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Fauxlosophic Narration: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''Mohinder needs to do a thing where he doesn't treat me to rambling stoner quasi-philosophy voice-overs at the beginning of every episode because it makes me dislike him as a person.''|'''[[8-Bit Theater (Webcomic)|Brian]] [[Atomic Robo|Clevinger]]''', on ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]''}}
Philosophical narration, dialogue, or exposition that has little to do with the plot, usually of the same vague nature as what a first-year philosophy student uses [[Padding|to pad out, lengthen, expand]] [[Purple Prose|and/or decorate]] his term paper.
When a movie, television show, or other such narrative wants to simulate or create the illusion of more depth than it actually has or possesses, it can can use [[Fauxlosophic Narration]] to have some character, whether it be protagonist, villain (especially the [[Nietzsche Wannabe]]), or innocent bystander, (especially [[The Philosopher]]) talk about "Big Topics", like [[Added Alliterative Appeal|Destiny, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair, Dream, Delight,]] [[Atop the Fourth Wall
It may be an attempt to change a character's purported wisdom from an [[Informed Ability]]. It doesn't work.
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** This is far from the only instance of this in the series. In the confrontations against two [[Big Bad|Big Bads]] both the villains and the protagonists start ranting a mile a minute about things like free will, determination, hope, despair, responsibility, and everything the series goes for. They never say anything terribly original or deep, but it's presented as though both sides are profound.
* ''[[Glass Fleet]]'' features [[Fauxlosophic Narration]] from Michel before the opening credits of each episode.
* ''[[
* ''[[
* ''[[FLCL]]/Fooly Cooly/Furi Kuri''. Naota usually begins each episode with some sort of semi-emo philosophical musings. He says several times throughout the six-episode series that "nothing exciting ever happens here. Everything is ordinary", which is clearly not the case, what with the fighting robots and such (though this is probably meant to be ironic).
** As the single most mature individual in the series, Noata is probably affecting what he thinks is an "adult" outlook. But most of his monologues are largely meaningless and inaccurate.
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** And don't forget Rei's monologue.
* ''[[Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha As]]'' features lengthy inner monologues by the [[Anti-Villain|Wolkenritter]], which mostly revolve around their perceived inability to have normal lives and impending failure to save the only person in the universe they care for.
* Done ''[[Fridge Brilliance|ingeniously]]'' in the [[Post Episode Trailer|Post Episode Trailers]] for ''[[Higurashi no Naku Koro
** Also subverted in the second season, when the real protagonists do some narration that would normally be fauxlosophic... but not in their situation.
* On very rare occasions, the narration at the beginning of each episode of ''[[Gun X Sword]]'' refers to previous plot events in a helpful way, but it frequently falls into this sort of pseudo-philosophy. The over-the-top voice doing the narrating on the English dub makes matters worse.
* Every [[Next Episode Preview]] in ''[[Fullmetal Alchemist (
** What makes this especially fun is that these musings are entirely in-character for {{spoiler|Father}}.
* ''[[Paranoia Agent]]'' has the Mysterious Old Man rambling on about seemingly completely random things during each preview. Not helping is that it includes puns that only work in Japanese.
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== Film ==
* ''[[The Beast of Yucca Flats]]'' was comprised almost entirely of the director [[Coleman Francis]] performing this sort of narration to avoid having to sync the soundtrack. Much of it has nothing to with the movie. Flag on the moon. How did it get there? A man murdered. A woman's purse. Nothing bothers some people. Not even flying saucers. A couple vacations, unaware of scientific progress. Man's inhumanity to man. Flag on the moon. [[Science Is Bad|Caught... in the wheels of progress]].
** [[Stargate SG
* Subverted in ''[[Stranger Than Fiction]]'' The narration means something, even the scenes that appear to be random filler fold into Emma Thompson's story, and when the narrator talks about objects and events being meant to save our lives, she is talking literally...and literarily.
* Criswell's narration in ''[[Plan 9
** In ''[[Glen or Glenda]]'', [[Bela Lugosi]]'s addled delivery of obtuse philosophical rants over [[Stock Footage]] of buffalo herds is [[Narm|memorable in a way Wood surely did not intend it to be]].
** The ''Plan 9'' narration is parodied in the biopic ''[[Ed Wood (
* ''[[Boondock Saints]] 2'' opens with a Rocco voiceover that finds a fancy way to say "Doers do things, and talkers just talk." It isn't very long-winded though.
* The closing shot narration from the cinema release cut of ''[[
{{quote| DECKARD: I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life, anybody's life, my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die.}}
** Especially [[
* ''[[Teenagers From Outer Space]]'''s opening scene. In fact, many B-movies from the 1950s and 1960s either began or ended with some amount of Fauxlosophic Narration.
