Why Did “Exposition” Become a Dirty Word? (Patreon)

There are so many times where I’m having a conversation and someone will quickly dismiss a scene or even a whole film with the reasoning: “ugh, too much exposition!” And I’ll often get stuck in the moment of response because, like most things, it’s a more complicated conversation than that. Especially because sometimes that person is right. After all, we’ve all seen movies where there’s some scene that goes on and on with clunky explanations and the more the characters on screen try to explain, the less we understand. It’s like one of those moments in class where you felt like you were keeping good notes, but suddenly the professor is talking about something else and you’ve completely lost the thread. Is it because you weren’t paying close enough attention? Or is it because the explanation was unclear? Or was it because the movie isn’t giving you a clear enough framework to understand the new exposition in the first place? Sadly, most often it’s the latter option. In fact, there’s so much of this bad framework in modern Hollywood that I believe it’s why we have so readily adopted the line of thinking that “exposition = always bad.” But not only is that a reductive way to unfairly dismiss films on the whole, it’s also a reductive approach to understanding exposition itself.

Especially because exposition is always happening.

As a storyteller, you are presenting information to the audience in every scene whether you are aware of it or not. There’s obvious things like saying a character’s name or seeing what they do for a living, but it can be smaller and more observant, too. Like how they dress, what they drive, or even how they like their eggs. But even more important than these tactile things are the signifiers of their behavior. It’s about how the character carries themselves in their day to day. Are they confident or shy? Observant or oblivious? And it’s also about how they respond to others when challenged. Do they shrink up or match the other's energy? The truth is that good characterization IS good exposition. Because it’s the way we come to understand a person, their psychology, and what they want. But done in all these subtle ways that add up to us being “exposited” without even really having to think about it. What we’re really talking about here is natural dramatization. It’s the “show don’t tell” golden rule of storytelling that everyone espouses so regularly… But sometimes within that golden rule, you really do have to tell.

Because every story has information that provides crucial context for the viewer. And sometimes that information is a little bit complex. But that’s where things tend to get into trouble. Because there is soooooo much bad telling. And the good telling is often invisible.

The real question is: what separates them?

Going From Bad To Good

So you’re probably familiar with all the kinds of “bad telling” that are out there, but it’s worth mentioning that the worst kind of exposition is in fact the exposition that is missing. Usually it’s not an important autobiographical detail or information about the world-building, but instead when you are missing an understanding of a relationship or how two characters on screen feel about each other at the current moment. Without that understanding, we don’t really have rooting interests or empathy so we don’t care about the scene at all (it’s the difference between watching a fight between two character you’ve never met before and, say, watching the end of a deeply emotional story like Rocky or something). Basically, this is the reason we need exposition in the first place.

But perhaps the most familiar form of “bad telling” is usually when a movie opens with some sort of big info dump. You know it when you see it. It’s basically when you get that feeling there is going to be a damn quiz later and you gotta hone your memorization. The thing is that: we are really, really bad at listening when things are being explained in a factual matter, like it’s a lecture, especially if we have no real familiarity beforehand. It just all feels so abstract so our eyes can’t help, but glaze over. Put simply, that’s not what we go to the movies for! We go for storytelling! There’s got to be a better way to absorb this!

Similarly, there’s so many times where the conflict of a given scene will be vague and a studio will give a note about wanting this scene to be more clear. The problem is that their solution is always to have the action STOP and have a character basically explain the conflict right there in the middle of the scene. But if you have to do that you’ve already lost them. Instead, you want to go to an earlier moment and cleanly set-up the relationships (hopefully through dramatization and not explanation) so that this moment of conflict can just play out with the audience fully understanding WHY. Stopping in the middle, never, ever works. But it’s not just about the interruption. The reason these scenes are bad is the same reason any scene with this kind of approach would be bad. It’s because there’s nothing actually happening. There’s no character arcs or any of that good stuff. So, in order to help take something from bad telling to good telling, you want to consider the following ideas…

- Flow & Exchange & Questions - The first thing you want to do is prevent one character from explaining things in a long, drawn out monologue. The idea is not just to break up the information into a conversation, but to create a sense of flow and exchange. A simple back and forth if you will. We can all agree that the original Star Wars: A New Hope is a successful movie, right? It made billions? Launched a whole saga and all that? Well if you go back, you’ll notice how much of that film is mostly Luke asking questions. Seriously, he does it constantly. And while it may seem mildly annoying on one level, it’s actually an active trait. He’s not passively sitting back and being too cool for school as people lecture him. He’s the driving force. His curiosity matches the audience’s. And it’s what creates a sense of propulsion and investigation into what was once a bizarre new world to discover. And it’s what allows the story to have a give and take as it unfolds.

