Way back at the beginning of Chapter Two we are told that Hendricks "had served in Vietnam as a radio man, and [...] was fond of military terminology." So it's no surprise that in Chapter Ten he insists on correct voice procedure when using a walkie-talkie to communicate with Brody. ("Just procedure, Chief. Keeps things clear. Over and out.").
In fact, you don't have to have done any trigger time to know the lingo. Come In, Loud and Clear, Roger, Wilco, Copy That, Say Again, Over and Out are all common currency thanks to their use in countless war movies. There's something distinctly atmospheric about the crackle of a walkie-talkie and the background chatter of official communications. It serves as a background soundscape during the cardboard fin sequence in the film, and Spielberg himself provides the voice of the Amity Point Life Station coastguard who calls the Orca at the first sighting of the shark. The director would go on to use air traffic control communications to brilliant effect ('Do you want to report a UFO? Over.') in an early scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and in the same year George Lucas would add frantic radio exchanges ( 'Cut the chatter, Red 2. Accelerate to attack speed.') to amp up the excitement of the space dogfights of Star Wars.
The two-way radio can also be a means of highlighting the distances between people as they try to communicate. No one knew this better than Stanley Kubrick, whose movies are full of strangely disjointed exchanges - some face to face, others via radio waves. In The Shining a radio provides the only link between the snowbound Torrances and the outside world. When Wendy Torrance speaks to a state trooper, she - like Hendricks - uses the correct voice procedure, but mixes it with a folksy idiom more suitable for a neighbourly chat over a picket fence ('Boy, this storm is really something, isn't it? Over.'). It's a typically subtle moment of semiotics that helps to illustrate just how isolated the character is. Kubrick's epic horror film was released in 1980, and in that same year another movie - also destined to build an enormous cult following - gave us a long overdue spoof, which has become the radio voice procedure equivalent of baseball's Who's On First?
In the frantic moments as the shark closes in on young Jim Prescott, both Brody and Hooper abandon their walkie-talkies, and resort to a more primitive means of communicating. Running and screaming.
