Weather Report Narration
Weather Report Narration is when some of the first words in a story is a comment on the weather. Seen a lot in Literature, but also shows up in Film Noir detective stories when the narration begins "The rain was making a jazz drumbeat against my office window when the dame with the case walked in...", or something similar.
"It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" is the best known example and, by now, a subtrope by itself.
Examples of Weather Report Narration include:
Comic Books
- Early in The Long Halloween, Selina Kyle remarks, "It's hot. Years from now, when it gets hot at night, people will say 'Its hot, but not as hot as the night Johnny Viti got married.'"
- The first line in Sin City: "The night is hot as hell".
Film
- Inverted in Amelie, the (more technical than usual) weather report is the final line of the film's Talky Bookends:
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September 28, 1997. It is exactly 11 a.m. At the funfair, near the ghost train, the marshmallow twister is twisting. Meanwhile, on a bench in Villette Square, Felix Lerbier learns there are more links in his brain than atoms in the universe. Meanwhile, at the Sacre Coeur, the nuns are practising their backhand. The temperature is 24 degrees, humidity 70%, atmospheric pressure 990 millibars. |
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- Played with in Throw Momma from the Train. Larry Donner suffered writer's block to the point that the only thing he had written for his new novel was, "The night was..." He kept trying variations:
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"The night was dry. Yet it was raining." |
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- The fact that Owen Lift's badly written story, "Murder at My Friend Harry's" began, "The night was humid...," nearly caused Larry to have a migraine. And Momma Lift's suggestion, "The night was sultry" gives Larry impetus to throw her off a speeding train.
Literature
- In Nineteen Eighty-Four: "It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen".
- The Jungle Book:
- "Mowgli's Brothers", and thus the book itself, begins, "It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest..." (One does wonder why Kipling mentions the specific time, since wolves presumably don't have clocks.)
- "Her Majesty's Servants", begins: "It had been raining heavily for one whole month--raining on a camp of thirty thousand men, thousands of camels, elephants, horses, bullocks, and mules all gathered together at a place called Rawalpindi."
- "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" from William Gibson's Neuromancer.
- Which when written meant grey with sparks of bright white (metaphorically invoking a thunderstorm with no rain), but with the advent of digital tuners could mean either black or an unnatural blue.
- There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge. — "Red Wind" by Raymond Chandler
- In To Kill a Mockingbird, a few paragraphs in you have, "Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square."
- J. K. Rowling seems to be pretty fond of this, instead of just telling you that x months have passed, you get a lovely description of Scottish weather patterns.
- Wyrd Sisters parodies this. The narration begins with and keeps mentioning a storm, but in fact the storm is treated as a sentient background character (this is Discworld, after all).
- Surfing Samurai Robots, about an extraterrestrial Ascended Fanboy of Philip Marlowe, includes "It was a beautiful night. The air was cooler than it had been during the day, but it was the soft coolness of a silk scarf that had been wrapped around a cold champagne bottle."
Live-Action TV
- Dragnet almost always mentioned the current weather in Los Angeles at the very beginning of the episode.
Music
- Paris's The Hate That Hate Made features the lyrics, "June 6 in the time of 6 o'clock/hot summer night in the city of hard knocks/two black brothers took a walk on the south side/could have been any brother lookin' for a dope ride".
- Emerson Lake and Palmer's "Karn Evil 9: First Impression Part One": "Cold and misty morning I heard a warning borne on the air..."
Radio
- Almost all of Garrison Keillor's "Tales from Lake Woebegon" and "Guy Noir, Private Eye" on A Prairie Home Companion.
- The Goon Show, "Dishonoured" (remade as "Dishonoured Again") begins with Peter Sellers narrating: "It can be cold in London - damn cold. On such a night as this 80 years ago a ragged idiot staggered into a fog-laden Limehouse area."