By the way, have you seen District 9? You haven't? You need to.
What, then, am I going to write about tonight?
A simple concept that is repeated again and again to and between writers. Show, not tell. Show, not tell. In writing, your prose should be of such quality and precision that it fades into the background and the images, scenes and interactions that you are describing on the page spring to vivid life in the readers minds' eye.
That's my interpretation of the phrase. Alice in Wonderland tries to do it. District 9 does this with no visible effort.
'But wait', you say. 'Am...these are films. Showing is an inherent feature of their composition, so...their ability to do this should come as no surprise to you'. Then you might suggest that a quiet rest would do me good while you go out and call a padded wagon. 'Nervous breakdown...yes, he's got his genres all crossed...indeed. Sure sign of overwork. A few weeks should do him good.'
But no. While a few weeks rest would do me good...well, working rest at least, the fact that I have chosen two films to be the focus of a post on showing not telling is not incongruous. In fact, if you have watched the films in particular, you probably have an inkling of what I am getting at. Each film demonstrates, in film, a skill set that we, as writers, should aspire to possess in our toolbox. Let me begin with Alice in Wonderland.
Side note: does no one realise that Tim Burton is insane? No one? Really? Alright then, back on topic. Alice in Wonderland is a lush yet abrupt offering. The set up and resolution of the film smacks of heavy handed plotting. Its blocky and wooden, feeling like a pair of square brackets surrounding the actual content of the film, Alice's time in Wonderland. The focus of the film, here the film both excels and also falls down. The imagery is lush yet flat (maybe meant for 3d?) and all the human characters stick out from the CGI backgrounds in varying degrees throughout the film. Yet, it was engaging enough for me to look past all that and be interested in the story. Or rather, what I thought the story was trying to be.
In my head it wavered between a feminist tale about a young lady growing up in a society not interested in her having her own opinions and direction and a generally positive tale of overcoming and believing in yourself, no matter what the situation or the odds. Of the two films, however, it is the worse of the two at showing what its trying to say. Alice runs away from a forced marriage in an insane Elizabethan setting which, by the way, would have been ripe for its own movie and runs headlong into a return to Wonderland. There she is tasked with slaying the Jabberwocky as foretold by a magic scroll. At all turns she runs away from this duty, itself a metaphor, but she is drawn in when things come to an inevitable head and no surprise there, goes out and kills it in a satisfying enough fight.
That is the actual story. The story that I've put together for it, the story in my head, comes from hints and small pieces of dialogue and other bits of innuendo that hint at said story. Alice wearing the suit of armour in the final scene, riding out to the final conflict astride the Bandersnatch, a confident young female adult. The Mad Hatter asking her 'Why are you always too tall, or too short?'. Her not wearing a corset or stockings to the garden party early on. Her walking across a moat filled with the heads of the Red Queen's victims, on said floating heads. The caterpillar's constant rebuking of her for not 'knowing herself'. All of these things add up to an attempt at multilayered storytelling that isn't as smooth or as subtle as one would like. Because so many of these points are brought across in dialogue rather than through action or the resolution of a specific conflict (such as when The Hatter drops his sword in disgust after Alice slays the Jabberwocky, right as he was about to slay the Knave of Hearts) they break the storytelling flow and don't ring as true or as deep as they might have. Still, for what it is, its an admirable effort, filled with adequate showing but a lot more obvious telling.
Then we have District 9. Whoo. What can I say about this movie? The final shot had my heart curling up in my chest and I'm not too much of a man to deny that I felt tears at the edges of my eyes as it faded to black. Uncompromising. It breaks several conventions of various genres in its recreation of a story of the 'final days' of its human protagonist, and I put those words in quotations because while true, they don't mean what you will think they mean at first. Indeed, they are his final days in so many different ways. Dear lord. I have to stop and organise my thoughts before I write about this movie.
Uncompromising. That is the word that comes to mind when I think about District 9. Uncompromising. The author and director, one Neill Blomkamp, had a specific vision for what each scene, each environment, each encounter should look like, should play like, should encompass and evoke from the viewer, and they nailed it. To say that this film is a masterpiece of storytelling is an understatement in terms. It is set in Johannesburg. It is a film about aliens, another living race of creatures being treated as less than human. Set in Africa. The parallels are immediate and totally unsubtle. It slaps you in the face that this film is going to be about the African situation and condition, is going to posit opinions and try and educate you about painful subjects that many of you would rather not focus on. But the setup and the trailers, seen here and here, do an excellent job of telling you this while rooting the film at once in modern geopolitical awareness as well as pure, high production value, science fiction action goodness. So the trailers themselves are active parts of the bait and switch that is District 9. Because that is what it is, a bait and switch.
Its structure takes a little getting used to. It is presented as a mix of documentary and storytelling, as a collection of footage of the protagonist from various sources is mixed in with the bits of the story that lay behind them, and snippets of 'live media coverage' of the ongoing events. It sounds odd, but when it is observed it is breathtaking in the way it gels to give us at once the full story in continuous and ongoing counterpoint to the outside world, or 'our' perception, of the events.
You know going in that you are seeing a film rooted in modern international political and social conflicts and stresses, so you walk in prepared and on guard. The film, aware of this, never once tries to engage you on the matter. Not once. It never tries to overtly engage you on these matters. Instead, it does one of the best jobs of showing it to you that I have ever seen. Throughout the film. From start to end. All of the shots used, the environments and situations are hand picked to get across behind all the action going on the messages of this film...and I say messages, because there are a lot. It deals with exploitation on a whole, Africa and apartheid, PMC's, Corporations and evil in its basest, purest form: selfish humans acting for profit with no regard for human life. The dialogue is a part of this showing, again never trying to engage you consciously on these matters but illustrating at every turn the unthinking nature of most people as they go about their lives and even as they spiral into a crisis. Finally, it deals with humanity in a most unique form by asking us, 'what is humanity?', that most essential of qualities that itself is a bundle of such noble principles such as selflessness, love, empathy and respect. Is it being human, or is it something more, something deeper? The answer is resounding yet never told to you. You are made to arrive at it for yourself.
In the end, District 9 illustrates what show, don't tell means far better than Alice. Illustrate, don't elaborate. Allow your audience to wake up to your message in a gradual progression, drawing their own inferences and conclusions from what you have presented and thus making them all the stronger in their minds. Achieving this requires a touch at once light yet powerful. Not easy to achieve, but more than worthy of our cons as creators and writers. It is, encapsulated in film, the method of storytelling that we should all aspire to.
More as it develops!
