Please Stop Having Your Characters Just State the Themes of Your Show or Movie to the Audience, Thanks

Years ago, Forrest Wickman published a piece in Slate titled “Against Subtlety.” As the headline suggests, the essay argues that subtlety is an overvalued trait in art, assumed rather than proven to be of paramount importance, and that critics praise it too highly. Art that’s blunt is usually better and longer-lasting, Wickman claimed, and we should stop giving it short shrift. I thought it was a pretty weird piece. On the one hand, absolutely, yes - there are other virtues than subtlety, many artists create great things when they’re freed from restraint, and we should want artistic variety in all things. I’ve written before that this scene from The Sopranos, where Carmela sees a therapist who spells out exactly why Tony is a bad person and she (and the audience) should not be seduced by him, is the best scene in the entire series. Blunt can work. That message itself is fine.

What’s odd about that piece is that it seemed not to understand the culture industry it commented on. The piece was published in 2015. The top five movies of that year came from the Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Fast & Furious, Avengers, and Minions franchises; those are, perhaps, not entities defined by a surfeit of subtlety. The Academy Awards nominees included some more explicitly subtle titles, such as Richard Linklater’s restrained Boyhood and the underrated Foxcatcher. Then again, Oscars went to Eddie Redmayne for a classically heavy-handed portrayal of a severely disabled person, to JK Simmons for his scenery-chewing work in Whiplash, and to Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Birdman, an almost impossibly self-impressed showcase for Iñárritu’s attempt at audacious visuals and capital-D Drama. Subtlety was on the menu, in movies, but hardly anybody was buying. Wickman mentions Mad Men as an example of the critical preference for subtlety; personally, I think the show is much less subtle than you might imagine, but then critical darlings The Leftovers and The Americans were major shows from that year which were indeed more restrained. They stood out in great contrast, though, with Game of Thrones, Mr. Robot, Narcos, and Empire, other top shows that were about as subtle as a brick to the face. The top music of that year was eclectic, but the biggest event was surely the new album from Adele and its lead single “Hello,” both of which were a deep dive into bombast. Pop domination of music was already well established by then. One of the best selling books of the year was Humans of New York: Stories, based on a photo blog project that was draped in unapologetic sentiment and tidy stories.

So you can understand why I would have read that piece, in 2015, and thought… who exactly looks around and thinks that the problem with our culture is too much subtlety?

I have lately thought of Wickman’s essay often, due to a tic I’m seeing (and hating) more and more in movies: characters just telling you the themes or message or moral directly. The socioeconomic conditions that were driving our culture industry in 2015 - in particular, the drive for “four quadrant” entertainments that play well internationally - have finally resulted in signs of exhaustion with the franchises that flew so high in the past decade. And it feels like creators simply don’t trust anyone to grasp subtle artistic moves. More and more often, that which has traditionally been left to inference and symbolism and implication are now just stated explicitly, with film and TV writers apparently afraid that anything that isn’t shouted at the audience will be missed by the audience. Maybe this is because they’re only half-watching while playing with their phones, or maybe because they’ve been conditioned by what they watch on their phones, which is usually splashed with direct expressions of intent, to the point that they’ve now lost the ability to dig for meaning. (There’s just not enough time in a five-minute video to do much more than shout your opinion at your viewers.) “Show, don’t tell” is a hoary old cliché that I’ve complained about in the past - Shakespeare made great hay out of telling - but there are limits to just coming out and saying things. If explicit statement of themes is is used very sparingly, such as with one scene in Sopranos - otherwise a remarkably restrained show given the dictates of the mobster genre - it can be effective. As a phenomenon that I simply can’t escape, I hate it. I hate it so much.

Barbie is the most prominent case here. I thought it was funny, consistently entertaining, and remarkably well-made. The set design and costuming is as gorgeous as everyone said. But the movie is also so afraid that you’ll mistake its message and its purpose that it’s forever just foregoing any pretense of not directly explaining itself to you. The filmmakers were clearly deeply invested in making sure people knew that there was a progressive way to portray a doll with a famously contested political meaning. The results are obvious; America Ferrera’s character seems to exist solely to have someone around to learn how Barbie, for decades a symbol of sexism, could actually be feminist. The movie is a lot of fun and also a two hour lecture.

