I think it’s funny, but also possibly true to life that The Man in “All is Lost” utters exactly one word during his days-long ordeal, and then only when driven to the absolute brink by the series of fails.
The female scientist in Gravity, on the other hand, pretty much never stops talking out loud to herself.
As a woman who was long ago dubbed a compulsive communicator and who talks out loud to myself and my dogs pretty constantly, sounds about right to me, as far as the woman. You?
Tom Hanks does quite a bit of talking in Castaway, but then he has someone (something) to talk to.
Not to throw a spanner in, but the screenwriters/directors for both the mentioned films were male, so this may represent a couple of guys’ prejudices more than anything else.
Not to mention it seems to be A Typical Guy’s Favorite Word.
It should be noted that, in Gravity, the man specifically tells the woman to keep on talking, because even if she can’t hear Mission Control, they might be able to hear her.
Nitpick, sorry. Cast Away is the movie with Tom Hanks and Wilson. Castaway is a 1986 Nicolas Roeg film with Oliver Reed and Amanda Donahoe, based on the fascinating memoirs of Lucy Irvine of her time spent on a desert island with a man who put an ad in London’s Time Out. Kate Bush fans are the only ones likely to care, because she wrote a song specifically for the movie’s opening credits, though I thought the movie itself was pretty good.
Good point. But remember it is a movie: did the writer stick that in there to explain why his character keeps talking out loud? Did he choose to have her talking out loud because he wanted to convey her thoughts to the audience and he dislikes voiceover (rightfully so, as a rule) or because he feels an accurate picture of a woman would have her behaving this way?
This came up for me because my own monologuing habit has been highlighted for me the last couple of days by severely chapped lips: talking all the time makes me lick them much more and slows the healing, so I’ve been paying attention to my talking and have found it a little alarming to realize how incredibly difficult it is for me to stop doing it. Which then made me think of the Tiwlight Zone episode where some guy who talks all the time is offered a lot of money if he can stay silent for year, and I am pretty sure that I probably couldn’t last even a week, much less a year. In fact I don’t think I could last for* a day*.
I don’t talk constantly, though; I almost never do when I’m sitting at the computer, for instance. I talk mostly when I’m moving about the house, cleaning, preparing to go out, cooking, doing laundry - engaged in simple tasks that don’t require much of my attention to accomplish, leaving me free to chat with myself and my dogs.
Here’s something else: I almost never talk in my own normal speech, either. 90% of the time I’m using accents, most often Australian, several kinds of British, New York and southern. It’s not some weird personality disorder, it’s just more entertaining that way.
My job has me talking on the phone (mostly) and to my supervisor (sometimes) all day long. When I’m not doing my job I very rarely talk to anyone other than my husband. I can go full days without saying more than 20 words to anyone but him, 0 sometimes on weekends. I’m a very quiet person. Even with my husband, we’ve been together so long and know each other so well we don’t feel the need to constantly chatter at each other. We talk about things that interest us, and he reads to me, and we joke and have fun, but neither of us are very good at small talk. We’re comfortable with silence.
