Talking Small Small Talk - These Days It’s Anything But. Out In The Real World, The Art Of Small Talk Has All But Disappeared In Its Original Face-To-Face Form.

He led her to a table on the veranda. There was a moment’s silence while she did unimpressive things with her fan.

“It’s hotter here than in Eau Claire,” she said.

Warren stifled a sigh and nodded. It might be for all he knew or cared. He wondered idly whether she was a poor conversationalist because she got no attention or got no attention because she was a poor conversationalist.

- From “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Look at me.

It’s harder that way. It’s easier when you let your eyes wander while you’re doing it. But making eye contact, looking at the person who is looking at you, that’s what all the experts say you need to do if you want to be any good at it.

Small talk - these days it’s anything but. Out in the real world, the art of small talk has all but disappeared in its original face-toface form. At a time of highway snipers and subway shootings, the overarching goal of present-day public life is to get through without looking at - never mind talking to - anyone.

But thanks to technology - a new generation of electronic small talk is flourishing, from voice mail to electronic mail - we have just about eliminated all the pressures of engaging one another in conversation.

Yet, like a lot of things we fear and loathe in real life, we just can’t seem to get enough small talk when it comes to watching it on a screen. On television, sitcoms such as “Seinfeld” and “Friends” have proved small talk to be the stuff smash hits are made of. In film, meanwhile, it’s getting so chatty, villains scarcely take time to shut up for a second and blow someone away. “Get Shorty” recently reigned at the box office, led by John Travolta’s gangster-hero whose greatest power was his ability to engage absolutely anybody in spellbinding small talk, always opening with the three-word incantation “Look at me.” And then there is the fact that Hollywood’s current definition of hip - which is to say, Quentin Tarantino - is the patron saint of small talk.

Of course, there is a simple reason to explain why something we find so excruciating in real life is altogether fascinating in fantasy: Real small talk and fantasy small talk are two very different things. In the real world, small talk is self-conscious silences, stammered missteps, abandoned sentences, strange comments about the strange weather we’ve been having lately. But in our fantasy worlds, small talk is a fireworks display of wit and timing, a province of smooth-talkers who glide from Big Macs to foot massages, who never miss a beat, who always have something interesting to say.

“The key thing to remember is that what we are hearing on screen is not really small talk at all, but an idealized version of small talk,” says Matthew McAllister, a media studies professor at Virginia Tech. “That’s part of the attraction. Movies and television are full of people making clever conversation, the sort of conversations we like to imagine ourselves having, full of the clever pop-culture references that, really, we never think of until a couple of days later.”

So on-screen small talk is just another show-biz illusion, and like the rest of them, the better the fake, the more real it seems.

“Quentin Tarantino has made a career out of his ability to create fake real small talk,” says Charles Webb, who teaches creative writing at California State University at Long Beach. “He is like a stand-up comic in that way, the way comics pretend to be speaking off the top of their heads while doing a routine they have timed down to the last breath. His dialogue is artfully designed to seem extemporaneous.”

But why this current infatuation with all this tiny talk? For one thing, it’s hard not to notice that this trend is occurring at a time when small talk in our daily lives has been reduced to exchanges centering on questions such as “Paper or plastic?” and “Care to supersize that?”

“It’s true,” says Jeanne Martinet, author of “The Art of Mingling.” “In our age of cars and televisions, we’ve lost the art of small talk. I didn’t realize until I started writing the book how many people are terrified of, you know, being in a room full of people and having to strike up conversations.

“But I don’t think our fear of small talk is instinctive. Back in Victorian times, conversation was viewed as entertainment, and people were trained in it from an early age. But now - that’s why movies and TV have so much of it, I think. We love to watch people doing things that we can’t do.”

In this way, we brush up against small talk’s voyeuristic appeal. In the same manner that Hitchcock used all sorts of visual devices (the camera peering through a keyhole in “Notorious”) to both stir and comment on the viewer’s voyeuristic impulses, today’s filmmakers are skilled at evoking a sense of fly-on-the-wall eavesdropping in their audiences. In movies from Martin Scorsese’s “GoodFellas” to Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs,” the “fun” of the movie is listening in on what guys talk about in between committing ghastly acts of violence. And in television’s era of reality-based programming, from “Cops” to “Hard Copy,” small talk’s aura of eavesdropping fits right in.

To be sure, on-screen small talk is nothing new. Screwball comedies in the ‘30s and ‘40s were all the rage and brimmed with rapid-fire, clever-clever small talk.

“But it was small talk of a different sort,” says Neill Hicks, a UCLA senior instructor on screenwriting. “Writers back then were very restricted in what they could talk about and the ways in which they could talk about it. As a result, they got very clever, saying things in such a fast and furious way that they could push the boundaries.

“Now, though, we are free to say anything, to talk about any subject.”

That isn’t the only way on-screen small talk has changed. Dialogue within a story has always served two purposes: character development and plot progression. But today’s small talk seems to have abandoned its latter function. Indeed, the appeal of the small talk, particularly in Tarantino’s work, is the way it acts as a break from the plot rolling to its inevitable conclusion.

In “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction,” the small-talk exchanges exist outside the story, creating a sense of the audience just hanging out for a while with the characters before everybody gets back to finishing the movie. At a time when entertainment-makers have more sophisticated technology with which to make things blow up, ooze blood or morph into a killer from another dimension, scenes of small talk are becoming oases of human-scaled action.

“Our technological capacity to generate digital wonders is so enormous now,” says Hicks. “It could be that in this way, small talk now serves as a breather, a relief.”

But if technology has made on-screen small talk a relief, it has worked no such miracles in real life, where small talk hangs between the twin threats of tedium and humiliation. So why does anybody bother? As it turns out, though our fear of small talk may not be instinctive, our compulsion to engage in it may well be.

“People are really uncomfortable with silences,” says Webb, who is also a practicing therapist. “Because it can be taken as hostile, people feel the need to fill it, to defuse it. We make small talk with the people around us as a way of proving we’re OK, not a threat, don’t need to fight for superiority. It’s akin to shaking hands, which started as a way of showing that neither person was carrying a weapon.”

But while on-screen small talk can seem as far removed from its real-life counterpart as our human small talk is from a dog’s small-talk vocabulary, on-screen and off-screen do overlap.

“Every party you go to, and the conversations you have at them, are role-playing,” Martinet says. “In my book, I talk about how fantasies can really help you, since it’s an illusion that you have something to fear, a fantasy can act as a counterillusion.

“Let’s face it: Movies are absolutely instructional in learning how to behave at parties, how we want to come off to other people. So think of yourself as Bette Davis or Cary Grant if that helps. Have lines from movies that you use.

“When you use a line from a movie - like, I have often used that Bette Davis line, ‘Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy night’ - everybody is transferred to the set of a movie, with all its glitter and charm.”

And so we are left to make our way - everyone pretending to be Bette Davis or Cary Grant, everyone dropping lines from this movie or that, everyone a star in a movie full of glitter and charm and beautiful people saying interesting things.