Tag Archives: Before Midnight

Conversational Ping Pong

Before Midnight Wikimedia commons
            Before Midnight/Wikimedia commons

Every theater is a museum of conversation.  In its many forms and formats drama invites us to admire the diligence that goes into a transformative exchange.

In these pages we have frequently worried about how the primary model for human communication—the face to face conversation—seems to be weakening as a default form, taking on more mutations that diminish its essence of human contact in real space and time.  We’ve cited the alarming research of Sherry Turkle (Reclaiming Conversation, 2015), with its surveys of younger Americans that reveal a distinct discomfort with direct interpersonal connection.  And we’ve noted a decline in emotional affect: emotions seemingly flattened by no-obligations digital devices that absorb so much of our time.

For most of us the challenge of engaging others has never been that easy.  In the presence of another we must also listen, a process we often fake more than fulfill. The means getting out of our own heads long enough to hear what another is saying.  And then there’s the unpredictability of direct contact.  Potential partners in conversation can surprise or even diminish us, as when a listener shows complete indifference to what we are saying. A bored interlocutor who has been entrusted with a precious and personal story can inflict real injury.

It’s a good thing we have theater and all of its variations:  plays, films and television.  Theater perfects conversation.  In important ways it functions as a museum of the form, inviting us to admire the craft that goes into a transformative dialogue.  Characters that aren’t rhetorical–aren’t very fluent or engaging–are seldom the magnets in a story.  In popular theater, at least, we want snappy one-liners.  We want responsiveness.  We welcome a clash of wills between two equally formidable and loquacious people.  Even a dystopian story offers useful lessons.  We wonder why those in a dysfunctional world can’t find the resources of hope and empathy that should be their inheritance.

Anyone’s short list for inclusion in their own cinematic  museum of interpersonal fluency will vary.  The top of my list would include films such as John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998), Richard Linklater’s wonderful trilogy of love and loss that concluded with Before Midnight (2013), and the old film and stage chestnut that has just reopened on Broadway, The Front Page (1931, 1974, 2016).  In both serious and funny ways, all give us characters who are alive to the words and ideas of others.

Amplifying feelings and ideas requires reservoirs of energy, curiosity, and the will to draw others out.

Television is just as fertile in providing good examples. Old chestnuts like The West Wing (1999-2006) and Gilmore Girls (2000-2007) were mostly centered on interpersonal relationships that needed to be negotiated through compelling talk and argument.  The actors in those series were quick to remind admirers that their scripts tended to run twice the length of other shows with the same time frame.  Conversation takes effort and a degree of generosity.  Amplifying feelings and ideas requires the will to connect and draw others out.

Listen to Celine and Jesse, Before Midnight’s couple with a young family and a boat load of unfilled aspirations: he, as a writer, and she as a mother who wants to escape back into the unpredictability of her adventurous youth.  Their love is no longer new.  Yet both are trying to find the safest tracks to a shared future.

Céline: So if we're going to spend another fifty-six more years together...

Jesse: Yeah?

Céline: What about me would you like to change?

Jesse: [Smirks] That's another one of your can't-win questions. I'm not answering that.

Céline: What do you mean? There's not one thing you'd like to change about me? I'm perfect?

Jesse: Okay.

Céline: Okay.

Jesse: Actually...

Céline: One thing.

Jesse: If I could change one thing about you...

Céline: Uh-huh.

Jesse: It would be for you to stop trying to change me.

Céline: You're a very skilled manipulator, you know that?

Jesse: Well, I'm onto you. I know how you work.

Céline: You think?

Jesse: Yeah. I know everything about you.

It’s clear they have a long way to go.  But somehow we believe they have the conversational chops to navigate through the accommodations the will have to make for dreams that have been put on hold.

Of course conversation should not be relegated to a spectator form.  If it is representative of our dramatic arts, it’s one that we need to cultivate in ourselves.  Twitter, and two-word responses in Facebook won’t cut it as forms that will push the potentials of communication forward.  As a teacher it can be painful to be on the frontlines with too many able students who seem to have been rendered mute by shifting too much time and energy to stunted forms of connectivity.  The impulse to interact seems to have become dormant.  What is lost is the expressive power that is our birthright as symbol-using creatures.

Comments: Woodward@tcnj.edu

Invitations From Hollywood to Witness Conversational Trainwrecks

Actress Sarah Steele, "Bernice"
      Actress Sarah Steele

The scholar Hugh Dalziel Duncan believed that communication has to be studied as a form of theater.  We are not only role-players in our lives, but in his simple aphorism that I never tire of quoting, he noted that theater is the process “by which we become objects to ourselves.”  

Plays, films, and all forms of written or performed narratives allow us to see our lives in the proxy behaviors of actors in a performance. A character on screen may not be living a close facsimile to our own lives, but their responses to others are still recognizable.  Empathy and imagination give us all the room we need to compare our communication choices with a panorama of figures ranging from Hamlet to Harry Potter. 

