Brittany Constable

Me: *looks down at the thing I wrote just now*

The other day, my husband told me about a conversation he had with a woman who claimed not to like Disney’s Cinderella because she’s a feminist. It’s not the first time I’ve heard such an argument, and I never cease to find it to be bullshit. I wish I could have asked the woman when she had last watched the movie, because I’m guessing it hasn’t been since puberty. So many of these knee-jerk dismissals of things like the classic Disney canon are based on vague recollections of movies the person half-watched decades ago, rather than the actual text. (And the actual texts definitely merit a second look as an adult, if only for the frequent what-the-fuckery, like how Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio is a hobo who hits on every remotely feminine entity in the movie, up to and including wooden carvings and the fish.) There’s this perception that Cinderella is a wholly passive character who just sits around and waits for a prince to rescue her, but that’s just not supported by the film itself.

For starters, Cinderella’s not going to the ball for the prince. When the invitation arrives, her stepsisters are the ones who burble at the idea of seeing the prince, but Cinderella presses for her chance to go because, dammit, she was invited too. She never equates her unspecified wishes and dreams with this invitation or implies that her whole world is riding on it; she simply wants to be treated like an equal, to have a night off and enjoy herself. When it’s all over, she’s thrilled to have been left with the one glass slipper and the memory of a dance with a hottie. The idea that he’s the prince, or that she could have a shot at marrying him, doesn’t even occur to her until the news gets out the next morning. Hell, she didn’t even seek him out at the ball; he’s the one who came over to her, and never managed to introduce himself while they were dancing.

Then there’s the tricky question of agency. This is the image that detractors seem to point to as the essence of the issues with the story: Cinderella weeping while the Fairy Godmother comes out of nowhere to solve all her problems.  

But that’s not quite what’s going on here.  When she appears, FG implies that Cinderella actually summoned her. (“Nonsense, child.  If you’d lost all your faith, I couldn’t be here.”) True, that would indicate a power that Cinderella doesn’t otherwise demonstrate–except when she’s singing. She harmonizes with herself in multiple parts on “Sing, Sweet Nightingale”, and immediately before FG materializes, Cinderella is having a conversation with the background music. Seriously, there’s no other way to explain her dialogue there.  A little later, she duets with the prince on “So This is Love” without either of them opening their mouths. It’s not a direct correlation, but it’s enough unnatural shenanigans to underscore the repeated refrain that believing hard enough (not just possessing a belief, but the action of believing) will make a wish come true.

But that’s still passive, right? She’s not actually doing anything, just bursts into tears and gives up. Well, she did do something about going to the ball: she finished up an inhuman workload and found an outfit, which her menagerie did an extreme makeover on.  She earned her chance and then was fucking assaulted, forced to watch in horror while her dress, a memento of her dead mother and a gift from her only friends, was destroyed. Of course she breaks down. Holy shit, guys, give the girl a minute. All FG is doing is restoring the balance, popping in like Sam Beckett to set right what just went wrong.

Of course, the dress was only presentable in the first place because of the mice and the birds. So let’s talk about them for a second, shall we? After all, the Tom and Jerry bullshit takes up over half the runtime (41 minutes out of 75, I shit you not; it is 23 sodding minutes before Lady Tremaine gets a line), and we meet two of the birds before we even meet Cinderella. The animals, then, drive the bulk of the plot. But this isn’t like Sleeping Beauty, where the supposed protagonists take a back seat to fairy face-offs.  See, while the mice are the main ones we see in action, they never act on their own behalf. Ever. The one time we see them doing something for their own benefit is when they go out seeking food, and who’s the one that provides it? In addition to feeding them, Cinderella clothes them and teaches them to speak (which is something they value, apparently) and protects them from traps and the cat. This has created a cult of personality, where the animals all happily sing to her tune as they perform incredible feats of engineering in her service. Everything they do on-screen serves Cinderella’s interests, from acting as her lady’s maids in the morning to altering her dress to helping her escape her tower. In short, she has a small army of devoted minions at her command, who prove by the end that they’re willing to risk their lives against a sadistic predator if she needs them to. Do we say that the supervillain has no agency because he hangs out on his dark throne until the final battle, letting the underlings get their hands dirty until then?  (Am I calling Cinderella an evil mastermind? Well, she has taken over a kingdom by the end credits. Just saying.)