In terms of being the most shameless about this practice, the worst offender is probably the Oscars-dominating Everything Everywhere All at Once. In addition to running every joke in the film into the ground (Hey! It’s Racacoonie! For the sixth time!), the Daniels insist on having characters just say the point that they’re trying to get across. When they need a dramatic beat, somebody just says some maudlin synopsis of the movie’s view of the world to somebody else. If you’re watching it and are worried that you might not be getting the message, just wait five minutes and one of the impossibly earnest characters will explain it to you with a PowerPoint presentation. Those talking rocks? All they do is shout the movie’s message at you. That is their sole narrative function.

You know my thoughts on The Bear, a show where every conversation is a heart-to-heart between two characters in which they fight through a short-term misunderstanding only to come, eventually, to grow a little closer. And they really don’t want you to miss the points they’re making. Fan favorite Richie makes an unlikely total life turnaround in season two, going from a schlub to the consummate professional. He’s gone from zero to hero! And in case you missed that, he helpfully says “I wear suits now.” Yeah, I got that.

In the recent film version of Cat Person, based on a short story that was not itself a model of restraint, the film is palpably afraid that people won’t get the point. This is cringiest when, say, an anthropology professor speaks archly about ant mating practices. (Could it be that she’s really talking… about people?!?) As Jen Chaney says for Vulture,

Robert turns out to be a total Star Wars nerd who’s obsessed with Harrison Ford and insists on taking Margot to see The Empire Strikes Back on their first date. When he sends Margot a compilation of film clips that includes the first kiss Han imposes on Leia in that sequel, it’s apparent that Robert was raised to believe nothing is more romantic than a man giving a woman “what she really wants” despite her protests. Like so much in Cat Person, this observation would carry much more weight if Margot didn’t immediately explain that subtext for the audience.

I really loved They Cloned Tyrone, which was so unexpected and sharp and funny. I thought it was just delightful, filled with great performances. I also thought that the broader point about how the American Black underclass is treated in our society was really obvious. I mean, it’s an explicit plot point that the evil company is doing their experiments in poor Black neighborhoods because no one in power will notice or care. So why why why have Kiefer Sutherland show up to look into the camera and tell the audience how they’re supposed to feel about this, politically? Why gild the lily that way?

Jim Jarmusch’s impossibly terrible 2019 film The Dead Don’t Die features (alongside such delicate nods to current event as MAGA hats that say “Keep America White Again”) a line at the end of the film from Tom Waits, told in voice over, that runs “consumerists... guess they were dead already.” I guess so!

This year’s tepid Pixar movie Elemental demonstrates the gulf between immigrants and the native-born by depicting one as fire and the other as water; in keeping with that dedication to picture-book symbolism, characters say things like “this whole time I thought you were so strong. But turns out, you're just afraid,” and “sometimes, when I lose my temper, I think it's just me trying to tell me something I'm not ready to hear,” and “Ember, the shop was never the dream. You were the dream. You were always the dream.”

Stranger Things is as indifferent to subtlety as you can possibly imagine, unsurprisingly given that its entire reason for being is to hit you in the face with a nostalgia brick until you surrender. There’s a large bounty of quotes to choose from, but two favorites from the most recent season include “You’ve experienced trauma. When you bottle feelings up, it doesn’t take much to trigger them again” and “We are all time travelers, if you think about it.” I expect the final season will feature characters repeatedly staring directly into frame and saying “Friendship is the real magic!”

In Glass Onion, Ryan Johnson’s even-worse sequel to the overrated Knives Out, the character of Benoit Blanc and the film itself compete to see just how heavy-handedly they can scream the movie’s clumsy political themes. Johnson desperately wants you to know that Edward Norton’s Elon Musk stand-in is actually very stupid, rather than a genius. Personally, I think that this actually blunts rather than deepens the critique of people like Musk and their place in the world, but OK. How many times, exactly, does this stupidity have to be demonstrated? How many times does Benoit Blanc need to just say outright what we as the audience are supposed to feel?

Character in overhyped melodrama Past Lives, about a woman’s struggle over whether to stay with her husband or leave him for another man: “It's true that if you leave you lose things, but you also gain things, too.” You don’t say.

