Secrets Lies Value and Damage - the four ingredients of subtext
Deceit is at the heart of every good story. Falsehoods, un-truths and blatant deceptions. If a story isn’t a den of lies then it’s likely - somewhat ironically - to be missing the essential element that will may make the experience of that story authentic and truthful.
Does that sound a bit odd? Let me explain…
The presence - or lack thereof - of secrets and lies in a story is all to often what i observe to be absent from the films and scripts of both my students and screenplays by new and inexperienced writers. Often what is otherwise cited as missing in these cases is ‘subtext. But whilst this is certainly true, subtext is also a notoriously slippery term. It’s relatively easy to define subtext as that which is between the lines - what is not said between characters - but which is none the less clearly present for the viewer. However, putting that idea into some sort of tangible construct as a writer engaged in a creative process is not nearly so easy. Subtext is easy to see once it’s well written but not all that easy to write.
Thus what I’m proposing is an alternative way to consider narrative subtext that perhaps makes it easier to hold onto and use as a creative narrative tool rather than a slightly abstracted concept; Subtext as a set of prescribed Secrets and Lies.
Secrets and Lies can exist in a story under two broad umbrellas and we might conceive of these two categories in the same way that sound design is often considered in cinema - diegetic and non-diegetic. A diegetic sound is one that comes from within the scene and belongs there, such as the sound of a car engine as we see a car drive or the sound of a gun shot when we see a gun go off, not to mention the sound of a person’s voice as we see them speak. Conversely, a non-diegetic sound is one where the audio does not emanate from or belong to the scene; voice over narration or a musical score being the two most obvious examples. When we apply this idea broadly to the subtext of Secrets and Lies in narrative we see a distinction between the secrets and lies held diegetically between characters and those secrets and lies held non-diegetically by the audience observing the characters. In the former, diegetic, sphere we have something one character knows that another does not, or something one character believes but the other does not. In the alternative, non-diegetic, sense we have something the audience knows that the character (or characters) do not (or vise versa).
From this simple observation we can construct all kinds of variations for introducing and manifesting secrets and lies in a narrative; be they at the macro-level of an over-arching story concept that’s predicated on a conceit (Breaking Bad and the secret that Walt is a drug dealer) or at a scene-by-scene level (Michael in The Godfather lying to Kay declaring that he didn’t have his brother-in-law killed). In either case the secrets and the lies fuel the dramatic tension.
So let’s ponder the variations of diegetic secrets and lies. There are essentially 4 kinds:
Character A knows something Character B doesn’t.
Character A doesn’t know something Character B does.
Character A knows something Character B doesn’t and lies about it.
Character A saids something Character B knows to be a lie.
Any one of these variations invested in a scene or story adds subtext almost innately by investing an element that is not spoken or, if it is spoken, is not true. That said, what is important from a writing perspective is for the writer to orchestrate clarity about who knows what? If you don’t know what your characters know and, just as importantly, aren’t clear about what it is they Don’t know, then you have very little in the way if a toolkit to build compelling subtext beyond words and actions.
When mapping out characters for a story we often think in terms of what WHAT and HOW; What does the character want and How are they going to get it. Stress is exerted by every screenwriting book and script guru doing the circuit that characters must Want something and encounter Obstacles on the way to getting what they want. This may well be true but in many ways this is also too simplistic to be really useful to screenwriters in the midst of the creative writing process. As with most of the high profile script gurus that dominate screen narrative discourse I find such preaching fine and dandy in a retrospective way - describing how good films worked - but far less useful or functional from the front-end when you’re writing from scratch. Such analysis is focused on description from hindsight and so disconnected from in-the-trenches creative process. For example, you may have the clearest What and How in the world for your character with a big obstacle and high stakes and yet still have a scene that is bland and dull and entirely lacking in subtext. Wants, obstacles and active protagonists are great but they do not, of themselves, generate subtext.
This brings us back to the usefulness of Secrets and Lies as a way to tangibly motivate the writing of scenes with more sophistication than just What and How. If you can map out not only what a character wants and how they are going to get it, but also sketch what it is they Know, what they Don’t know, what secrets they have and what lies they are willing to tell - from beat-to-beat and scene-to-scene within a script - you will have a very complex array of dramatic possibilities open to you when it comes to plotting.
Of course this leads us to the key ingredients that character-based Secrets and Lies rely on to be effective. To make the secrets and lies work dramatically we need to add two things - i’ll call these Value and Damage . The Secret has to have Value and the Lie must cause Damage (or be capable of causing damage). This might otherwise be called dramatic stakes but thinking in these more specific terms of Value and Damage may help to make the ideas they embody more specifically targeted and tangibly useful for the writing process.
For a character’s Secret to have dramatic implications it must have Value, the knowledge they hold, or withhold, from other characters must be valuable and desirable and important. The more valuable the better, the more other characters want the secret or would be affected by the secret, the more dramatic pressure is applied to the character. What must also be remembered is that the value of a secret is in direct context of the story-world the narrative plays out in. Thus, for example the location of the knock-list of secret agents is a very valuable secret for Ethan Hunt to hold in Mission Impossible, a secret with implications for international diplomacy. On a different scale altogether, but every bit as valuable in the context of the story, is Don Draper’s secret past and appropriated identity in Mad Men. This knowledge wont bring down governments but in the context of the Mad Men world the secret, none the less, has immense value in being kept or released.
