Alright, y’all, it’s been a while. For that I apologize. However, I come to you now, in this great hour of need, to appeal to you to help Doug and I settle, insofar as that is even possible, a debate question.
As we settled yesterday to watch Decalogue VI,[1] the question came up about voiceover. It was inspired by a line from the movie Adaptation, where the brilliant Brian Cox portrays screenplay guru Robert McKee.[2] While speaking at his famous story seminar, ripping apart many different film writer faux pas, he quips in a harsh whisper, “And God help you if you use voiceover!” The nature of the disagreement came with my personal disagreement with him. I don’t think it’s true that voiceover is a bad thing. Doug, however (in his steely way), sided with the Adaptation McKee[3] that voiceover is cheap and never a good idea.[4]
I understood a lot of his reasons. It’s overdone, and often when it is done, it is done badly. I concede that completely. Especially when it’s expositional. Relying on voiceover to move the plot (as opposed to the Story itself – and there is a difference) can be a deadly mistake. You use dialogue, actions, scenes of tension; it’s the show-don’t-tell philosophy all over again. In that regard, voiceover can be completely destructive.
However, to say because of that, it is across-the-board weak – well, I can’t agree with that at all. I mean, some movies need voiceover, not for plot, but for story, because it is their perspective that is one of the key forces of the story. In this regard, it is like dialogue; dialogue that is expositional is cheap and boring, and often annoying, because it lacks perspective and interaction. Voiceover that is expositional is the same. But voiceover itself is like dialogue, in its own special way, because the perspective of the narrator is oftentimes the over-arching perspective of the story, and the interaction is of the narrator with the audience itself. Like the first person narrative in books, the narrator is telling us a story from his/her point of view. And when that works, that’s golden.
I think of it like flashbacks, which are like voiceovers in that they are incredibly hard to do well and they provide perspective. The crown jewel example of this would be Rashomon. The movie is almost completely perspectival – even the flashbacks told in the trial are set within the flashbacks of the three characters dialoguing in the film, and the point of the story is how each carries with it the character’s own perspective. Other films that do flashbacks in interesting and powerful ways could include Laura, Citizen Kane, Unbreakable, Enter the Dragon, Darjeeling Limited, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Big Fish. For every one of those films, there are of course one hundred or even a thousand that do flashbacks really badly, and the same could be said for voiceover, but that does not make the devices themselves bad; it makes them tricky, difficult, and risky. But as in many things, those that are tricky, difficult, and risky are often the stuff of the greatest and most powerful achievements, with the greatest payoff. Hell, in Casablanca, the flashbacks are probably the weakest part of the film, but I don’t know if it could’ve worked without it.
And I don’t know if utter gems like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, The Shawshank Redemption, Legends of the Fall, V for Vendetta, Juno, or countless others would work without the voiceover. The voiceovers in these stories make the film, because of the perspectives they provide. I can’t imagine trying to adapt a book to film like The Catcher in the Rye without using voiceover, because it’s not just the story, it’s Holden Caulfield’s (somewhat skewed) perspective of the story that is important. The same is true for these other movies. And rather than get rid of these devices, we need to think of new and fresh ways to use them to empower us to continue to make masterpieces.
Of course, it is not secret that the line that sparked this entire debate is from a movie that heavily relies on voiceover. However, I would hold that Adaptation works because of the voiceover, not in spite of it. It is the singular perspective of Charlie Kaufman that makes something quite “uninteresting” (the struggle of the movie itself) quite interesting indeed.
So let us know what you think, and provide examples from either side of the debate.
Voiceover – 5/5
[1] Which, incidentally, was incredibly brilliant. Review forthcoming.
[2] Cox was McKee’s own personal choice for the role, I’m told.
[3] It might be something he really thinks, but as I have never been to his seminar or read his book, I don’t know; the movie is all I have to go on.
[4] Yes, he did say never, I don’t care if he denies it =).
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