* ''[[Howard the Duck (
* Parodied in ''[[
* Parodied in ''[[Rocky Horror Picture Show]]'' with the Criminologist, especially his closing lines.
* The first ''[[Left Behind]]'' movie opens with a Fauxlosophic Narration: short but tedious, [http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2008/11/lbtm-thats-our-buck.html described as] "a vaguely foreboding series of non sequiturs", it might have been mildly effective delivered by a voice with some weight, [[The Culture|gravitas]], [[The Colbert Report|balls]]. Unfortunately it's read by Kirk Cameron, who lacks the gravitas to deliver "Happy Birthday" effectively.
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== Literature ==
* ''[[
* Terry Pratchett does this occasionally, especially at the beginning of books, sometimes introducing a later-important [[Chekhov's Gun]] at the same time (just look at [[Discworld
** In-story example: Vetinari occasionally gets very non-sequitur-ishly philosophical. Could be deliberate, though, because anyone talking to him at the time finds it ''seriously'' disconcerting.
** The [[Fauxlosophic Narration]] is most often [[Played for Laughs]] as a parody of works that do this in all seriousness.
* In [[David Eddings]]' ''[[Belgariad]]'', Belgarath poses the question "Why does two plus two equal four?", saying that he's been pondering it for ''millennia'' and hasn't been able to come up with an answer. He also asks a series of questions regarding basic natural phenomena, all of which stump Garion, though that's justified by the lack of universal education in a world of [[Medieval Stasis]].
* R.A. Salvatore used to fall into this. Especially in [[The Dark Elf Trilogy|Drizzt series]] that contain pages of his journal with musings of the protagonist on matters like morality, faith, and emotion. However, Drizzt ''was'' very young (by elven standards), grew up in a rather isolated city and had education focused less on what local high priestesses or even wizards learn and more on swinging a pair of oversized razors and not dying while trying to wage war in caverns full of ridiculously deadly critters... through which he later wandered alone until gone half feral. It's not like he could do much better when trying to make sense of the suddenly complex world.
* This makes up about half of ''[[Friday the 13th (
== Live-Action TV ==
* ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'' is infamous for this, with Mohinder (see the right page quote, above) starting and ending each episode with some random philosophy that often has only the flimsiest of connections to the episode itself.
** From the first episode of the second season- "The sun rises on a new dawn..." I mean, what the hell does that mean, Mohinder? "The story continues"? Yes, we knew that, Mohinder, that's why we're watching, shut up!
** However, Season 3, Episode 2 (the second half of the two-hour season premiere) ends with Mohinder reciting "The Second Coming", by [[William Butler Yeats]] ("Turning and turning in a widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer..."). This was not only a dead-on appropriate coda to the preceding two hours, but one of the best uses of an overused poem this troper has seen.
** In the official parody "[http://heroeswiki.com/Zeroes Zeroes]", the Mohinder stand-in is forced to stop his closing narration as a "sentence finisher" starts reading along with him.
** Occasionally other characters, such as Linderman or Sylar, got in on the act-though the one-off narrators tended to be a bit more relevant than Mohinder.
* This was basically the entire point of Augustus Hill on the show ''[[
* Tends to pop up in the opening video packages for [[WWE]] pay-per-view events.
** Probably somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of them. The rest are pretty blatant, "Hey, come check out [[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?|grown men hitting each other with chairs and throwing each other around to make it look like it hurts without actually breaking their necks!]] Only this time ON A LADDER!!!"
* The beginning and end narrations on ''[[Desperate Housewives]]'' are full of musings on love, loss etc with only the barest of connections to the actual show.
* Arguably this applies to ''[[
** This was spoofed on an episode of ''[[The Simpsons (
{{quote| '''Mulder:''' "Voodoo priests of Haiti! Tibetan numerologists of Appalachia! The unsolved mysteries of... ''[[Unsolved Mysteries]]''!"}}
* Meredith's opening and closing narrations on ''[[Grey's Anatomy
** Ruthlessly mocked in one episode of ''[[
* ''[[VR Troopers]]''. Every one of the episodes (save one) over two seasons opened up with Ryan Steele musing about Life, The Universe, and the Monster of the Day, always tying it into some memory of his father. The guy had issues.
* ''[[
** JD's constant talking and his vivid fantasy are one of the defining aspects of the series. The fauxlosophic narration is just one part of it.
** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ok12K9X6y0 Touche, magic hallway]
* ''[[The Hitchhiker]]'' had a few of these, that tried horribly to give the show a feeling of [[Film Noir]].
* ''[[
* ''[[
* ''[[
** "The hardest thing in this world is to live in it." Yeah, it's a lot less profound than it sounds.
** As did ''[[
* Gil Grissom often lapses into [[Fauxlosophic Narration]] on ''[[
* ''[[Dead Like Me]]'' often has it, and often reiterates the same message that death is random, seems unfair, but is inevitable.
