All talk

This chapter focuses on the ways in which film dialogue can enact and foreground the complex mechanisms underlying conversational interaction, and demonstrate the ways in which verbal interaction may be as much about concealment and solipsism as it is about intimacy and revelation. With close reference to Spike Jonze’s Her, which centres on the developing relationship between a lonely writer and an operating system designed to fulfill his every need, the chapter will examine how the film’s foregrounding of character dialogue to the exclusion of almost everything else challenges convention and relies on the audience to read between the lines of the characters’ utterances. The chapter draws on theories of dialogue from literary criticism, narratology and linguistics as well as film studies to argue that dialogue in film is not just about exquisitely staged scenes or displays of auteurish experimentation, but plays an integral role in the audience’s active engagement with the characters and their investment in their unfolding relationships.