which movie or show had this character?

June 13, 2022 5:21 PM

A character keeps saying out loud what he's doing in a step-by-step way.

I'm remembering this character in a show, perhaps a movie, who keeps saying what he's doing. No one else is in the room. He says things like, "going to the kitchen," "putting on my shirt," "walking over to the couch." These guesses could be totally wrong, but the gist was that he seems to be repeating these self-conversations, whatever he is doing.
Good luck everyone!
Sorry I can't be more helpful.

posted by sugarbx19 to Media & Arts (8 answers total)

In the show Peep Show, you'd hear characters' internal monologues constantly, as you'd see a first-person view of what they were doing. The character Mark (played by David Mitchell) especially would do this sort of thing in his own internal monologue, stuff like "I'm going to the kitchen and making myself toast, just like a normal person would" as you see him going into the kitchen and making toast.
posted by zsazsa at 5:26 PM on June 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

Slightly different, the main character's actions are being narrated/ordained by the author, in Stranger Than Fiction.
posted by happy_cat at 5:34 PM on June 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Samuel Jackson's character does this in The Long Kiss Goodnight.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 5:35 PM on June 13, 2022 [7 favorites]

In The Lookout, Joseph Gordon Levitt plays a man after a serious accident, who relies writing everything down in a notebook and then reading, or narrating it outloud, to remind himself about his daily routine (and then how to solve the central problem of the movie).
posted by pjenks at 5:44 PM on June 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

The only thing that comes to mind is the “I am
Moving my left leg, I am moving my right leg” scene from The Beatles’ movie Help!, but that scene is outside and involves another person.
posted by knownassociate at 6:05 PM on June 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

The main character in the kids movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs does this, and IIRC he even says "narrating what I'm doing" at one point in the sequence.
posted by peanut_mcgillicuty at 6:22 PM on June 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

Possibly the Baby Steps scene from What About Bob? - starts around 2:00 of that video.
posted by urbanlenny at 6:34 PM on June 13, 2022 [6 favorites]

Response by poster: Exactly correct, ActingTheGoat, in spite of me incorrectly saying he was alone in a room. The da dum da da dum clenched it! Love that movie!
Thanks to everyone!
posted by sugarbx19 at 12:06 AM on June 14, 2022 [1 favorite]