- Naturalism - Similar to the idea of flow and exchange, you can always feel it when expositional aspects of a conversation feel forced. The most egregious example is when two characters sit down and go over information that they both already know. It’s just catching the audience up and there’s no other purpose, particularly if there’s no real disagreement or exchange happening in the scene. Which is why you usually want one character to be informing another character who is unaware of something. But this is just the starting point. Because a better way to make exposition feel invisible is through…

- Emotion & Character Dynamics - So there’s that great meme where some asked his dad to name all the Game of Thrones characters and his answers were predictably hilarious. But what I really like about this chart is how much it proves you don’t have to have all the super clear information to enjoy a show (or even know people’s names). You can just relate to their deeper essence and understand the core of their character. Note how many times the dad defines someone by their behavior like “Lord Weasel” or their place in a power structure “King of the Guys,” or most especially their relationships, like calling someone “Frey’s Buddy.” It may seem vague, but it helps prove how much of the lore is (kind of) unnecessary. Because he’s still cluing into what the characters want, who likes who, and most importantly: how they’re all mad at each other. Which is what clues us into the BEST approach to exposition…

- Conflict - Yup. The best way to explain any information is through conflict. Not just because conflict is the thing that drives our engagement with a given story, but because it’s absolutely the best way to make that information feel like it’s an invisible part of the drama. Instead of being like “these two clans have been at war for centuries!” You can literally show the two clans fighting and how it impacts your characters. But it’s also the best way to convey even the driest, most tangential world-building information. To go back to A New Hope again, you may remember the scene like 20 minutes in where it suddenly cuts to inside the Death Star and we’re seeing some meeting with a bunch of people we’ve never met before. Now, Lucas’s goal in this scene is to establish the political climate and show that they are using the battle station as a weapon of fear. But smartly, Lucas has two characters argue over the tactic of how. One guy is worried and anxious about the plans getting away and wants them to be cautious. But the other guy is smug and overconfident, utterly believing that this new station makes them invincible! But that guy’s overconfidence hits a real speed bump at the end of the scene when starts being a dick to Darth Vader and thus gets force choked. Which actually brings me to the next point of good exposition…

- Arcs - Again, you have to treat scenes with a lot of exposition like they’re any other scene. You need to give them a sense of arc or growth. How does the new information impact the character? Has learning X or Y set them up for a kind of transition or moment of growth? Is it all setting up something that’s important for later? What I like about the war table scene above from A New Hope is that the overconfident guy getting force choked isn’t just a fun little button, it’s actually setting up the fatal flaw of the empire: their hubris. It’s their belief that their new space station is invincible is constantly what prevents them from putting all their resources into the search. Which reveals that all bits of exposition in your movie aren’t just about providing context, but the overall goal of…

- Set Up & Punchline - It’s perhaps no accident that the film I often use to explain this concept is actually one of the films that’s most unfairly lambasted for its exposition. And that’s Inception. Because people notice that, yes, the first half of the film is positively loaded with exposition. But again, exposition isn’t a dirty word in and of itself. It’s not about how much, it’s about the quality. And if you go over that film you’ll notice how much that exposition uses the good tactics mentioned above. There’s a constant use of questions with flow and exchange (Nolan is very good at giving something a sense of propulsion and NOT just in the editing), but also a great deal of argumentation about the tactics they are going to use. They keep running into wrinkles and problems with the plan and trying to overcome it. It’s also constantly using visualization tricks to show the things that will be used later (like disappearing stairs, train interruptions, etc). All of this stuff is just your classic heist planning with a little more of a sci-fi bent. And it’s deeply aware of the end goal: making everything clear so that it doesn’t need to be explained later. That way, the last half of the movie can just GO and be exciting with barely an added word said. Which is the exact reason the last hour is so damn thrilling. It’s just good set-up and punch-line work.

