Dennis Lehane again teaches us the lesson:
In the Boston neighborhood where I grew up, people talked vividly. Lots of f-bombs, lots of italicizing, lots of words purposefully dropped from a sentence because they got in the way of the meaning or the punch line. To grow up around such wonderful, profane, exuberant dialogue is to have a found poem dropped in your lap every day before you've even finished the walk to school. So, when I began my apprenticeship as a writer, the only gift I brought to the table was an ear for dialogue bequeathed to me by constant exposure to Olympian-level talkers. That's given me a lifelong love of colorful gab, both as a reader and writer.Dialog trumps story -- Always thought that myself (see I. Compton-Burnett), and am glad to see Lehane admitting that the rule of simplicity is just begging to be broken....
In Richard Price's urban masterpiece, "Clockers," two New Jersey cops sit in the bowels of a housing development and tell stories to each other. The scene goes on for pages and, in truth, adds little to the overall plot. But the dialogue is so pitch-perfect an urban symphony, and so hilarious, that it effortlessly crosses the transom of the utilitarian standard and transcends any rules that would box it out of a novel. If everyone could write dialogue as gutter-gorgeous as Mr. Price, they could write a hundred pages before any reader started asking if a story was going to appear anytime soon.
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I don't think that's quite what he's saying.
.....the dialogue is so pitch-perfect an urban symphony, and so hilarious, that it effortlessly crosses the transom of the utilitarian standard and transcends any rules that would box it out of a novel.
The notion that story doesn't matter seems odd, coming from a guy who loves long-stemmed TV dramas. What does Tulk think we're enjoying there, the patterns on the drapes? (On "Downton Abbey" maybe yes.) I doubt very much that the notoriously impatient Tulk, who is prone to give up on long stories when too many episodes have passed in which "nothing happens," would be inclined to sit still for a long conversation that wasn't anchored in and leant context by a narrative. It's the strong supporting skeleton of a story rooted in genre conventions that frees Price to let his characters wander off.
I love stories more than anything, pretty much, and I also enjoy instances, like this, in which the structure of a story is stretched almost to the breaking point. "Almost" being the key word. Without that underlying melody, all you've got is noise
Actually, I do think that story matters... but I find it somewhat lower on the chain of being than others.
The relationship of long-form television to narrative is complicated and differs depending on whether you watch weekly or in binges. Having watched most of The Wire or The Sopranos on a weekly basis, I'll admit to friends at least to not really following the story for most of the time -- except on the broadest and stupidest level. I'm not sure anyone can, without multiple viewings, reference to newspaper blogs, or multi-episode binges.
What I was watching was basically the actors, the writing, and the setting. And I cared about the actors more than their characters....
"...lower on the chain of being"? Good grief.
Far for wrestling my argument to the ground, as promised, you haven't laid a hand on it. Start by explicating your complaint that "nothing happens" in the first three episodes of Homeland," and we can take it from there.
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