Would you like cheese with that?

[sistermagpie]

I've been having these vague thoughts lately on "realistic" drama, and how it is or isn't realistic, or how real life does or doesn't get considered realistic. And seeing a couple of comments on the last couple of episodes of Mad Men spurred me to actually write some of them down

Comments

[go_back_chief]

In fact, writing a diary is something that so many people would do in a similar situation. So I found myself thinking--hmmm, I feel like this is a totally believable choice for this character, but is it still a bad idea because a) voiceover is immediately bad and artificial and those things are supposed to be outside the style of MM, and b) a character laying out their thoughts is a cheat because good dialogue should be ambiguous and we should have to work to really understand people.

I don't think voice-over is immediately bad, but it's very very hard to pull off well, and when it manages to do that, I think it's usually because it brings something extra. Although I can't come up with any examples on the spot. With the Mad Men episode though, the problem for me was just that, that I didn't think it brought anything that we couldn't figure out by ourselves. Okay, we found out Don never finished high school, but that was pretty much it. It's possible that I've missed something, of course, I've only seen the episode once, and I don't always hear everything. But as far as I could tell, they were mostly his thoughts about events going on and none of them was surprising, the only new insight to his character they brought was that he was now keeping a journal. And I agree that that seemed perfectly in character, but we didn't need to know (hear) what he wrote.

I have to say I liked the hand-thing and I didn't think it was too much. Maybe if that had happened in the very last episode of the show, it would have been a bit too clunky (as it's supposed to reflect that scene in the first episode) but at this point in time, I don't think it was.

[redbrunja]

I would point to the show Veronica Mars as an example of voice over being used effectively. Yes, sometimes Veronica's OV were clunky bits of exposition... but a lot of time they were her internal monologue and worked because the show was a neo-noir and hearing the protagonist's thoughts was a homage to all the previous first person detectives who had gone before her. So not only were the viewers getting insight into Veronica's character, the VO also fit with the genre VM was part of.

[go_back_chief]

Yeah, it's been a while since I watched Veronica Mars, but as far as I can remember, they handled that pretty well. It was obviously a grip they'd thought through, at least.

[redbrunja]

Yeah, they were definitely aware of how it could easily go wrong.

[sistermagpie]

Yeah, I felt like...there was nothing in the VO that was really surprising at all or that we really needed to know, I thought. And so I'm sure the writer knew that. It seemed like the whole point of it was just that Don was keeping a diary, like he was swimming now. It was all part of his sort of project for the summer of self-improvement. I guess if they just showed him writing we wouldn't have known what it was, and if we might still not have gotten it. So maybe it was just saying that the character was trying to be more open, honest about emotion, etc. and it was more about that and more about the change in him than any particular insight that he had in the diary because there really weren't any.

I definitely don't mind him continuing to keep the diary--I even liked his writing. But I wouldn't want it to be a regular thing to hear what he had in it at all. I can take it as a transitional thing, which is what I thought this ep was. It shows turning over a new leaf etc.

[go_back_chief]

Good point about the diary being a first step for him in opening up a bit, I hadn't thought of that.