{"id":4784,"date":"2014-04-09T00:00:59","date_gmt":"2014-04-09T04:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=4784"},"modified":"2014-04-14T15:47:12","modified_gmt":"2014-04-14T19:47:12","slug":"on-exposition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/on-exposition\/","title":{"rendered":"On Exposition"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nThere\u2019s a great little story about how on the set of E.T.<\/a>, Spielberg slowly unwrapped a toy off camera to illicit a reaction from the young actor playing Elliott.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always thought this story was a great way to explain how a filmmaker should approach exposition.\u00a0 Exposition is the easiest, most fun, and most misunderstood part of storytelling.\u00a0 But filmic exposition is generally stupid, because people are afraid of it.<\/p>\n

Somebody once asked me,\u00a0 about my 50\/50 Rule<\/a>, \u201cWhen making a movie, would you pay extra special attention to how it starts, since you lose interest in so many movies so fast?\u201d\u00a0 The answer is decidedly no, because every<\/i> frame of a movie is sacred and equally important.\u00a0 If you treat your entire movie like that, then you don\u2019t need to spend extra attention to any one part of it.\u00a0 Exposition is too often just underestimated as something that has to be blown through in order to get to the fun stuff.\u00a0 To counteract this, the indies have bloated their exposition with way too much visual minutiae.\u00a0 You can build a \u2018stark\u2019, \u2018oblique\u2019, \u2018atmospheric\u2019 world with your story<\/i>\u2014you don\u2019t need shots that hold too long on a girl as she wistfully puts on makeup.<\/p>\n

Jurassic Park<\/a> is my favorite exercise in exposition, and in a way, the entire movie<\/i> is exposition.
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\nJurassic Park is basically the best movie ever made about an insurance inspection.\u00a0 And by not taking place at the grand opening of the titular park, the writers are able to focus on the relationships of a few select characters, without the clutter of a sea of nameless, running people.\u00a0 It\u2019s also the best way to slowly reveal the real heroes and villains: the dinosaurs.\u00a0 We learn which dinosaurs are harmless, like the huge Brontosaurus that eats some leaves right next to our main characters, and which are scary, like the Raptors that maul a cow to pieces hidden behind bustling foliage.\u00a0 The character\u2019s individual reactions to these scenes accomplish two things at once\u2014it builds their relationships with each other (and therefore the audience) and it telegraphs the thrills found later in the story.\u00a0 It\u2019s all very formulaic and common, but what Jurassic Park proves is that old tricks are effective when executed with earnest craft.<\/p>\n

We are actually introduced to the Raptor twice\u2014once during feeding, and again while behind born.\u00a0 The baby raptor looks incredibly cute bathed in the warm light of its robot arm hatching bin or whatever\u2014but then, as Dr. Grant holds it, he becomes silhouetted. Cloaked in darkness, he asks what species it is.\u00a0 The tone shifts\u2014raptors are scary, and the lighting suggests that:

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\nThe purely expository scenes in Jurassic Park are some of its best, because the characters have an intelligent yet bizarre familiarity\u2014the actors flourish inside their characters.\u00a0 It\u2019s the stuff Spielberg does best: the overlapping dialogue and action; the hectic hustle-bustle of human reality, staged like a ballet amidst his trademark camera movements.\u00a0 There is a beautiful sense of movement to the first half of Jurassic Park.\u00a0 It\u2019s exotic and alluring, and it brings you inside the experience.<\/p>\n

In movies like The Dark Knight<\/a> or Transformers<\/a>, exposition is staged with a boring coverage scene where the movie suddenly gets quieter after the explosion-ridden opening reel.\u00a0 I\u2019m all for formulaic structure\u2014but not homogenization.\u00a0 Within the confines of Hollywood homogenization, exposition is the first to become stupid because it has to be clear and direct and not miss anybody.\u00a0 Movies used to use exposition for fun\u2014<\/i>it used to be that somebody says something badass, or funny, and then we\u2019d cut to the adventure.\u00a0 Nowadays, boring expository scenes are dragged out through matching closeups until the next head gets blown off.<\/p>\n

Again, I\u2019m thinking about The Dark Knight.\u00a0 The Dark Knight had me for about ninety seconds.\u00a0 Bill Fichner yells \u201cGet out of my bank!\u201d and grabs a shotgun and everything seems pretty badass.\u00a0 But then the heist is over, they drive away, and we are plopped into boring dialogue.\u00a0 The next memorable scene is the one where The Joker comes in to talk to all those bad guys and he kills the dude by balancing a pencil on the table and smashing a dude\u2019s head on it.\u00a0 That scene is memorable because there is a real tension created by the mania of The Joker as compared to more traditional bad guys.\u00a0 It punctuates act one, and ideally we are supposed to be led swiftly into act two where Batman must deal with this cat and mouse game he\u2019s about to be in\u2014instead, we\u2019re just given exposition about other, way less satisfying subplots.<\/p>\n

My three favorite expository sequences of all time are in the three best movies ever made.\u00a0 (Go figure.)\u00a0 The first is the ever-intricate, ever-intriguing, awe-inspiring, career-starting first shot of Back To The Future<\/a>.\u00a0 The whole character is in that shot, along with tons of other useful info about the plot. \u00a0A lens-flaring guitar pick, a tiny guitar, a teenager who\u2019s best friends with an actual mad scientist\u2014it gets you to believe all of this stuff at face value, and it does it so quickly that it looks effortless.<\/p>\n

