Detail of Visual Story Telling
For some reason, a strange detail of visual story telling struck me during last night's episode of Treme. Melissa Leo asks David Morse to look at some homicide files to see if there is anything sketchy about the investigations. A few scenes later, we see him in his office reading a few files late at night when no one is around. We can't tell what he discovers. A few scenes later, he arrives at her house and tells her he found nothing, they all look good. Then, towards the end of the episode, he is talking with someone else (is she internal affairs? another homicide cop?) about the incomplete nature of the files.
It is a good little sequence. We suspect there is something wrong due to prior information we know about the murders, but aren't sure how it is going to be discovered. What interests me is the scene of David Morse looking at the files at night in the police station. Why do we include this scene? Say it was removed, we still get all the same information...
Melissa Leo asks for information. Later, Morse comes to her with the information. Then, later, we discover he was lying to her for some unexplained reason (as he has been forthcoming with her in the past). This is a leaner way of getting across the same information, but it doesn't work as well. Why? I am not sure. On one basic level - we like watching action more than we like getting exposition. But is looking at files action? It is, but it is not visually spectacular action. We get the sense of this guy going out of his way because it is late at night, etc, and no one is around. Is that why the scene is valuable? Or is there something intrinsic in seeing people doing something for a reason we know about that compels our narrative attention?
1 comment:
I think this is a great example of the David Mamet school of writing that says, what is the story and what is the idea that I want to create? In this case, the idea is: "attention to the files". So you write a scene that says, this guy stayed late in the office, poring over this information. Short, but creates that feeling. We know he's looking at them carefully, studying them. When he says something blase about them later, we can either believe that or not, but we keep the memory of how carefully he was looking at them in our head. By the time you get to the end and you discover there WAS a reason to pay attention to the files, you are surprised but feel it was somehow inevitable.
This kind of writing is the hardest to do, I think. It requires a real understanding of pacing and the subconscious threads of the story. It's the kind of scene that's most likely shot as a pickup. It's the shading that's hard to do when you are inside the mechanics of the story as the writer, but it's the best kind of thing you can do for your audience.
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