Nonverbal Communication in the Movie "Closer"

"Closer" is the story of Dan, a British writer of obituaries, who falls in love with Alice, an American who ventures into England. However, as time goes by he meets Anna, an American photographer and is instantly obsessed with her. Shortly after, Anna meets Larry, a British dermatologist and they soon become a couple. The film questions the nature of relationships and faithfulness in particular.

The movie certainly deals with modern relationships and the fact that there is a diminishing role for affection and trust. One of the strengths of the movie is the reality that one feels while watching it. We feel that somehow we are transplanted in the tangled lives of these four characters. The characters and events are mostly weaved in conversation style from scene to scene. Thus, the communication in the movie is the key element to understand what drives someone in a perfectly good relationship to cheat and risk losing the one they love and love them back.

Adler, Proctor and Towne define communication as "a transactional process involving participants who occupy different but overlapping environments and create relationships through the exchange of messages" (14-15). There are two types of communication. There is verbal communication and non-verbal communication which is "messages expressed by nonlinguistic means" (211). The movie begins nonverbally as two people, Dan and Alice, walk toward each other in a busy London street. Their eyes meet and flirt tentatively and we see the interest is building up as they come closer and closer. This nonverbal flirtation ends quickly as Alice is suddenly hit by a car while crossing the street toward Dan. Their flirtations later on become verbal as Dan escorts Alice to the hospital and their relationship picks up as they both start to get to know each other. As they begin talking, Alice looks straight at him while Dan looks down most of the time. This signifies Alice's dominance, since downcast eyes are a sign of submission. She also takes his glasses as he is talking to her and cleans it for him then tries to arrange his clothes. It is as if she is his mother while in fact she is younger than him. Judee Burgoon and Beth Le Poire state that "greater dominance is conveyed by greater global involvement, greater immediacy, and greater expressivity" (114).

As the time pass by, Dan is late for work. Alice reminds him of his work but he does not want to leave her. This is a start of their relationship. There are several reasons why we get attracted to someone and form a relationship. Attraction could be attributed to physical appearance, perceived similarity, complementary personality features, reciprocal interest, perceived competence, disclosure of personal information and proximity. In the movie, physical attraction seems to be the igniter of this relationship since Alice is a beautiful young American while Dan is a handsome British. The attraction moves on gradually to complementarity, as Dan seems to be passive while Alice is more dominant. Thus, their characteristics satisfy each other's needs. Competence also is another reason as we see Dan as a writer while Alice is simply a stripper. Disclosure seems another key fact in this relationship, as Alice later on reveals a lot of personal information about her life which Dan uses as a basis for his book.

In addition to communicating with words, we also communicate with our kinesics, or body position and motion. Kinesics plays an important role in this movie and especially in the next scene. We go forward in time and Dan is being photographed by Anna for his new book. Their conversation picks up quickly and out of nowhere Dan asks Anna to come closer and they kiss. After the realization that Dan is living with Alice, Anna's attitude changes completely and she becomes sharper with her words and dominant with the conversation. When Alice comes to pick Dan up from the photo session, his kinesics has already changed. He is not standing directly to face her. He is facing her sideways. He is looking down and trying to make the conversation quick and vague. He is avoiding Alice's looks. Dan has fulfilled a lot of the cues which Robert Kraut lists as potential cues for lying. Kraut lists concreteness or "the extent to which the answer was filled with detail rather than vague" as a very important sign (388). He also notes consistency, length of answers, hesitation, speech error and kinesics. Alice, however was able to decode his behavior change and we see on her face this look which basically translates her troublesome. As Dan introduces Alice to Anna, Anna is trying to avoid both Dan and Alice's looks.

Another year passes by; Dan and Alice are invited to Anna's exhibit. While getting ready to go out, Alice starts a serious conversation with Dan. She tells him she is waiting for him to leave her. She looks directly at him while he is shaving and asks "I love you, why won't you let me love you? . . . Why won't you let me love you? " He gets quiet for a moment and then he insensitively tells her "Let's go to this thing, I will get on my train, I will be away one night. I will be back before you know it" Even though he is trying to divert her from the topic as a way of a supporting response, he is actually denying her feelings. By this point, Alice knows of Dan's feelings toward Anna. She knows he kissed Anna and she knows that he is not completely with her.

