Dinner Guests Compare Medications, Explained：flatten someone out

What's really going on

The dinner party is where the film lets its lonely characters find each other by accident. The house tour is a status display, but the real connection happens around the table, and it happens through illness. Pat and Tiffany trade medication names like other people trade vacation stories, and the details are pointed: the drugs that made them foggy, the ones that flattened them out. The blunt verdict, 'It flattens you out. I mean, you are done,' is both funny and sad, because these two understand each other better than the healthy people around them. The scene also shows Pat's problem clearly: he cannot stop talking about Nikki, cannot stop telling the truth about other people, and so he wounds Tiffany — 'You scare people' — without meaning to. What looks like a ruined dinner is actually the beginning of the film's central relationship.

Theme

このチャプターで学べること

• Comparing medications bonds two people who barely know each other.
• Tiffany's blunt request puts the whole dinner on edge.
• Veronica's politeness cracks the moment she feels judged.
• Pat tells a history fact like small talk, not showing off.

発音のポイント

• have an iPod — Link have an so it sounds like one word before iPod.
• good at it — Good at it is spoken fast, the consonants almost melting together.
• flattens you out — Flattens you links into a single blur, almost flatten-chu.
• walk me home — The k in walk often drops before me in fast speech.