And what I hope the overwhelming success of a film like Inception highlights is that there are no hard and fast rules about approach. A lot of exposition? A little? The truth is there’s a push / pull with every movie trying to meet its own needs and it’s all about what ultimately WORKS. And I think there’s a number of films that help exemplify the different range of overall tactics…

Different Strokes, Different Folks…

- The Two and a Half Dunes - Frank Herbert’s Dune has always been considered one of those “unfilmable” novels. Because it is so dense, so full of fantastic detail, and extended political genealogy. But if there is one radical difference between the two and half film adaptations (Villenueve’s 2021 entry, David Lynch’s theatrical version, and Lynch’s 3 hour directors cut) it’s their approach to exposition. In the 3 hour director cut, it starts with a huge assault of information. It’s literally an entire history lesson, told in narration, all set to pictures. It’s the very height of the “there’s going to be a quiz later” lecture form that we don’t actually absorb. And honestly? The approach of the theatrical cut isn’t all that much better. We have Virginia Madsen’s princess character laying out all this information about prophecy and the emperor, but that stuff won't be relevant for a long, long time. You can’t help but ask, “why is it really important that I know this right now?”

Meanwhile, the Villenueve version is actually a beautiful exercise in accessibility (at least by comparison). It doesn't try to lay a wealth of information at your feet. It never wants to quiz you. It doesn’t even really want you to worry about what comes later. Instead, it only tells us only what we need to know to get through the next scene. Yes, it starts with Paul’s visions, but those are much more about his emotional yearing. It then quickly brings you through his relationship with his family, and by extension, the roles and duties of his house in the larger world. But it’s all built organically from conflict and meaningful exchanges, building to payoffs. Rather than trying to give the audience an abstract roadmap, it is instead constantly building the track in front of us as we go, and doesn’t worry about things that don’t matter. It doesn’t even bring up the emperor! Because it doesn’t need to worry about setting that up until the next film. As a result, I think they really made a successful, easily digestible adaptation on a popular level. I can’t tell you how many people were like “I finally understand Lynch’s version now,” and it’s all because they ordered the information in terms of immediate relevance.

But I also have a fun wrinkle on this thought, because when I think about which one I want to throw on in the middle of the night as I drift in and out, my answer is actually the Lynch one. But that’s only because re-watches are often totally a different story….

- Holding All The Cards - At this point, I understand David Lynch’s Dune because I’ve seen it a bunch of times and thus can process it an a completely different way that someone who is trying to follow along dramatically for the first time. I just don’t need to grok the information in the same way. I can just turn it on and be fascinated by the odd, Lynchian choices and just vibe with the damn thing. But this reminds us that it’s ALWAYS a different experience when we know the movie’s subject matter inside and out because we’re already holding all the cards. This is the problematic wrinkle that often comes with popular adaptation. When I went to see all the films in the Harry Potter franchise (aside: screw J.K.), I was part of a big group of fans who knew the books inside and out. Thus we got to watch in a completely different manner than traditional narratives would require. It was like many were just going to see the movie to see how they would express the beats they already knew so well. But how do these kinds of movies also work for someone who knows nothing? I remember my brother seeing Azkaban (which is my favorite of them) but he said he got to that ending giant conversation and just got completely fucking lost in the proper nouns (it’s much easier to follow that kind of stuff in a book). Ideally, you need it to work for both groups, but it sometimes makes for an uneasy pairing. So you have to constantly ask yourself: who is it for and why? Can you make it for everyone? Often not. Because you could fill up your story with every conceivable detail from a novel (which is a very different format) or you can ask how much information do you really need for the core drama to be understood?

- Minimalism and the Unknown - Whenever I point to a film that operates off of beautiful minimalism of exposition, I point to John Carpenter’s The Thing. We start with a dog running toward the camp and the whole damn movie can just GO, dammit. Even when they’re trying to figure out what’s going on with the monster in question, there are only a few loose “rules” that they have to establish (like setting up the blood test). More important is that you understand character dynamics and what everyone’s fighting over in terms of strategy. It gets away with such minimalism because the film is deliberately taking advantage of the paranoia of the unknown. But crucially, note that the film itself doesn’t try to hide or be too clever with how it unfurls its narrative, either. It is in fact very plain-faced about its story. But that sober approach is precisely what helps keep the monster itself as unknowable and scary as ever.

