Five Layers of Meaning Encoded in Dialogue.
In early September of 2024, I went to a party hosted by some close friends. We’re all in our forties. Is this normal? Do middle-aged adults host parties? We should, and more often. Parties are fun. Or are they? Certainly, as a nation, we don’t dance enough. Even the American subcultures that do dance don’t dance enough. Parties can help with that. This party, in a Boston suburb, had plenty of good dancing. The people there—many of them characters—needed to move their bodies (our bodies—I was also there…).
One thing I failed to find, at this party, was a conversation.
I went hunting for some, spoke to dozens of people, and every time found myself reciting lines.
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Before going any further I should say that the hosts are some of my favorite people, and I could talk with either of them for days, on any topic you could name, no taboos. But you can’t talk with someone when they’re hosting a party. (If the only time you see a friend is at their birthday party, then you never see them, and you probably aren’t very good friends.)
I should nail down one more important point: I’m not laying blame on my fellow party goers. When I say “I failed to find conversation,” I mean that I failed. I had plenty of conversations—that is, I exchanged speech with a person—and I failed to find a dialogue; I failed to create a verbal exchange that felt at once fun, layered with significant meaning, and dynamic.
In the 2010 edition of his media studies textbook Television Culture, John Fiske notices the difference between speech and dialogue. Speech, he says, is a “social code,” similar to dress, make-up, gesture, and hair styles. Speech transmits reality, what’s really happening. Dialogue, on the other hand, is a “technical code,” just like other aspects of filmmaking, like camera angles, lighting, editing, music, and sound. Technical codes transmit representation, which, in a visual text like TV or film, usually means “narrative, conflict, character, action… etc.”
I’m not totally sold on Fiske, or perhaps I don’t totally understand…
In a 2016 lecture on the craft of fiction, writer Charles Baxter says that “Dialogue is a container. It embodies characterization, [narrative] structure, and conflict. Writers thinking about dialogue should be like fish thinking about water. We live in dialogue with ourselves, with others, and with God.”
Certainly, when Fiske uses the term, he is speaking about scripted visual text, like television and film (and perhaps also drama). For Fiske, dialogue is part of a system of codes that creates layers of meaning in the text. Baxter seems to want to bring dialogue off the page and screen and into life. And, indeed, we use the word to describe how we interact with each other: we say that we’re “in dialogue” with someone, or that we are “having a dialogue.” This isn’t quite the same thing.
I don’t have a fully formed thesis here. This is an essay in the truest sense: it makes an attempt to create understanding through the act of writing. I’m going to contradict myself somewhere. But let’s see how we do.
At the party, I spoke with the DJ. He told me about how he hadn’t used his DJ gear in several months, and when he retrieved it from his garage he disturbed a yellowjacket nest. Just a week earlier I discovered a wasp nest on my porch, hidden inside a light fixture. This coincidence wasn’t enough to move us into dialogue. But that’s not fair. He was there to work, not chat.
There are at least five layers of meaning encoded in dialogue.
Level Zero – This is reality. This is what is really happening. Level Zero is described purely, without aid of interpretive terms.
Level One – First layer of meaning; what appears to be happening.
Level Two – Second layer of meaning; This level caries a lot of weight. It supports any narrative that may be present in the text. It reveals character. It exposes binary tension. It showcases fluctuating power dynamics, and it moves characters toward or through some kind of meaningful action. Most dialogue never moves above Level Two. Good dialogue must arrive at least at Level Two. Bad dialogue might merely mimic speech, without supporting narrative. It might also skip Level One, jumping straight to Level Two, existing only to support narrative, sounding nothing at all like speech (we’ve all seen movies where actors’ endless riffing somehow ends up in the final cut. We’ve all seen movies where lines exist to remind people who haven’t been paying attention what’s happing right in front of them. These are bad movies that don’t trust their viewers.). Good dialogue hits Level Two. Great dialogue keeps climbing.
Level Three – Third layer of meaning. Level 3 is where we find the philosophical stance of the text. This is where we find the text’s “take” on an idea. How the text “feels” about the ideas with which it deals will be made apparent here. I put “take” and “feels” in quotation marks because this is metaphorical language. The text doesn’t really feel anything.
Level Four – Fourth layer of meaning. This is where we find Thematic Unity. Lines of dialogue that contribute to Thematic Unity are especially rare. They subtly point us towards the text’s central idea and/or central question. As with all dialogue, lines that contribute to Thematic Unity are disguised as common speech and therefore shouldn’t appear, on first viewing, particularly out of place.
In the preceding paragraphs, I’ve used the term “level.” It might be more helpful to think of floors of a building. Level Zero is the basement, Level One is the ground floor, etc.
There. Now that we have an image, we can look at an example.
About two thirds of the way through the first episode of the AppleTV+ show Severance, we find short scene worth a close read. The scene lasts twenty-three seconds, from 38:06 to 38:29. It begins the episode’s third act.
Mark, a deeply unhappy man in his late 40s, sits in his unadorned living room (place looks like a dull AirBNB, a unit we know the owners have never lived or even stayed in. These are the worst rentals. No art on the walls. The knives aren’t even pretending to be sharp.), drinking red wine, wearing old sweatpants, and watching mindless TV. There’s a knock at the door. It’s his sister, Devon, expectant.
“Hey,” he says, surprised to see her.
“Hey,” she says, casually, not surprised to see him.
She waits a moment, patient, before asking,
“Did you forget?”
