On the most basic level, dialogue is responsible for “creating” the theatrical diegesis, the fictional world of the narrative. Ericka Fisher-Lichte has pointed out how plays use dialogue to delineate their surroundings:
If the stage is an empty space that the actor states is a forest and subsequently refers to as a palace, a room, or a dungeon, then this empty space becomes the forest, palace, room, or dungeon in the eyes of the audience. If the actor’s words refer to nonexistent objects as if these nevertheless existed, then they do in fact exist for the audience. If, in the actor’s words, dusk draws in and the sound of the nightingale and the songs of farmers returning from the fields are to be heard, then all of this can still be seen and heard by the audience.
Because of their ability to photograph the physical world, films rarely need to rely upon dialogue to the same extent; why use “verbal” scenery when the camera can take you to any natural setting, or the Hollywood Dream Factory can sumptuously fabricate any locale? The catch is that although the camera can take us anywhere, identifying the location is trickier. As Roland Barthes argues, all visual images are polysemous; their meaning must be anchored by resort to verbal signs (which is why paintings are given titles, photographs, captions, and tourist postcards, geographical labels). One city skyline, one mountain region, one medieval castle looks very much like another unless its specificity is identified by some means. One popular cinematic strategy is to resort to the language of familiar iconography: the Golden Gate Bridge means “San Francisco,” the Eiffel Tower, “Paris.” Other methods include utilizing superimposed printed captions—”Phoenix, Arizona” in Psycho (1960)—or conveniently placed diegetic signs. (Julie Salamon’s record of the filming of Bonfire of the Vanities [1990] reveals Brian De Palma’s insistence upon the size of a street sign reading “Alternate Route Manhattan.”)
Yet, in addition to such methods, films use dialogue to identify the diegetic world. That flat farmland could have been anywhere— Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska—but when Dorothy says, “Toto, I don’t think that we’re in Kansas anymore,” it becomes Kansas. Moreover, this process of verbal identification works, not only for major locations, but for all the characters’ movements in time and space throughout a film—the dialogue continually reorients the viewer through what David Bordwell calls “dialogue hooks” (e.g., “Shall we go to lunch?” followed by a long shot of a cafe). For instance, in Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), a reporter calls Elena Harris with the news about Tiger Lily’s marriage to Jimmy Harris and the brawl with Judy:
ELENA: Mr. Harris’s marriage has nothing whatever to do with me.
REPORTER: They’re in the Night Court now. Don’t you want to make a statement?
ELENA: I’m not interested. I don’t care who’s where and I’m not making any statements. (Slams down the phone, then picks it up again.) Where in the blazes is the Night Court?
The next shot is a wipe to a courtroom scene, which the viewer “naturally” infers is the Night Court just discussed.
Using dialogue for “re-anchorage” is especially important if a film is departing from linear chronology. In Andrew Davis’s The Fugitive (1993), the television reporter outside Kimble’s apartment notes:
“We do know this: that he and his wife Helen were at a fund-raiser at the Four Seasons Hotel earlier this evening, a fund-raiser for the Children’s Research Fund.” The screen goes white with the bulb of an exploding flash; cut to a large party scene, now identified for us in both time and space.
Exactly where simple anchorage (identifying of existing, but unspecified, time and space) leaves off and literal verbal fabrication of the diegesis (painting in the viewer’s imagination a locale that does not physically exist) begins, is difficult to define in film. Production practices always allow for one location to substitute for another:
Canadian cities can double for New York, Morocco can be Kafiristan, the Philippines can be Vietnam, the back lot can be anywhere at any point in history. What is important to me here is how implicated the dialogue always is in defining the fictional space. In a real sense, “naming” constitutes “creation.” Or, as Tzvetan Todorov puts it, “One cannot verbalize with impunity; to name things is to change them.”
~~Overhearing Film Dialogue -by- Sarah Kozloff
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