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WHO NEEDS REALISTIC DIALOGUE?
GIVE ME "GILMORE"-SPEAK
March 11, 2005
"Who the heck talks like this?" is the question most often heard escaping my wife's lips each and every Tuesday from 8 to 9 p.m. That's when the WB beams "Gilmore Girls" into cable boxes across America, and I have happily been watching more often than not this year. It's hard to resist now that Lorelai and Luke have finally found that perfect love in each others' arms.
Still, if this were only a sweet Connecticut love story, it might not make the most riveting television. Thankfully, "Gilmore"'s eclectic cast also like to talk … and talk and talk and talk and talk. They talk in sentences both clever and complex - long strands of dialogue that blow by at breakneck speeds. And within their undying verbiage live exclamations of deep emotion, puns of infinitely varying degrees of wittiness, and pop culture references that may fly over your head, buzz passed your ear or smack you square in the face.
Regarding the latter, I recently put on my protective goggles to conduct a scientific test. I was determined to keep track of all the pop culture references flung at the "Gilmore Girls" listener (you hear this show more than you see it) over the course of 60 minutes. I only made it to the half-hour mark before my writing hand collapsed from exhaustion. In just 30 minutes, Stars Hollow's various eccentrics had, in normal conversation, made mention of the Marx Brothers, Florence Nightingale, "Jesus Christ Superstar," sound effects from the '60s-era "Batman" TV show (i.e. Bam! Pow!), Tom Sawyer, Watergate reporters Woodward and Bernstein and their editor Ben Bradlee, Dopey (you know--one of Snow White's dwarves), Haight Asbury, "I Love Lucy," and model Gisele Bundchen (a.k.a. Leonardo DiCaprio's girlfriend).
THIS WAS IN 30 MINUTES!
Keep in mind, those were just the ones I caught.
And it's not like all of these big words and knowing references come out of just one particularly well-read character. Everybody on "Gilmore Girls" talks this way. Even Luke, the gruff man's man, who on any other show would probably be written as the strong, silent type. There's no such thing as a "silent type" in Stars Hollow, which, as I've said, inevitably leads my wife to wrinkle her brow and offer up the old, "Who the heck talks like this?" line of questioning every single Tuesday.
So I always turn to her and offer up my answer: No one does. "Gilmore"'s dazzling and dizzying dialogue exists only in a fictional town born from the head of the show's incredibly smart creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino. And you know what? That's just fine.
In the real world, good conversation is becoming a lost art, replaced by advertising catchphrases, dumbed-down slang and chatroom shorthand (LOL and all those smiley faces). The number of people who take the time to string words together in unique and wonderful sentences grows smaller. For these reasons, I delight in the fact that not all TV writers have their characters speak like their real-world counterparts. I catch enough stupid conversation when I'm at the mall or standing in line at the grocery store.
Shows such as "Gilmore Girls" (and "The West Wing" and "Veronica Mars"), which thrive on too-good-to-be-true dialogue, offer a charming and challenging alternative to the boring dreck that comes out of most non-fictional peoples' mouths.. If that makes these shows somehow "unreal," then so be it. TV mustn't always honestly reflect real life. Sometimes, it can rise above it … occasionally, on words alone.
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