular '80s hairstyles. The fashion model or chick in a rock video (like "Addicted to Love") with short, slicked-back hair, slender boyish figure, long legs, and nonchalant attitude was one of the main sex symbol types. Very obviously a neo-flapper image.
"The spirit may have been the same, but the old flesh was dead and forgotten, and new life was being born."
No, there was both identity by descent (revival) and by convergent evolution (similar spirit leading to similar outcomes).
"Like how there wasn't a Gothic-Romantic revival in the 1920s either, no matter what the similarities."
Sure there was -- the classic horror movies. The revival of the original vogue for all things Egyptian and Ancient. Again both through revival and convergent cultural evolution.
"something pathetic like Far Cry 3 : Blood Dragon (you can look it up, but its a current gamer thing - all pseudo-80s all lasers, all the time style that misses the point, all boring modern videogameplay)"
Maybe you're talking about Hot Tub Time Machine, The Expendables, chiptune music, Rock of Ages kind of stuff, then. Which always sucks and always flops -- so, hard to see that as a broad revival. If you want something fresh, i.e. post-'80s, everything popular today is fresh.
The Hunger Games, Lord of the Rings, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, Call of Duty, Street Fighter IV, CSI, The Daily Show, Apple minimalist design, etc etc etc -- none of that even remotely resembles '80s culture.
It's a lot like the mid-century culture, though it's its own incarnation. It's its own reflection of the Platonic ideal of sober culture, as opposed to wild culture, for lack of better terms. But you can't say it's not fresh and not popular.
"to actually have new cultural products"
ReplyDeleteIf you haven't experienced it yet, the past feels new. How many Art Deco buildings have you seen in person or in pictures? If not that many, they feel fresh, even though they're 80 years old. How many short stories by Fitzgerald have you read?
How many '80s new wave songs have you heard? Have you seen The Parallax View, Chinatown, Videodrome, Heathers?
It's an honest question -- most people, especially young people these days haven't experienced the classics even once. And you can't feel fatigued from something you haven't experienced. That's just a cop-out answer, a lame excuse for not wanting to give the past its respect and treat it as a treasure trove of wonders as yet undiscovered to you.
It's like some lit-crit type complaining about how the revenge tragedy has been done to death, why we need something fresh and edgy in drama. Or how the Gothic novel is so dated, and we need a fresh take on the novel.
Well, sure, it's nice to have something both enjoyable and new, but enjoyable and old beats new and retarded every time. Especially when those lit-crit types haven't even read / seen all of the classic revenge tragedies, outside of the handful they had to read in their survey of English lit course in college, where they might not have even read Marlowe or Webster, but only Shakespeare.
There's way too much to sift through and enjoy from the past to complain about a lack of fresh material here and now.
To put it more clearly, I'm talking about a revival, and you seem to be talking about a re-enactment. Sure, there were no cosplay flappers in the '80s, but a revival doesn't require scrupulous adherence to the original. Just taking an interest in it, being fascinated by it, and trying to work it back into contemporary culture.
ReplyDeleteAnd getting back to the main argument, no matter how we define revival, there was more of a '20s revival during the '80s, and much less of a '50s revival at the same time (a negation, if anything).
The only movie on that list I haven't seen is Heathers. Parallax View was most recent, and I found it disappointing. I suppose I wanted it to "make sense" given the realistic setting, whereas for a movie like Videodrome I make no such demands. Speaking of which, it's been even longer since I've seen eXistenZ, but that seems like the movie Cronenberg was aiming to make and only later did technology start catching up to his vision. In contrast, Rabid seems like a step down from Shivers.
ReplyDeleteI'm talking about a revival, and you seem to be talking about a re-enactment.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I don't know if I'm talking about a re-enactment really (or where revival / re-enactment begins and ends).
More originally responding to a guy who seemed to be talking about the relative persistence of the previous introverted and extraverted (or falling crime and rising crime) period movies and music, specifically. And I still think that the pre-1930s era of music and film seems far more forgotten than the 30s to 50s era. Not that persuaded as to tech explanations for this (seems a bit truer in film than music - recordings of the Charleston or whatever were pretty well preserved really). Kind of went to broader culture and revivals from there.
I still think certainly 80s nostalgia / imitation and TV series and movies set in the 80s seems more popular today than any kind of 30s - 50s nostalgia (burlesque dancing or pinups and stuff in that mold just isn't very much compared to all the fuckers obsessed with the 1980s, or even how popular the 1950s [or 50s-60s period] was in the 1980s). I don't know if you want to call that a revival or not. Still not very persuaded that the 1920s was looked back to in the 80s particularly much. Appreciate the responses tho.
Its because so few iconic movies, fashions, or fictional characters came out of the 1930s-1950s. It was a cultural desert.
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