On Dialogue

Thinking honestly, these are probably among my favourite lines of dialogue ever;

"The nominees are "The Gay Divorcee," 

"Here Comes the Navy," "The Barrets 

of Wimpole Street," "One Night of 

Love," "The Thin Man," "Cleopatra" --"

"Overrated!"

         "You are going to miss your plane"
         "I know"

         "Birdy Edwards is hear. I am Birdy Edwards"


What do these snippets have in common? None of them are in themselves particularly funny, brilliant or memorable. I don't you find any of them in books such as '1001 Memorable Movie Quotations' or hear them on 'Channel Four's 100 Words From Movies that Stuart Marconie likes'. No one would endlessly parrot them at parties. And this is what I love about them. None of them have any relevance outside their own context; but in their own context, all are immensely powerful.

Take the first snippet. It is said by a woman to herself when she is working late at night and listening to the Oscars on the radio. However, the line's power comes from the fact that earlier in the film; this woman lost her only son almost certainly to a serial killer and then been falsely imprisoned in a mental asylum for refusing to accept a homeless boy as her son. The line tells us that the woman has not only come through the ordeal; but is still able to take an interest in trivia again...in other words we have a woman no longer content to define herself as victim, which is nearly a rarity in these 'true life tales'

The second snippet comes from the end of the utterly heartbreaking/warming duo of films 'Before Sunrise' and 'Before Sunset'. It's hard to express just how much it encapsulates the culmination of the emotional journeys of the two leads, while the third snippet is from the Sherlock Holmes novel 'The Valley of Fear' and is probably the most thrilling line of dialogue I have ever read in a novel.

What I am trying to say is that dialogue is simultaneously overrated and underrated at the same time. Overrated because of the immense importance reviewers tend to put on single lines as witnessed by the way they will take a single line and use it as to point to the failure of a film as a whole. For example, Peter Bradshaw took the fact that the film of "The Fellowship of the Ring' featured the line 'By night these hills will be swarming with orcs' as showing the film was a failure. Yet without context this proved nothing; after all surely the success of a film is not dependent on whether it contains such a line but how the line is placed; how it is said; what leads up to it and down from it. There is nothing in itself wrong with the line 'Lisa, you are tearing me apart'.

And yet we consistently underrate dialogue that we simply don't notice because it is doing its job. We notice the funny lines; the dramatic lines; the melodramatic lines even. We don't notice the lines that just do their job and do not stick because they are so in character and so natural.

Stewart Lee writes of his desire to produce a piece of stand-up that simply does not work in the page because every single word and sentence is dependent on context and performance for its meaning. Which is not a bad goal to aim for.