Your Nose Is a Small Target, So Stop Aiming For It!
Last night, I watched the first couple episodes of Island at War, a BBC miniseries from a couple years ago. (Yes, apparently it’s British Week in the Screenplay Science laboratory.) Overall, it’s proving to be a nicely executed but not particularly exceptional show about the invasion of the British Channel Islands by Nazi Germany in WWII, but one scene in the first episode really popped. Cassie Mahy (played by Saskia Reeves) has just lost her husband, an amiable civilian, to enemy fire, and rather than exhibit the standard, obvious signs of grief — tears, weeping, proclamations that she can’t go on without him, etc. — she gets angry. The fact that this is entirely in character (partly for reasons that aren’t revealed until the second episode) is a bonus, but the real point is that her bitter, furious tirade at her dead husband for going out on the pier and getting shot make us feel her grief far more viscerally and immediately than any mere crying jag ever could. As executed, the scene is tremendously powerful. If it were written “on the nose” (in industry term for dialogue in which characters say exactly what they’re feeling, e.g. “I miss my husband terribly”) it would’ve been mediocre at best.
OTN writing is a deadly mistake that’s unfortunately very commonly made by new screenwriters… and by a surprising number of more experienced ones, too. Part of the problem, I think, is that while teachers and screenwriting books almost all warn against the practice, they never seem to give a very good explanation of why it’s so bad. Oh, they’ll say things like “it has no subtext,” but that’s not really helpful to someone trying to acquire an emotional understanding of what works and what doesn’t work.
The real reason OTN writing is a disaster is actually very simple: it provides no conflict, so it just lies there dead on the page or the screen. Think about it. In Island at War, Cassie Mahy is trying to fight the anguish and desolation which threaten to overwhelm her. We already know she’s grief-stricken, because we saw that she loved her husband. A scene in which she merely expressed her grief wouldn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, and it wouldn’t contain any conflict, either. Conflict, though, both internal and external, is literally what stories are made of. And conflict provides tension, because we want to see how it resolves and whether the characters get what they want or not. Without conflict, you don’t even really have a story at all. Subtext is important not only because it adds layers of meaning to your story, but because it adds conflict — between what a character is saying and what he or she really means, between characters who may not fully understand each other, inside a character who is trying to fight some sort of feeling or drive, and so on.
And yes, the infamous rat (which has now shown up in FX’s otherwise somewhat promising new show Damages!) is quintessential on-the-nose writing.
Well, it’s been a very long day, so I’m off to watch disc one of the Fanny Trilogy. Maybe it’ll spawn a new blog entry, but even if it doesn’t, I’m finally going to get out of the office and see some new releases this weekend, so come hell or high water, I’ll start talking about current movies again within the next few days. Hope you all have a great night.
Tags: Inner Conflict, Island at War, On the Nose, Rat, Subtext, TV