Have you ever watched a movie or show and thought, “I have no clue what’s going on?”
There is a good and bad way to apply this question to yourself. I expect to leave a movie and question life. I expect to dwell on that movie for the rest of the day and sleep thinking about the movie. I expect to watch a movie and glean from context clues the exposition that will build excitement. I expect to leave the experience having discussions with my friends about the meaning and cleverness of the film or show we just watched.
“Show Don’t Tell” by definition is a fundamental writing technique that encourages authors to basically just use visuals on the screen instead of dialogue telling you what is going on. Some movies and shows with examples of this are “Breaking Bad” and “The Dark Knight.”
I too am guilty of falling victim to this: sometimes I do turn on a show as background noise and just sit there while I am on my phone if it’s a show that is not challenging me to think or getting me intrigued. I recently got caught up in DC comics and was watching one of my favorite childhood shows, “Young Justice.” I wasn’t pulled in by the alluring plot of the show, my continuation of watching every episode was driven from the fact that I loved it growing up. While watching it, I recognized the story was a mess and conflicts are dealt with too easily or there are none. The episodes are just kind of there. In my opinion, it isn’t that great of a show, but for other reasons outside of the plot, I was drawn to it. To be fair to the creators, it is a show made for children.
I recently went to the movie theaters to watch “One Battle After Another.” This movie in my opinion is a great example of a “Show, Don’t Tell” movie. From the very first minute of the movie, I was asking myself, “What is going on?” To be completely honest, the movie didn’t come full circle for me until after I left and was pondering it in my car.
Nowadays, TV authors insult our intelligence when watching their products. They do this by implementing flashbacks and montages to show the audience what is going on instead of assuming audiences can keep up.
A lot of us prefer the short term gratification. We expect almost everything to be given to us, whether we worked for it or not. We expect to understand movies immediately without trying ourselves figure out what is going on.
Something I have noticed in today’s culture is that we all feel the need to be hyper-fixated on something all the time. If something isn’t garnering our full attention we will most likely move to something else. “One Battle After Another” attracted my attention the whole time. I felt like I was robbing myself every time I touched my phone because I felt I was starving myself from an experience. The movie forced me to think and move along with the story. It posed many challenging questions and ideas that I had to come to terms with. The plot wasn’t just exciting, it was enthralling. The movie pushed my brain to the point where I had so much to talk about regarding it that I felt like I couldn’t stop. To me that is a movie, and many movie and TV show writers have lost this.