* ''[[Due South]]'' often opened or closed with Fraser Sr.'s voiceover reading extracts from his diary. But the man wrote beautifully, and the text always offered an interesting commentary on the main action.
* Carrie's [[Captain's Log]] s in ''[[Sex and
* [[Are You Afraid of the Dark?|The Midnight Society]] had a variant on this: The kids ''knew'' they were spewing nonsense in the prefaces to their stories; it was all just to build atmosphere, and sometimes to mislead the audience on what their story was actually about.
* Bit of a subversion, ''[[
** And a [[Crowning Moment of Heartwarming|beautiful]] subversion on the episode where [[TV Genius]] Spencer Reid gives a victim's necklace back to her father, telling him that he doesn't recognize the piece of poem in it. The guy starts reciting it, and it is clear that it fills him with hope, so much that he cannot bring himself to finish it. Reid then leaves, and, being a genius who remembers ''each letter of every text he's read in his life'', the finishing narration is him finishing the poem.
{{quote| What though the radiance that was once so bright, be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.}}
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* Done intentionally by Lars von Trier at the end of each episode of the original ''Kingdom'' series.
* ''[[Profit]]'', though it's more like a demented corporate speaker spouting uplifting cliches that are undercut by the action just seen.
* ''[[
* ''[[Gossip Girl]]'' sometimes does this.
* ''[[
* ''[[In Plain Sight]]'' does this a ''lot'', to the point that the narration often has an entirely different version from the subtitles.
* ''[[The Twilight Zone]]''. Rod Serling's opening and closing monologues are simultaneously brilliant and brain-twisting. One generally needs to re-listen to Serling's soliloquoys three or four times before they stop sounding like so much word salad and start making sense. It's honestly just easier to [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Zone_(1959_TV_series)/ read them]. A lot of this is due to Serling's gumshoe delivery, which adds a healthy dose of mystery to what would otherwise be a commonplace prologue or summation.
* The second season opener of the horror anthology series ''The Hunger'' gives its narrator (played by [[David Bowie]]) a backstory that also helps explain his ramblings in subsequent episodes: He's a [[Mad Artist]] obsessed with death and shunned by society.
* ''[[Andromeda]]'' opened with the text of a different quote (usually at least bordering on this trope), sometimes real ones from actual real-world sources, often from some in-universe source.
* ''[[
* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' serial ''[[Doctor Who S 17 E 5 The Horns Of Nimon|The Horns of Nimon]]'', Soldeed interprets everything Nimon says as this.
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== Videogames ==
* Kreia from ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]] II'' skirts this trope for the majority of her dialog, but tends to pull off something more to the effect of [[Contemplate Our Navels]].
* The ''[[Super Mario World (
* ''[[
* In the [[Game Mod]] ''[[Batman Doom]]'', the text screens that pop up a few times throughout the game are filled with Batman's [[Narm|Narmful]] musings about how he's "the chosen one" to fight evil. In fact, the text screens are probably only there because there's no way to remove them from the game, so the modding team decided they might as well fill them with something vaguely relevant.
* The entréee of each and every serving of the ''[[Kingdom Hearts]]'' franchise. Cutscenes are riddled with existential positing on the subject of hearts, darkness, power, light, [[Don't Explain the Joke|nothingness]], or [[What Do You Mean It's Not Didactic?|destiny of the heart of darkness against the power of light and destiny]].
* ''[[Max Payne (
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* Like the anime example above, pick any serious webcomic. And even a few humorous ones.
* Appears occasionally in ''[[Molten Blade]]''. Most of Fred's [[Inner Monologue|inner monologues]] fall into this category.
* Parodied by ''[[
** Then parodies itself at the end of "Judy gets a kitten"
{{quote| *Shows Dr.Mcninja at his desk*<br />
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== Western Animation ==
* The much-maligned third season of ''[[
* The final moments of the 1994 ''[[Fantastic Four (
* Spoofed to hell and back in ''[[Xavier: Renegade Angel]]''.
* Each Episode of ''[[Star Wars:
** The openings reek of fauxpraganda a la ''[[Starship Troopers (
* Spoofed at the end of ''[[
{{quote| ''"As the candy hearts poured into the fiery quasar, a wondrous thing happened, why not. They vaporised into a mystical love radiation that spread across the universe, destroying many, many planets, including [[Planet of Hats|two gangster planets and a cowboy world]]. But one planet was at exactly the right distance to see the romantic rays, but not be destroyed by them: Earth. So all over the world, couples stood together in joy. [[My Friends and Zoidberg|And me, Zoidberg]]! And no one could have been happier unless it would have also been Valentine's Day. What? It was? Hooray!"''}}
** The narrator of ''The Scary Door'' intros tends to do this as well, in a spoof of ''[[The Twilight Zone]]''. And boy howdy do they play with it:
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