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EMILY: I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back—up the hill—to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look … Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER: No. The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.…

EMILY: Oh, Mr. Stimson, I should have listened to them.

SIMON STIMSON: Yes, now you know. Now you know! That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those … of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know—that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.…

EMILY: They don’t understand, do they?

MRS. JULIA GIBBS: No, dear. They don’t understand.

…

STAGE MANAGER: Most everybody’s asleep in Grover’s Corners. There are a few lights on: Shorty Hawkins, down at the depot, has just watched the Albany train go by. And at the livery stable somebody’s setting up late and talking. —Yes, it’s clearing up. There are the stars—doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven’t settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk … or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain’s so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest. Hm … Eleven o’clock in Grover’s Corners. —You get a good rest, too. Good night.

If you haven’t seen or read Our Town in a while, it is a remarkable piece of work. Even in this brief scene, the women—Emily and her mother-in-law Julia Gibbs—focus on their own feelings and those of others. The men, Simon Stimson and the stage manager, use virtually no pronouns and describe the world in nice objective manly ways. Wilder’s men do indeed talk like prototypical men and his women talk like prototypical women.

Compare Wilder’s writing with Callie Khouri’s screenplay Thelma and Louise. Through a series of haunting misadventures, the two main characters, Thelma and Louise, find themselves running from the law after shooting a would-be rapist. The primary investigator, Hal, talks with Louise by phone and pleads for her to give herself up:

LOUISE: Would you believe me if I told you this whole thing is an accident?

HAL: I do believe you. That’s what I want everybody to believe. Trouble is, it doesn’t look like an accident and you’re not here to tell me about it … I need you to help me here.… You want to come on in?

LOUISE: I don’t think so.

HAL: Then I’m sorry. We’re gonna have to charge you with murder. Now, do you want to come out of this alive?

LOUISE: You know, certain words and phrases just keep floating through my mind, things like incarceration, cavity search, life imprisonment, death by electrocution, that sort of thing. So, come out alive? I don’t know. Let us think about that.

HAL: Louise, I’ll do anything. I know what’s makin’ you run. I know what happened to you in Texas.

What makes Khouri’s men so interesting is that they actually speak more like women than do the women. Hal’s frequent use of pronouns and low use of articles points to his deep interest in other people as opposed to concrete objects. Another important feature of the movie is that all the men—including the role played by Brad Pitt—have a feminine speaking style. At the same time, none would be considered remotely effeminate in their actions.

Just the opposite pattern can be seen in Quentin Tarantino’s script Pulp Fiction. Perhaps the most traditionally feminine character in the movie is the young French woman, Fabian, who is involved with Butch (played by Bruce Willis). Despite her girl-like appearance and childlike voice, Fabian’s words are decidedly masculine. In this scene, Butch has just returned from throwing a boxing match and accidentally killing his opponent (life is not easy for any Tarantino character). Fabian is not aware of what