I don't want to use this blog for movie reviews as a rule, but I find this set of thoughts pretty interesting and want to put it down for posterity.
I've been reading You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy and at one point the author refers to Aaron Sorkin's writing as representative of the modern tendency for talking to be all about ourselves and talking over each other in effort to continually say something clever. I remembered that I had a friend who was a big Sorkin fan and when he read one of my scripts he commented with open surprise and obvious, but unspoken, disappointment that it wasn't filled with more snappy and clever dialogue, which I found dissatisfying as a critique, direct or implied.
I tried now to think what the modern examples of movies about people listening and thought of Quentin Tarantino, of all people. I thought about Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, The Hateful Eight and Jackie Brown, which I recall as very listening positive, perhaps even intensive, but what about Pulp Fiction? This spawned a million imitators, all of whom led with clever, or "clever", dialogue and people spouting forth quotes. Certainly, that is about talking.
But I wondered if I was remembering wrong. The screenplay, and the deleted scenes, include a scene in which Mia asks Vincent questions to find out who he is. The lesson Jules ultimately learns could arguably be that in really listening to the words he's been say he gains the wisdom and direction that he lacked when he merely spoke them.
It turns out, it's even more than that. Butch is introduced in a scene in which he's only shown listening. In a later scene in which he listens to another long speech, we see the person, Christopher Walken, speaking a lot more, but we're given a lot of queues that he's listening intently, including the conclusion of the speech cutting to a visual and dramatic punctuation of his continuing to listen and turn the words over in his mind decades later.
Almost all of the major scenes of dialogue people remember aren't framed around the speaker, but the listener and the clues that they're listening.
When awkward silence is recognized and noted, Mia demands the Vincent returns with something she can listen to.
And, in a touch that would be on-the-nose if the listening theme were explicit, or likely to be conscious, the character who demonstrates the worst listening skills, Brett, is the character the movies text seems to show the most contempt for. Marvin might come to a more ignoble end, but even Vincent recognizes that was undeserved.
I was watching it for evidence of this, so I know that confirmation bias is a factor in all of this, but it's really interesting to me how incredibly well this theory holds up.
What I note is that, while the 1994 Tarantino called Rio Bravo his favorite movie and Howard Hawks, with his famous clipped style of characters who regularly interrupt and show off their verbal acuity, as his favorite director, people here almost universally look thoughtfully and carefully engage with what everyone else is saying, even when they ultimately dismiss it.
(I probably need to revisit Rio Bravo as part of the Western 2020 I have going for myself this year, and see that I'm not giving it credit for the listening its characters do, but it remains that them bantering is what it's known for.)
Seeing how well this holds up will be a good reason to go through the Tarantino oeuvre this year, too.
