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| Can you imagine what she would say? |
They didn’t talk like that back then.
It is one of the aspects of any production that can turn me away most quickly: anachronistic dialogue. That is, one of the characters says something that a person would not have said at the time and place being depicted. Whether a movie or other video production, stage play, or book, if one of the characters speaks in a way that is not consistent with the setting of the drama, for me, the whole thing collapses.
Ironically, it is our own time that stands out in the arc of history as the anomaly. There are many things that characterize speech both public and private in our time that would never have occurred at any other time in recorded history.
Neither during the Civil War nor the Revolution, nor in medieval times nor in Roman times, would anybody have spoken about his own feelings at all, much less as much as our modern depictions would lead one to believe. The constant gushing about affections and disaffections, hopes and dreads, and disappointments real and imagined, not to mention the endless romantic soliloquys that pass for plot drivers and denouements, simply would never have been uttered in any but our own self-obsessed time. They say such things make for good cinema, but even that I question heartily.
Almost every other society that has managed to survive for any time on the face of the earth has valued some degree of form and formality in its discourse. We have projected our insistence on constant and unrelenting casual familiarity onto situations and civilizations that would have found such a thing repellant.
And when, I have to ask, did everybody become such a potty-mouth? Soldiers in the trenches didn’t use language so vile as one customarily hears from four twenty-somethings sitting together at a baseball game. To project such shameful behavior onto other people in other times only amplifies the manifest disrespect.
Almost thirty years ago, well into the era of films that depicted everyone at all times as if they were simply twentieth-century southern Californians in different period costumes, there was a movie that was different. I saw it because it was about the Civil War era, not because it had Spider-man (Tobey Maguire) in it. Ride with the Devil depicted life during that time of conflict and irreconcilable differences that were political as well as personal, but in western Missouri far from the battle fronts and capitols. It was shocking that all the characters, even the ones depicted as young adults, spoke like denizens of the nineteenth century, which made their actions more intelligible because they clearly thought like denizens of the nineteenth century. It was shocking and refreshing all at once.
Speech not only reflects and transmits thought, but also makes thought possible. We consider our age enlightened and point to astonishing technology as proof, but the speech one hears most often suggests that our concepts and considerations and our ability to apply them have deteriorated, because our language certainly has.
Dialogue that is post-modern in form and content renders all the characters engaged in it as puerile, selfish, and ignorant. This may be intended as a judgment on our forebears’ shortcomings, but in effect it delivers a devastating assessment of our own. They didn’t talk like we do back then.
Monsignor Smith
