I can't be the only one sad about dialogue in media noawadays. Especially in tv series, many times in movies. It seems like every single line needs to be impactful now, something either cool, mysterious, genial or dramatic. Something that would look great in a fan edit (no shade to fan edits, there's some serious talent out there).
Everything needs to be said in a way that would sound extremely cool as a one off quote. Why?
This happened a lot in the last season of Stranger Things, for example. Every single dialogue had to have five lines dramatic enough to be cliffhangers. There were so many that they actually became forgettable and now all I remember from watching it was thinking "why are you all talking like that?"
And look, I'm not saying we can't have climatic lines. Look at the MCU, there's so many lines like those that are loved. "the truth is... I am Iron Man" "and if we can't protect the Earth you can be damn sure we'll avenge it" "That's my secret, Cap, I'm always angry"... you get the idea, I'm not going through 21 movies of quotes.
I'm not saying we need to have 0 dramatism, but there's a time and a place, that's what the "this is cinema" thing should mean. Good writing isn't throwing one-liners everywhere, it's making space for those one-liners to land with impact. You need characters to talk like people.
Look at Pulp Fiction! Universally adored! And so much of it is "dumb" dialogue about massages, and miracles and language differences in USA and Europe. It's not really making sense and doesn't seem to push the story further but it's fun to follow, it's witty, there's emotion, conviction, it's good writing! So when Jules goes crazy you're like "woah dude where did that attitude from the hallway go?".
And look at Russian Doll! Eeeevery loop it's the same story "birthday baby! (...) this house was a jewish school (...) want some chicken?" (paraphrased) but they were interspersed with action and information so well that the dialogue never started feeling dry and boring (unless it was very obviously meant to). Oh, and the metaphors all felt organic too. Nadia finding thins out with Ariadne and the apples and her way of explaining that to Alan was not over the top, it felt in place. (unlike you know what, that I mentioned up there)
Somehow I feel like this is connected to the so called "death of filler". First filler episodes were gone, now the apparently "filler" dialogue? Why does every single second of a scene have to be filled with tension? Why do we need such a divide between the story and the comedy? Because what happens is that in these cases the comedic relief becomes one dimensional, they're just there to not understand the conversation and we end up having no balance.
ATLA was good at keeping the balance (no pun intended?), both Sokka and Toph (I'm even tempted to say Zuko) served comedy even in darker moments but the writers did that with situational awareness.
I feel like I'm getting off topic, sorry about that.
What I'm trying to get at is: dialogue doesn't feel like dialogue that much anymore, it feels like a cheap version of the final monologue in a Poirot story. Or like a bunch of characters trying to sound way cooler and smarter than they are. It's over the top and... not in a good way.
Sorry. That's my opinion. What's yours?
