We Read Bodies, Not Minds
We read bodies, not minds. Don’t rely on dialogue to express psychological truth; add empathy and projection to your toolbox.
Why dialogue is the last tool, not the first
We read bodies, not minds. On screen, the deepest insights come from what characters do and how we show it. Dialogue is one ingredient among equals—images, movement, behaviour, music, and sound—but narrative structure gives them all meaning.
We are taught to believe that the core of communication is the spoken (or written) word. New screenwriters, in my experience, are especially prone to applying it to screenwriting, thinking their principal job is to write dialogue.
But this is only ever a partial truth, and a misleading way of thinking about writing screenplays.
The limits of dialogue
Interesting dialogue is rarely truthful, and truthful dialogue is rarely interesting. Dialogue can be blunt or soft. Slippery or direct. But its function is to help the character get what they want and avoid what they fear. Just like all the other things they do.
Dialogue does have a special task, but it’s not to reveal the truth. It’s to manage relationships.
Dialogue is a mixture of truths, half-truths, deception by omission, and out-and-out lies. Of ignorance and knowledge. It’s rarely the truth, and when it is, it’s often revealed carefully so that the speaker can backtrack.
In any case, people never know the whole truth, even about themselves. Even when they think they know the truth, they might want to deceive the other person, out of either kindness or malice.
And whatever the speaker intended with their words, they only have a certain amount of control over how they are received. They might be taken at face value, seen through, or suspected.
So, if we can’t trust dialogue, and a person’s inner life is hidden from us, how do we read psychological truth at all? Through EMPATHY and PROJECTION.
We read Bodies, not Minds
Humans, like other social animals, communicate at a pre-verbal level far more than polite society acknowledges. We can’t tell what anyone else is thinking, but we can see the effect it has on their body and infer what they’re thinking from that. And we can very often tell what they’re feeling, if we allow ourselves to.
We have two different paths to understanding each other, which reflect two different ideas about what we are to each other. I think of these as:
EMPATHY, coming from the idea that all (mentally healthy) humans are essentially the same and can understand each other at a level beyond the spoken word.
PROJECTION, from the idea that each human being is essentially an isolated individual. What we think of as understanding each other is only an illusion created by projecting our own experiences and emotional responses onto the observed behaviour of others.
These may seem opposite, but both are true, and the way we understand each other hinges on where and when we apply each.
The same choice underpins our storytelling.
EMPATHY
Empathy is involuntarily feeling what someone else feels, in our own body.
Unless they have been taught to repress them, humans reveal their emotions and momentary emotional responses through facial micro-expressions, tone of voice and body language. Even when they try to suppress them, they often leak through.
Other humans perceiving those bodily expressions of emotion respond automatically (technically, autonomically). It’s not an intellectual process. Instead, the viewer autonomically mirrors those bodily cues in their own face and body, triggering equivalent feelings.
Our body can reliably tell us if an emotion is real. But most societies and cultures ask us to habitually ignore this knowledge, in the interests of social harmony.
PROJECTION
Projection is the process of lending our own emotional experiences and truths to a situation. It is an alternative tool to empathy – you can create and use either across your story, and even in the same scene, but not in the same moment.
Empathy is a great tool, but sometimes it’s more powerful to get the audience to supply the emotional content from their own experience. This is especially true if it’s a powerful universal experience.
Almost everybody has experienced the deep shame of being chastised by an authority figure. It takes a rare actor to give a viewer something more profound than the viewer’s own experience of those things, no matter how truthful the actor’s performance.
It’s often stronger to create an empty space in the narrative into which each audience member can project their own feelings.
There are many ways that the director, actor and cinematographer create this space.
But this isn’t an added extra to the script. It’s built into the script, albeit without labelling shots and describing them.
You can see this most clearly in the two ways close-ups work in films.
The Power of the Close-Up
EMPATHY: If the emotional response is specific, and the actor is good enough, you can use the close-up to reveal a truthful emotional moment, which will then trigger an empathetic response in the viewer.
PROJECTION: On the other hand, if the experience is a universal one, or open-ended, perhaps you would prefer to call on the audience’s own experiences and emotions. In that case, you can use a close-up of a withheld emotional moment as an emotional place-marker.
In which case, the audience will willingly do the emotional work for you.
The writer’s role?
There’s a deeply unhelpful demarcation between writer and director that says writers do dialogue, directors do shots and staging. But they are all different sides of the same coin, and need to be developed with that in mind. These days, the writer generally doesn’t directly specify shots in a script. But the picture your script paints in the mind of the director and cinematographer can, and should, do the same job.
But the power of the story is completely dependent on the emotional truths captured by the script, hidden in the script, and revealed judiciously by the script. Whether it’s within the dialogue or the action, the job of the writer, working with the director, is to reveal the clues, but hide the answers.
Which lets the rest of the team do their work. And the audience its work.
And so, working together, jointly create psychological insight, story and meaning.