I love me some dialogue. There’s nothing quite like a good snappy exchange, and great quotes are the kind of thing that becomes timelessly viral (as evidenced by the average quantity of Monty Python quotes in a given D&D session). But dialogue isn’t everything, and there’s a whole lot you can do without ever saying a word.

As befits a story about a stoic badass riding into a town full of stoic badasses, The Quick and the Dead is practically a master class on this topic, packed with just about every kind of visual communication you can imagine.

Here’s one silent exchange from very early on, when the Lady first arrives in Redemption:

The creepy mustached guy, Eugene Dred, will be her secondary antagonist, right behind Herod. Notice the way she shows him her gun, and his reaction? Their enmity gets set up immediately, in just under 15 seconds.

Another similar exchange of glances establishes Herod’s primary challengers (Ed. note: This GIF cuts out a couple of shots in the middle):

In both cases, pretty much all it takes to set up these relationships is eye contact. There are a whole lot of characters in play and not a lot of time to set everything up, so this method efficiently builds audience expectations, so we already know what’s going down even before individual beefs get explained.

Efficiency occasionally leads us to an entirely wordless scene. The Lady meets with Cort to work out the rather complicated conspiracy that will see her fake her death and blow up half the town, but we naturally don’t see that whole discussion. All we see of it is this:

Of course, it’s not a silent film, and there’s quite a bit of dialogue. But the visuals still don’t slouch, frequently providing crucial subtext:

The barkeep is talking about the food and drink Herod is paying for. Later on, Dred will rape the girl, and the Lady will kill him for it.

And, of course, there’s the trailer-friendly, not terribly subtle but still rather awesome:

The movie is thick with background details, too. I’ll spare you examples of the gun porn (every fighter carries a unique, frequently blinged-out and customized, weapon) because this page would be about eighty screens long. But look over the Lady’s shoulder in the saloon for a wanted poster for one of the other contestants:

Or the skulls and bones that are all the hell over that scene:

The saloon scene is a good example of how the film divides its focus well among its large ensemble cast, and they’re frequently worth watching in the background throughout. For instance, you can spot every character who makes it past the first round as they watch the first duel:

Here’s Foy’s priceless reaction to the glass of water that almost hit him in the face:

Or watch Cort’s hands twitch after he’s held a gun for the first time in years:

Those little details help keep the character present and active, even while the lines are going to other people.

Okay, so that’s an awful lot of examples, and admittedly, things like subtle acting choices or set dressing aren’t really major tools in your arsenal as a fiction writer. Still, there are a few things that can be drawn from this for writers in any medium:

Don’t forget who’s in your scene. If a character is there, they’re going to have a reaction, even if they don’t have any direct involvement.

Well-chosen details in the setting can reveal a lot. For instance, describing in prose everything happening in the densely-packed saloon scene would take dozens of pages, but it would be easy enough to include the skeletons.

Don’t be afraid to pare down. If you can establish something with just an exchange of glances or a gesture, maybe you should, especially if it helps build the tension.

When you talk about imparting information in a story, there are actually two groups that need to get clued in: the audience and the protagonists. So, we have three potential combinations for how we start:

Established Villain: Both the audience and the characters know the bad guy

Dramatic Irony: The audience knows who the bad guy is, but the characters don’t

Big Reveal: Neither the audience nor the characters know the bad guy

(There is a fourth combo, where the characters know something the audience doesn’t, but that one doesn’t often apply to the identity of the antagonist. And it would kind of ruin my thesis here, so shh.)

As it happens, all three of these flavors of antagonist are in The Rocketeer. (Spoilers ahoy, obvs.)

Established Villain

The Feds know from the outset that the rocket thief is working for gangster Eddie Valentine, and as we learn around the second act break, they also know that Valentine has been hired by an unidentified Nazi spy. In general, you see this one mostly in retellings where the audience is already familiar with the story, or in series and serials where characters reappear frequently.

Benefits: There’s not a lot of mucking about with setup. Nazis frequently get used in this capacity (though not in The Rocketeer, funnily enough) for exactly that reason. You don’t need to spend a lot of time establishing who they are, what they want, or just how nasty they can be. Both the audience and the heroes say, “Oh shit, Nazis!” and we can get on with things.

Drawbacks: Our current storytelling culture tends to favor novelty, originality, and surprise, and the identity of the bad guy is a frequent source of that mystery. As such, you don’t see this one as much anymore.

