Chief WTF Engineer

    These days I often ask people what their take is on dialogue obfuscation in films.  The people who don’t know what I mean tend to annoy me.  As does dialoge obfuscation.  My theory, perhaps a cynical one, is that the studios do it to increase the chances that the viewer will go to the movie / rent the DVD again to find out “What the fuck did he say?” 

    A little bit of mystery is a good thing, but there is a fine line between romance and annoyance.  As if Charlize Theron’s character in Young Adult isn’t annoying enough, there’s the scene where she says to Patton Oswalt, “____ me.”  Hmm.  Anyone catch that?  Could’ve been "Hold me."  Or maybe "Fuck me."  Hell, I'm thinking, Why me?  An acquaintance of mine pointed out that maybe the studio was going for a certain rating and so needed to cut the “fuck” down to, say, a barely audible “do.”

    My friend in L.A. who works in the business, sort of, says that sometimes on a given take the actor might have a vocal miscue, or the vagaries of the take might leave an audio soft spot.  I don’t really buy that explanation, since much of the dialogue is dubbed in during post-production anyway.  C’mon.  They have the fucking technology.  I mean, even in The Invisible Man, a film shot in the ‘30s, you can clearly hear every word.  You can’t see him, but you can hear him fine.

    The woman I'd been dating doesn’t know what I’m talking about.  “Okay, the next movie we see, I’ll point it out to you,” I promised.  Unfortunately, next up in my queue was The Artist.  It’s always something. 

    How can so many people not be aware of this practice?  As if you need some kind of sixth sense to detect it:  "I hear dead syllables." 

    If the studio wants to create mystery of the “what-the-fuck-did-he-say” sort, they should stick to the type rendered by Bill Murray at the end of Sophia Coppola’s Lost In Translation, where we are not meant to know what he said to Scarlett Johanson. 

     On a related topic, someone should start an 800 # or web service to explain confusing plotlines.  “Hello, yes.  I don’t get the thing with the keys in A Perfect Murder.”

    “Right, here’s the deal with the keys…”

     As of now, I’ve never seen “Chief WTF Engineer” appear in the end credits, but I’m convinced these schemers exist, secretly calibrating the amount of obfuscation.  Especially in romcoms.  Especially a certain 2008 romcom.  I won't mention any names.  Suffice it to say, the film left me frustrated:  Forget you, Sarah Marshall!