In terms of Lies, it is Damage that becomes a crucial ingredient. If the lie cant hurt anyone, if it has no fallout from being perpetuated, then it is dramatically un-useful. But if the Lie has the potential to cause damage, large scale damage commensurate with the story-world, then you will have armed your character and narrative with a potent subtext explosive. The more damage the lie can cause the more effective it will be. (of course by damage we don’t necessarily mean physical damage - though that may very well often be the case - but fallout damage in a wide variety of forms)
In Pixar’s Monsters Inc. for example the big lie is that children are utterly toxic and contact with them will kill and bring down the whole Monster World. The fallout damage for this lie is in fact positive rather than negative (the revelation that children are not toxic after all), but the damage is none the less big in scale as the revelation of the lie inverts the monster world and changes forever the characters in it.
Likewise, working at both personal and world scale, is the film Amadeus. The big lie maintained and perpetuated by Saleri is that Mozart’s music is mediocre and not worthy of the Emperor’s attention. The lie in this case for Saleri is to himself more than anyone else, when he in fact knows the truth of Mozart’s genius. The lie can and does inflict great damage - to the world by curtailing Mozart’s career and life, and to Saleri personally as he lives out his days in guilt and despair at his own mediocrity.
What we can take away from these ideas and observations should be some very practical tools for writing character-drama; give your hero a big secret, your villain a big lie (or vise versa), arm each character with a secret to keep and a lie to tell - secrets and lies that have value and possibility for damage - and then throw events at the characters that force the secrets and lies out into the open… At the heart of all great screen drama are Big Secrets and Bold Lies - plotting therefore is the events you toss at the characters to bring out and confound their secrets and their lies.
So far, so good but what we havn’t touched on yet is the other kind - those non-diegetic Secrets and Lies that are held by the audience. It is these that bring an even greater spectrum of complexity to notions of narrative subtext.
Horror films give us the clearest insight into the power of secrets and lies held with the audience. The scares and frights of a horror film are predicated on the viewer being positioned in one of two states - either they know More than the characters know, or they know Only what the characters know. In the later, when the monster leaps from the shadows, we jump as the character jumps in shock and surprise. In the former, by contrast, we already know the monster is around the corner waiting and we watch, bighting our nails in dread and suspense, as the ignorant character - oblivious to the secret we as viewers are forced to keep - heads blindly into the danger. Both forms are very effective and great horror films move the viewer consistently through these different positions letting them in on the secret sometimes, keeping them in ignorance at others - ensuring a complexity of thrills.
From this simple basis we can extrapolate a complexity of possibilities for how and when the audience may be told a lie or given a secret to hold. As with diegetic secrets and lies, we can view a number of ways they can be perpetuated with the audience which broadly may be seen to reside in two broad forms:
The Character knows something the Viewer does not.
The Viewer knows something the Character does not.
The first of these is the most obvious and results in the classic reveal often situated at key turning points in the plot. Here the viewer is made aware of new information that forces them to re-evaluate what they previously knew or believed. Whilst this may seem simple it is in fact a direct orchestration and manipulation of what the viewer knows by the writer at any given point in the story’s timeline. To make such reveals work the writer must clearly conceive of what the viewer doesn’t know that the characters do in order to make the reveal of the conceit plausible and authentic. Scripts that fail this test and do not properly plan or articulate the secrets and lies to the viewer in the writing process, fall foul of Deus Ex Machina where a plot twist or reveal rings as untrue or overly contrived.
Excellent examples of this kind of conceit with the viewer can be found in virtually any Hitchcock film but more contemporary films such as The Sixth Sense also demonstrate how effective this lie can be (spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t seen The Sixth Sense). The film’s reveal that the protagonist himself is actually dead - and indeed has been almost the whole time - is a tremendously effective ending Not because it’s a surprise but because the viewers all slap their foreheads as they realise that ‘it all makes sense’ and indeed that they perhaps should have seen it coming all along. The lie is authentic because it was carefully planned, each scene knew the truth as it was written and hid that truth carefully from the viewer as a secret. Such planned secrets to the audience also form the basis of complex-narrative stories such as Memento and The Usual Suspects which are films that build their entire dramatic concept on the ‘unreliable narrator’ and the grand ruse where the viewer is forced to recognise the lies they had previously accepted as truth.
The second of the two - that the viewer knows something the character does not - is consistent across all genres of screen narrative. Whether it’s at a macro level such as Titanic where the audience is fully aware of the ‘secret’ that the iceberg is coming while the characters are oblivious; or at a scene-by-scene level such as in the opening of Jaws where we have already seen the shark waiting and know the danger long before the first victim gets wet. We know the secret and we watch in horror that we cannot stop the inevitable.
Similarly we might look at numerous scenes from Battlestar Galactica where the viewer knows which characters are in fact Cylons whilst the other characters remain oblivious. The audience is positioned to be the custodian of the secret and the drama plays out as an orchestration of not just What the viewer knows but When they know it. Likewise in Dexter the audience knows Dexter’s secret life and so whenever we see Dexter interact in a normal way with his police colleagues we watch with a rich vein of subtext based on the dark secret we hold.
Whether the secrets and the lies are held between characters or with the audience the fact is that without secrets and lies your story will often be starved of subtext and tension or else be reliant on far more verbose and less effective forms of tension such as car chases, pointed guns and spectacle.
As a tool, investing your characters and your story at the planning stage with specific Secrets and Lies, that in turn have Values and Damages, will generate tangible potential for rich subtext before you even write the first scene.
