the day.
Clearly she isn’t giving him her card for another taxi ride. Like the cute tart from San Francisco, she has other things on her mind.
Subtext is the true meaning simmering underneath the words and actions. It’s the real, unadulterated truth. The text is the tip of the iceberg, but the subtext is everything underneath that bubbles up and informs the text. It’s the implicit meaning, rather than the explicit meaning. Great writing and great drama are subterranean. Subtext points to other meanings. The words we hear are meant to lead us to other layers. Conflict exists at this intersection of text and subtext. Great drama dwells beneath the words.
When writers write dialogue that is obvious, we say they’re “on-the-nose.” Characters say exactly what they mean in neat, logical, sentences. It’s dull. It’s bland. It sounds like a lecture or a sermon or treatise or a resume. The dialogue is not emotionally alive. The words don’t resonate with other meanings. Instead, characters give information, recite backstory and exposition, and comment on unimportant things. They chat, and chat some more.
In obvious dialogue, characters are direct. They are all-knowing and understand everything well enough to explain it all to us. They tell us about their psychological problems – and have self-knowledge and insight and can tell us exactly what’s going on. They tell us exactly why they’re the way they are, and what childhood forces caused their psychological problems. Nothing is hidden. Like the writer, this character is all-knowing and the writer is determined to have him tell it all.
Or, consider this scene: Two characters meet, and are clearly attracted to each other. They talk about their attraction, about their hopes for the future. They have it all figured out. Everything is out there, without any of the uncertainties or nuances that occur in real life.
When everything is in the text, everything going on is in the lines, not between the lines, as it should be in great writing. It’s all there. But what’s missing is the important part – the motives and thoughts, emotions and human truths that resonate with multiple meanings.
In The Great Santini (1979, by Lewis John Carlino and Herman Raucher from the novel by Pat Conroy), the mother explains to her son, in so many words, the importance of understanding subtext. She says, “You have to learn to interpret the signals he [the father] gives off.”
That’s what writers need to learn to do: Write subtext so audiences will understand that more is going on than meets the eye. Writers point the way. They choose suggestive words and describe revealing behavior so that audiences get a whole lot more information than they could ever get from just a line of dialogue.
HOW DO WE KNOW THERE’S SUBTEXT?
Subtext is all the meanings that are not stated, but lie beneath. It’s what’s really going on. What the movie is really about. In this book, I use a fairly broad definition of subtext because what lies beneath is not just beneath the words: Subtext can be found beneath words, gestures, behaviors, actions, and images.
Usually subtext is something you can’t quite put your finger on. It is felt. You sense it. We know we’re encountering subtext because of the feelings of uncertainty we have and the questions we might ask. We encounter subtext when we wonder: “Hmmm, that doesn’t seem quite right. What did the person really mean?” Or, we think, “Yeah, sure, I just don’t believe a word of it!” Or, we feel uneasy, and sense, “I’m sure there’s more going on here than it seems. I wonder what he’s up to, and why is he doing that?”
In her book The Film Director’s Intuition, directing and acting coach Judith Weston explains:
Language is what we say with our words, and subtext is what we really say, with our body language, with the tone of our voice, with our eyes and expression. Subtext expresses our real feelings – for instance, feelings of impatience or distaste which may lurk beneath small talk and compulsory politeness. Subtext is the emotional history, intention, metaphor, and emotional event at the center of the scene.
Subtext adds depth. Judith adds, “Without subtext, the movie can be superficial.”
EXPRESSING SUBTEXT
You can express subtext in a number of ways. You might have the text say one thing and have the subtext say the opposite. Suppose you ask your friend, “How are you?” and he replies, “Fine, very well, thank you,” as he packs up his belongings to leave the office, having just been fired. If you found out the real situation, you would know the subtext: He means the opposite of what he says.
Sometimes subtext implies multiple meanings and allows several possible interpretations. If someone says, “I’m going away. I just can’t take it anymore,” you might wonder: Is she taking a weekend off? Just going away? Is she going to kill herself? And what is the “it” she can’t take anymore? How bad is “it”? Is this behavior related to the fact her husband left her, or because they went bankrupt, or because her son is on drugs? So you start thinking of all sorts of associations and possibilities and interpretations. You don’t know for sure what’s going on, but you do know something is. And, if you know there’s subtext, you might recognize the danger and decide to ask a few questions of your friend. Perhaps you go with her for the weekend to make sure she’s not alone. Maybe you suggest that she not take the gun.
Even if we recognize subtext, its true meaning might be known to the character but unknown to everyone else. It’s the character’s secret, those little problems and flaws that only he or she understands but doesn’t want others to know about.
Or, the subtext might be invisible even to the character, and reside deep within the unconscious but affect the character’s actions, emotions, and choices. Sometimes the subtext is also invisible to the writer, who discovers it in the process of writing. Eventually, the audience needs to know, sense, or be aware of the truth, without anyone explaining it directly.
Subtext is not just the meanings beneath the words, but it is also the associations we bring to dialogue and images. You, as the writer, choose the words in both dialogue and description that resonate most. But you also must consider actions and emotions and gestures and images, not just lines of dialogue. A sunset might provoke associations of romance, of the end of things as night and darkness come, of nostalgia for what might have been, of the possibility of new events taking place in the secret, romantic night. A sunset has become a cliché because we bring so many associations to this image. We have seen it so often in films. A film just has to show a sunset and we usually know everything it means. It is a tired subtext, greatly over-used. But, it is subtextual, nevertheless, because we don’t just take it at face value. We know it means a great deal more than the end of the day.
Always, with subtext, we know something more is going on. Something is unspoken – something that, if written well, is drama at its very best.
REAL-LIFE SUBTEXT
Dramatic subtext is based on our own experiences and our understandings of how people tick. As writers and artists, we watch people in real life and then use our accrued understanding to create dramatic, dynamic characters. We learn what people hide and what they choose to reveal. We learn how people don’t mean what they say or say what they mean and how much figuring out we have to do to learn what’s really going on. We recall richly layered scenes from our own lives, and examine them for subtext. We may recognize that, in real life, subtext often wastes our time and muddies our relationships because we’re forced to spend so much time figuring out what’s really going on. We try to fathom what’s up and keep thinking: “Something’s wrong here, but I don’t know what it is!”
Although we think we’d prefer that people be direct with us, and many of us learn to be direct with others (usually through
