How Bad Dialogue Breaks the Fourth Wall in 'Venom'

In the 2018 blockbuster comic book movie, Venom, Tom Hardy portrays reporter Eddie Brock. In the course of investigating a story about a corrupt and morally compromised corporation, owned and operated by Riz Ahmed, Eddie is exposed to a chemical which happens to be an alien being. This alien being, becomes like a venom that infects Eddie and forms a symbiotic bond with his body.

Eddie remains Eddie but he is also the host of Venom which can take over his being and emerge as a large, vascular, muscular, humanoid figure with a snake-like tongue, spider-man-esque eyes, and superhuman strength and agility. The central conflict of Eddie and Venom is that Eddie is a good person who wants to do good in the world. Venom desires to eat people, pretty much anyone. Eddie learning to co-exist with and exert influence over Venom to do good is the arc of the story.

But, as the title indicates, we aren’t here to discuss Venom, per se. Rather, this article is about dialogue, specifically bad dialogue. In fact, we are going to talk in very specific ways about one particularly bad piece of dialogue. It’s movie dialogue so bad that it breaks the fourth wall between the action on screen and the viewer. It’s dialogue so atrocious that we can’t maintain our connection with the movie. We hear what is said and our visceral reaction is to recoil.

The spell of the movie is broken. The magic of immersing ourselves in the world that the movie is creating is shattered and our experience of the movie is irreversibly unmade. Yes, my friends, I’ve finally muscled up my fortitude and I am ready to examine the piece of dialogue that became the central point of not one, but two ad campaigns, one promoting Venom in theaters and the other touting Venom’s arrival on the cable subscription channel Starz.

Let’s talk about “a turd in the wind.”

Let’s set the scene. We’ve reached the end of Venom, a not great but, for me, passable bit of superhero cinema. Our protagonist, Eddie Brock, has come to terms with the symbiotic alien, Venom, and the two share an uneasy but stable alliance inside Eddie’s body. Eddie attends a neighborhood convenience store where he carries on a conversation with Venom while retrieving groceries.

Into the scene walks a villain, a thief, a robber. Actor Sam Medina portrays a character who is credited in Venom, according to IMDB, as ‘Shakedown Thug.’ Shakedown Thug has a gun and is robbing the neighborhood store. After a brief external dialogue with Venom, Eddie allows the alien being to emerge and confront Shakedown Thug in order to prevent the robbery. The sight of Venom is enough to make Shakedown Thug regret his life of crime but Venom isn’t just here to intimidate.

Here, Venom engages Shakedown Thug in a brief and forceful conversation. Venom sets out to intimidate Shakedown Thug by stating that first he will rip off his arms and then his legs and then eat his face. Venom then vividly describes Shakedown Thug’s future status as this armless, legless, faceless, thing, rolling down the street, ‘like a turd in the wind.’ All this leads up to the movie tagline Eddie and Venom saying ‘We are Venom,’ before Venom eats Shakedown Thug.

That line, that gross, incongruous line. The word ‘turd’ is bad enough, but the employment of the term within the intended imagery, a turd in the wind, doesn’t hit the ear or the imagination very well. I am going to be overly pedantic here but, turds don’t typically blow in the wind. Generally speaking they have weight and mass that prevents fecal matter from being a flying object, outside of a very heavy wind.

I hate myself for writing that as much as you hated reading it. That said, that’s a strong indication of why that line is so awful, so ear-splittingly unpleasant that it shatters the movie. It’s not helped by being followed by the money-grubbing movie tagline but it really can’t get much worse than it already was before the tagline rendered it a borderline parody of the movie it inhabits. Venom, as a movie, is not unlike a turd in the wind.

What could have possibly possessed one of the screenwriters behind Venom to write this piece of astonishingly awful dialogue? What was the thought process for director Ruben Fleischer to film his character saying this line? And what must it have been like for an actor of the dignity and talent of Tom Hardy, an actor so talented that Venom is almost a good movie just by his sheer force of personality, to have to deliver this line of dialogue?

This series of words are so astonishingly putrid that they force you toward such thoughts: what was anyone behind this thinking. It sends you to that thought immediately, as you are watching the movie. You have to mentally and emotionally remove yourself from the experience of the movie to ponder the sheer magnitude of stupidity, hubris and bad taste that went into every aspect of the creation of this 2 second piece of dialogue.

Venom aimed to be remembered as a hit blockbuster that spawned a franchise that made billions of dollars for the people who created it. The goal was to create a cool anti-hero comic book movie that could be drawn upon as the basis for an entire cinematic universe within an already existing cinematic universe, that of Spider-Man, where Venom exists tangentially to Tom Holland’s heroic teenage crime fighter.

Instead, the lasting legacy of Venom for many is, myself obviously included, is ‘A turd in the wind.’