It follows that sometimes the most direct way to access communication challenges is therefore to get down to cases. Communication is almost always a matter of relatively fixed templates: sets of expectations about what someone facing the demands of one setting must do if they are to use their communication abilities to make things better. And that frequently means taking a look at a key scene in a film or play to discover how key figures handle the demands imposed by their own social settings. We’re easily drawn in. And we find that our natural hard-wired love of narrative means that we can place ourselves in almost any scene and compare our likely responses to those given by a character on stage or on the screen. 

Most films have such moments, as in the recent Before Midnight (2013) written in part by actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke.  They play a married couple who came together over the course of two earlier films, and are now drifting out of love and into middle age. The film is a feast for those interested in conversational analysis.  But two current favorites are from more popular and commercial films released a few years ago.  Each film offers a moment when a simple communication misstep builds into a volcano of hurt and anger.  Both play to a familiar litany of questions we ask whenever we failed to realize our intentions with another person. What went wrong?  How could someone with good intentions create the interpersonal equivalent of a complete train wreck?   

The Family Stone (2006) revisits the familiar terrain of an engaged son bringing his fiancé home to meet his family.  Everett Stone’s clan is a free-thinking group of comfortable New Englanders.  Dad is a professor.  Diane Keaton’s mom is a sharp conversationalist, and happily uses it to build a protective fence around a younger gay son who is deaf, and who is in a committed relationship to an African American man.  This modern couple is also hoping to adopt a child.  Enter Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker), the new fiance and a Manhattan executive who is invited to meet the family over dinner.  Meredith’s views are more conventional that her hosts.  And that spells trouble as the conversation turns to the younger son’s impending marriage.  She clearly likes the family, but she’s thrown off by Mom’s offhand comment that she wished all of her children were gay.  They might stay around longer, she muses. And Meredith takes the bait. Her questions are earnest but potentially wounding to the senior Stones, who wear their liberalism as badges of honor.  Will an interracial marriage be more difficult?  And would the Stones really wish for gay children?  Dermot Mulroney’s Everett is suddenly silent as these question settle over the meal like a bad stomach ache.  

As the scene plays, we see a classic communication breakdown.  One person lays down an ambiguous observation. It’s followed by a clumsy question that is easily misinterpreted as a marker of bigotry. Meredith is clearly at sea, and wants to be in the good graces of the family.  But none of the Stones are interested in helping climb out of the hole she has fallen into.

The Family Stone is a modest film, but this scene is a brilliant miniature of the potentially rough terrain of even simple statements and queries.  As it plays, we see why language and the tonalities of presentation complicate what appears to be the simple objective of finding a secure place in another’s life. 

A second favorite scene is built around one of the many winsome figures the Hollywood producer/writer James L. Brooks has created over the years.  In Spanglish (2004) Bernice stands out as a sensitive soul in a family of over-achievers.  Actress Sarah Steele’s empathetic character has an impulse to please which closely binds her to a spirited grandmother and to John, her affectionate father (Adam Sandler).  But she must also defend her fragile self-esteem against aspersions about her weight from an overwrought mother. Deborah has made Bernice her project. And while the razor thin compulsive has mastered the outward rituals of everyday conversation, she  tends to substtitute empty talk and hours of jogging for true intimacy.   

She is the provocateur in this conventional Brooks set up of an upwardly mobile Los Angeles family.  Connection and affirmation are put at risk by a character who is not so much malevolent as clumsy in understanding the fundamentals of social intercourse.   Even when Deborah returns from a shopping trip with new clothes for Bernice, we sense that her ostensibly thoughtful act will have a painful denouement.

The scene opens with John helping Bernice complete her history homework, making a game out of a quiz question asking for the name of the famous World War II President who was not a “ruse.”  What does the word mean? Bernice asks.  A “Phony,” he notes.  “So this president was not a ruse. . . He was the real thing.”  When Deborah returns with bags of new clothes, Bernice is at first delighted by her apparent thoughtfulness.  But when she tries on the gifts of a coat and sweater, they are clearly too tight.  A quick look at the tags of all the other new garments confirms that Deborah has deliberately bought everything one size too small.  This is her idea of an inducement for her daughter to lose some weight, and it unfolds as a slow motion humiliation in front of John and other members of the household.  The moment snuffs out the excitement that was just seconds old, leaving Bernice to find a way to resurface with some of her dignity intact.  She recovers, fighting back tears.  There is no big outburst, just a few rueful words said more in regret than anger.  “Thanks  Mom. . . I’m glad you didn’t get here a little earlier or else I wouldn’t be able to tell you that your gift is a ruse.  Please excuse me.”  And she exits.

There is agony in this small but emblematic moment where, as Brooks observes, Deborah feels “the futility of anyone understanding her point even as she makes it.” Those are his script directions to actress Tea Leoni who plays her.  She isn’t connecting with members of her family:  something she senses, but is powerless to remedy.  She is tone deaf to her daughter’s needs.  And somehow her ideals for success and a perfect waistline have also made her blind to the charms of her own family.