Post by StevePulaski on Apr 18, 2016 11:30:10 GMT -5
Do I Sound Gay? (2015)
Directed by: David Thorpe
Directed by: David Thorpe
Director David Thorpe in Do I Sound Gay?.
Rating: ★★½
There is a film to be made and a discussion to be had about the universally accepted but the conceptually vague idea of a person, usually a male, having a "gay" sounding voice. You know the type. The high-pitched, effeminate voice that emphasizes syllables of certain letters and often has a nasally drawl to accompany it. For most of his life, director David Thorpe has been annoyed by his own voice, to the point where he can't imagine how it must feel for other people to hear him speak at length or in passing conversation. Armed with a camera, and many donations from people via his Kickstarter campaign, Thorpe undergoes the process of exploring whether or not the speech patterns of gay men have any sort of consistency or scientific justification, in addition to treating himself to speech therapy in the meantime.
Thorpe talks to popular gay actors with very distinct vocal patterns themselves, for example, actor George Takei and satire writer/recurring NPR regular David Sedaris, who claims he has gotten, "good morning, ma'am" from the person on the other end of the phone more often than not. More fundamental and scientific examination comes from speech therapists that Thorpe visits. Throughout the course of the documentary, Thorpe practices his enunciation, learning he does common things such as putting too much emphasis on his L's and S's, in addition to ending sentences with an upward inflection, another ever-present trope, most apparent in those who are speaking with self-consciousness or a grave desire to be understood.
Thorpe is also told by his speech therapist that humans generally engage in typical speaking patterns such as "uptalking," which work to alter the way they might speak naturally. When one contemplates, the way we communicate in terms of our vocal patterns changes frequently based on people we interact with, no matter how subtle that change is. Because of this, it's incredibly difficult to determine what one's natural and neutral speaking voice is, and the result is a great deal of confusion and anxiety over speaking patterns that Thorpe experiences throughout the course of the film.
Do I Sound Gay? has an intriguing thesis with a concept that can be recognized by almost everyone, regardless of how unclear and generalized the descriptions of a "gay voice" can be, but it's burdened by the vanity Thorpe keeps injecting into it. Of course, this is a film where Thorpe's personal experiences work in a germane manner to the concepts at hand, but too often does the film seem to rely on Thorpe's perceived feelings of inadequacies rather than actual science or conversational basis. We wind up walking on a treadmill of sorts in terms of exploring and debating ideas because Thorpe makes the documentary so much about the individualized guilt over his voice that the documentary's factual basis gets lost in the shuffle.
In addition, the plethora of subjects don't really add anything noteworthy to the narrative largely because they seem to be affirming Thorpe's own self-consciousness with his voice. The whole documentary, rather than working to establish a basis of scientific conversation or auditory understanding of the "gay voice," seems to just be a showcase for Thorpe to battle with his own personal albatross. This cheapens the material of Do I Sound Gay? from a broadly appealing documentary to a more narrow, personalized view.
There's nothing wrong with personal accounts; I'd be the first to advocate for them in a documentary or in most sociological or anthropological discussions, for the collective is nothing more than a series of collected and analyzed personal accounts. However, Do I Sound Gay? begins like it's going to analyze the scientific angle when it's interest keeps returning to its director, giving this project more of a vanity angle than it needs. When it comes to being helpful and informative, it is on a personalized basis, which is valuable, but try attributing it to other people who experience the same vocal tone and you're going to end up right back where you started - an accepted notion of a conceptually vague idea.
Directed by: David Thorpe.