Mark looks up at the door jamb, thinking. His brow wrinkles. He searches his mind. He finds what he’s looking for. He remembers that yes, he has forgotten.
“Oh. Yeah. Shit.”
“That’s okay,” Devon says. She is disappointed, but not surprised.
“Sorry,” he says.
“That’s okay.” She isn’t angry. “Do you wanna put on pants and I’ll–”
“I’m wearing pants.”
“–meet you in—those are not pants.”
Severence, S01E01, “Good News About Hell”
Directed by Ben Stiller
Written by Dan Erickson and Anna Ouyang Moench
At Level Zero, what’s really happening, we’re watching two actors performing for the camera. Adam Scott and Jen Tullock recite lines. They wear costumes. Each knows what the other will say. We don’t need to worry too much about Level Zero. It’s good to know that it’s there, but it will rarely tell us what we want to know when we find ourselves wondering about a dramatic moment. Level Zero is a bit like the molecular level of human behavior. We could explain, say, a murder motive by talking about chemical reactions in the brain (and sometimes this is relevant), but usually we want to know about the relationships between two people.
While we don’t really care about lines, we do care about speech. At Level One we’re hearing speech. Speech, for our purposes, is two people using words to communicate. In our scene, at Level One, we’re watching Mark and Devon speak to each other. Devon is there to take her brother to dinner at her house with her husband and some friends. She asks, “Did you forget,” and she means, “I’m here to pick you up to take you to my house to dinner–you agreed to this earlier, and it seems to have slipped your mind.” Mark thinks for a moment and then remembers the agreement. They have a brief pretend argument over whether his pants are pants. At Level One, because the actors are excellent and the production is of high quality, we believe that the words we hear are speech. Back at Level Zero, in reality, this is not speech–it is a performance–but through the magic of television we are led to believe, so we call it speech.
Level Two is where things start to become interesting. Devon picks up Mark at his house because he is a serious alcoholic. He is very depressed and has no friends. If she didn’t pick him up, he wouldn’t come at all. Her question “did you forget” offers the benefit of the doubt. She knows within microseconds of seeing his face (and pants) that of course he forgot. The tone of the question reveals not only that she already know, but also that she isn’t at all surprised; forgetting plans is something Mark has done before. Her further reply, “that’s okay,” reveals that she isn’t upset; she cares for her brother and she is a patient person.
Mark’s dialogue reveals his character as well. His tender “hey” shows us that he is both happy and surprised to see his sister. Mark’s dry reply of “oh, yeah, shit” reveals that Mark is also accustomed to having appointments slip his mind, and that he isn’t fazed by forgetting. The playful banter about pants indicates that these two people know each other well and have a playful relationship.
The interplay reveals the tension between the two characters. We might also call this power dynamic. In this scene we can see how there isn’t much more than playful tension, and that Devon has all the real power in this relationship.
Further, the dialogue functions to move Mark out of his house and into the next act of the story where we meet more characters who complicate the world building done so far.
Level Three shows us how the episode values tender sibling relationships. The episode values empathy toward depression. The episode values trauma-informed care. Devon is a sympathetic character. The episode takes care of her and makes sure that, later, when we see that her husband is a buffoon and his friends are pretentious yuppies, Devon remains a voice of reason. As the series unfolds, Devon’s ideals are seen to be those of the text–Devon acts how we would hope to carry ourselves. We might not know any of this in episode one, but we will come to know it as the series moves forward, and the groundwork is laid in her very first line.
At Level Four we find Thematic Unity. The question “Did you forget” asks a person to be mindful of their own memory. The first two thirds of this episode show us people who choose to become blind to their own memories. We say to ourselves, how odd, how out-there, how sci-fi. Devon’s question reminds us that memory blindness is something that happens to all of us, whether we choose it or not (usually not…). This bit of dialogue subtly points us back to the episode’s (and perhaps the series) central idea: awareness of memory, and the central question: How does memory shape the person?
Fiske’s book on Television Culture reminds us that much of everyday speech is actually sets of scripted lines that we’ve all memorized. An American greeting, for example:
A: How’s it going?
B: Good. You?
A: Good.
B knows that her line is “good,” no matter how “it” might actually be “going.” If she deviates from the script and says how she really feels, A doesn’t know what to do. We all know some variation of this script.
Part of the script at a party is “what are you drinking,” especially at a party where there are more than three varieties of alcohol being served. At this one, I counted beer, wine, prosecco, tequila, and fireball whiskey. There may have been more. I spoke to the woman who brought the fireball whiskey. She claimed that it wasn’t for herself—she didn’t drink or even like whiskey. She brought it so that other people might enjoy it, perhaps enlivening the party, for her.
I don’t mean to condemn this party. People had a terrific evening. They danced for hours. I danced for hours. I also retreated to a closet to read, in turn, bits of Ulysses, Notes from Underground, and a brand new novel called Two-Step Devil, by Jamie Quatro.
One must learn several pages of lines in order to join the Cult of Sobriety, and I refuse to even read the cue cards. Just because a person takes no drink for a hundred days doesn’t mean that they identify with some adjective.
The moment you start to identify with a noun or adjective, you become a character. I am a writer. I am a musician. I am sober. I am white. I am a man. These are all constructed entities, and therefore subject to critique. Better to remain a person who just does things. You don’t want to be a character. A character is merely a collection of ideas, and has no rights.
Life is not a text. Life has no thematic unity. If you find yourself reciting lines, the fact that you’ve noticed probably means you’re like me: hungry for dialogue. Let’s write some together.
And then let’s party!
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