How a stylistic quirk of ’90s indie film forever changed movie dialogue
What a difference a ‘Royale with Cheese’ makes.
Let’s have a nice, engrossing, naturalistic conversation. Here, pick from this list of potential topics:
- The substantive benefits of doing the crossword vs. watching TV;
- Literary critic Lionel Trilling’s thoughts on the characters of Jane Austen;
- The moral subtext of Lady and the Tramp
These topics are supposed to give you deja vu. Nothing yet? Okay, how about the moral implications of the rebels killing all those independent contractors who were working on the new Death Star. Or how the menu items all have different names if you visit a McDonald’s in Europe.
Did your ears perk up at that last example? Royale with Cheese?
Yeah, that one usually rings a bell. These are all among the countless subjects of conversation that fill the mouths of characters from the ’90s indie film boom. For the record, the above mentioned subjects are discussed in Kicking and Screaming, Metropolitan, Last Days of Disco, and Clerks, respectively. But don’t feel bad if you’ve seen a few of those and the only one that burned into your head was the Pulp Fiction reference. That’s just the point; quite possibly the single most defining characteristic of this period in movies is the ample amount of dialogue that the characters engage in that has no (or very little) relationship to the plot. It’s a constant river of discussion, from debates about Madonna in Reservoir Dogs, to the conveyor belt of exchanges about literature and art in Whit Stillman and Noah Baumbach’s movies, to basically the entirety of Before Sunrise.
This stylistic mode came so part-and-parcel with the whole auteur mode of the moment, it’s easy to take all this non-essential conversation for granted. But how did extraneous dialogue become so focal so fast? It really seems like from the moment Steven Soderbergh lit the fuse in 1989 with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, the aesthetic of indie and arthouse film turned on a dime, with the collective unconscious of all young, hip filmmakers suddenly primed to fill screen time with both long and short form exchanges between characters about about any and all free-associated ideas—like whether you can succinctly explain American foreign policy through a metaphor about ants (not really, according to Barcelona), or whether Lois Lane could survive the ordeal of carrying Superman’s baby (apparently not, we’re told in Mallrats).
You couldn’t really say that everybody saw this trend coming, or that all the movies making waves from the slight left side of the artistic spectrum had been leading in this direction throughout the ’80s. For all their quirkiness, ’80s sleeper hits like Raising Arizona and Moonstruck don’t rely on this aesthetic at all. No, in order to figure out where this filmmaking mode came from (and where it went), we need to first determine its origins. But that shouldn’t be too difficult, considering that film critics at the time immediately took to calling filmmakers like Baumbach, Smith, Nicole Holofcener, and the rest, “The Children of Woody Allen.”
Indeed, you could mount a case on Annie Hall alone that Allen laid the groundwork for this style. In fact, Annie Hall could probably prove that Allen artistically birthed these filmmakers in all number of ways (thematically, tonally, technically), but just listen to high-neurotic character Alvy Singer casually babble about his preoccupation with death or the likelihood that his girlfriend is on her period and the direct lineage between himself and the ’90s indie-boomers clicks definitively into focus.
Not that Allen was alone in his zealous attention to dialogue, even in the ’70s. But while this time was also a heyday for playwright-turned screenwriter Neil Simon, whose scripts are fueled by euphorically clever, lightning speed verbal volleys in a way that perhaps only theater-inspired writing can be, even his inarguably genius dialogue remains, for lack of a better turn of phrase, relevant to the point. Watch The Goodbye Girl or Last of the Red Hot Lovers and try to find a single moment in any of his brilliant dialogue scenes, each one beautifully timed like a game of computer chess, that isn’t wholly and entirely about what is happening to the characters at that moment. You’ll scarcely find an observation about something that isn’t germane to the plot, let alone an entire tangential conversation about whether it’s sexy for a woman to have a pot belly (thanks, Pulp Fiction).
So yeah, Allen remains the biggest and most important influence on this movement. Honestly, you don’t even have to arrive at that conclusion entirely through deduction because filmmakers like Noah Baumbach have copped to it explicitly. But anyway, there are of course, other filmmakers who made circuitously talky movies. French director Eric Rohmer’s characters, known for their long, philosophical conversations about love and desire, can be heard echoing in the ellipses between sentences in many of the ’90s films discussed here, especially those of Holofcener and Tarantino.
And then there’s Jim Jarmusch, who technically finds his way into this niche by filling his ’80s movies like Stranger Than Paradise with left-field conversations about TV dinners and how football works. But oddly enough, Jarmusch’s similar palette as a writer seems to be a bit incidental. He’s far from a child of Woody Allen, with a contrastingly arch, sometimes avant garde aesthetic that draws far more openly and obviously on directors like Yasujiro Ozu and Jean Pierre Melville.
And sure, there are some other isolated examples of ’70s and early-’80s films where the characters are given lots of downtime lounging around living rooms and dinner tables just so they can spend it musing about life (The Big Chill and its direct antecedent, Return of the Secaucus 7 come to mind), but honestly, it’s tough to find anybody else who integrated this much non-essential conversational dialogue into their overall filmmaking style the way Allen and the second-gen ’90s crowd like Stillman and Richard Linklater did.
Of course, while John Sayles’ and Lawrence Kasdan’s contributions to this milieu may have been one-offs, we still might have hit on something with that notion of “downtime.” After all, in order to give the screenwriter space on the page to fill with snippets of random discussions probably cribbed from real life, you first need to take some exposition off their plate, which is probably why the plots of these films don’t tend to center on epic, complex events like bank heists or custody battles. A woman stuck in a rut whose best friend is getting married (Walking and Talking); a guy covering somebody else’s shift at a convenience store (Clerks); these tend to be movies in which not that much actually happens, where the arc of the story occurs internally within the characters, not externally within the forces around them. Linklater’s Before series (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight) begin with a premise as bare as, “A couple walk around for two hours and talk about things.”
