Monday, December 6, 2021

The Problem with Show don't Tell as Film or TV criticism.

I did an anti "Show Don't Tell" post on this blog once already, but this time I'm going to try to be more nuanced about it since I've learned more.

The origin of "Show Don't Tell" as a writing rule was specifically in the context of Prose, and in that context "tell" refers only to information simply told to be audience by the author, "showing" refers to anything that happens within the story itself, including dialogue spoken by a character within the story. 

So the problem with how YouTube angry reviews and analytical Video Essays apply this to talking about Movies or TV shows or Anime, is that in those mediums unless there is a third person omniscient voice over narration, nothing actually fits the proper original literary definition of "tell".  So instead it just becomes an excuse for these critics to treat their personal dislike of expositional dialogue as some objective criticism, when it's absolutely not.

"But Film is a visual medium" one might shout from the roof tops to justify finding a way to make "show don't tell" relevant to film criticism.

Paintings, and maybe like Comics are the purely visual mediums of storytelling.  Silent Films could perhaps be considered more visual then anything else.  But modern film is a multimedia art form, as explained in this Video Essay criticizing when a Director simply uses Classical Music instead of composing an original score.  All the tools of that medium need to be respected as part of how it works, not simply the visual ones.

Not all Films or TV shows or Anime are going to be the same.  Some creators might choose to be minimalist when it comes to the talking and I can respect that artistic choice, but it won't appeal as much to my personal tastes.  Dialogue is what I enjoy more then anything else, including the world building expositional dialogue that conventional YT critics find lazy and/or boring.

I'm the kind of person who'll for fun watch hour long seminars of an Evangelical Christian I no longer even agree with on most things explain their interpretation of History and Theology and how they fit together, and the equivalents of that from people with other world views as well.  A World Building Exposition dump is just the in universe version of that for a Fantasy or SciFi setting, it can be inherently entertaining so long as you make the character giving it charismatic or interesting to watch/listen to.

And you know I've been in real life conversions that in a movie would absolutely look like "explaining something everyone already knows for the sake of the audience".  Sometimes real life isn't "well written" by the standards of some critics.  But what about the opposite of that Trope?

Early in episode 5 of Fate/Apocrypha the rest of the Black Faction shows up after a few vital plot developments just happened.  Right when the characters who were there for that are about to explain what happened to those who weren't, it jumps cuts to after that conversation, because they figured why show the audience characters talking about what the audience already knows.  That annoyed me, because you see I already made a post on how if the audience already knows is the last thing I care about, after all on a re-watch I'll absolutely know everything already.  I like watching characters react to learning things, as well as seeing how a character would explain what just happened.  This show basically skipped exactly what I wanted to watch, and created an awkward looking Jump Cut in the process of doing so.  All to appease critics who think "pointless " dialogue is the worst thing an Anime can have.

Another product of trying to apply "show don't tell" to mediums it wasn't meant for is an overuse of flashback scenes.  Flashback scenes can be good, but sometimes TV writers feel the need to flashback to any past event they've made even mildly important, sometimes it's best to just leave exactly what happened to the audience's imagination in a way that "showing" rather then "telling" doesn't allow.

And even in the present, sometimes what we don't see can be more impactful then what we do.  This is a lessen that I feel creators of Horror and Suspense and War films should always keep in mind.  But they wind up being in tension with this popular misuse of "show don't tell".

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