- Fostering Dread - Sometimes, instead of minimalism, you can get away with being very direct about what is going to happen. A great example of this is actually in Titanic. Where many people already understand the boat is going to go down. But one of the things I like is how the wrap-around sections show the computer model of exactly how the boat exactly broke apart (albeit with a terse, comic delivery). This not only creates a sense of understanding about HOW the boat will break apart later in the actual story - but gives the audience a framework to foster a deep sense of dread. It’s essentially planting the stakes and function when we know people may get trapped in certain places, along with the dread of knowing the boat is going to get snapped in half, etc. Remember, drama isn’t often about surprises. But instead putting the proverbial “ticking time bomb under the table” and giving rise to your fear.

- Smart Alecs / When the Information Doesn’t Matter - Stevern Soderbergh is so good at making movies about smart people. But one of the crucial aspects of this is he knows that we don’t always have to understand what they’re saying. We can just see them being smart and good at their jobs and we go, like, “ooooh, that person’s wicked smaht!” and we can simply like that they’re getting the one up on some other fuddy duddy character. But this also allows for great moments where the movie can slow down and thus convey to the audience that something is going to be important. Like in Contagion, when Kate Winslet has to stop and try to explain fomites and how often people touch their face in day to day life, much to the horror of the people she’s informing (a moment which in no way went on to be a terrifying bit of insight into day to day life during a pandemic, yup, no siree bob). But the real reason this information is important is because it helps establish the drama of the film. We’ll see a hand of a sick person on a bus and they’ll touch a bar and we’re like OH GOD, PLEASE NO ONE ELSE TOUCH THAT, etc. It’s all about the framework.

But one of the great things about Smart Alec characters is that we get to experience the “push / pull” of the information we are eventually let in on. Nothing exemplifies this better than the Oceans movies, where you get to feel like you’re being let in on the fun of heist planning - and that you as the audience member are cooler and smarter for it - versus the moments when we get to feel like the smart alec was just one step ahead of us in playing the fun little game of understanding what they’re up to.

- Visualization? More Like Simulation! - So the first Matrix is a great example of a film that is trying to convey this big, complicated sci-fi world to us, but it does such a great job of taking through each nugget of explanation just a scene at a time. Better yet, they have a great way of under-lining those explanations through choices, tests, and simulations. There is of course the (in)famous Red Pill / Blue Pill scene - which the new one has such a clever riff on - but it very directly turns the real world exposure moment into an active choice for the main character instead of something that just happens to them. But there’s also the “program sequences” that come soon after, like the white room which helps you understand the notion of the matrix’s ability to create environments, along with the incredibly exciting kung fu and jumping sequences. What’s so smart about this is the way it’s layering classic “training montage” storytelling right into the exposition of the world itself, therefore helping to define the rules of what you can and (seemingly) can’t do in The Matrix. They are dramatizing exposition through Simulation, but arcing the character in the process. And much like Inception, they are doing it all in the first half so the last half of the movie can just go, go, go!

- Turning Into The Joke - So one of my favorite exposition movies ever is actually Jurassic Park. Because they’re taking this very big sci fi premise (at least at the time) and trying to mine it for believability. The film has all these great moments of exposition set-up and pay-off, like the T-Rex blindness or Goldblum explaining chaos theory. But my favorite fun part comes early on when the film sort of jokes about the reductive / lecture style of exposition when they get locked into the little theme park ride to explain the “how” they made dinosaurs, complete with the cutsie double helix friends saying “bingo, dino DNA!” But rather than let that go on even a second too long, the main characters quickly get off the ride to go into the lab and ask their own questions. It’s both a meta way of making fun of the way we often deliver exposition, but then just turning it into a classic dramatic investigation scene. Speaking of which…

- Gamifying Information / Investigation - There is perhaps no more amusing way to dramatize information than through mystery and investigation. Because that’s what it’s all about, right? You start off with a driving question - something like a murder that you’re trying to solve - but you have to do all bits of investigation to get new STORY INFORMATION that helps point you in the direction of understanding the whole scope of said story. But rather than experience the story chronologically as it happens, it is essentially a dramatic puzzle to find out what already happened. And all the big key bits of exposition come out through dramatic reveals.

