Monday, February 14, 2011

The Philadelphia Story (6)

A language of vague and incomplete gestures

Very little language use is about conveying information. I sometimes think of language use can be divided into information and affirmation speech.

Affirmation language is what puppies do when they meet you. A puppy has a desperate need to make it clear to you that he is your friend. They express this need so determinedly by shaking their tail so hard that their whole body wiggles as they push up against you. Labrador puppies do it so vigorously that they can hurt you.

Giving directions on how to get somewhere is a good example of information use.

Let's stick with the puppy awhile. He is interesting because he doesn't have many options. If he can't convince other dogs that he is their pal they may kill him. At the very least they won't protect him or, if he is making the appeal to his mother, she might feed the rest of the litter more than she feeds him.

Affirmation is our primary reason for using language. More than anything else we use language to connect with others and to reaffirm and maintain existing connections. Information is not of paramount importance in most conversations because what we are really looking for is to connect.

You can test this by taking your laptop and headphones to Starbucks. Put the headphones on but don't play any music and sit near a group having a conversation and note the number of actual facts exchanged in the conversation. There is so little that you can often sum up twenty minutes of conversation in two or three lines of information.

Pop culture is a good place to go to see affirmation language being used and refined. Paul McCartney and John Lennon make an interesting contrast in this case. McCartney spoke clearly and Lennon, despite his fame as a lyricist, did not. McCartney may or may have been telling the truth in interviews but he always knew what he was going to say and he said it. Lennon was always making things up to try to get others to respond to whatever need for affirmation he felt at that moment. But that need for affirmation made him rather good at it.

There is a famous story about the writing of a song called "I Saw her Standing There". McCartney began writing the song and was playing around with this opening line:
She was just seventeen
He wasn't sure what to write next. There is some dispute about whether he even had a full line in mind but everyone agrees he meant to rhyme "seventeen" with something about this girl "not being a beauty queen".

Now let's think about what we can learn from just that. She was just seventeen and she lacked the confidence that girls who are beautiful and know they are beautiful have. This is not a song written by a guy who means well. He just wants to nail her. That's important to see because the change Lennon makes does not make the song less innocent as Joshua Shenk suggests.

Lennon's suggestion, and the final version, was the following:
She was just seventeen,
You know what I mean.
What does that new line do? It most definitely does not give us any information. The whole point is to make us connect us with the singer. Listening to it, you either imagine what it is like to see her or what it is like to be her. The new line really says, "We all know what is really happening here." Depending on your inclinations in these matter, this is ether a song about a man in his twenties spotting sex and candy or it is a song about a seventeen year old girl raising the flag to see who salutes and fantasizing about what might happen. Either way, we are now "in on it" with the singer.

Sticking with the men for a moment, one thing you might not guess from the above is that Paul McCartney was the one of the pair who was most comfortable and confident around women. John Lennon was the one who was driven by deep insecurity and uncertainty with women. He was subject to periods of deep depression and helplessness on the one hand and sometimes to incredible rage on the other. More than once he beat the woman he loved.

I say that we might not guess that but it all makes sense once we know doesn't it? The mastery of affirmation language that Lennon had and McCartney did not was a product of that sense of alienation of Lennon's. You see that in a lot of pop stars. They get trapped in a state of arrested development and they get very good at the sorts of expression that go with that state of development.

So now let's ask ourselves, what about the woman who does not want to be the the one standing over by the record machine? The woman who thinks it undignified for human beings to relate that way.  How does she act and communicate?

That, I believe, is what The Philadelphia Story is really about and I think most of the other characters are almost incidental. The whole move is about Tracy Samantha Lord. People who love this movie either want to be her or meet her. We watch it to figure out how to get to be like her or how to be good enough to win her approval.

Final entry this afternoon.

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