Here’s my problem with
everything Aaron Sorkin has ever done:
It doesn’t feel real. On an
intellectual level, I fucking love it; I eat it up like every other liberal,
college-educated post gen-Xer. But on a
gut level, it doesn’t totally work for me.
When watching anything written by Sorkin, I always have a tiny voice in
the back of my brain screaming “REAL PEOPLE DON’T TALK LIKE THIS!”
Case in
point: The opening scene to the first
episode of “The Newsroom”. Minutes ago,
Jeff Daniels’ world-weary news anchor just snapped and spouted off a “spontaneous”
tirade condemning the idea that The United States of America is the greatest
country in the world. Daniels does a
grand job of making the speech seem passionate and sincere, but the problem is,
this isn’t what people sound like when they’re pissed. When people are pissed, they are blunt and
crazy and they swear a lot. They don’t
spew a rapid-fire list of accurate statistics about the world which provide
solid evidence to back up the point they’re trying to make, no matter how
fucking smart they are. Jeff Daniels can
give the performance of his career, but it doesn’t matter, because no matter
how much humanity he brings to the moment, I am distracted by the fact that
this speech SOUNDS SCRIPTED. By somebody
who is so clever in his writing, he’s forgotten that cleverness is a fleeting,
elusive element in the reality of everyday life which even the luckiest of
intellectuals only attain every once in a while, and even then, only for the
briefest of moments.
A great
writer does not use every character as a mouthpiece for himself. Granted, every character is going to have
some of the writer in him (obviously no one is so ingenious that he can
entirely separate himself from his work and create something entirely unique,
even to himself), but a good writer should attempt to create different
characters, with different strengths and weaknesses. But every single person in anything Aaron
Sorkin writes is so GODDAMN QUIPPY.
Every character, from the jaded 50-something news anchor, to the
ambitious mid-30s producer to the wide-eyed 20-year-old intern is the spitting
image of Aaron Sorkin (so to speak).
Every single character on this show, regardless of their apparent
intelligence, educational background, or life experience, packs more witty
one-liners into one conversation than any reasonably intelligent person in real
life is lucky to come up with in a month.
What the fuck kind of pseudo-intellectual parallel universe are we
living in here? This is not
realism.
On some
wanky liberal-arts major level, I love it.
But on a gut level, it is both exhausting and entirely
unbelievable. Every conversation occurs
so rapidly, in a way that conversations do not occur in real life, because in
real life people actually have to take time to process and come up with a response
to what the other person is saying, not just spit out brilliant lines as soon
as the other actor has finished speaking.
Jesus.
Also, the
music is fucking terrible.
