WRITING FOR TV
Lesson 4
Suspense and comedy are the most difficult of subjects. The reason is actually quite obvious. Suspense and comedy are basically the same thing.
Alfred Hitchcock
It sounds as if Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense in films and on television, had a few too many when he talks like that. Suspense scares us, comedy makes us laugh, how on earth can the two be the same thing?
Read and learn. I’m going to focus in depth on comedy in the future, this week I’m only mentioning it because in many ways it is the mirror image of suspense. You do know comedy and farce are not the same thing, right? True story, I’m not lying.
If I may use famous American scripts as examples:
Friends is comedy. It makes you laugh using funny sayings and situations. It’s very human.
Dumb And Dumber is farce. It makes you laugh by visually shocking and/or disgusting you. Think before you write me a nasty about this. An idiot who licks ice and gets his tongue stuck is shocking first and then it turns disgusting. Very human? More like insane, I think.
In the world of suspense there are also two types:
Silence of the lambs is primarily a suspense story. The main character, young detective Clarice, follows clues given by the monstrous cannibal Hannibal Lecter and she discovers, for example, a dusty vehicle in a dark garage. We start getting scared before the camera shocks and disgusts us with what waits inside the vehicle. Suspense is the art of frightening you.
Scream is a shock story. You’re not even given a chance to get scared. Bam! The killer is suddenly standing right behind the beautiful young woman. The point is to scare you silly and then disgust you when the police find her mutilated body.
Okay, fine, there are points where suspense and shock sometimes overlap. A suspense story can later turn into a shock story. Of course, if I have to teach you how to shock people, then I’m wasting our time here. It’s too easy to shock people. Show them something unexpected and bam! they are shocked, over and out. Teaching you to write shock for TV is also a waste of time because censorship on television is much worse than censorship in film, you won’t easily get away with truly horrendous shock scenes on TV. So I’d rather talk about something you can really use.
Let’s cook us a pot full of suspense, okay?
Suspense and consequence
Okay, fine, let’s first imagine a scene and a feeling we all know: We are waiting in the exam room for the lecturer or teacher to say we may turn over the paper and start answering the questions. What we experience at that moment is naked suspense. Call it tension if you like, same thing. At that moment we are detective girl Clarice in Silence Of The Lambs; we discover the dusty vehicle in the garage and realize it’s been there for a long time, and inside the dark car there is something very bad and it’s been there for a very long time. Suspense is always about time: it takes time for the lecturer or teacher to hand out the exam paper. The longer time is correctly stretched, the greater the suspense.
So: one of the most important ingredients of our suspense pot is timing. How long it takes Jodie Foster as Clarice to find that garage, open the garage door and then get inside that damn scary vehicle. The correct amount of time. So you, poor writer, have to make sure Clarice struggles to find the right address of the garage, the right key for the garage door, and then how to open the dust-covered vehicle inside. The writer can, of course, enjoy hanging time too much, let it go on too long. If suspense is salt as ingredient, you are sprinkling too much salt when, for example, you bring a curious neighbour on the scene, she wants to know what the hell Clarice is doing here. You know what the viewer of your story does at that moment? The viewer decides now would be a good time to go for a pee.
But I promise you: if a suspense scene works correctly, a fully involved viewer would rather pee his or her pants than miss a second of that scene.
You still think Alfred Hitchcock was wrong? Suspense isn’t funny?
Okay, fine, let’s compare successful suspense like the garage scene in Silence Of The Lambs with a successful comedy sequence in Friends. Actress Jennifer Aston, playing Rachel, urgently needs to get to the airport to prevent David Schwimmer, playing Ross, from flying to his wedding in England; Rachel must tell him she loves him, he can’t go marry that English tart. All sorts of incidents befall Rachel on her way to the airport, all of it extremely funny, but the viewer’s tummy muscles tighten with tension: Will poor Rachel reach the airport in time before idiot Ross gets on that plane?
Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t wrong: good comedy is good suspense.
But let’s keep cooking. The other important ingredient is the character at the centre of all this suspense. Thinking about our experience in the exam hall, it is us in there waiting to turn over the paper, we do not imagine ourselves being someone else in the scene. In script parlance, we call this POV, Point Of View. We don’t want a stranger’s POV, it has to be ours; in a story we are the character we most identify with. If I may mention Silence Of The Lambs again : Say it’s a nosy neighbour who makes that gruesome discovery in the garage and not Clarice…would we be at all stressed about it? Do we care if a stranger looks inside that dark vehicle and loses her lunch?
Suspense can, of course, happen to more than one character at the same time. It could be a group we’ve come to love, we fear something bad might happen to one of them. But be warned, writer: A group can be dangerous, viewers generally tend to identify with one or two characters. What if you pick a group of five or six and you let the terrible thing happen to the one viewers like the least? They’re going to wonder what the fuss is all about, and that’s just being human. In one of the most successful films of all time, The Avengers: Endgame, the script lets the most popular superhero die after tremendous tension: Iron Man.
And yes, suspense can fail if its consequence doesn’t work. If someone else died at the end of The Avengers: Endgame, say Iron Man’s wife Pepper, would it have provoked the same global reaction from viewers? Pepper as played by Gwyneth Paltrow is a cute character, but she is not nearly as loved as Iron Man.
So it really doesn’t help if we cook this stress potion without the most important ingredient. And what, dear writer, is the most important ingredient?
Love, of course.
Yes, the viewer must fall in love with the character who will end up in great distress. Sounds corny, but it’s true: Love, caring, is always the most important ingredient of suspense. I have never seen a truly brilliant suspense sequence without that being the case.
One last point about suspense before I say goodbye. Didn’t want to mention it at first, because I believe you already know: Don’t do a spoiler. Hannibal Lecter doesn’t tell Clarice ahead of time who or what’s in that dusty bloody car, right? In Friends they don’t start great comedy dialogue with the punch-line, right?
Next time, two weeks from now, we’ll talk about comedy in more detail. Please remember to do your homework: watch and read!