While Tarantino may be the exception that proves the rule (only he can fit a conversation about mixtapes and modern dating into a movie about a guy who kills people with his car), this assertion may help us determine where this trend went — or at least what it morphed into. If the ’90s vanguard were the children of Woody Allen, who are the children of the ’90s vangard?
Their style certainly never stormed into mainstream movies in a big way. Spoiler alert: you won’t find any off-the-cuff conversations about Proust or breakfast cereal in The Matrix or The Dark Knight. There are anecdotal examples here and there; if you look for it, you’ll notice ’90s indie vet Steven Soderbergh weaving pages of old school naturalistic dialogue into Magic Mike, though it’s easy to miss with all the abs. And though people like to say that Whit Stillman is the progenitor of Wes Anderson, that really refers to a lot of other things they have in common, like settings and character types and mannered line readings, not so much the content of their dialogue. But don’t go into mourning just yet. The hyper-verbal indie aesthetic does in fact live on. The first place to look is the most obvious: the following generation of indie movies. Specifically, the mumblecore films of the 2000s.
So named for their heavy reliance on deapan realistic and frequently improvised dialogue, the uncomfortably close-up, shoestring-budget films of the mumblecore scene in some ways take the style pioneered in the ’90s to an even greater extreme, with a religious adherence to spoken naturalism that accounts for dead air, inarticulation, and overall awkwardness as all but completely necessary parts of the aesthetic. Interestingly, filmmakers like Joe Swanberg, Lynn Shelton, and the Duplass brothers made mumblecore the first truly new style to sweep indie cinema since the 90’s with films like Hannah Takes the Stairs, Humpday, and The Puffy Chair, by drawing as much on the films of Linklater, Smith, and the rest of the ’90s crowd as they did Allen, Rohmer, Jarmusch, the French New Wave, and seemingly every other talk-heavy cinematic influence.
But there’s something vaguely disappointing about this outcome, isn’t there? The fact that such an explosively impactful film style could sweep through pop culture and in the end, leave its greatest and most lasting impact imprinted onto an even tinier, more esoteric and inaccessible school of filmmaking. Can you count on one hand the number or people you know who’ve seen The Puffy Chair? Are you even one of them? It’s not a value judgement, it’s just a fact: mumblecore represents a very narrow niche. But don’t lose hope. The story doesn’t end there.
Because while the mumblecore films, brilliant as they are, were undoubtedly not created with mainstream consumption in mind, they also fall victim to the same sorry state of affairs affecting the entire independent film industry. Which is to say: it has not been a great time to get a movie made or seen for roughly the past fifteen years. You’ve heard people talk about this, right? Movies aren’t where the money is at, that’s why the studios are all scared-stupid to release anything but a “sure-fire hit” like a sequel or a remake. Where is the money these days? TV. And TV, it may please you to know, got on board with the talky style of ’90s independent cinema so early, you could argue it was a concurrent effort.
Remember that notion mentioned above about how your characters need plenty of “downtime” where they aren’t busy battling heroin withdrawal or solving a small town murder if you want to leave them with enough screen time for conversations that have no bearing whatsoever on the plot? Well, think about it for a minute. What sitcom — that is, situation comedy — got in on this trend good and early with virtually no “situation” in which to stage the comedy? That’s right, the original self-proclaimed “show about nothing,” Seinfeld — co-created by Woody Allen torchbearer and sometime surrogate in Whatever Works, Larry David.
Premiering in 1989 at almost the exact same moment that this artistic approach seized the film world, Seinfeld is one-stop-shopping for hearing characters muse, ruminate, and argue about how to give an acceptable handshake, the consequences of improper toenail hygiene, or whether the “Shake Before Serving” instruction printed on a bottle of juice represents an unreasonable request. It became one of the most successful shows in TV history, followed shortly in 1994 by Friends, another show with a premise as simple as, “A group of people hang out; hilarity ensues.” Friends was originally pitched as a TV adaptation of 1992’s Singles, a movie that actually kind of fit into the ’90s cadre of conversational films as well. And likewise, Friends is sprinkled with snippets and observations and random verbal inanity designed to sort of mirror the thoughts and exchanges of real people (with some added four-camera theatricality, of course).
Not only did that talky, observational style of comedy become integral to some of the most hugely popular sitcoms of the ’90s, it seeped into more literate, single-camera shows like Gilmore Girls, where Rory and Lorelai converse in a perfectly charming but totally unrealistic manner — unless you’re in a Whit Stillman movie. This whole moment in television got a strong head of steam going just in time for the improv comedy scene to infiltrate TV in the 2000s, leading to a convergence of what turned out to be two extremely compatible modes of dialogue on shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation. Which makes sense when you think about it; making stuff up on the spot is a tried and proven method for creating both wildly spontaneous comedy and naturalistic dialogue. Which is why you still hear it in the bizarre non sequiturs and happenstantial conversations that make improv-heavy shows like Veep (whose current showrunner, David Mandel, wrote for Seinfeld, Curb and the short-lived Clerks TV show) and New Girl so insanely funny. And now that directors like Nicole Holofcener, Lynn Shelton, and Kevin Smith have taken to directing TV, we may find ourselves coming full circle. Either way, if their characters have something to say, we’re listening.
