Having just seen John Carter, I feel the urge to express something about film that has gone largely unnoticed. No, I’m not doing another John Carter analysis. Between Dom’s review and Raj’s recent post, what ground is there left to cover? However, there is a particular part in Disney’s epic sci-fi money-shredder that got my brain churning.
When Carter is eventually beamed to Mars, there’s this part (which is not a spoiler by any means) where he’s being ‘prepared’ by the local alien tribe, the Tharks. During this initiation, he is forced to drink from a bottle of liquid… something. After that, BOOM, he understands AND speaks fluent Tharkian (sp?).
Now I don’t want to be THAT movie geek who pokes holes in the science of a hypothetical chemical compound that can instantly develop the cerebral cortex with such obscure precision. Rather, I wanted to ponder over the various methods of learning another language, as suggested by the film world.
Language-learning a difficult story aspect to deal with, forcing many scriptwriters to fall back on the usual plot devices. Sometimes you can applaud their subtle efforts. Other times, you just laugh at whatever bullshit they come up with. Either or, it’s interesting stuff, so I decided to highlight a number of movie methods that allow an ordinary human being to skip the language crash-course to becoming an instant pro at speaking any wacky language you want.
Let’s Broca the camel’s back and get into it.
1) Magic
Magic: the favourable tool to doing pretty much anything you want (or anything the screenwriter wants). Through the unexplained power of specified verbal combinations, the impossible becomes possible: you can make a peanut stand, make a rubber band, you can even make a needle wink its eye.
You can also talk to whoever or whatever the hell you like through the power of mystical magical mumbo jumbo. This can be achieved in various ways. Perhaps you need to recite an incantation where every word ends in “ious”. Maybe you need to bathe in a potion made out of a bullfrog’s toes, goats’ milk and three strands a US senator’s moustache. The method really doesn’t matter, just as long as you look like a f**king fool doing it.
Case in point: Harry Potter
Funnily enough, you can’t actually learn parseltongue linguistics at Hogwarts. Rather, the genes must be past down to you. Apparently, you need to be made up of the right anatomical components in order to pronounce and comprehend the acute phonemes of the language or some shit.
“But Liam, how is this related to magic?” Because he can talk to a f**king snake! Plus, no full human has ever acquired parselmouth as far as I am aware (I didn’t read the books; I’m not edumacated). It really just comes down to this: parseltongue exists because magic exists.
And yes, some dedicated Pott-heads are actually trying to learn the language.
2) Telekinesis
Here’s a common method to ridding two characters of the intergalactic language barrier:
“How am I understanding you?”
“We are connected through a psychic link.”
Thus, we can assume that every psychic creature in the universe thinks in English. How fortunate.
It’s quite an ingeniously simple tactic. Two lines of dialog and the bugging situation is resolved, never to be mentioned again (even in the face of a giant plot-hole).
It’s really not that cheap of a tactic, just as long as we are convinced that the aliens in question are actually capable of such a mental phenomenon.
Case in point: Green Lantern
To me, this is an acceptable use of the method. Earth dude is given a ring filled with the unbound power of ass-kickery. It’s fair to assume that such a ring could act as a psychic hearing aid as well. With all the different lifeforms on Oa, communication is a must. Thus, telekinesis was forged into the ring.
Just don’t count on it helping you out if you’re caught in a conversation with Nick Nolte. That man thinks the way he speaks.
3) Download it
In our current generation (Uni students in particular), the acquisition of knowledge is only a Wiki-link away. The internet can be the sole source of any stupid thing you want to learn: bonsai tree agriculture, hippo mating rituals, potato chip processing equipment manufacturers.
Given how current-day technology has made knowledge so accessible, the idea that we’ll be able to download an entire language straight into our mind is nowhere near as ridiculous as it may have sounded two decades ago. That’s all the scriptwriter needs to hear to jump the communication hurdle.
Case in point: The Matrix
OK, so Neo was never really required to speak another language, but it would’ve acted as added insurance to know that he could whip out a Russian haiku whenever the situation called for one. All you had to do was get a circular USB socket drilled into the back of your neck and let someone shove a giant f**k-off needle into the hole.
