Why The Audience Likes To Know Stuff Characters Don’t

I often dip into a book while my PC boots up. It’s one of those rituals writers have. To this end I always have three or four tomes lying around on my desk. The other day I was browsing through Directing The Story, by Francis Glebas, when I happened on his chapter on Dramatic Irony.

Glebas starts the chapter by reminding the reader that it makes a big difference whether the audience or the character receives information first, and that it’s up to the filmmaker to determine this. A classic example is the intercut between people in an elevator and a fraying elevator cable. They’re oblivious, but you, the audience are not. It doesn’t much matter what’s going on inside the elevator, the suspense is there because of what these people don’t know.

All of which triggered an instant rewrite in my head of a sequence in a spec script I’m working on.

The situation, in brief: It’s the summer of 1945, we’re in Holland, the second world war has just ended, and a young Jewish boy who has been in hiding on an isolated farm, is about to be reunited with his mother, who has returned from the hell of the concentration camps.

Initially I had the foster parents, the couple who had been hiding the boy, preparing him for the reunion with his mother, to whom we cut away as she makes her way towards the farm. Then, after having my brain jolted by the above-mentioned read, I wondered: Wouldn’t it be more dramatic if the boy doesn’t know his mother is on her way to pick him up, but we, the audience, do?

So I rewrote the sequence in order to explore this possibility, and lo and behold, it now has much more tension and suspense. And the reason is simple, as Glebas puts it:

The audience can be ahead of what the characters know, creating tension from watching characters do something that may not be the right choice for them.

In this case the foster parents, convinced that the boy’s biological parents have both been killed, are about to go ahead with their plan to have him baptized and then formally adopt him. The fact that this isn’t the right choice for the boy is made all the more dramatic by the fact that we intercut with scenes of the mother trying to locate her son’s whereabouts and then physically approaching the farm.

It’s because the human brain is constantly working out what to expect on the basis of previous experience, that dramatic irony works so well. You, the audience, can’t help but feel for the character who is working on the wrong hypothesis, as it were. If only they knew what you know, then they would do the right thing!

If I’d left the sequence as it was, it would have been much flatter and less suspenseful. And if I hadn’t browsed Glebas’s book I wouldn’t have thought to make this change. And if I didn’t have this ritual of dipping into books while my PC boots up, I wouldn’t have browsed Glebas. Which is all rather Zen, actually, when you come to think of it…

So what information can you take away from one of your characters to make a sequence more exciting to watch?

Great Expectations

Last night I sat up late, impatiently waiting for extended coverage of the US Masters golf to end (who watches that stuff anyway!?). At last, about 45 minutes later than scheduled, the final episode of Damages began.

As I mentioned in a previous posting (The Power of Withholding Information) the masterfully created mystery and tension had me hooked right from the get-go and I could hardly wait to see the final pieces of the puzzle fall into place!

Which they did, but with a whimper rather than a bang as far as I’m concerned.

The build-up was tremendous. The clever use of flash-forwards kept teasing and wrong-footing me. It created the expectation of some kind of incredibly unorthodox denouement.

Which is exactly why, as the final details were laid out like someone revealing their hand after a nail-bitingly tense game of cards, I couldn’t help feeling they’d been bluffing. That’s it? That’s all there is to it!?

The principle the series used is simple: Cut the story and serve it up in such an order that it’s never obvious who’s really responsible for what until the very last moment. But for this kind of storytelling to be more than a fig leaf for an otherwise mediocre plot, the final twist needs to be hugely powerful and memorable. Which it wasn’t. Not for me, anyway.

Contrast this to a movie I saw recently, The Illusionist, written and directed by Neil Burger. A very simple story in terms of plot, but told in such a way that the very last sequence completely reverses almost every assumption you’ve been led to make throughout the film!

You are literally treated to a montage of all the pieces falling into place in the mind of the detective. Suddenly it all makes sense and in retrospect the entire story acquires a different value.

For me the difference between Damages and The Illusionist is like the difference between a slick and hugely expensive commercial for a run-of-the-mill product, and a modest recommendation for something surprisingly valuable.

The lesson for screenwriters? Never create expectations you can’t deliver on, big-time.