I could go on. I’ve seen little of Ted Lasso but I’m told it’s serially guilty of this tic. The dreadful Last Night in SoHo, the well-intentioned faceplant that was the Candyman reboot, The Matrix Resurrections patiently explaining its cloddish meta nature, all of them totally lacking in confidence that the audience will get the point unless they’re hit in the face with it like a dead fish. There’s a lot of examples I’ve watched recently that I can’t remember right now. Even stuff I liked, such as the film Barbarian or the show Beef, have an aggravating tendency to make subtext text in a self-defensive way. And while I want to stick to the practice of just saying the themes or moral here, there are of course many other ways that shows and movies can swing their messages at you like Gallagher smashing a watermelon. Nobody says a word in the recent horror-sci fi movie No One Will Save You, but you could not possibly watch the film without understanding that the real monster is trauma, man.

I wonder what Wickman thinks when he watches a film like Glass Onion, which has something to say and also zero faith that its audience can piece that together for themselves. I find the tendency artistically unfortunate because it removes the inspiration for mental work that abstract and difficult art sometimes achieve; I find it insulting because it seems to presume that I don’t have the capacity to figure anything out without direct coaching. I forget who said that he disliked poems that “black the eye or put out their lips to be kissed,” but he made a good point. Artistic work that inspires an emotional response by simply dictating that response to you is usually going to make you feel cheap. A girl likes to be bought dinner sometimes! In his essay, Wickman writes

Even Hemingway’s famous Iceberg Theory, the “Theory of Omission,” only works to the extent that the reader picks up on what’s omitted—i.e. to the extent that the work isn’t actually all that subtle

This is an odd definition of subtlety - that which is subtle is that which the audiences necessarily misses. Hemingway’s theory, which I have traditionally not been a fan of, of course threatens that some people will never grasp that which is omitted. But the implication is that losing some will be worth it for the inspiration of others. Hemingway’s theory banks on the notion that the conditions under which some will get it and some won’t are fertile artistic ground, and that specifically the process of gradually absorbing a theme or understanding a moral is both entertaining and meaningful. With the commercial desire to speak to as many people as humanly possible, there will always be financial pressure to just spell things out. But symbolism and allusion have for so long been such prized tools because they are powerful; they involve the audience in the creation of artistic effects, making us partners in the feelings we feel as a result. Some messages are best delivered via smoke signal, and there are certain kinds of feelings that can only be achieved in art if you trust the audience to make the leap themselves.

“God made both fleas and whales and pronounced both good,” said the literary theorist and poet XJ Kennedy. The virtues of subtlety and the virtues of being blunt can live comfortably together. What we have to bear in mind, though, is that the financial interests of the entertainment industry point firmly in one direction. These showrunners and directors and writers are putting unmistakably didactic lines in the mouths of their characters because that’s what’s being rewarded economically in their industry. Wickman was thus comforting the comfortable in his essay, making a passionate plea for the overdog. He seems to grasp this, such as when he nods to Taylor Swift and pop music, who were already effortlessly colonizing the entire world of music appreciation and criticism. Of course, “poptimism” has been the dominant critical style for at least a decade and a half now, and Taylor Swift is a cultural phenomenon so hegemonic my dogged attempts to avoid her have failed again and again. The almost equally-unavoidable genre of K-pop has its virtues, but it’s the product of an entertainment machine that has absolutely no use for subtlety. And now high-brow TV and movies, Best Picture winners, feel compelled to fill the mouths of their characters with earnest bromides that sum up exactly what the creators want the audience to feel. You won, Forrest! And I gotta tell you, I hate it.

I love Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of one of my favorite novels. Like the book, the movie is the opposite of restrained, filled with spastic grotesques, a showcase for Doc Sportello’s bizarre behavior, stylish to the point of being overwhelming. When it came out, a lot of critics hated it. Too abstruse, they said, too obscure. What’s it even about? It didn’t immediately open its legs and give them what they wanted. “Inherent Vice may prove frustrating for viewers who demand absolute coherence,” runs the Rotten Tomatoes summary. But I think it’s coherence that’s overrated, not subtlety, and for me, the movie’s perfect.