The sounds of silence: hyper-dialogue and American Eccentricity

Abstract

Within the stylistic trend in contemporary cinema toward creating exaggeratedly articulate characters, a mode of contemporary filmmaking, that I call American Eccentricity, exhibits a form of dialogue that simultaneously performs a dramatic function – hyper-dialogue. Hyper-dialogue is the intensified, unevenly fluctuating, and often ironically inflected use of dialogue in the place of action that stems from the presence of a deep, unspoken anxiety. American Eccentricity can be read through the ideological and cultural imprint of the New Hollywood due to their shared underlying thematic concerns of alienation and dislocation. These thematic concerns have undergone a transformation in the American Eccentric mode, in which films depict the anomie of modernism through postmodern cinematic language. Hyper-dialogue is a key stylistic and dramatic technique employed in the American Eccentric mode that depicts the transition from the identifiable anxiety present in the New Hollywood through the dramatic use of silences and naturalistic dialogue, to the continually deferred anxiety present in the American Eccentric mode through incessant talking.

Keywords::

• dialogue
• new eccentrics
• Wes Anderson
• David O. Russell
• I Heart Huckabees
• Five Easy Pieces

Notes

^1. Linnea Reese is the character played by Tomlin in Robert Altman's New Hollywood era film Nashville (1975).

^2. Music by The Kinks, and other 1960s and 1970s British Invasion artists, have been prevalent on the soundtracks of American Eccentric films. In particular, the work of Wes Anderson, whose The Darjeeling Limited uses three Kinks' songs in slow motion sequences, but also the use of 1960s and 1970s music of Pink Flyod in Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale (2005) and the use of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There (2007). This use of music (and retro costuming) demonstrates a nostalgia for the time of the New Hollywood era.

^3. Although Juno centres on the plight of a pregnant teenage girl, it is a fairly conservative film. While Juno does become pregnant, she opts for adoption rather than abortion and is supported by her family and friends throughout her pregnancy. Furthermore, Juno is completely supported by the baby's father, Bleaker. The two are afforded a happy reconciliation at the film's conclusion with their baby adopted out to Vanessa, a baron but motherly woman, and Juno reinstated as a ‘typical’ teenager.

^4. I refer in particular to the film's opening sequence in which a minimart cashier greets Juno with ‘what's the prognosis, Fertile Myrtle? Minus or plus’ and follows up Juno's amusing revelation of a positive result with ‘that aint no etchersketch, this is one doodle that can't be undid, homeskillet’.

^5. The term ‘American Eccentrics’ was first used in this review. However, White attributes it to an anonymous friend.

^6. The New Hollywood era is frequently cited as a time when filmmakers were producing cinema that examined their own troubled cultural milieu through a transformation in traditional cinematic language, aesthetics, and narrative. David Thomson's (2004) article ‘The Decade When Movies Mattered’ discusses New Hollywood films as ‘quoting’ real life with ‘unaccustomed candour’.

^7. Elsaesser's (2004) ‘The Pathos of Failure: American Films in the 1970s' identifies two interrelated key thematic concerns of the New Hollywood: the unmotivated hero and the pathos of failure. Elsaesser saw the New Hollywood as exhibiting ‘the experience of a rebellion whose impulse towards change aborted’ (291) and ‘the moral and emotional gestures of a defeated generation’ (283), increasingly resorting to the self-pity of those who feel their identity had been denied by the establishment. For Elsaesser this form of pervasive pessimism that he sees evident throughout the New Hollywood (particularly post 1970) more a constraint of what he names as the new realism, rather than personal statements being made by individual filmmakers.

^8. Mayshark makes specific note of Quentin Tarantino's first two films, and the self-reflexivity of the Scream series, as examples of films employing reflexive self-awareness the favoured siècle de pose of the time.

^9. Peter Biskind (1999) writes in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that these films said “‘fuck you' not only to a generation of Americans who were on the wrong side of the generation gap, the wrong side of the war in Vietnam, but also a generation of Motion Picture Academy members that had hoped to go quietly, with dignity” (49). See also, Thomas Schatz' (2009) chapter ‘Film Industry Studies and Hollywood History’.

^10. By absent-script I mean to suggest that, congruent with the influence of Italian Neorealism and the Maysle brothers' documentary style, the New Hollywood sought an aesthetic that would appear unscripted. The use of the term ‘present-script’ thus connotes the inverse, scripts in the American Eccentric mode are often foregrounded within the films.

^11. The Andersonian character is the most obvious articulation of American Eccentric characterisation in their quirky, yet sincere attributes and their recognisability, not as peers, but as cinematic elements.

^12. This is with the exception of Woody Allen who conversely is a direct precursor to this style of characterisation and exegesis.

^13. Interestingly, Albert's parents have a different surname to him. This is never explained in the film, however, it does serve the purpose of highlighting the distance felt between Albert and his parents.