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February’s
Buzz:
WHEN TO LET YOUR AUDIENCE IN ON THE SECRET
(Copyright 2003) By
Kathryn
McCullough Predictability is something every writer wants to avoid. However, this doesn’t mean that every beat of your script needs to be a surprise. There are times when letting your audience in on the secret will actually improve your story.
Alfred Hitchcock once offered this description to demonstrate the difference between surprise and suspense: Two people sit at a café table, unaware that there is a bomb ticking beneath it. If the audience doesn’t know about the bomb = surprise. If the audience does know = suspense.
Though surprises provide shock value, suspense carries much more dramatic weight. For instance, in CHARADE, the audience is shown early on that Cary Grant’s character is in cahoots with the three villains who want the fortune hidden by Audrey Hepburn’s late husband. By letting us in on this information, the filmmakers create several layers of tension: 1) we wonder when Hepburn’s character will find out the truth; 2) we worry for her safety; and 3) we wonder what Grant’s true agenda is.
In THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, neither Laurence Harvey’s character, nor any of the people closest to him (with one notable exception), is aware that Harvey has been brainwashed into becoming an assassin. The audience knows practically from the start, however, and this makes every beat of the movie fraught with tension, as we wait for disaster to strike.
Of course, there is no reason why the information the writer presents to the audience needs to be true. Audiences love to be tricked, if the trick is handled cleverly. One of the most well-known instances of this is in THE USUAL SUSPECTS, in which the filmmakers shift suspicion from one character to the next, only to have any assumptions the audience has made shattered by the final revelation of the movie. Similarly, in murder mysteries like AND THEN THERE WERE NONE and THE LAST OF SHEILA, the mostly likely suspects are systematically killed off, until the audience is sure they know whodunit -- or do they?
A more subtle form of early revelation is foreshadowing. While this technique does not clearly reveal information, it helps prepare your audience subconsciously for later events. In THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, the movie opens with William Holden and a fellow prisoner burying the last of the POWs whom they had served time with at their camp in the Pacific. This graveyard is shown throughout the movie, often in the background of scenes, subtly hinting at the tragedy that is to come.
Plots in which every dramatic beat is a shock or surprise are not involving, they’re contrived. It is a fine line between telling an audience too little or telling them too much, but it is worth analyzing your script in detail in order to keep as close to that line as possible. It can mean the difference between a simplistic, cartoony plot and a rich, sophisticated, dramatic story.
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