Sorkinesqe

[osprey_archer]

Sorkin has a very specific style of dialogue, and when it works - as in The Social Network - it’s brilliant and absorbing. But in Sports Night Sorkin must have still been developing it, because he relies heavily on a bunch of dialogic tics.

So heavily that I can sometimes - oftentimes! - guess the characters’ dialogue before they say it. In particular, he likes to have his characters iterate their way through their dialogue: they’ll start with topic A and the next ten lines will be variations on A, at which point they might reach B. So there’s a lot of dialogue like this (which is entirely my creation, but has the same style):

Sadie: The boat?

Juliet: Yeah, the boat.

Sadie: We’re not using the boat. Are we using the boat?

Juliet: Of course we’re not using the boat.

Sadie: Because I hate boats.

Juliet: We’re not using the boat, Sadie!

Sadie: Great.

Juliet: Because you hate boats. I know you hate boats. So I told them that we definitely can’t use the boat.

Sadie: Great. So about section 332 C in the Meyer-Korsakoff act -

Juliet: And it’s a catamaran.

Sadie: What?

Juliet: It’s not a boat, it’s a catamaran.

Sadie: Right.

Juliet: It has two hulls.

Sadie: A catamaran. Okay. So about section 332 C -

Juliet: (clutches Sadie’s arm) We have to use the boat!

The iterative style, the fascination for trivia and minutia, and the sudden reversal at the end are all very Sports Night-era Sorkin. This sort of thing can be entertaining enough if delivered at top speed and used sparingly. But it happens every other episode and as soon as Line 1 happens I can predict the next dozen lines and it’s very frustrating. It could be half as long and get farther, easy.

Sadie: Are we using the boat? I hate boats.

Juliet: I know, I know, and I told them they shouldn’t use the boat, but they insisted -

Sadie: I told you to put a no-boat clause in my contract.

Juliet: And actually, it’s not a boat. It’s a catamaran. They have a long and noble history in Polynesia -

Sadie: Like that’s going to stop me from drowning.

(Juliet is clearly Sadie’s agent. Now I want to write a story about them.)

Do West Wing episodes use the same tricks, and I never noticed because I never watched tons of West Wing episodes back to back? Or perhaps this is a tic that Sorkin worked his way out of?

Certainly the dialogue in The Social Network is much less reliant on such schemata. It’s still recognizably Sorkinian, but that’s because of its velocity - Sorkin characters learned to talk from His Girl Friday - the frequency with which the characters interrupt each other, the fact that they talk and talk and talk. And talk some more.

Which makes Sorkin's newest venture, The Social Network, an interesting counterpoint to The West Wing. In West Wing, there’s an underlying assumption that if people just talk enough, they’ll reach consensus and everything will be rosy. In The Social Network, there’s no such thing as enough. The characters talk and talk the whole day long, but they can’t communicate with each other; and that’s their tragedy.

Comments

[chaletian.livejournal.com]

Ah, the Sorkin Repetition!! One knows it well... I think he does it pretty much everything he writes. Your fake!Sorkin!dialogue made me chuckle, though - pretty much the same kind of thing I wrote when I first contemplated writing West Wing fic: http://chaletian.livejournal.com/226968.html#cutid1.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

That dialogue clip is hysterically hysterical. Poor Danny! He's become a thing, and now that he's a thing who knows what will happen next?