If you want exposition, ask a policeman.
A beautiful example of writing technique from Celine Song's 'Past Lives'.
I had a wonderful writing revelation over a coffee one afternoon with my writer and actor mate Rufus Jones. We were talking about the things that it turns out it’s impossible to make characters do when you’re writing a script. Go in and out of rooms, for instance (when you need them to bugger off somewhere for the next bit to start). Or not leave rooms (when that’s required instead).
The bastards simply will not budge, sometimes. And when they’re not rooted to the spot, they’re just wandering off. It’s like herding cats. I imagine the reason the successful stage musical Cats doesn’t have a plot is that it started out with one, but the characters just wanted to stand about in furry legwarmers, singing, and everyone gave up and left them to it.
Anyway, we got onto the problem of exposition. The problem with exposition is that it’s both vital and annoying. The audience need to be kept up to speed with what’s going on, and what might happen next. It’s also handy to let the audience know what the characters do and don’t know, so their behaviour makes sense. But the audience must never consciously know that’s what you’re doing (or they get stroppy that you’re just telling them stuff, and not letting them work it out, which is the fun of engaging with fiction).
So you need characters to say stuff out loud. But people who know each other well in real life very rarely explain themselves. Unless they’re being patronising or ratty, people rarely provide checklists of information, ticking off important points on their fingers. They don’t quietly listen while other people bring them up to speed. Most of us hold these conversations internally, if at all. We just get on with it, and that’s why we misunderstand and misread one another, and why we’re so often confused. So when someone speaks this way in a drama, it sounds false, and breaks reality.
Except for the police.
They never shut up with the data dumps. And it’s their job. “Why,” we asked each other, “would you ever make a drama without a policeman in it?” Because it’s just making life difficult for yourself as a writer.
The detective is an accapted avatar for the audience, so familiar we don’t see what they’re there for. Any professional investigator character asks the questions the audience wants, and they have permission to do so. They do it formally, and with occasional breaks to explain how far we have got in the drip fed info-dump that is the spine of most narrative.
They can even tell the audience what mistakes it would be handy for the audience to make, and set up the wrong assumptions that might help the mechanism of the plot to stay surprising. Without a detective, the audience is very much on their own. And it’s a lot to ask of them. You don’t want to have to give out those Cluedo pads and little pencils, so you get a policemen to look after that for you.
The audience starts any story with no information, and the detective asks it for them. “What do we have here?” Inspector Exposition says, as the SOCO lifts the incident tape near the lumpy tarpaulin. And that is exactly what the audience are asking. “What do you have for me?” Sergeant Recap asks the forensic examiner. “Get me up to speed,” Constable Story-so-far asks their fellow officers. And then everyone stands around while the information is relayed, and the audience is happy. And nobody says “This is an unconvincing way of reminding me of the information I need as a member of the audience” because that’s what police people do.
It’s their job. And also their character. It’s why we see the classic investigative protagonist brooding between dialogue scenes. They work stuff out quietly, like all of us, and then instead of holding all that info inside, they have to go and report to someone and say what they were thinking. Which most of us don’t do.
Asking, and thinking, and then saying-out-loud is their essence. Put a lead character in your story who isn’t a detective, and they might decide to just listen, and not share information with us. Or to decide the investigation’s too dangerous or complicated, and go down the pub instead. It’s what’s so funny about ‘wrong detective’ stories like The Big Lebowski or The Beiderbecke Affair or The Thin Man. These people have better things to do: bowling or jazz or a vital marital cocktail habit.
They might not join in the required writers’ game of telling the audience the story in chunks. They might get distracted or scared or forget to tell us stuff. And we know that’s wrong of them, so it’s funny. The lack of engagement in his stated job of gumshoe that Elliot Gould displays in Robert Altman’s wonderful The Long Goodbye is one of my favourite examples, and shows up, by contrast, what we usually expect from police protagonists, and why they’re so useful for writers.
The narrative copper can be a detective, or a policeman, or a spy, or a journalist, or an inquisitive old lady, or someone seeking justice for themselves… any sort of investigator. But if they have to gather information and give reports, to assemble data, they’re answering to one boss: the audience. And better still, they’re doing the most difficult part of the writer’s job too: delivering information convincingly, and as a narrative-paced string of revelations, without ever breaking character. Because that’s what these guys do. They’re storytelling machines.
I thought of this discussion this week because I went to see the film Past Lives, which isn’t a detective drama and has no police people in lead roles. It’s as wonderful as everyone says. It’s that rare thing an accessible, warm, mainstream romantic drama rather than a romantic comedy. It’s funny, but more like Brief Encounter or In The Mood For Love or a Powell and Pressburger film, than the regular goofy Hollywood date movie. It’s nice to be reminded that romance needn’t just be funny; it can be a matter of life and death too.
But it is written absolutely beautifully, by first time film director Celine Song, with an awareness of the audience’s requirements and expectations. Best of all, from its opening voiceover, it’s happy to be a beat, or ten, ahead of you, and to let you know it knows what you think might happen next, but… just wait and see. It’s a flattering experience. It doesn’t feel like a debut movie. There is confidence and panache in the way it tells its simple, beautiful story. But in the middle of it, is the best Police Exposition scene I’ve seen in years. I almost stood up in the cinema and applauded.
The film is told (like all good adult romance stories) over a long time period. At one point, we leap forward twelve years, and we want to know, the moment that caption pops up, what has happened to our heroes. We ache to know. So we see them in a place where that information can be conveyed really quickly, and a place we know that transitions happen within this story of globe-spanning romance, because we’ve seen it before: an airport.
Celine Song stands the couple, facing the camera, either side of a symmetrical three-shot, with the back of a third character standing… well… where the audience are. And that third character is a customs officer. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done before, but it’s a stroke of genius. We now have a policeman in the story, effectively, so we can do seamless exposition exactly where we need it. And so the policeman asks the couple every single question we need to know before the next scene can happen.
In less than a minute, we know where they are living, their relationship, their jobs, their attitude to one another, what has changed, what has stayed the same. It’s a bravura bit of police exposition, in a film that has no murders and detectives, and no walls of red string and crime scene photos, but needs the occasional burst of very fast exposition to satisfy the audience.
It’s simply wonderful storytelling. I made a mental note of it as a great writing trick: that sometimes you need to place an official between your protagonists and the audience, with their back to you, and have them ask everything we need to know, quickly.
Because even if you’re not telling a police story, sometimes a writer needs to call in the police.