Elevating Exposition

How many times have you turned to your best friend and told them how many years you’ve been friends? You’ve never done that? That’s weird, because it happens all the time in movies.

I get it. It can be hard to convey depth of friendship. It’s easier to just have a character blurt out the exact duration of the relationship. Better yet, you could have a ticker running at the bottom of the screen that says “Linda and Stephanie, Friends for 17 years.” That way the story can continue on without this inorganic piece of exposition.

Exposition is the information the audience needs to understand the world of the story. If the force was never mentioned by any character in Star Wars, we would be very confused when Darth Vader starts to choke Admiral Motti without touching him. Understanding the force is central to understanding Star Wars, so it’s ok when Obi Wan explains it to Luke. That’s necessary exposition.

But if Luke turned to C3PO and said “You know, I wasn’t raised by my parents,” that’s bad exposition. Thankfully, Star Wars handles this more smoothly by simply having Luke refer to his guardians as his aunt and uncle. We don’t need to be spoon-fed that he wasn’t raised by his parents. We get it.

The conventional screenwriting wisdom says to hide your exposition within action or conflict so the audience will have something else to focus on and won’t necessarily notice if a scene’s purpose is merely to relay information. To see this in action, let's examine the scene in Guardians of the Galaxy 3 when Quill needs to deactivate the three layers of shields to enter The Orgoscope.

Storytelling-wise, this scene doesńt need to happen. They could have just landed at the structure and the story would be no different. However, the purpose of this scene is to reveal an important piece of exposition: that Quill’s grandfather might be alive and that Quill needs to reconcile this part of his past. Rather than have Mantis simply ask Quill about his family on Earth (which would be boring), the filmmakers created this shield lowering obstacle as a way to make this scene slightly more interesting. Each shield that’s lowered coincides with a story beat that moves the conversation and the scene forward. There’s no real danger or tension in Quill removing the shields, but it's a piece of action that the audience can focus on to distract them from the conversation.

Now there are many, many movies that are guilty of having characters straight up say the exposition to each other (normally preceded by a line like “let me get this straight” or “as you know”), but most movies have some device by which they can “hide” their exposition. These range on a spectrum from the unforgivably lazy to the extremely clever.

There’s voice over narration which directly tells us what we need to know. Then there’s the news report, which is similar to voice over except the exposition comes in the form of a news report, which is a little more organic. Then there’s my personal least-favorite: the past due bill to show that the character is in financial trouble. I’m not sure why this one bothers me so much. Maybe because it’s been done to death and I want to see filmmakers come up with new ways to convey this concept, or maybe just because many people don’t get paper mail anymore. Forget the past due paper bill – show me a character trying to order a burrito on Grubhub but their payment gets declined. Now that’s financial trouble.

There are plenty of movies who handle exposition well. There’s the channel surfing scene from Shaun of the Dead, which uses the news report trope but twists it to great effect. Another movie which comes to mind is The Big Short. It features complex financial concepts which require a lot of explanation. Two scenes from this movie stand out: the one where Ryan Gosling’s character explains the housing crisis using Jenga blocks (clever) and the one where Margot Robbie explains it while taking a bath (exploitative? Lazy? Genius?).

For my two cents, I’m a fan of environmental storytelling as a means to deliver exposition. The more information that can be gleaned from the set design, props, wardrobe, etc, the better. Look no further than the famous Married Life montage from Up for a masterclass in conveying exposition visually. It’s so much better than what it could have been: Russell finding Carl’s wedding photo and Carl telling him all about his wife. This would have been far more boring and elicited far fewer tears.

I think that every writer, no matter what stage they are in their careers, should add an “exposition pass” to their rewriting schedule. Locate each piece of key exposition and challenge yourself to deliver it with more subtlety and innovation. Yes, sometimes heavy-handed exposition comes at the request of the studio and is unavoidable; but we should all push ourselves and each other to elevate our exposition – if not for ourselves, then for our eventual audiences, who I’m sure will appreciate some confidence placed in their ability to understand our stories just fine wihout being hit over the head with informaiton.