{"id":443,"date":"2009-03-03T09:52:48","date_gmt":"2009-03-03T09:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=443"},"modified":"2009-03-03T09:52:48","modified_gmt":"2009-03-03T09:52:48","slug":"the-rain-in-spain-is-mainly-declaimed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/the-rain-in-spain-is-mainly-declaimed\/","title":{"rendered":"The rain in Spain is mainly declaimed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Through painful experience over many years, I have learnt to avoid any movie with a script written by David Mamet.\u00a0\u00a0 Hailed as a great American playwright and screenwriter by many, he\u00a0appears to have – sadly – a tin ear for human speech and dialogue.\u00a0\u00a0 His film characters do not converse or speak as we humans do.\u00a0 Rather, in some variant of a weird, artificial language I call americantheatrespeak<\/em>, they declaim:\u00a0 their words are enunciated clearly and loudly, with neither pauses, nor stumbles, nor mumbles, nor muttering, nor cross-talk, all the while speaking in entire sentences and paragraphs, pre-composed and uttered with a formality that would provoke laughter if you heard anyone actually speak like that.\u00a0\u00a0 It is not how we human beings\u00a0speak, except sometimes in formal settings such as courts of law and important congressional or parliamentary sessions.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0After seeing Montgomery Clift, with his pauses and false starts and mid-sentence hesitations and on-the-fly mods, how could anyone think to write movie speech of the stilted, unnatural style of Mamet’s?\u00a0\u00a0 In The Misfits, <\/em>Arthur Miller wrote dialogue for Clift that played to his superb abilities, so we know it is possible for a theatre playwright to write natural-sounding speech for film.\u00a0\u00a0 As I said, Mamet must have a tin ear.
\nI now learn I am not alone in this assessment of Mamet.\u00a0 Adam Gopnik, in a New Yorker article<\/a> about Damon Runyon, also notes Mamet’s formal, unnatural, language.\u00a0\u00a0 Gopnik, however, admires it, for no compelling reason that I can see.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps americantheatrespeak works OK on the stage, and people who see a lot of theatre don’t notice it when used on film.\u00a0 Yet, against that,\u00a0Clift was New\u00a0York’s leading\u00a0theatre actor before he ventured onto film.\u00a0\u00a0 But on film this style of speech is a disaster, as Mamet’s 2004 film Spartan<\/a><\/em> demonstrates; no, Virginia, it is not the wooden acting or the unexplained gaps in the plot that make this film unwatchable, but Mamet’s stilted, wooden dialogue.\u00a0 \u00a0Ditto for the other scalps on his film pelt:\u00a0 House of Games<\/em>, Glengarry Glen Ross<\/em>, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 Someone else seems to be writing (or de-Mametizing) the script of The Unit<\/em>, although even here (unlike, say,\u00a0The Wire<\/em>), people rarely pause, mumble\u00a0or cross-talk.
\nPOSTSCRIPT:<\/strong>\u00a0 Thinking some more about this, the issue arises because of what Gopnik calls film’s arch-naturalism<\/em>.\u00a0 Concepts that could work perfectly well as\u00a0theatrical\u00a0productions often fail on film, as, for example, the\u00a0black backdrops and absurdism of Derek Jarman’s 1993 film Wittgenstein, <\/em>which was irritating in the extreme.\u00a0\u00a0 We have a problem suspending disbelief for film, a problem we don’t usually have for the theatre.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps the cause, as some film theorists have noted,\u00a0is that films are akin to dreams, and dreams don’t require us (at least, not consciously) to do work ourselves to imagine whatever is missing from the production.\u00a0 We are happy to do this work when watching theatre (and when reading books and listening to the radio), but are less so for watching films or TV.
\nReference:<\/em>
\nAdam Gopnik [2009]:\u00a0 “Talk it up:\u00a0 Damon Runyon’s guys and dolls.”\u00a0 The New Yorker<\/em>, 2 March 2009, pp. 66-71.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Through painful experience over many years, I have learnt to avoid any movie with a script written by David Mamet.\u00a0\u00a0 Hailed as a great American playwright and screenwriter by many, he\u00a0appears to have – sadly – a tin ear for human speech and dialogue.\u00a0\u00a0 His film characters do not converse or speak as we humans […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-film","p1","y2009","m03","d03","h09"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}