I just finished watching Season 1 of Breaking Bad and while I'm loving the show, I have to comment on something that's really pissing me off. I don't like Jesse as a character, but even more so, I hate Aaron Paul's depiction of him. He's so clearly a coddled, fleshy little drama school kid, with nice teeth and smooth hands and a baby face. He has absolutely no idea how to talk hood. To be fair, I don't think he was given particularly great source material.
None of the characters on Breaking Bad who are supposed to be ghetto actually come across as remotely so. This is a consistent problem throughout movies and TV. The closest that I've seen is The Wire, of course, and even that dialogue wasn't convincing a lot of the time.
I have a theory why.
The job of an actor occasionally involves helping to write the character. When directors trust an actor, the actor is asked to participate more actively in helping to round out the words they're giving life to. But not every actor gets that request. For unknown actors doing smaller parts, there's really not much input desired.
Since minority indigence is rarely depicted in mainstream American storytelling, the roles are usually small. That means it's historically been less essential to make sure that character is nailed, and therefore, less welcome for some actor to hold up production in order to get the dialogue right. Especially if a larger rewrite of the scene is what's really called for.
Since the roles are small, the minority actors playing the parts never obtain enough clout to be able to offer unsolicited input to the hurried, overwhelmingly elite-class production team. They're probably not asked for input, and if they offered it and somehow demanded an improvement, they could be replaced for these small roles. (Of course the screening audiences are all studio people and hand-picked audiences, two demographics to whom it probably all sounds the same.)
So between the low impact of the roles on the overall production, and the small influence of the actors playing the roles, ghetto talk doesn't go through the rigorous fine-tuning needed to make it sound realistic.
Other factors are probably at play, too. One thing to note is that a lot of black-led dramatic productions, like Belly, do sound authentic because they're not only not afraid to show real black life, but interested in doing so. Also, a lot of black actors playing ghetto roles are probably not as formally trained as the white conservatory detritus that get supporting roles in TV and film. Maybe that has an impact. Finally, it's worth noting that screenwriters seem really bad at composing other types of dialogue, too. Nothing is more cringe-worthy than when the Smart Character delivers a line made of a bunch of big words with no content. Hearing smart characters talk is usually very different from hearing smart people talk; in real life, conversational intelligence has a creativity to it. When someone smart talks, they're skipping the obvious and saying something you hadn't thought of. That's kind of the point. On screen, it's all much more linear. Of course, being smart is hard, and not just any writer can pull off being a world-class genius when that's what is called for.
Anyway, I'd like to challenge writers and directors across the land to strive for more realistic ghetto talk. Unfortunately, this is a private blog and like those actors, I have no influence.
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