The sounds of silence: hyper-dialogue and American Eccentricity

Within the stylistic trend in contemporary cinema toward creating exaggeratedly articulate characters, a mode of contemporary filmmaking, that I call American Eccentricity, exhibits a form of dialogue that simultaneously performs a dramatic function – hyper-dialogue. Hyper-dialogue is the intensified, unevenly fluctuating, and often ironically inflected use of dialogue in the place of action that stems from the presence of a deep, unspoken anxiety. American Eccentricity can be read through the ideological and cultural imprint of the New Hollywood due to their shared underlying thematic concerns of alienation and dislocation. These thematic concerns have undergone a transformation in the American Eccentric mode, in which films depict the anomie of modernism through postmodern cinematic language. Hyper-dialogue is a key stylistic and dramatic technique employed in the American Eccentric mode that depicts the transition from the identifiable anxiety present in the New Hollywood through the dramatic use of si...