This weekâs rebroadcast looks at priming the audienceâs expectations, featuring a blog post from 2014 and a snippet of John and Craigâs conversation from Scriptnotes.
The accidental set-up
Talking with writers recently, I pointed out that readers (and ultimately the audience) are always on the lookout for details that answer the question, âWhere is this going?â
Often, they literally want to know, âWhere is the character headed?â
So any time you refer to a new place â be it âthe supermarket,â âschool,â or âBostonâ â you create a natural expectation that we will visit that place at some point in the story.
Often you mean to set it up: itâs The Emerald City. Itâs Wally World. Itâs the place where the resolution will happen.
But itâs altogether possible to set up places that you have no intention of visiting. Your hero might say something about how they hear good things about Marfa, Texas. Itâs not part of his journey, and not part of this story. Theyâre just saying it because theyâre the kind of character who would say something about Marfa.
But once youâve put it on the page, itâs out there as a goal. Youâve accidentally punched a location into Chekhovâs GPS.
I often see this when characters talk vividly about something in their past. The more details you give about a place, the more important we think it is. That raises our expectation higher and higher that weâll see it in the story.
A final thing to keep in mind about places: the audience often use them as structural signposts. âWell, theyâre trying to get to Boston, and they finally did, so the story must be just about over.â That can often help you â weâve reached the rendez-vous spot â but it can be trouble if youâre hitting that spot an hour into a two-hour story.
Similarly, the audience keeps track of the order of locations. If a character says, âWeâll get pizza at Romoâs and then go to grandmaâs house,â we expect to see Romoâs pizza place, or at least some evidence that pizza happened. In a cut, itâs often easy to lose the pizza scene. But if you do, try to get rid of any mention of the pizza so thereâs no dangling expectation for a location weâll never visit.
Intentional set-ups
Hanging a lantern is when you call out that youâre doing something in the film.
And itâs a really important skill. It can be done awkwardly and haphazardly, but it can be useful in saying âThis thing Iâm doing, you see that Iâm doing it and I acknowledge that you see that Iâm doing it, but this becomes really important.â Youâre shining that spotlight on something or acknowledging that you are doing something that is different than expectation and done carefully, done with the right finesse it can be a useful way to signal to the audience that you get whatâs happening here and thatâs OK.
You see that being done a lot in the Iron Man movies where you can have Tony Stark acknowledge the improbability of whatâs happening, and yet it just rolls off him because he has the charisma to sell the idea.
You just have to be careful to not overdo it. Because what happens is the movie will start to push towards a general irony zone. Now, you may want to be in irony zone. For instance, Deadpool is just â thatâs a big irony machine. So itâs perfectly fine to do that constantly in Deadpool because people want that from that movie. They donât want it in another kind of movie that takes itself seriously.
But if you are in that middle zone, and you do the lampshade or the lantern thing one too many times, the movie starts to feel a little cheaty. Because hereâs the thing: everybody knows itâs cheating. You get away with it once or twice because youâre saying âWe know weâre cheating, so donât be insulted.â But the more you do it, the chintzier it all starts to feel.
Like with coincidences. You get one coincidence, maybe two coincidences in a film. More than that and the audience stops believing in the movie itself.
John: Sometimes itâs helpful to just have a character say it. If you need to rule something out, sometimes it can be useful for a character to acknowledge that itâs a possibility and then explain why that cannot happen. Or, you can physically set up your world in a way that that option is taken off the table. So youâve taken away that as a possibility for the character to consider. Youâve burned that bridge. Youâve forever sealed that door. Thereâs no way to go back to that thing.
Thatâs a real advantage to the way that our movies do work on rails. Very carefully disguised rails, but you can move the characters through to a place but thereâs no way to get back to that option that seemed so useful before.
And that can be really useful dramatically, too, because the journey of a character should have things get more and more desperate. So if you take away that simple solution to the problem that is a terrific thing.
Craig: And this is something that I think good screenwriters spend a lot of time on. Because ideally you never want anyone to stop and go, âOh, I see, thereâs a lot of explanation for why they canât do this or that, which would make the movie not work anymore.â Youâre always looking for those elegant solutions that donât seem like solutions at all. The problem isnât a problem because this is just clearly true and therefore this must also be true, and so on and so forth. It all feels seamless.
Itâs more important in comedy, because comedy relies on a certain sort of effortlessness. If anyone ever catches a whiff that you are changing the rules of the world so that you can do a joke, the joke just isnât as funny. In dramas, I think people get away with it a little bit more. Again, this is why only comedies should get awards.
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đŁ Have ideas for future topics (or just want to say hello)? Reach out to Chris via email at inneresting@johnaugust.com, Twitter @ccsont, or Mastodon @ccsont@mastodon.art