Creating the Illusion of Insight
How to write a script that creates the illusion of an inner life through cinematic language and neutral performance.
Audiences create subtext when the author strategically leave out parts of the story, and the audience completes the story by supplying those parts. Subtext is a collaboration between the audience and the story, or the audience and the storytellers.
In other posts, I’ve discussed Subtext as Comment or Insight, with Insight broken down further into Empathy and Projection.
In this post, I want to discuss another tool that also invites the audience to create subtext by combining Projection, cinematic language, and withheld performances to imply a character’s inner life.
I call this tool Narrative Insight. It’s the illusion of inner life created by subjectivity, framing, juxtaposition, and sound, but with neutral uninflected performances.
The key difference between Projection and Narrative Insight is that Projection happens in the moment, while Narrative Insight is retrospective: instead of supplying what the character is feeling and thinking right now, as we do in Projection, we supply what they must have been thinking and feeling in the past.
Projection responds to ‘What is he thinking and feeling?’, while Narrative Insight responds to “Given where we are now, what must he have been thinking and feeling to end up here?”
Here’s an example – made slightly obvious for clarity.
Although many parts of Narrative Insight are achieved in the shoot (framing, height and lens selection, camera movement) and in post-production (subtle shifts in sound perspective and tone, colour grading, music cues), the script provides the framework that enables all those aspects to work, and I’ve focused on that.
However, for clarity, I have broken the story down shot by shot, and used shot descriptions like POV, which you wouldn’t normally do in a script.
SHOT 1: CU phone screen. A map, a flashing dot, an arrow approaching it.
SHOT 2: A sunny city street. A man hurries along, looking at his phone and dodging the pedestrians coming the other way.
He comes to a halt outside the enormous glass windows of an upmarket gym.
SHOT 3 (POV): Lycra-clad, toned bodies in a spin class.
SHOT 4: CU. He looks down at his phone screen, looks up at the window of the gym. Cups his eyes to see better.
SHOT 5 (POV): At the back of the gym, behind the stationary bikes and their dedicated riders, a woman chats with a muscle-bound instructor.
He says something. She laughs.
SHOT 6: CU. The man stares. The camera moves in subtly.
SHOT 7 (POV): The muscle-bound instructor puts his hand on the woman’s shoulder. Tilts his head towards a door at the back of the gym. The woman takes his hand, leads him to the door, and through it.
SHOT 8: He bangs on the glass, trying to catch her attention.
SHOT 9 (POV): They go through the door. It closes. The spin class instructor turns and angrily gestures for him to move on.
SHOT 10: Hands turn on taps in a bathroom, cup the water, and bring it to the man’s face. He stares at himself in the mirror.
SHOT 11: A suitcase lands on a double bed and is flipped open.
SHOT 12: A drawer opens, socks and underpants are gathered up and taken.
SHOT 13: A wardrobe opens. An armful of shirts taken from hangers.
SHOT 14: The man opens the front door of a suburban house. Puts the closed suitcase down. Leaving the front door open, he goes back into the house, emerging again a few seconds later. He closes the front door, locks it, and goes to an open window. Throws his keys through the window, picks up the suitcase and exits.
Camera tracks towards the window. A car door slams, the engine starts up, the car drives off.
Flames emerge from the open window.
This whole time we’ve been inside his subjectivity, and have supplied his feelings and his thoughts.
The only ‘acting’ required by the actor playing the central character is stillness, because the less the actor shows the better – it allows us to Project our own feelings into the situation. Especially if the lighting and music give us little, subtle nudges. He simply needs to do whatever the character is doing. There is no meaningful dialogue.
The actor doesn’t even need to be there for shots TWO, FOUR and SIX, which could be shot in a totally different location on a totally different day.
But we cannot help supplying his inner thoughts and feelings, because of the way our instinct for narrative responds to the way the shots are structured. Whether we like it or not, we have chosen to follow one person’s story, and have inadvertently and involuntarily identified with him, by supplying his hidden thoughts and feelings to the narrative.
We can see how powerful this technique is if we now suddenly change whose story we are telling using exactly the same technique.
DISSOLVE FROM FLAMES ENGULFING THE HOUSE TO
SHOT 15: CU flames in a brazier. Over which chestnuts are being roasted. The vendor scoops up some chestnuts, pours them into a paper cone, exchanges them for a handful of cash with a man in winter clothes, scarf and a beard.
‘Merci!’
‘Merci – Joyeux Noël!’
SHOT 16: WIDE SHOT FROM A DISTANCE, the man walks through a noisy crowd of revellers. It’s snowing. The houses and lampposts are covered with Christmas decorations. Any language we see is French. The camera begins to move, following the man. Other people walk between the camera and the man.
He comes to an open supermarket, enters into the brightness.
SHOT 17: NEUTRAL SHOT – NON-POV. Inside the brightly lit supermarket, we can now see clearly that, despite the beard and the different clothes, this is the man who burnt down his home.
He takes milk and butter from the cool shelves and adds them to a cart laden with groceries.
SHOT 18: WIDE SHOT from across street, framed by a glass phone booth. The man exits the supermarket, carrying three bags of groceries, and still trying to eat his roast chestnuts.
SHOT 19: The outline of a woman standing in the shadows behind the glass phone box, watching. She moves off, following the man.
SHOT 20: WIDE SHOT. Standing on the stoop of a house, the man tries to get his keys out of his pocket without putting the groceries down, or dropping his chestnuts. He pushes the doorbell with his elbow. After a moment, a heavily pregnant woman opens the door, kisses him, takes two of the bags from him. They go inside and close the door behind them.
SHOT 21: CU Woman in the shadows. We see that it is the woman from the gym. She stares at the house. Decides. Moves off with purpose.
And now, by the magic of Narrative Insight, we have caught up with what the man has been up to.
More than that, we suddenly realise that we have been seeing the story for some time through his ex-wife’s eyes, and have shifted our connection from him to her.
How it Works
- We start in his subjectivity. We see what he sees. But, because his feelings and reactions are withheld, we donate our feelings to him, and attach the consequent action to him.
- We jump from his (implied) realisation to his consequent action-in-response. We jump from subjective coverage to objective coverage.
- But this is not an A.N.E. (Ambiguous Narrative Ellipsis – a jump forward in time to an unclear situation that gradually becomes clear.) Even though it’s not explained, it’s not ambiguous. He’s leaving the marriage.
- The flames underline this, especially as we didn’t see him do it. We join the dots, realise what he did, how he feels, connect even more.
- A big A.N.E. which reveals a significant shift in space and time. We are catching up with what has happened since the man set fire to his home and walked out on the marriage. He’s in a new country. Enough time has passed for him to grow a beard.
- We believe that we are still seeing this objectively. We believe these realisations are ours, and ours alone.
- Then we realise that we are sharing these realisations with someone. We may deduce who it is likely to be, or we may not. It doesn’t matter, yet.
- Then, another big shift. We realise that enough time has passed for him to re-partner, get pregnant, and be close to the birth.
- And then an even bigger perspective shift when, at the end of this new sequence, we realise that not only have we been catching up with what the man has been doing, so has his wife. She has seen what we have seen, and has come to the same realisations we did.
- Our realisations have aligned with hers, not with his anymore. Instead of following his story, and supplying his inner life, we are suddenly following her story and supplying her inner life.
- Now we want to know what she will do with this information.
The story has been revealed to us, but not explained. This has forced us to supply the unspoken psychological subtext for two different characters, without a single line of dialogue explaining what’s happening.
