How do people speak? Pretty open-ended question, right? Also, why does it even matter when we have the much more useful ‘what do people mean’ to keep us going? Well, I’ll talk about the specifics of properly communicating the noises that come out of the mouths of others with regard to writing for film and television, but I’ll first linger a moment on understanding them.
What we say is quite obviously important, but it is only words, and words don’t always mean what they should mean, taken at face value. Words alone won’t cut it. An example; if I call you a slag in south London, I mean you are a person of low moral fibre who cannot be trusted, but in the north the same word indicates that I’m talking about a girl who has sex with lots of men. (As an aside, this latter context is only ever pejorative when used either by other women or men who never meet women who actually want to have sex with them without it being an effort, but that is very much beside the point here.) Language is infinitely flexible and formed as much from local idiom and colloquialism as it is structured within a generally acceptable and easily understood context.
I don’t want to talk about words, though – even though it seems like I’ve just spent quite a long time setting up a column about words – I want to talk about how the words sound, in which context they are used and what we can learn from them over and above the message contained therein. (I appreciate, incidentally, that I’m not being especially clear, here. In a strange way, that is my point.) I’ll be clearer now, I promise – if I fail, then I would have broken the unwritten contract that exists between the writer and the reader and you will be perfectly entitled to stop reading, sigh about the lost moments that I have stolen from your busy schedule and make a mental note that I am on a last warning, and if I don’t do better next time then I’ve lost you forever. Fair enough?
Films don’t work in the same way that life does – everything is truncated, meanings are clearer and emotional and intellectual shortcuts are everywhere. In a film, if I like a girl then I just look at her in a certain way and she knows that I like her and she always likes me too (unless it is important to the plot that she doesn’t) and I seduce her easily and quickly and we have great sex – until The Threat arrives bringing fear and conflict, of course. Anyway, in the film model, I say something and other people understand it and we do it this way because nuance isn’t our friend in that place, because life is generally very long and film is, of necessity, very short. So, people talk in film as though all subtlety and nuance has been stripped away. Because meaning is generally all we have time for in a complicated and probably action-packed ninety minutes, subtext is discarded unless vital as a device, context is given through broad emotional hues – rage, desire, fear – which can be transmitted visually, thus saving time and reducing the possibility of misinterpretation. People don’t talk like people because that requires an emotional connection and a local perspective which writers simply don’t have the time to set up.
There are different ways of handling this, as a writer. David Mamet comes from the theatre, where the audience has the opportunity to absorb the essence of a character and grow with them. The actor lumbers about on stage, so even when they aren’t speaking we can watch them. We can see their hands when they speak – important, the body, in offering an extra set of clues about meaning – and we have enough time in their company without the barrier of a screen between us to gain insight into their meaning – to contextualise their interaction with others. So David’s sentences – differently formed from those of any other writer – live on the stage in a way they simply can’t on the big, or small, screen. When they have air around them, they sing, but when they aren’t delivered along with the toolbox of translators that we rely on to unpack their real meaning, I don’t think they work.
Reading through the above, I can see that I run the risk of evoking the same question. What do I mean? What is it that I am trying to say - with a stunning lack of eloquence - whilst also dismissing the film work of one of our greatest writers? I think it’s this; as with every other aspect of your script, you need to strip language down to meaning, within the discipline needed to properly draw each character. Everyone who speaks within your script will do so in a different way; cadence, tone, rhythm – all different, to the extent that a neighbour, or your sister, or the bloke that serves you coffee in Starbucks should be able to read the dialogue with the character names covered and know who is saying what and why. And what they really mean by it...
So, as well as them speaking differently from each other, they also need to speak in the same language – the one which we all understand; the one where significance is all that matters - except when lack of significance is the point of the thing, in which case that in and of itself is the bit that tells the audience something.
Have I been clear?
Oh.