Dramatic Irony

Our first introduction to Neville Sinclair is when he’s chewing out Valentine for fucking up the robbery. Though we don’t yet know why he wants the rocket, there’s no question that he’s up to no good. Tends to be common in kids’ movies where the “sides” are clearly delineated.

Benefits: Easy source of tension. The audience is on edge from the moment Sinclair sets his sights on Jenny, although she doesn’t realize the danger she’s in until much later. If you didn’t suspect Sinclair from the start, the only emotional investment we’d have in his seduction of Jenny is pity for Cliff that he’s going to get dumped.

Drawbacks: Be careful to keep track of who knows what, or of treating something as a reveal when the audience already knows. It’s also easy to fall prey to accusations, fair or not, that a character is carrying the Idiot Ball.  After all, we may know a character is in a horror movie, but they don’t.

Big Reveal

Oh shit, Nazis!  We actually get the reveal in two consecutive scenes demonstrating the two different variations: Jenny stumbles upon information that solves the mystery for both her and the audience simultaneously, while Cliff puts the pieces together for himself when he’s told about the Hollywood spy, and then explains his conclusions to the group.

Benefits: The aforementioned suspense and surprise!  We all live under the shadow of the spoiler now, so it’s rare to find a story these days that doesn’t have a reveal of some sort.  Throwing this sort of curveball at the characters can also force them to reevaluate and change tactics, as when the reveal to Valentine prompts him to betray Sinclair.  (As a side note, I always thought that development was kind of cheesy, but rather awesomely, it’s Truth in Television: prominent gangsters worked with the government during WWII to aid in the war effort.)

Drawbacks: Setting up a good reveal is a tricky balancing act: too much information and the audience will figure it out early, but too little and it feels like an ass pull.  You also have to make sure you don’t have a reveal for the sake of having a reveal, since those can easily drag a story down.

I’m going to be spoiling the everliving shit out of Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, so nearly this entire post is going behind a cut. Go watch it, it’s pretty great. 

Whenever a story promises to include Jack the Ripper, it’s almost a guarantee that they’ll take some stance on his real identity. And in DC Elseworlds, half the fun is seeing how they fit the familiar characters into this new setting, So when I sat down to this one with my friends, we immediately started speculating.

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Spare a thought for the poor goon, will you? After all, the bad guy can’t do all that heavy lifting himself, and the good guy can’t go straight to the top and sort shit out off the bat or we wouldn’t have much of a story. Like an impressive skyscraper, it all comes down to the support structure; an organization is only as good as its people. Sure, the baddie can throw wave after wave of anonymous masked bastards at the problem, but that’s not very engaging for the audience. So speaking of impressive skyscrapers, let’s take a look at Die Hard.

Yup, in addition to being indisputably the greatest Christmas movie of all time, it’s also widely considered to have a nearly perfect structure, so this probably isn’t the last time I’m gonna come back to it. Hans Gruber’s flunkies aren’t fully-fledged characters, true, but they’re far from faceless bullet fodder.

For starters, all twelve “terrorists” have names, which is uncommon. Usually beyond the Dragon and a couple of important henches, the rest of the crew usually ends up credited as “Soldier #5.” True, they’re not really given backstories or motivations to go with the names, but it helps make their interactions amongst each other feel realistic. It doesn’t so much matter if I remember which one Marco is, just that they’re worried McClane might have gotten him.

Speaking of interactions, special mention goes to Karl and Tony, the very blond brothers. You get a hint of their personalities and relationship in the brief scene where Karl takes a chainsaw to the phone lines Tony is trying to patch. But their biggest significance to the plot comes when McClane kills Tony and taunts the terrorists with his corpse, and Karl loses his shit. His dogged pursuit of McClane isn’t because of sadism or orders from Gruber, it’s because this is the bastard who killed his little brother and he wants to make him pay. It’s not enough to make us root for him or anything, but it makes him human.

The movie’s filled with little humanizing details like that, from the dude who nabs a candy bar during a standoff to the guy who pours Ellis a soda during his failed negotiation attempt. The director’s commitment to realism was such that he used extra-loud blanks that permanently deafened his star, and that realism carries through in the depiction of the bad guys. Even though you don’t know their histories or their personal goals, they feel like real people, which makes them more interesting foes for McClane. There’s more tension in him trying to evade a cunning, desperate individual than there would be if it were some dumbass blindly following orders.