Fauxlosophic Narration - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Waxing Philosophic

Future events such as these will affect you... in The Future.

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.

— Brian Clevinger (author of Eight Bit Theater), on Heroes

Everybody was a baby once, Arthur. Oh, sure, maybe not today, or even yesterday. But once. Babies, chum: tiny, dimpled, fleshy mirrors of our us-ness, that we parents hurl into the future, like leathery footballs of hope. And you've got to get a good spiral on that baby, or evil will make an interception!

— The Tick

Philosophical narration that has little to do with the plot, usually of the same vague nature a first-year philosophy student uses to pad out his term paper.

When a movie or television show wants to simulate more depth than it actually has, it can can use Fauxlosophic Narration to have some character (especially The Philosopher) talk about "Big Topics", like Destiny, Dream, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair, Delight - or maybe Delirium, - not to mention Life, the Universe, and Everything. This overall doesn't add anything to the story, rather the intent is to make the story's characters and events seem grander and more generalized at the same time. This usually backfires, as the faux intellectualism is both insulting and distracting to anyone who has the brains to figure out this narrator is speaking a lot of words that don't actually mean anything.

Post Episode Trailers use this quite often to mask the actual events of the coming episode.

A product of the desire to Contemplate Our Navels. Is not used so that Evil Sounds Deep.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

EurekaSeven's next episode previews. This one is pretty ingenious, actually-it actually is relevant, usually, but the ambiguous language ("the boy" and "the girl" instead of "Renton" and "Eureka", for example) makes it sound like it could be talking about anything, because that's not pretentious or anything.
- Renton making his in-episode monologues addressed to his sister oft treat into this as well.
Same for Gasaraki.
Also the same for Elfen Lied.
Outlaw Star episodes always start with an opening narration, some of which fall into this category; most of the rest are universe building or exposition.
The ruminations about life and love that begin and end each episode of Boys Be.
Vash does a form of this in the Post Episode Trailer at the end of each Trigun episode. There are three exceptions: Meryl recites a capsule description of him for the trailer to the Recap Episode; Vash as a child does the narration for "Rem Saverem" (the Whole Episode Flashback); and Vash gives up on the philosophy entirely and breaks down for the trailer to "Live Through".
Suzumiya Haruhi is about 90% Kyon talking to himself. Surprisingly, he actually makes the viewer want to listen.
Ergo Proxy over-uses it.
Lee ron from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann gives one of these around episode 22, about... gyroscopes. So Yeah.
Glass Fleet features Fauxlosophic Narration from Michel before the opening credits of each episode.
Code Geass does this in the Previously On segments, with musings about Fate, Will, Good, Evil, and how we'll have to keep watching to find out which will triumph.
Bleach would sometimes, albeit rarely, do this. One such involved Renji saying a rather obvious musing of "Compared to letting it fall apart, holding it together is so much more difficult" (said in the dub as "It is always harder to hold it together than to let it fall apart", or something to that effect). Really, genius? Didn't know that. I thought holding it together was easy, while holding it together was the hard one.
- To be fair, it's Renji. What do you expect?
  - It was actually Yumichika, and he, like Izuru, was talking about why Renji should just forget about Rukia after her adoption into the Kuchiki clan.
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). Most of the musings are actually somewhat deep. At least, in This Troper's opinion.

Comic Books

Done to Green Lantern by Tommy Monhagan in Hitman. Kyle Rayner is hoodwinked from all sides and ends up helping Tommy put the smack down on homicidal government agents. He ends waxing Fauxlosophic after the adventure. Before Kyle comes to his senses and arrests Tommy, he sneaks off.
The Punisher comics is riddled with the character's interior monologue on life and death, fate, etc. which while pleasant to read, makes little to no plot points and cements already established character traits. It makes Frank Castle sound like a Warrior Poet when in reality he's Badass Normal.

