Three Flavours of Subtext
Invite your audience to work with you to add layers of meaning to your story through three kinds of subtext.
When you are telling a story, you are simultaneously managing two relationships. The first relationship is between the story and the audience. The second is the direct relationship between the storyteller/s and the audience.
Both relationships can create subtext.
The Story <=> Audience relationship creates INSIGHT, by prompting the audience to infer what’s happening under the surface of the story.
The Storyteller <=> Audience relationship creates COMMENT by inviting the audience make connections and inferences that are not visible to the characters.
Both are versions of SUBTEXT. Subtext is powerful because the audience believes that they discovered it for themselves. And you sneakily invited them to discover it, by what you left out or withheld from the story. Or in some cases, by what you added to the way you told the story.
There is also a third kind of subtext: NARRATIVE INSIGHT. This is not about uncovering an existing psychology, but using structure to create the illusion of one.
All are partially created by various members of the cast and crew.
All are co-created with the audience.
But always, the writer plays a crucial role.
Three Flavours of SUBTEXT: Insight, Comment and Narrative Insight.
INSIGHT is hidden psychological truths under the surface of the story. It is within the world of the story, and comes in two flavours: EMPATHY and PROJECTION.
Empathy asks us to recognise ourselves in the character; projection asks us to fill out what’s hidden within the character with our own feelings and thoughts.
If it’s visible to the characters in the story, it’s INSIGHT.
COMMENT is the Authorial Voice speaking directly to the audience, using the story as a construction to convey meanings that are not visible to the characters. It uses tools such as allegory and metaphor in the story; juxtaposition in the frame or the cut; camera movement and lenses; the ‘look’ – grading and production design; music; and so on.
NARRATIVE INSIGHT is the illusion of inner life and psychology created by the combination of projection and cinematic language. It is usually based on withheld performance, where the characters thoughts and emotions are deliberately hidden, and the story is told through the flow of images and uninflected behaviour.
INSIGHT
INSIGHT is what lies hidden beneath the surface of the story. The audience accesses in it exactly the same way as the characters in the story, and share the same tools for uncovering it.
It hinges on our shared humanity, and our ability to understand some things about each other, but not others.
We read bodies, not minds.
We – both the audience and the characters – can only see the visible clues and hear the audible ones. We can’t know what thoughts lie behind those clues, and are forced to infer them.
Which forces us all to deduce the hidden thoughts and feelings of the characters, as well as the implicit negotiations and transactions between them purely from what we see and hear.
At the climax of Casablanca (1942), Vichy Chief of Police Captain Renault (Claude Rains) witnesses Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) shoot his boss, German Major Strasser, dead. Renault, up till now a functionary who has always followed the path of least resistance, must make a choice. Arrest Rick, and hand him over the Germans to be shot, or make a stand and join Rick in actively opposing the Germans.
We understand Renault’s dilemma. Rick understands Renault’s dilemma. And Renault himself certainly understands his dilemma.
So, when his men arrive, and Renault orders them to ‘..round up the usual suspects,’ we all understand the subtext. As Rick replies, ‘Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’
Everybody in the scene understands the subtext. Even Strasser would understand the subtext – if he weren’t dead.
This kind of subtext gives us an INSIGHT into what is happening within the story.
The people inside the story can see it and understand it, even though it’s not explicit. And so do we, sitting in the cinema.
COMMENT
COMMENT is about the MEANING of the story and is invisible to the characters. They don’t know it exists. It’s as if the filmmakers were standing at the side of the screen, whispering to the audience, commenting on what’s happening on screen.
Humphrey Bogart knows that the character he is playing in Casablanca represents the isolationist United States. Idealist, strong, principled, but made cynical and disconnected by his experiences of the First World War. And Claude Rains knows he represents Vichy France, torn between pragmatic compliance with a dominating conqueror and precious long-held ideals.
But neither Rick nor Captain Renault, the characters they are playing, are aware of those metaphoric parallels. And neither is aware that they are living in a place whose name means “The White House,” where the man who will actually decide whether the USA will join the war lives.
Unlike Bogart and Rains, who know what they are making and why, Rick and Renault are people caught in a situation and trying to make the best of it.
COMMENT is the conversation between the filmmakers and the audience. Perhaps even between the film itself and its audience.
But you don’t need to notice the COMMENT to enjoy the story. After all, unlike INSIGHT, which you need to understand before you can understand the story, COMMENT should be discoverable, not required. If the audience must perceive it for the story to work, you’ve crossed over into preaching.
