Some of us are waterfalls of language. But we can be too sure that a constant flow of dazzling fluency will solidify our relations with others.
I had a friend who had an aversion to people who constantly filled a room with talk. It was probably the eastern mystic in Paul, who was constantly chagrined by people who had dedicated themselves to replacing whatever silence they encountered with their own observations. I never asked him why he recoiled from these conversational marathoners. But I think I knew. He favored words chosen carefully. He liked comments that had a point, but not ten points. Most of all, he recoiled against Very Verbal People who turned their opinions into a circus of logorrhea. Speaking before fully processing what you wanted to communicate wasn’t his style. Not surprisingly, his care with words and comfort with silence made him a wonderful listener and a good colleague.
Even so, there are times when we do love verbal people who light up a space with their wit and responsiveness. For most of us that room is usually a theater. It helps when we can witness a conversation that has been worked out and honed by a room full of crack writers. It helps as well to have actors who can deliver the perfect response with a naturalness that lets us forget that their words came from a script.
The performer as a Very Verbal Person is something of a showcase for the possibilities of language, a model that we may admire for putting a difficult person in their place or, better yet, restoring the will of someone damaged by the worst that life can give. A good script perfects what is never quite so clear in real life.
My favorite cases include the Schlegel sisters in James Ivory’s 1992 film, Howard’s End. E. M. Forster’s two young women are confined by the conventions of the day to stay close to their modest home in turn of the century London. But they are full of ideas and thirsty for conversation, even if the potential conversant is simply a clerk who shows up at their front door to retrieve a misappropriated umbrella. Their curiosity makes them seem fully alive.
There is also the pleasure of hearing the complex overlapping dialogue of a Robert Altman film, especially his classic M.A.S.H (1970). Its the same satisfaction a viewer gets from vastly different television classics like WB’s Gilmore Girls (2000) or The West Wing (1999). Writer Aaron Sorkin’s breakthrough series about the Bartlet administration is defined by Sorkin’s love of dialogue structured as a series of intense interrogatories and responses. No voiceless and moody reaction shots here, which is supposedly the stuff of television. In Sorkin’s world characters are always duty bound to frame their feelings as complete counter-arguments.
The surprise in the otherwise more conventional Gilmore Girls lies partly in the fact that the actors were running through scripts that were often twice the number of pages as similar hour-long shows. Indeed, the long-running series now in re-runs owes its best scenes to the rhythm and pacing common in 1930’s film farces. Who knew that Lauren Graham would be an heir to the traditions of the Marx Brothers, Cary Grant, and Rosalind Russell?
In these and other entertainments the fun is in watching Very Verbal People trade rebukes and put-downs using a logic entirely their own. The point obviously was not the real-world relevance of the logic, which only makes sense within the manufactured world of the narrative, but the pleasure of seeing people completely comfortable with the task of explaining any and everything.
And so it goes for Irene Dunn and Cary Grant, playing a couple who have drifted into a split in Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937). The pair have talked their way into a divorce that neither wants:
Jerry: In a half an hour, we'll no longer be Mr. and Mrs. Funny, isn't it.
Lucy: Yes, it's funny that everything's the way it is on account of the way you feel.
Jerry: Huh?
Lucy: Well, I mean, if you didn't feel that way you do, things wouldn't be the way they are, would they? I mean, things could be the same if things were different.
Jerry: But things are the way you made them.
Lucy: Oh, no. No, things are the way you think I made them. I didn't make them that way at all. Things are just the same as they always were, only, you're the same as you were, too, so I guess things will never be the same again.
All of this boils down to our love of the idea of total fluency. We spend a lot of our waking hours trying to imagine the right thing. . .anything. . .that will resolve the challenges of dealing with prickly others. Its only natural to admire the Very Verbal People who make it look so easy.
From television I learned a basic lesson that extends beyond the studio into every corner of daily life. The face is the perfect register of the human condition.
Novice television directors need to learn early on that the art of video is largely built on the close up, sometimes called the “reaction shot.” The traditions of film-making still include the idea that the long-distant shot, or “coverage” of a scene, can be useful for defining locations or clarifying who is within earshot of a key figure. But the video image that matters most is the tight close up of someone who is giving or receiving important information. Frequently the director’s choice is to focus on the actor who is simply reacting to another’s lines. As many performers have noted, some of their best work occurs when they are allowed to let their character’s face represent their feelings.
I learned about the importance of the television close-up the hard way as a less-than-gifted student director in a television production class. Directing my own scene from the control room, I asked a camera operator in the studio to pull way back for a very wide shot. I think he was eventually pinned against the back wall trying to accommodate my request. And it was at that point my instructor leaned forward to deliver in a whisper what I’m sure he would have preferred to shout in the quiet control room: “Woodward, you are not David Lean shooting Lawrence of Arabia. This is television. It’s an intimate medium. Forget the wide shots.” In truth, the 35-foot wide studio was never going to yield up anything like the distant speck of Peter O’Toole crossing an empty desert. And that was not what I really wanted. But I learned a basic lesson that extends beyond television into every corner of daily life: The face is the perfect register of the human condition.
The angle of the head, the averted or astonished eyes, the position of the brow, the muscles of the face and the position of the mouth: they are all there to give up our secrets because they so easily reveal our feelings. Children begin to require the capability of reading faces even before their first birthday. We learn early on that they eyes are sometimes a more accurate indicator of a person’s true state of mind than what they say. Watch actor Tom Hanks as Walt Disney during his first meeting with the starchy P.L. Travers in Saving Mr. Banks (2014). The story of his twenty year effort to get the rights to make a feature film built around her character, Mary Poppins. At first he uses all of his down-home Missouri charm to flatter Travers, shaking off her icy hostility. But then she takes a step too far, tossing off the observation that she doesn’t want Poppins in “one of your silly animated films.” At that point Hanks suddenly goes quiet, but the camera is in close to register the kind of hurt a anyone might feel if they have just been told that their life’s work has been a waste of time.
British actor Michael Caine’s classic masterclass on performing for the camera is helpful in understanding how important reactions are in bringing a character to life. His advice to actors to connect with an audience by allowing only one eye–not both–to look at the camera is especially interesting. It’s available here, on U-tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBzReBMU2s8
The larger lesson is quite simple. The loss of access to another’s face when we are talking to them is an enormous handicap. I can’t confirm the accuracy of the old saying that ‘the eyes are a window into the soul.’ But it is surely the case that the complex musculature of the face is rich in meaning and nuance. It’s absence in the kind of text-only content that is increasingly the norm in digital platforms puts us at a significant disadvantage in understanding others.
