Things People Say In Old Movies To Prevent Another Character From Discussing Their Feelings
For even a second
I have the good fortune to spend July at a writer’s residency called Mastheads in Pittsfield, Massachussetts, to finish my novel Women’s Hotel, as well as two smaller projects I’ll discuss at greater length here a little later in the month.
I’ve also brought a few books here with me, all of which I heartily recommend.
Arnold Palmer, Movable Feasts: Changes in English Eating-Habits (A Reconnaissance of the Origins and Consequences of FLUCTUATIONS IN MEAL-TIMES with special attention to the introduction of Luncheon and Afternoon Tea), 1952
I’m a big Margaret Visser fan, and she references Palmer in The Rituals of Dinner, so it’s been on my list for a while. Plus I’m a sucker for a loose survey of domestic history as long as Bill Bryson isn’t writing it.
“Much has been written of the kind of food and amount of food consumed by our forebears. Less has been heard of the times at which they congregated at table and of the way in which their meals fitted into the arrangement of their days. Here, it has seemed to me, is a corner of social history that could stand a little filling in.
For most readers the pleasantest history books are those which are most precise. I share this preference; few people, if any, revere Macaulay more than I. Nevertheless, a small voice, refusing to be stilled, goes on endlessly whispering to me that history is far from being an exact science; that what appears to be true is, as a rule, only roughly true; and that if one can call two witnesses for every one called by the other side one has done exceptionally well. To readers who suffer increasing annoyance from my vagueness, I can only reply that, had space permitted, I should have been much vaguer and insisted on their company as I picked my painful way over rocks and holes to which, in my mercy, I here seldom allude. Hardly anything in this book is quite, quite true, or would not be the better for qualification.
Who can say, today, at what hour the Englishman breakfasts? It depends on which Englishman one has in mind.”
L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953
If you know this book, you likely know it for its first line, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” or possibly as a partial inspiration for Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I’m sorry to say the latter association kept me away from reading The Go-Between for too long, which is especially perverse because I’ve never read Atonement, nor even seen the movie adaptation — I just took an automatic dislike to it because of how prominently Keira Knightley’s green dress was featured in the trailers and posters, which I thought looked awful and tacky. I know it was created by Jacqueline Durran, who certainly knows more about period dress than I ever will and has a whole bushel of Oscars and BAFTAs for costume design to prove it, and that she dyed the silk herself, but I still think it looks like it came from a Spirit Halloween and I just can’t stand it. But my antipathy for the Atonement dress is hardly a recommendation for The Go-Between, which is a near-perfect book and you should read it as soon as possible.
L.T.C. Rolt, Narrow Boat, 1944
I started reading Robert Aickman’s weird fiction last year on my friend John Thompson’s recommendation, and subsequently came across his enthusiasm for maintaining historical British canals and formation of the Inland Waterways Association with L.T.C Rolt, and now I finally understand what a “tow-path” is and what “legging” means after years of glossing over either phrase whenever I encountered them in Edwardian fiction.
E. Temple Thurston, The Flower of Gloster, 1911
Rolt opens Narrow Boat by saying almost no one had written a decent book about British waterways since E. Temple Thurston’s The Flower of Gloster, so of course I’ve had to stop reading Narrow Boat and read The Flower of Gloster first. Charming, insubstantial, easy, like a barge-canal that tops out at three miles per hour.
In the meantime, I’m unlocking a subscribers-only post from 2018 about abortive emotional declarations in old movies. One of the reasons I so enjoy movies from the 1930s (I don’t have the patience to watch silent movies unless they’re being screened in a theater, and I’m less keen on postwar cinema for a variety of reasons) is the pleasure I find in being surprised by an unspoken rule. A character might erupt in a (tolerated) outburst over something I’d consider wildly inappropriate, or they might be stifled by others before registering an objection I’d consider totally anodyne, and I’ll do my best to puzzle through what lost rules of etiquette might be in operation onscreen.
I know that you can’t draw sweeping generalizations about real-life behavior based on a passing familiarity with some films of the 1930s and early ‘40s, but sometimes it seems like they rationed “talking about feelings” along with sugar to support the war effort. At this point I’m used to old-timey characters refusing to tell anyone else that they’re dying (sometimes characters won’t even let the doctor tell the person who’s dying that they’re dying, I can only assume that on occasion doctors refused to examine patients because they, the doctors, didn’t want to know if anything was wrong either), but it’s jarring to watch someone try to say something as mild as “I had a bad day at work today” onscreen and see another character react like they’ve just tried to detail their marital problems to a near-stranger. It gives the impression that everyone was on company manners almost all of the time, saying things like “Oh, the calendar is very sandwich today, I’ve never had a problem, let’s drugstore” even when talking to their spouses in bed.
(Also whenever I see a period piece set in Edwardian times I know I’m going to get one thing for sure, and that’s a ton of little paintings and photographs on the walls. I was rewatching some Merchant-Ivory movies recently and it was like everyone lived in a fern bar! What was it about living under Edward VIII that made everyone think, “I have absolutely got to cram as many photographs as possible onto not merely the lintel but the wall immediately behind the lintel?” I don’t know. There’s not enough here for a whole piece of its own. But it almost feels like something. You know how sometimes you think, “I’ve got about half a bit here, and if I try to work it out in conversation with my friends they’re going to say something to me like, ‘Yeah, this sounds like half a bit’ in a way that’s both affirming and totally withering because it makes it perfectly clear just how aware they’ve always been when you’re not having a fun, spontaneous, off-the-cuff conversation but instead rehearsing something you’re planning on using later, and that you’ve only ever been kidding yourself when you pretended you weren’t doing that. Those moments can be hard.)
Here is a partial list of things I’ve seen movie characters say in order to forestall a sentence like “My marriage isn’t perfect” or “Sometimes I get discouraged” or “My meeting didn’t go well today”:
Don’t talk like that
Say, don’t talk like that
Why, don’t talk like that
You just leave that alone now
What you need is a drink
What you need is a stiff drink
What you need is a couple of drinks
I know what you need – a drink
How about a cup of coffee?
I know what’ll put you right –
Hey, now – not another word of that!
You don’t have anything to worry about
I’m sure it’s nothing, and you’ll thank me later for stopping you saying something you’ll regret
You’ve got too much sense to talk like this
Now what put an idea like that into your head?
Well, we’d better take you home. Let me call you a car
“Don’t mess with Mr In-between,” is what the song told them, and boy, did they listen. In England, in my family (where it’s still 1940), the conversation goes something like, “I’ve just lost my job and a dingo has eaten my baby” (or whatever), and the response is always, “Oh well then, never mind!” If you say, “well actually, I do very much mind,” they shift nervously and go make some tea.
Enjoy Pittsfield; thanks for the reading recommendations, I have an Aickman awaiting.
Oh my god the clock is ticking and I have to read some Barbara Pym before your new book comes out.