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. Caught... in the wheels of progress.
- Never run with...scissors?
Criswell's narration in Plan Nine From Outer Space and Night of the Ghouls, both written and directed by Ed Wood. Neither examples are helped by the fact that the dialogue is extremely awkward or the fact that Criswell delivers it very oddly. You can tell he's reading it off of cue cards, likely without any prior rehearsal.
- In Glen or Glenda, Bela Lugosi's addled delivery of obtuse philosophical rants over Stock Footage of buffalo herds is memorable in a way Wood surely did not intend it to be.
The closing shot narration from the cinema release cut of Blade Runner definitely veers into this territory. Then again, Harrison Ford and Ridley Scott made all the narration awkward on purpose in an attempt to convince the producers to cut it.
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.
Almost every single character in The Matrix trilogy did this at length, particularly the Merovingian, Smith and the Architect. Though, really, navel contemplation was the point.
Howard The Duck, though it may have been a failed joke.
Parodied in The Big Lebowski: the narrator is not only Wrong Genre Savvy, but can't keep his fauxlosophy straight and keeps getting sidetracked. At one point he repeats "Sometimes there's a man" a few times before trailing off and stating that he lost his train of thought. He eventually just gives up ("Aw, hell, I done introduced him enough."), and at the very end even lampshades it ("Huh - I'm ramblin' again."). Ironically, the last time he realizes this and gives up is when he's actually on the verge of making a sage, relevant point for once.
Parodied (or possibly played straight... it's hard to tell) 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, described as "a vaguely foreboding series of non sequiturs", it might have been mildly effective delivered by a voice with some weight, gravitas, balls. Unfortunately it's read by Kirk Cameron, who lacks the gravitas to deliver "Happy Birthday" effectively.
- You obviously weren't at my birthday party. Best 36 bucks I ever spent.
Raising Arizona. Done intentionally.
The So Bad Its Horrible B-movie Zardoz begins with this, but there is no way to be profound when Sean Connery is running around in an red thong.
Anatomy of Hell, a cold, sexually-explict, coma-inducing arthouse film by Catherine Breillat. As put by Roger Ebert: "They talk. They speak as only the French can speak, as if it is not enough for a concept to be difficult, it must be impenetrable. No two real people in the history of mankind have ever spoken like this, save perhaps for some of Breillat's friends that even she gets bored by. "Your words are inept reproaches," they say, and "I bless the day I was made immune to you and all your kind."

Literature

How can this possibly be done in literature? Read The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. There is no better way to start a long-winded, pointless series that attempts to be philosophical than with a long-winded, pointless introduction attempting to be philosophical.
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.

