What Do You Call This Style Of Dialogue?

This annoying, banter-y bullshit is absolutely inescapable

By Eric Shorey

Two things I famously loathe are 1) comedy and 2) Marvel movies. I claim no expertise with regards to either topic, but perhaps, as a total outsider to both, I have a unique(ly hateful) perspective.

It’s particularly easy to reject the latter given the utter creative bankruptcy implicit in the franchise, the reliance on soulless CGI, the pseudo-political posturing, the ubiquitousness of these movies as shared cultural touchstones, etc… I’ve previously written about the banality of the multiverse, but one thing about these movies that I truly can’t stand — yet doesn’t seem to get discussed very much — why the fuck do they all talk like that?

Dear reader, you must know what I’m referring to. That quippy, quick-paced, light-hearted banter. The unserious, colloquial tone. The smugly flippant, hardly-witty retorts. It’s all so obvious and expected. What do you fucking call that style of dialogue? Does it have a name?

Last month I went to see Infinity Pool, Branden Cronenberg’s latest film, a Kafka-esque dystopian thriller with a distinctly grotesque body horror flair a la the auteur’s esteemed father. I expected the trailers beforehand to be standard A24, artsy middle-brow stuff. Instead, I was forced, Clockwork Orange-style, to viddy this absolute atrocity:

Oh Jesus. Gross.

Nails on a fucking chalkboard. Had to cover my eyes and ears. Painful.

Look, this whole thing is fucking garbage, from the melodramatic, re-scored nostalgic music to the catchphrase-slinging side-characters, to the disorienting, uncanny terror of films shot in empty, green screen warehouses and mercilessly edited together in post. But the dialogue.

Here’s the exchange that really made me want to throw up:

Batista: I will kill anyone who gets in our way!

Pratt: No, not kill anyone.

Batista: Kill a few people.

Pratt: Kill no people.

Batista: Kill one guy. One stupid guy who no one loves.

Pratt: Now you’re just making it sad!

What the fuck do you call this kind of dialogue?

It seems like the script writers were attempting a kind of youthful back-and-forth, juxtaposing silly joviality with the supposed seriousness of galaxy-saving super-heroes.

To me, this style of writing seems like the direct descendent of Joss Whedon’s “Buffyspeak” — but bastardized so thoroughly as to be rendered unrecognizable, absolutely ineffective, and even more irritating.

Buffyspeak is defined on wikitionary as “a form of dialog in televised fiction, characterized by the use of vague slang and neologisms.”

Let’s table the cancel culture discourse around Whedon for a moment and admit that the guy was pretty inventive when it came to the way his characters conversed. And kudos to Sarah Michelle Gellar and her supporting cast for actually making it all seem somehow authentic, despite the style’s obvious stupidity! While pre-Buffy sitcoms and dramas starring teenage characters had been heavy-handed and obtuse (think: Audrey Horne and James Hurley from Twin Peaks), Whedon gave his characters a lightness and goofiness that spoke to both their innocence and the time period in which the show was made. The fact that the Scooby Gang talked in slang, even amidst various apocalypses, was a source of humor and charm in the show’s seven seasons — even if, in retrospect, it’s pretty annoying.

Some common idiosyncrasies of Buffyspeak were: using nouns as adjectives, adding “-y” or “-age” to words that don’t normally have them, incorrect but legible syntax (“How much the creepy is it that she's been spying on us?"), fourth-wall breaking recognition of tropes, inter-textual references to other media as a short-hand to explain character idiosyncrasies or plot points (“I can't believe you, of all people, are trying to 'Scully' me!"), and in-jokes between characters to indicate affection and informality. The specifics of Buffyspeak are broken down more adroitly over here. There are multiple academic and non-academic books written on the linguistics of this shit.

Whedon would go on to direct The Avengers in 2012, perhaps the real inflection point in super hero dreck, when the genre turned from vaguely entertaining to completely unbearable. Whedon fans at the time, myself included, hoped that the auteur could bring his unique style of writing to the big screen. He was no stranger to comic books, that’s for sure, and quite honestly his run of Astonishing X-Men is perhaps the greatest of any writer in Marvel’s history (in my extremely biased and only somewhat informed opinion).

But damn, The Avengers fucking sucked. One could easily detect Whedon’s attempts at Buffyspeak in it, with characters engaged in Buffy-adjacent banter — but something was off. It didn’t make sense for adults to talk like that, and the whole thing felt dumbed down. Less clever. More generic. Was it studio meddling? Or was Whedon best when given limited resources, forced to work on a TV budget? Who knows!

The most obvious failure in The Avengers dialogue is Iron Man’s obsession with shawarma, which functions as a kind of (barely-)comedic through-line in the film. Iron Man’s never had shawarma. When this is all over he wants some shawarma. The post-credit sequence is the heroes eating shawarma. Is this an attempt at creating a charming character quirk? Wouldn’t it have been better to have, I don’t know, given Iron Man an actual personality instead of this one repeated in-joke? Why the fuck has this character, who lives in New York City for gods sake, never eaten shawarma before?

Please kill me.

(There’s also something hideously nauseating about the human faces in this clip, as if they’d been photoshopped onto totally unreal bodies—like proto-deep fakes—which, I guess, they probably had.)

