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There are a number of reasons why U.S. politics have unforgivably poisoned the internet, but I just discovered the latest one.
I was trying to track down a source for a piece of writing advice I once read, which described a phenomenon called "California conversation." Unfortunately, the phrase "California conversation" only turns up election articles, no matter how much I refine my search terms. I'm in hell.
Anyway, from what I recall, "California conversation" refers to dialogue that fails to realistically reserve emotion and/or pain. Characters will, while talking to people they barely know, go into incredible detail about their feelings and tragic backstories. To paraphrase the source that I still can't find, those who write California conversations claim "that's how real people talk," and that's true--but only in California, where everyone desperately wants to seem interesting.
You'll find a lot of California conversation in television these days. TV writers have started to realize the things they put their characters through are traumatic and emotionally fraught, but they also work in an era of storytelling where Plot reigns supreme. Emotional arcs are for girls and themes are for 8th grade book reports; all that's important is outsmarting the Reddit theorists. Therefore, any emotional processing has to happen during incredibly short scenes set aside specifically for that purpose.
And because these scenes are so short, what we get is a brief exchange where a character talks about how they feel bad in the most explicit way possible, nothing is resolved, and the story quickly steers back toward the all-important, convoluted Plot. Because the showrunner wants you to know he's smarter than you.
I'm sure everybody who knows me is sick of hearing me talk about Leverage, but this is something Leverage avoided quite well. Because each season's metaplot was usually kept on the backburner, individual episodes were free to tie into the characters' emotional development. A character was able to process their scars and the changes in their lives by resolving the episode's plot.
As a result, dialogue was often multi-layered, with characters hashing out both the case of the week and their feelings about it. But the feelings were in the subtext and the actors' performance, where they belonged.
Of course, we also live in an era of storytelling where actors aren't told what scenes they're filming, so I guess it would be difficult to get a nuanced, multilayered performance out of anyone these days.
In summary, Damon Lindelof should be tried at the Hague.
I was trying to track down a source for a piece of writing advice I once read, which described a phenomenon called "California conversation." Unfortunately, the phrase "California conversation" only turns up election articles, no matter how much I refine my search terms. I'm in hell.
Anyway, from what I recall, "California conversation" refers to dialogue that fails to realistically reserve emotion and/or pain. Characters will, while talking to people they barely know, go into incredible detail about their feelings and tragic backstories. To paraphrase the source that I still can't find, those who write California conversations claim "that's how real people talk," and that's true--but only in California, where everyone desperately wants to seem interesting.
You'll find a lot of California conversation in television these days. TV writers have started to realize the things they put their characters through are traumatic and emotionally fraught, but they also work in an era of storytelling where Plot reigns supreme. Emotional arcs are for girls and themes are for 8th grade book reports; all that's important is outsmarting the Reddit theorists. Therefore, any emotional processing has to happen during incredibly short scenes set aside specifically for that purpose.
And because these scenes are so short, what we get is a brief exchange where a character talks about how they feel bad in the most explicit way possible, nothing is resolved, and the story quickly steers back toward the all-important, convoluted Plot. Because the showrunner wants you to know he's smarter than you.
I'm sure everybody who knows me is sick of hearing me talk about Leverage, but this is something Leverage avoided quite well. Because each season's metaplot was usually kept on the backburner, individual episodes were free to tie into the characters' emotional development. A character was able to process their scars and the changes in their lives by resolving the episode's plot.
As a result, dialogue was often multi-layered, with characters hashing out both the case of the week and their feelings about it. But the feelings were in the subtext and the actors' performance, where they belonged.
Of course, we also live in an era of storytelling where actors aren't told what scenes they're filming, so I guess it would be difficult to get a nuanced, multilayered performance out of anyone these days.
In summary, Damon Lindelof should be tried at the Hague.
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