On the other hand, because you don’t need to be aware of the COMMENT to enjoy the story, if the audience does see the deeper meaning, they see it as something they discovered, rather than something they were told. Which makes them more open to agreeing with it.
All in all, a better strategy if you want to persuade your audience.
COMMENT examples
THE GODFATHER (Coppola, 1972)
Using juxtaposition for comment, cross-cutting between the baptism of Michael’s nephew with Michael as the literal godfather, and the sequence of murders and assassinations that cement Michael’s role as the new Godfather of the Corleone clan. Particularly, Michael’s oath to “Renounce the devil and all his works” set against the brutal assassinations he has ordered.
GET OUT (Peele, 2017)
Casting. Alison Williams (America’s sweetheart) and Bradley Whitford (Josh Lyman in The West Wing – America’s Dad) as the untrustworthy antagonists works in two ways. First, it hides the twist in the story because we inherently trust these actors to be playing trustworthy characters. Then, after the twist, it acts as a comment on the hypocrisy of comfortable white liberalism.
THE CONFORMIST (Bertolucci, 1970)
Architecture and costumes as the face of fascism – beauty and aesthetics as the replacements for morality.
NARRATIVE INSIGHT
NARRATIVE INSIGHT uses cinematic language and withheld performance to create the illusion of an inner life. And then break it and remake it. Again and again.
A woman stands outside a kindergarten, watching the children play. The bell rings. They go inside. She leaves.
She stands in front of a screen, confidently delivering a complex PowerPoint presentation to a company board. All men. Interrupted by a knock on the door. It’s the CEO’s secretary, pointing at her watch.
The CEO follows his secretary out into the main open-plan work area. The rest of the board follows, leaving our woman alone.
A round of applause catches her attention. She walks to the door of the boardroom. In the distance, a farewell party for a heavily pregnant woman. The CEO claps his hands for attention.
Pages flip in a folder of potential sperm donors.
By supplying a narrative without an explicit psychological explanation, the story triggers the audience to supply their own personal psychological links through a process called Theory of Mind.
Projecting into the combination of situation and behaviour, ‘If that’s what just happened, and that’s how she responded, then she must be thinking and feeling…’
You are getting the audience to gradually build and refine their picture of your character through action without explanation.
The Writer’s Contribution
Every creative on a film set has the opportunity to add to the subtext – but the script provides the framework on which all the other subtext is built, and the framework that makes all those different contributions coherent.
The foundations of INSIGHT flow directly from the writer’s understanding of the characters. In particular, understanding them well enough to write their surface words and actions, and at the same time imply what lies under that surface.
The writer keeps the underlying psychology coherent and discoverable, but also hidden: either through the structure of the storytelling, or through dialogue that conceals as well as reveals.
NARRATIVE INSIGHT comes from the way crucial information is withheld and revealed in the flow of the script. This structural work is the most undervalued and overlooked tool in the writer’s toolbox, both by the development process and often by writers themselves.
Structural shape is much more important than almost any piece of dialogue in the script.
The writer’s contribution to COMMENT chiefly comes from Metaphor and Allegory, and overtly or covertly referencing other existing works the audience will know. The rest is added later by the other creatives on the crew.
The road hasn’t ended. Yet.
A brief historical aside.
Stories, and public performances of stories, have been containers for meaning and purveyors of meaning across all human society, and in all millennia.
From the Greeks to the Middle Ages, what I would call COMMENT was delivered by the CHORUS, or some character who functioned as the Chorus (often the fool or jester), who acted as the all-knowing, all-seeing voice of the playwright. And who was definitely telling you what the story meant.
We live in a post-Freudian world, where writing is suffused with psychology. And not just what we might call literature. Every magazine puff piece and every ‘know your love-type’ quiz reeks of pop-psychology.
It’s easy for us to forget that this hasn’t always been true. Even Shakespeare, the first great psychological dramatist, wasn’t thinking in terms of what we would call psychological characteristics when he built his stories.
It shows the depths of his skill that we can read multiple layers of psychological subtext in his plays, when we would struggle to do so in most of his contemporaries’ work.
Over time, as drama moved increasingly towards psychological realism, particulary under the influence of the novel, with its ubiquitous inner monologue, writers found ways to incorporate what was considered the higher meaning into the drama’s warp and weft.
At first, this was done through metaphor and allegory – encouraging the audience to see parallels between the story and events in the world around them.
As drama moved from stage to screen, cinema added many more ways to add layers of meaning to the story.
I fully expect it will continue to add them.
