6 July 2011

As You Don't Know, Bob

Every script needs a backstory. But how do you communicate it to the audience? Especially when it's a story that all the characters already know?

Cinema has wrestled with this problem for years. In the old days, you used to get the excruciating AYKB (As You Know, Bob) conversation in which one character would explain things that the other character knew, with the clear intention of bringing the audience up to speed. Effective, but unrealistic (and particularly egregious when the other character would respond to the speech with "oh, yes, I'd forgotten.") Screenwriters since then have become a bit more sophisticated, and now we've got different techniques such as the lecture, the newsreel, the Watson, and the voice-over (and, rarely, the scene-setting piece to camera, eg Annie Hall).

But none of these examples quite fits the bill, because they're either clumsy and old hat (the voice-over, the newsreel) or because they rely on another character not knowing about the backstory and having to have it explained. So how do you bring the audience up to speed, without resorting to having a character called Basil Exposition?

It's a difficult trick to pull off. Christopher Nolan gets away with having no exposition (or, more accurately, exposition revealed in real time) in Memento, because the lead character has no idea what's happening from one moment to the next. But, again, this isn't the situation we're talking about. The really difficult trick is to kick off with characters who know the backstory, who don't have to find things out as they go along, and who don't have any newcomers in the situation who have to be brought up to speed. There's no obligation within the drama to reveal the backstory. Yet we need to have it in order to appreciate the film. So how can this be done?

One production which seems to me to have done this pretty well is Giorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth (2009). As the film opens, we see three young adults listening to a tape in which a woman's voice gives them definitions of random words. All the definitions are inaccurate, wildly so. We have no idea what the relationship is between the people in the room. We have no idea who the woman is, or why the definitions are so off the mark.As the tape ends, the three adults discuss playing a game in which they hold their fingers under a hot tap for as long as possible. We don't see them play the game, as we cut to a blindfolded young woman in the passenger seat of a car beng driven by a man. They talk; the man isn't seen at first. He seems to be talking pleasantly with her, though, there's no sense of threat. The car stops, apparently in the middle of nowhere, and the man gets out of the car to close a chained barrier. He is quite a bit older than the woman. The car pulls into the driveway of a house and the woman has her blindfold removed. We then cut to one of the young adults (the only male), who is exercising in a spartan bedroom. The older man brings the woman into the room, introduces her and leaves. The young man and the woman have sex - they display no emotion, and she seems to be guiding his actions.

What's so effective about these opening eight minutes or so is that they dump a lot of information on the viewer (as do the other expositional techniques listed above) but make no attempt to organise this information, to indicate what's important and what's not, or to clarify anything. So we're left asking questions. Are the three young adults related to each other? Is the blindfolded woman a prostitute? Who is the man? Why is the house in the middle of nowhere? Why doesn't the young man seem to be enjoying the sex? Why isn't the blindfolded woman allowed to see where the house is? Are the words on the tape important? Is the finger under the tap game important? Why do most of the conversations seem unnatural, both in content and in tone?

We do, of course, find out the answers to these questions but in the first instance we have to make assumptions. We have to fill in the backstory gradually ourselves, instead of having someone on-screen explain it to us. And we have to do it ourselves by conjecture and deduction. In other words, we - the audience - have to do the work; and it's so much more satisfying because it draws us into the drama as semi-active participants instead of passive receptors of the action. The danger is that less patient viewers will switch off early because they don't want to do the work, because they're confused (as Hitchcock says, "a confused audience is not emoting"). It can be argued that Lanthimos overcomes this by throwing in an early sex scene (although, in the context of the drama, it's not gratuitous). But what would be really interesting would be to see an example of a comedy or less leisurely-paced drama which attempts the same technique - raising questions about the backstory and making the audience answer them.

Stephen Coltrane

A blog about films and film-making