Once Dan and Alice arrive at the exhibit, Anna makes eye contact and courteously smiles. Alice makes note of the contact and immediately leaves Dan. Dan in turn also takes his eyes off of Anna immediately and moves away. Alice is very aware of the way she wants others to view her, her presenting self. Several times in the movie we see her change her face once she realizes that no one is watching her. She always puts this smiling, "everything-is-ok" face around Dan and everyone; while on the contrary, she is sad and alone. She shows this sadness in a picture that Anna took of her right after she realized that Dan kissed Anna. In the picture, a tear is rolling down her face. She talks about this with Larry, Anna's boyfriend, as she says "people in the photos are sad and alone." Once Larry leaves her and she realizes she is alone, her smile immediately disappears and a tear form in her eyes.

Another year passes and we watch the scene which is the climax of the movie. It is the scene where Anna tells Larry that she has been cheating on him. It is also the scene where Dan tells Alice that he has been seeing Anna for a year. Throughout that year, Anna has married Larry and from the moment of marriage she stopped seeing Dan so her marriage would work. However, she fails miserably and decides to leave Larry. The communication in this scene is intense and seems more like a duel than a conversation among lovers. As Larry returns home from a trip to N.Y. Anna's body language is all about withdrawal. She has been crying. She tries to avoid Larry's looks and changes the topic constantly. Larry notices this and asks her twice if she is ok since her nonverbal messages are contradicting her verbal messages. However, she changes her nonverbal messages as she starts to tell him the truth and uses her facial expressions to substitute for speech. Larry gets angry, starts using a lot of "You statements" and uses both tag questions and questions that make statements. Adler states that "You statements", "expresses a judgment of the other person" (188). Tag questions and questions that make statements are "aimed at sending a message, not receiving one. They are also called "counterfeit questions" (264).

Even though Alice loves Dan, she decides to leave him right away. While Dan tried to stop her from leaving, he was not successful. Anna on the other side leaves Larry and he does not try to stop her, in fact he tells her to die. This rage of his does not last a long time for after that he calls her constantly so they would get back together but she ignores him.

The end of these two relationships is the culmination of nonstop lying. The lying was not benevolent however. It was not used to prevent embarrassment or to avoid conflict or even to guide social interaction. The lying was used purposely for selfish reasons. It was used for deception. The discovery of the lies at the end was indeed traumatic for both relationships. After Dan's confession, Alice is struggling to define all Dan's previous messages. She asks him if he ever loved her. Larry, on the other side is fighting with Anna to find excruciating details about her relationship with Dan and also with him. He asks her why she ever married him.

Clearly both of these relationships should have ended long time ago. Yet, they both continued the relationship. In an article that discusses addictive relationship, the author lists reasons for staying in a bad relationship such as "financial entanglement, shared living quarters, potential impact on children, feared disapproval from others, and possible disruption in academic performance or career plans." However, Dan doesn't leave Alice because he does not want her to be with anyone else. Anna, however, does not leave because she felt that if "she worked hard enough she should be able to save her relationship." Alice, who is aware of Dan's entanglement with Anna, does not leave him either because she loves him. She even says in the movie "I never leave if I am in love." Robin Norwood, discusses in her book "Women who love too much" steps to overcome an addictive relationship. Norwood suggests that if the relationship is not satisfactory to both members, we should "make our recovery the first priority in our life, focus on getting our needs met more effectively, courageously face our own problems and shortcomings, cultivate ourselves, and learn to stop controlling others" ( 44-46).

In the beginning I raised the question of why would someone in a perfectly good relationship risk loosing the one they love and love back. In the movie it seems that our desire for something we can not have is the answer. However, as we watch the movie it shows that there are several problems with every relationship. For instance, there is the lack of disclosure, the lack of "honest" communication, the lack of listening to the other person properly, and lack of respect. In his book "How to Ruin Your Love Life" Ben Stein talks about what we do to ruin our love lives. He explains that by believing that "our wishes are the only ones that matter in any situation" or that "living our life as if only our feelings count" sends a death sentence to any relationship (1-8). By accepting that we are not alone in the relationship and by valuing the other person's feelings, we can work on making the relationship work. Indeed, once Anna realized that Dan does not really love her, she returns back to Larry while Dan looses Alice and Anna forever. He fails to realize that love is about honest open communication, respect and sharing.

Works Cited:

-Adler, Ronald B.; Proctor II, Russell F.; Towne, Neil. Looking Out Looking In. California, 2005.

-Burgoon, Judee K; and Le Poire, Beth A " Nonverbal Cues and Interpersonal Judgements: Participant and Observer Peceptions of Intimacy, Dominance, Composure,and Formality" Communication Monographs, 66: 2 (1999 June) pp. 105-24.

-Kraut, Robert E. " Verbal and Nonverbal cue in the perception of lying" Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology, 36 (1978). pp. 380-91

-Norwood, Robin. Women Who Love Too Much. New York, 1985.

-Stein, Ben. How To Ruin Your Love Life. California, 2003.

-Addictive Relationships