But it can also play out a bit of a game, too. The Silence of the Lambs is one of those perfectly told stories (with complex transphobia issues no doubt), but so much of what makes it a compelling watch is the gamified back and forth of information that goes between Clarice and Hannibal. What could otherwise be a very dry way of getting information from someone is instead turned into a game of polite manners, give and take, and psychological warfare. But it’s also about him toying with her through his cryptic clues (kind of like the riddler) in a way that most other characters would not be able to… come to think of it, I feel like we’ve just been seeing worse versions of these scenes in popcorn movies for decades now. The thing they miss is the crucial point. That, as always, mystery is not just about being vague or cryptic or boxing it, it’s about ordering information dramatically and making those reveals WORK like gangbusters.

- The Subtle Genius of Title Cards - What I generally like about title cards is that they’ll give you really important information and it practically forces you to be really economical with what you choose and why (after all, there’s nothing more boring than a big wall of text appearing on the screen). But is there? One of the subtlety smart things about the Star Wars title crawl is that the font is really big so it’s way less writing than you think and, more importantly, really it’s only trying to tell you three important things: 1) The context: there’s a rebellion and the world is at war! 2) That there’s a macguffin: the death star plans can turn the tide of that war! And 3) there’s a driving action: Princess Leia is currently trying to escape with said plans! But if you look at some of the title cards in, say, the prequel era? They’re filled with a lot of extraneous information and it's perhaps no accident they do not work as well.

- Better Clunky Than Vague - So I’m going on and on talking about the problems with “bad exposition,” but again, the worst exposition is no exposition (and remember, 9 times out of 10 it is not a world detail, but understanding what characters want / the emotional context of a relationship). And the honest truth is that clunky explanations or on the nose dramatization can still function for solid results. For example, when I was recently covering Hawkeye I kept noting how there were all these moments of set-up that were inelegant or a forced, but in the end? It was still good enough that they were there, as opposed to being vague. It’s what made the end sequences and relationships ultimately function (at least before the finale, but that’s another MCU conversation).

- Unscrambling The Scramble - So, going back to mysteries, one thing they always confirm to me is that all stories, even straight-forward ones that have no mystery at all, are about the ordering of information. What do you need to understand right now? Why?

I mentioned how much more accessible this thinking makes Villeneuve’s Dune., but it’s a shame when you see how many movies get lost in the scramble. One film I always think about is John Carter, which has not one, not two, but three separate intro scenes which all set up this labyrinthian teasing of Mars politics, a flash-forward to him post travel, and also him at his lowest point (without really telling us why). But then it somehow goes two thirds of the way through the movie without revealing his core motivation. Doing all this just locks everything into this completely unnecessary puzzle that keeps us from emoting with the characters. Similar things could be said about 2016’s Warcraft, a movie that I think has its heart in the right place, but when it comes to managing all these moving parts of world building, it’s constantly scrambling the order in which we really need things. It keeps trying to establish these rules and yet I constantly felt confused by relationships and didn’t even realize two characters were related. Unlike the above Game of Thrones Dad, it missed so many opportunities to define characters by their personalities and what they emotionally wanted. But this is why it’s so important to talk about these kinds of films.

Because it’s so easy for me to point at the classic films that work and be like “just do that,” but honestly, it’s hard to pull off. And all movies can teach you things, often more so through analyzing their momentary dysfunction. Because sometimes it’s more productive to look at things that don’t work and play the fun game of thinking about how you would restructure the order of information to be more dramatically engaging to the viewer. I swear, no other process helps you become more attune to storytelling. Because in the end, so much exposition is about fine tuning this exact thing. It’s not about lecturing. It’s about layering character and plot and drama and stakes right into the DNA of what you’re seeing in the moment, and bringing the audience right into it along with you. Because exposition is happening all the time, always.

And it's never a bad word in and of itself.

<3HULK