My opinion doesn’t matter though, because The Avengers made $1.5 billion.

So of course The Marvel Industrial Complex was going to endlessly recreate this insipid style of speaking in every movie afterwards, and it’s gotten dumber and dumber ever since.

Nowadays, Buffyspeak has kind of merged with various other ineludible normie cultural products. With a dash of the bland, un-coolness of Friends and a hint of the unabashed camera-confronting sliminess of The Office, everything sounds the fucking same. Everyone is trying to be Will Ferrell — wide-eyed and outlandish proclamations abound endlessly — but almost no one has his charm, which I barely find charming at all.

This kind of dialogue seems also to come from the same school of infuriatingly vapid 2015-ish “I did a thing!” and “Adulting!” millennial jargon. Millennials are the ones writing these movies, and I guess they imagine this is what kids want to hear. We aren’t yet at the stage where super-heroes are resorting to more Gen Z quirks and buzzwords, because there probably aren’t a ton of blockbuster Gen Z writers just yet: they’re not old enough to be given these kinds of high-profile, mega-budgeted jobs. To my knowledge, Black Widow hasn’t said “the vibes are off” yet and Captain America isn’t ruminating on his “flop era” — or whatever. But surely that’s to come.

There’s also something aggressively family friendly (that is to say, heterosexual) about this style of dialogue as well. Of course, most Marvel bullshit is strictly PG-13, meaning that sex is a sort of specter that haunts the dialogue but is never mentioned outright. Genitals can be alluded to but never named. “That’s what she said!” is the ultimate retort in this cosmology, a negation of sexuality in the Freudian sense.

Contrast this with the Drag Race style of runway twaddle where sexual innuendos and overt sexual practices are both spoken out loud and in celebratory terms: named and played with in such extremes so as to be rendered almost irreproachable. Drag Race exploded in popularity almost parallel to the MCU, hitting its stride with mainstream audiences also in 2012-ish, and it oddly has the same kind of nerdy mass appeal. And yet, in contradistinction to the purposefully anodyne and inoffensive Marvelverse, it’s so hyper-sexual that it’s barely sexual at all:

Anyway, here’s one example of the kind of hideous dialogue I’m talking about, just to show how far it’s spread from the MCU. In the most recent iteration of the video game God of War, Kratos becomes embroiled in the affairs of the Norse gods. In his journey, he gets partnered up with Mimir, the decapitated head of a God who rides on his hip and wisecracks endlessly, offering a beyond-annoying running commentary throughout the game:

I’m sure reviewers praised this dialogue as “hilarious” but doesn’t it make you thankful for the quiet stoicism of The Legend of Zelda? I’ll take Navi’s repetitive “Hey, listen!” over this shit any day.

Again, the key here is that this kind of dialogue, somehow both blithe and glib at the same time, is supposed to be juxtaposed against the seriousness of a doomsday scenario — isn’t it cute and charming how the characters tell jokes even as existence is about to be annihilated? This was Buffy’s sort of signature move, but it’s gotten really tired.

Clearly, I’m in the minority about this shit. Clearly, people eat this shit up. Clearly, it makes a lot of money.

But it doesn’t have to be this way! We can do better!

Indie game Night In The Woods is perhaps the best example of re-inventing teen-jabber for a new generation. Released in 2017, the game takes on a child storybook aesthetic to tell the tale of a young adult returning home from college amidst mysterious circumstances. It’s slowly revealed through the protagonist Mae’s dialogue with various characters that (SPOILER ALERT!) she suffered a mental health crisis at school and had come home to recover, but remains plagued by paranoid ideation and delusions. Is the town threatened by a menacing, clandestine cult — or is Mae imagining the whole thing?

Sounds like a Buffy episode, and the game kind of feels like one too, given that the main characters resemble the youthful miscreants of Buffy’s social milieux. But Night In The Woods doesn’t rely on cheap Buffyspeak tactics and creates its own vernacular through dialogue that resembles how young adults actually talk:

Tacky puns, internet/texting slang, emotionally vulnerable exchanges mixed with sarcastic defensive maneuvers. We don’t need the dumbed down Whedon-ese to relate to these kids.

Let me be clear: I’m not making any political or moral claims about the kind of Marvel chattering that is inescapable today. It’s not “harmful” or “colonizing” or “appropriative” or even “problematic.” It’s just fucking unoriginal, boring, and annoying. I guess I could argue that it’s a symptom of a kind of super-flattening described by Takashi Murakami in the early ‘00s: an age-inappropriate obsession with youth culture that hides a kind of shared, cultural trauma (9/11? Covid?) through a perverse fixation on childhood. But honestly, I don’t really believe that. I just think it’s lame.

If we’re going to diagnose this problem, what do we call this syndrome?

Post-Whedon Badinage? Marvelspeak? Super-hero Repartee? I don’t know. Nothing’s sticking for me. I’m leaving the comments open if you’ve got any suggestions. Let me know where you’ve heard this style before or if you’ve got any other ideas as to where it comes from.

And if we don’t solve this problem I’ll have to write a similarly whiney post about how all musical theater performers sing in the same insufferable, over-annunciated style. Why do they all sing like that?! What do you call that style of singing?! Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about!