Road Apples by Tim Sanders

Road Apples
May 18, 2009

Frankly my dear, I don't give a — BOOM, BOOM, DE-BOOM!

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably explain that I am a middle-aged man (assuming that today’s average life span is 120) with moderate hearing loss. When I say “moderate,” I mean that I can hear, but not always correctly. My wife is continually frustrated when she makes rational statements, and I ask her stupid questions, like: “Why in the world would your mother have fighter planes?” She thinks any idiot would know that what she said was “spider veins.” This means that unless our TV’s volume is exceptionally loud, I’m often forced to ask Marilyn just what so-and-so on the screen said. Fortunately, she is usually able to tell me, either during commercials or during a lull in the dialogue.

Except when it comes to watching recently-released DVDs. I say “recently-released” because movie dialogue isn’t what it used to be. Nowadays it is, for the most part, unintelligible.

More often than not, watching a recently released DVD is like strolling through an artillery range, with four full symphony orchestras blaring through tree-mounted amplifiers and a teenager with a boom box strapped to your back, just in case the shelling and the amplifiers weren’t enough to distract you.

Not long ago Marilyn and I rented a DVD called “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” The movie was based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, and was enjoyable except for the musical score, which was deafening. From the onset, in fact, the music was so loud that I couldn’t concentrate on the story, and it all became muddled in my mind. I don’t want to give the plot away, but basically it involved a woman who gave birth to an 80-year-old Brad Pitt in 1920, and died of fright. In the original F. Scott Fitzgerald story Brad–or Benjamin–was 5 ft. 8 in. long at birth, and his father referred to him as Methuselah. According to Fitzgerald, despite the child’s size, his mother didn’t die in childbirth, and he remained at home with Mommy and Daddy until his prostate shrank and his hair grew back. In the movie version, however, Brad was your regular-sized baby, only very wrinkled and arthritic. His father deposited him, along with a month’s supply of denture adhesive, on the steps of a nursing home, where he was adopted by a kindhearted employee, Oprah Winfrey. From that point on Brad grew younger every year and had many adventures, including trout fishing in Montana, stealing money from Las Vegas casinos, and courting the likes of Jennifer Aniston. By the turn of the 21st Century, however, Brad’s advancing youth had taken its toll, and he was forced to hire a nanny, Angelina Jolie, who diapered him and cared for him until Hurricane Katrina swept them both out to sea. I believe the final Brad Pitt baby, by which I mean the 2005 version, not the 1920 model, was played by Danny DeVito.

There is a lot more to the movie, but much of it was unclear due to the inaudible dialogue. For example, there was a great deal of commotion at the beginning of the movie about some blind clock-maker who devised a clock that ran backwards because ... well, because he was blind, I suppose. The point is that the narrator explained all of that in great detail, but the music was so unbearably loud that you couldn’t hear the explanation. Had they simply kept the music from overpowering the narration, the movie would probably have made a lot more sense. Dialogue is crucial when it comes to character motivation. When, for example, the wrinkled four-year-old Brad, played by Wilford Brimley, gazed lovingly at Oprah and delivered the line, “I get all my diabetic supplies from Lib–” and then that raucous BOOM, BOOM, BOOM musical soundtrack kicked in, it took all the wind out of Wilford’s sails.

“What did he say?” I asked Marilyn.

“I wish you’d quit asking me that! I can’t hear it, either!”

Without the dialogue, we had no idea why Oprah took that flyswatter to little Wilford, or Brad, or Benjamin, or whoever it was.

We’ve had the very same problem with many other recent releases. Like the Academy Award winning “Slumdog Millionaire.” The Indian culture may be altogether different from ours, but take my word for it, in Mumbai they can beat kettle drums and crash cymbals and pluck bass fiddles just as enthusiastically as the idiots in Hollywood can. The poor Indian children, even when they screamed what sounded to me like “OH LOOK, IT IS REGIS!” at the top of their lungs, were barely audible. If it weren’t for those occasional subtitles, I wouldn’t have understood a word of it.

Oh sure, I’ll admit that there were probably hearing-impaired husbands who found “Gone With the Wind” unintelligible back in 1939. But when they asked their wives just who the dickens Scott and Humphrey were, their wives were able to explain it all to them. “What Scarlett said after she scratched that radish out of the dirt, you pinhead, was ‘As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!’ not ‘As Scott is my witness, I’ll never see Humphrey again!’” Wives were able to explain those things to their husbands because in those days movie makers knew enough to leave background music in the BACKGROUND where it belonged, especially when there was dialogue in the foreground. In “Gone With the Wind,” for example, the music was muted until Scarlett delivered her radish soliloquy, and then it swelled to a dramatic crescendo which let the audience members know that the film had reached a critically important dramatic juncture known as Intermission, and there was popcorn available in the lobby. The music did not obliterate the dialogue, it merely enhanced it.

I have this theory that sometime around 1985 the art of movie making began to deteriorate. Sort of like Brad Button or Benjamin Pitt or whatever you want to call him. The longsuffering American movie fan will probably have to wait for the rebirth of the silent movie before he can understand any of the dialogue.