Formal Movie Language

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Vicki Hurst.

I’m calling you from Vista, California, which is in North County, San Diego.

Yes, lovely Vista.

Yes, lovely Vista.

So what I wanted to talk to you about was the movie True Grit.

The remake or the original?

The remake.

The remake, I bet.

The remake.

I went to see it a couple of weeks ago, and I noticed in the very beginning of the movie, the girl in the movie starts out talking really, like with a very formal language.

And at first I thought maybe it was kind of, maybe it was bad acting.

It didn’t seem very realistic.

And then I noticed that all the characters were talking that way.

And about, I don’t know, about halfway through the movie, I realized that they weren’t using any contractions at all.

So is that really the way they talked in the wild, wild west?

Are contractions like a later invention of the English language?

This question has been asked online many times and been answered many times in a lot of different ways.

And some of this stuff sounds really great when these folks are answering.

Like Alan Barra wrote something for the Daily Beast where he claims that this is historically accurate.

And I say poppycock.

I say malarkey.

And I say baloney and much sterner words when the mic is off.

Wow!

Well, here’s the thing.

People used contractions and been using contractions for hundreds of years.

It is not historically accurate to portray the Wild West as a place that was contraction-free.

It is not accurate.

Now, here’s the thing.

The Coen brothers who made the film and a couple of the actors, the lovely young actress, Haley Steinfeld, who I thought was fantastic.

I think they’ve all been asked about this in a variety of interviews.

And there are some various answers.

The Coen brothers are quoted in Newsweek as saying it’s historically accurate.

And I just must say to them that you need to do better fieldwork if that’s what you think.

Because you are patently, clearly, inarguably, unquestionably, totally, completely wrong with that, Coen Brothers.

You think they’re wrong?

Yes.

Are you sure?

Joel and Ethan, I don’t know what kind of weirdo you hired to do your research, but there are people who can do it for you for free who know better.

Read Mark Twain, for heaven’s sake.

Loaded with contractions.

And every great work of literature is loaded with contractions.

And notice I said great work.

But there’s a gigantic but here.

Here’s the thing.

There are really good reasons that have nothing to do with historical accuracy that you might make a film with no contractions.

Oh.

Now think about this.

You want to portray these people as different from us.

You want to show that they’re not modern, right?

You need to separate their language from ours in some way so that we understand as viewers that they are very different from us.

They’re not just us without electricity and running water in our homes, right?

It’d be easy to look at them and say, well, by jolly, they’re just like us.

They’re not.

And so you might do things to their language to push them a little further away from the modern day and to show that they think differently than us, they act differently, they have different backgrounds and patterns of behavior.

And so you can clue viewers in by doing that with the contractions.

And there are other ways.

You can change the vocabulary.

You can change the cadence.

It’s a lot easier than trying to adjust their vowels to reflect the way vowels were pronounced a hundred and some odd years ago.

Yeah.

So you’re saying it was an artistic decision rather than a historical one.

And I think that’s right.

I mean, they don’t sound like the Beverly Hillbillies.

They don’t sound like modern people.

For me, when I watched that movie, it was like watching a foreign film almost.

I mean, sometimes I wanted subtitles because, you know, sometimes they would mumble.

But I think there’s a transporting thing that happens when you watch a foreign film.

You have to pay particular attention to it.

You can’t get distracted by other things.

To me, it was a kind of hyper-realism.

Do you know what I mean?

Right, right.

It’s a stylized account of history.

Yeah.

And now a lot of credit, of course, has to go to the original book, True Grit, written by Charles Portis, which also doesn’t feature all that many, if any, contractions.

Right.

And even further, and this may be the most important point here, the book is written from the point of view of the young girl writing as an older woman, talking about things that happened decades in the past.

Vicki, she was probably writing from an educated point of view in which for centuries, people who’ve been educated have been told to avoid contractions because it makes them look lazy, sloppy, and low class.

And so there’s that other element there.

The author is doing things so that we understand that this story is filtered through a woman who has lived the life of complications.

But she’s overlaid some sophistication and erudition.

Yeah, yeah.

At the end of the film, she looks really straight-laced.

Yeah, right.

And she has this wild adventure in her youth.

So that’s the other thing.

We can have many long conversations about it, but that’s kind of the short version of it.

There are a lot of reasons to do it, and historical accuracy isn’t one of them.

Wow.

Vicki, thanks so much for calling.

Well, thanks for the answer, you guys.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

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