Live Action TV

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.
This was basically the entire point of Augustus Hill on the show Oz. Some of the narration matched, but mostly it didn't.
Tends to pop up in the opening video packages for WWE pay-per-view events.
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 The X Files, where it was common either for Mulder to go on at length about how there are more things in heaven and earth etc., or Scully to lecture about how science is the only reliable guide to the truth without which nothing makes sense yada yada.
- This was spoofed on an episode of The Simpsons when Mulder starts one of these in the day and by the time he finishes it has become night and everyone else including Scully has left the area.
Meredith's opening and closing narrations on Greys Anatomy sometimes fall into this rut.
- Ruthlessly mocked in one episode of Scrubs as part of that show's series of Take That insults aimed at other medical series.
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.
Scrubs does the opposite with JD talking about the world and modern life in relation to events that are happening in the episode. This doesn't make it any less predictable or irritating though, especially when he literally does it every episode. Also, JD must have some latent psychic abilities to make connections between his philosophy of the day to things he has no in-character knowledge of, no matter how tenuous the link may be. This was recently lampshaded in an episode, where JD openly admitted that he was taking advice that was given to somebody else and using it for his own solution. When Jordan explained that seemed rather convenient, he would agree "except that he does it nearly every week."
Every episode (so far) of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles begins with Sarah ruminating on some ethical dilemma or other. Whether this actually adds depth or is intended to make intellectual types feel better about watching a show about evil robots is a matter for debate.
- This is in homage to the first two Terminator movies, which had Sarah narrating at the end. These were definitely not fauxlosophical, though.
The Hitchhiker had a few of these, that tried horribly to give the show a feeling of Film Noir.
Early Edition often had this.
The Outer Limits, both original and 90s revival, had the Control Voice give one of these speeches. Say it with me: "Do not attempt to adjust your set..."
Buffy The Vampire Slayer occasionally did this, including one narration by the villain.
- Would that be Angelus in "Passion"? That was really creepy.
- As did Angel.
Gil Grissom often lapses into Fauxlosophic Narration on CSI whenever the team encounters something offbeat, generally on the subject of human nature.
Dead Like Me, seeing how the narration always carries the same message (death is random, seems unfair, but is inevitable).
What's this trope called when it works? 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.
The characters of House do this, not in narration, but in dialogue. Given several characters' overappreciation for metaphors this may be unintentional, and simply a result of characters talking normally about things when their 'normal' happens to be the rest of the world's 'metaphorical and occasionally fauxlosophic-sounding.'
Carrie's Captains Log s in Sex And The City- justified in that she's writing a newspaper column based on the events of her life.
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.
The Hybrids from Battlestar Galactica are arguably guilty of this. They're demonstrated to have a much better understanding of what's going on than the other characters, but are too crazy to let them (or the audience, for that matter) in on it. Thus everything they say is so vague and metaphorical it's hard to tell whether a lot of it actually foreshadowed later events in the series or not.
Bit of a subversion, Criminal Minds Begins and/or ends each episode with one of the characters narrating a quotation, usually philosophical. And surprisingly, they usually DO have something to do with the episode, typically the nature of the killer.
Done intentionally by Lars von Trier at the end of each episode of the original Kingdom series.

Theater

The Mystery Of Irma Vep ends with a melodramatic rambling speech by Lady Enid as she stares off over the blasted heath that ultimately has no purpose except to make fun of Victorian melodrama.

Video Games

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.
- In their defense though, they do at least try to keep it related to interpretations of the force and not just start slinging around random quotes from Hegel or Schopenhauer.
The final fight in Kingdom Hearts II has Xemnas reciting some cheap crap about how "hate and rage are supreme," both before and during the battle.
- Well, it's slightly justified by him being a Nobody who can feel nothing. The only emotions he can even remember or comprehend anymore are hate and aggression. They clearly played with the idea of a character who can "feel" only on intellectual level (or who just fakes emotions), by making his expression constantly change from sad to angry, without really feeling either.
The Super Mario World rom hack Rise to the Challenge is filled with this.
Xenosaga has a generally good-quality narrative, but there are more than a few wince-worthy moments in ~120 hours of series gameplay.

Webcomics

Appears occasionally in Molten Blade. Most of Fred's inner monologues fall into this category.
Parodied by Dr Mc Ninja at the end of every chapter.

Western Animation

The much-maligned third season of Gargoyles had Goliath give one of these at the start of each episode. The season tacked on a subtitle ("The Goliath Chronicles") that was apparently there to convince us that somewhere, Goliath was actually writing down the incredibly generalized drivel he was spouting. Even Keith David's voice couldn't hold the attention of anyone over eight when he was reading that.
The final moments of the 1994 Fantastic Four cartoon feature one of these between the Silver Surfer and Reed Richards, throwing in something about understanding humanity's nobility that didn't have a great deal to do with the plot. The DVD release cuts Reed's response as the Surfer flies off, removing the final shot of the series in doing so. Fortunately, the Liberation Entertainment release is slated to fix this.
Spoofed to hell and back in Xavier Renegade Angel.
Each Episode of Star Wars The Clone Wars opens with a philosophical quote or pseudo-quote that tries to tie it in to the episode. It rarely works and is rather egregious, since this is a series that averts Never Say Die with, well, death.
Spoofed at the end of Futurama episode "Love And Rocket," with Zoidberg's meditation on Valentine's Day:
"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 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. 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..