Next is Signs<\/a>\u2014the entire movie.\u00a0 Signs unravels with comfortable, exquisite care.\u00a0 It begins with a medley of its score that cheesily ramps up, over even cheesier titles, which fly at you with cross-zooms.\u00a0 When the movie begins, you start to understand why\u2014each beat builds upon the last.\u00a0 Signs dispenses information in a very calculated way that serves the creator\u2019s story.\u00a0 To be inside Signs is to be inside Shyamalan\u2019s hands, and to be guided by the sublime.<\/p>\n

Information is a priceless commodity in a story.\u00a0 Every frame, every choice of color, every choice of light, every piece of wardrobe, every line, every delivery, every camera movement, every special effect, is a tiny bite of information that gets dispensed, continuously, to the audience\u2014it\u2019s why continuity errors are distracting, and why we have entire departments dedicated to this stuff.\u00a0 Signs knows exactly what color to use, at what time, with what camera movement, timed with what action, etcetera, at every beat. It is cinematic storytelling at the highest and most advanced level.<\/p>\n

But, my most favoritest exposition of all time is the first twelve minutes of Raising Arizona<\/a>.\u00a0 With Raising Arizona, the Coen\u2019s were tapped into whatever force in the universe governs the poetic ear for storytelling.\u00a0 Every shot is poetry, as is every twinge of 23-year-old Nicolas Cage\u2019s bizarre southern accent.<\/p>\n

Hi is pushed into the frame, centered, in front of a prison-white background.\u00a0 In voiceover, he starts telling his story by introducing himself.\u00a0 \u201cMy name is H.I. McDonnough.\u201d Thus begins the most pointedly-perfect 12 minutes of cinema.\u00a0 Over the course of the sequence, Hi takes you through his life, but not just<\/i> his life\u2014all of life itself.<\/p>\n

The film may well have been a creature-clad story by Aesop, Seuss, or the like.\u00a0 Raising Arizona is about a person\u2019s station in life, about their ability to understand how to reconcile their nature within their station.\u00a0 Hi is a lab rat in a mad scientist\u2019s experiment.\u00a0 What obstacles can we place in front of the rat?\u00a0 What resilience lies in the human heart?<\/p>\n

Each of these examples handle exposition in a completely different way.\u00a0 Raising Arizona is similar to Citizen Kane<\/a> and Titanic<\/a> wherein the entire story is told to the audience directly.\u00a0 Nobody remembers this, but in Titanic, that fat beard guy character tells everyone in the room exactly how the ship sinks.\u00a0 (Ebert and I have both noted that this was a clever way to sew up the fact of, yes, we are using the actual story, and yes, we admit you already know what happens, but yes, you will learn something, because what you just saw was super-badass and cool.)<\/p>\n

Really it all comes down to the fact that, exposition is a necessary part of your movie, so why not make it as good as everything else in the fucking movie? \u00a0<\/i>Being brazenly boring about it is literally admitting that you don\u2019t know enough about filmmaking and storytelling and art to care to try and make these scenes work.\u00a0 Sure you can stage a big opening scene with a seven-explosion photogrammetry shot, but can you make me believe that the characters talking afterwards actually know each other and have a relationship? It\u2019s the latter that really matters, and what elevates movies such as Indiana Jones<\/a>, The \u2018Burbs<\/a>, and Big<\/a> to the upper echelon of filmmaking, and reduces stylistic jazz-art like Raging Bull<\/a> to the level of shallow-yet-attractive curiosity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"jurassicexposition\"
\n

\nThere\u2019s a great little story about how on the set of E.T.<\/a>, Spielberg slowly unwrapped a toy off camera to illicit a reaction from the young actor playing Elliott.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always thought this story was a great way to explain how a filmmaker should approach exposition.\u00a0 Exposition is the easiest, most fun, and most misunderstood part of storytelling.\u00a0 But filmic exposition is generally stupid, because people are afraid of it.<\/p>\n

Somebody once asked me,\u00a0 about my 50\/50 Rule<\/a>, \u201cWhen making a movie, would you pay extra special attention to how it starts, since you lose interest in so many movies so fast?\u201d\u00a0 The answer is decidedly no, because every<\/i> frame of a movie is sacred and equally important.\u00a0 If you treat your entire movie like that, then you don\u2019t need to spend extra attention to any one part of it.\u00a0 Exposition is too often just underestimated as something that has to be blown through in order to get to the fun stuff.\u00a0 To counteract this, the indies have bloated their exposition with way too much visual minutiae.\u00a0 You can build a \u2018stark\u2019, \u2018oblique\u2019, \u2018atmospheric\u2019 world with your story<\/i>\u2014you don\u2019t need shots that hold too long on a girl as she wistfully puts on makeup.<\/p>\n

Jurassic Park<\/a> is my favorite exercise in exposition, and in a way, the entire movie<\/i> is exposition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,17],"tags":[2497,2692,582,2501,3783,566,2229,1914,37,3786,576,66,333,3785,567,716,332,104,185,992,67,409,268,3784,496,1593],"class_list":["post-4784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-gregsessays","tag-5050-movie","tag-5050-rule","tag-back-to-the-future","tag-big","tag-bill-fichner","tag-citizen-kane","tag-coen-brothers","tag-e-t","tag-greg-deliso","tag-h-i-mcdonnough","tag-indiana-jones","tag-jurassic-park","tag-m-night-shyamalan","tag-nicolas-cage","tag-raging-bull","tag-raising-arizona","tag-signs","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-spielberg","tag-steven-spielberg","tag-the-burbs","tag-the-dark-knight","tag-the-joker","tag-titanic","tag-transformers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4784"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4793,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4784\/revisions\/4793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}