’90s indie cinema and the revolutionary rise of ‘futile’ dialogue
It obviously wasn’t his intention, but nobody cast a shadow over 1990s independent cinema quite like Quentin Tarantino, and it wasn’t just because every third film seemed to be a crime thriller with a nonlinear narrative that felt as though it had been transparently curated to score cool points.
One strange thing about cinema is that it has become widely accepted that characters don’t talk like real people all that often. The majority of the dialogue was connected directly to the plot and the characters who existed with it to a certain extent, meaning that virtually every word was there for a reason.
While Tarantino isn’t the originator of incidental exchanges that found people discussing everyday, menial, and meandering topics that had absolutely nothing to do with the narrative, he didn’t half help popularise it through the litany of iconic soundbites found throughout Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.
Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, and Steven Soderbergh were among its other most notable purveyors, but they didn’t do it for the sake of hopping on a bandwagon. Each of them had their own distinct style and told stories from scripts that couldn’t have been written by anybody else, but the 1990s boom for inessential conversations nonetheless came along and caught them in its wake.
Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape was a seminal moment for independent cinema itself, refreshing the notion of what the arthouse could be. Suddenly, aspiring filmmakers weren’t interested in crafting the next great masterpiece but in telling realistic and natural tales that treated their characters as if they were actual human beings, as opposed to pieces to move around the chessboard of storytelling.
Extraneous conversations about politics, pop culture, comic books, musical artists, celebrities, and plenty more were thin on the ground throughout the 1980s, but they had existed in one form or another well before that. Woody Allen is the first name that comes to mind, and it’s not coincidental that he was an unfiltered auteur writing what he knew and regularly casting himself to play protagonists who were thinly veiled versions of himself to begin with.
That being said, it was a rare occurrence until the 1990s, with several distinctive talents pushing forward the notion of what a screenplay could be. As well as the aforementioned Tarantino and Soderbergh flicks, Smith’s Clerks and Mallrats contained reams of dialogue reflective of what he and his buddies would talk about, while Linklater’s entire Before trilogy is pretty much Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy wandering around talking about assorted things.
It didn’t really infiltrate mainstream cinema or studio blockbusters, which eventually decided to focus on self-awareness much to their own detriment, but the decade’s increasing obsession with having its character embark upon meandering soliloquies that were tangential to the events unfolding around them left behind a significant imprint, one that fed directly into the rise of mumblecore in the 2000s.
Some of the most innovative, daring, and ultimately influential filmmakers to rise to prominence during the 90s favoured the art of incidental dialogue to such an extent it gave rise to a phenomenon that infiltrated almost every level of cinema, all while doing the opposite of what the industry had done for decades beforehand by intentionally giving the cold-shoulder to plot in favour of injecting a sense of conversational realism that quickly morphed from a stylistic flourish into a cinematic staple.