4) The electronic universal translator thingy-ma-bob
Here’s a fairly well-received way to tearing down the language wall. Instead of ever having to actually know the foreign tongue, just get a machine that saves you the trouble. It’s quite simple, and its believability as a device only grows with age.
Hell, we’re already halfway there. Smart phones can nab a free copy of Google Translate, allowing audible communication between a select number of languages. Sure, there’ll be intricacies lost in translation, but hardly anyone uses language good.
Case in point: Star Wars
This poor son-of-a-bitch had to translate for war chiefs, unstable brutes and a snarky trash can. Whenever he had to deliver bad news to an angry warthog alien with 12 metre tusks and one millimetre of tolerance, it must have been petrifying. Worst of all, Anakin programmed an anxiety disorder into him. Not cool.
5) Learn it
If a film can’t accommodate for magic, telekinesis or outrageous sci-fi gimmicks, then you have to revert back to the tiresome analog method of actual learning.
Case in point: Avatar
Put yourself in Jimmy Cameron’s shoes. You hired a linguistics doctor to fabricate an entire language for your make-believe cat-alien tribe. It completely works, grammar and all. Would you want to patronize that language by writing in an unobtainiosital translator?
Hell naw! You force your characters to actually learn the language. Then, you can have the training montage that says “Hey look, this is actually a language!”
6) Do nothing, because every single organism just happens to speak English anyway
Sometimes, we really just don’t give a shit how an extraterrestrial can speak English good. Depending on the mood of the film, it simply doesn’t matter or warrant attention. Other times, the screenwriter just CBF writing around it.
Case in point: MIB
Fortunately for the MiB agents, communication isn’t an issue when encountering many otherworldly lifeforms that decide to leech off our economy. For whatever reason, they speak English.
“But Liam, not all the aliens speak English in Men In Black. You’re dumb, bro. You’re dumb.”
No, but many of them do. Point is, the movie never feels the need to over-explain the intergalactic language hurdle. It’d be needlessly cumbersome to wedge in a reason when most of the audience is either going to not care or assume a reason themselves.
7) The thing that just does it for you
The most fun you can get out of this story conundrum is to just lay all your card on the table. Then flip the table. Kick the chair. Do whatever the hell you want. Make up any elaborate piece of bullshit you want, just as long as the main character goes from ignorant to fluent.
Case in point: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Like many of the absurd things in Hitchhiker’s Guide, The Babel Fish was a cheek-tonguing mockery of every other sci-fi that tried to bridge the language gap. Inserted directly into the ear, the fish somehow lives in your brain, telepathically translating any language in the universe… forever.
Except Icelandic. No one understands Icelandic.
ZOMG! BONUS BLOG! – Not according to Plan (9 from Outer Space)…
You lucky scoundrels get an extra shovel-load of my bullshit this week.
About a month ago, I did a little post about movie video games that actually exist (that was literally the title). I ended with Plan 9 from Outer Space, promising that I’d investigate this game further if I managed to get hold of a copy.
Well, it took a bit of exploring and some “legal creativity” to get a working DOS version on my so-shitty-that-it-has-lumps-of-corn-in-it laptop. Here’s what I found:
The game still didn’t work.
I booted up the game, which took me to a neat little cut-scene of a cigar-chomping producer giving you a basic rundown. After answering a couple of basic questions, he ask me to type in a word that can be found on a particular page amongst a particular paragraph in a particular line.
Since I didn’t have the manual, I simply typed in “password”. That didn’t work, so he gave me one more chance. Out of all the words in the English language, I decided to go with “gastroenterology”. That didn’t work either, so the game shut itself down.
You cannot simply Google “the word” because the word he asks for changes every time you start the game. Turns out you need the game’s manual in order to pass this security check.
What was my next step? Google the manual. This proved to be a somewhat useless task, as the closest I got was the manual for the Amiga version, which was quite obviously different from the DOS one. Perhaps if I searched through all 142,342 pages of the search results, I may have come across it eventually.
So there you have it folks, I’m useless. Sorry.
