do you have advice on how to be more of a critical thinker/ tips on how to analyse shows?? bc i love yours but god i couldnt do it even if you paid me, i've got no skills
Oh gosh, thank you, anon! And I highly doubt you have no skills! All of this stuff is both learnt (I watch a truly shocking amount of movies, haha) and something that I genuinely think comes naturally to us as a species. I think humans like stories. I think we see that in historic - particularly Indigenous - traditions of oral storytelling, I think we see that in fairytales and fables, in modern films and TV - - hell, I even think it with tabloids (like, fuck, I kind of love that glossy magazines can build a story out of a celebrity getting a coffee from Starbucks [Not with her BOYFRIEND?? Theyâre clearly on the rocks, etc etc etc])
With that in mind, I think really learning how to unpack a story comes down to a pretty simple question.
When it comes to storytelling (and life tbh), everything is a choice that somebody has made - whether that be a writing choice, an acting choice, a costume choice, an art department choice. Somebody has sat down and decided that something looks, sounds, feels the way that it does, and theyâll have a reason for it. Stories arenât made by accident - theyâre the result of a lot of work done by a lot of people - so feel empowered to ask that story questions - interrogate it - really ask it why, because somebodyâs work and reasoning is generally behind it (and in my experience - those people love that you notice and want to engage with it, even when you have an opinion that might deviate from their intention).
Like - - okay, lets look at an example.Â
Beth wears a lot of floral, and her house is decorated with a lot of floral, which means that at least one person has made that choice. Probably a writer, who likely wrote it into a script at some point. Great! Likely though - that writer wrote it into that script, and a costume team and art department / set dressers ran with it and then doubled down on it, so now we have multiple creatives making an active creative choice to decorate Beth and Bethâs life in floral.Â
Why would they do that? What do floral prints mean?Â
Well, floral is culturally and socially something that is very feminine, and often heavily associated with beauty and motherhood (gosh, just think of any sort of motherâs day card or promotion). Flowers are also something that can represent a blossoming (which I think you could genuinely argue with Beth), and certain flowers represent very specific things - like lilies (innocence), daisies (youth), roses (love) or poppies (death) - none of the latter are relevant in this situation, but you get the gist.Â
Beth dresses in a range of floral, which implies theyâre going for a broader association with it - unlike, say, American Beauty, which used recurring rose imagery to directly contradict the idea of âloveâ - which takes us back to the original point - femininity, beauty and motherhood, and they use it to draw a very stark parallel to the life it is that Bethâs actually living. Sheâs wearing floral when sheâs arguing with FBI agents, or as a costume with other mothers. Itâs being used to amplify the contrast between what it is sheâs doing and the image that she wants to project to the world / arguably the woman that she is.Â
What Iâm getting at, is that if you notice an image, or an item thatâs recurring, just let yourself think about it.Â
Letâs think about Bethâs bourbon, or Rioâs gun.Â
These are two items that the writers keep putting in front of us, which means that they mean something to them, and therefore the characters and the story.Â
Well, season one establishes that Beth drinks bourbon usually after a long day, when sheâs criming with the girls, when sheâs just really fucking done. This is reiterated in season two, and then itâs something that Rio learns about her, orders her, and deliberately leaves her when he takes back her money.Â
Season one told us that bourbon is what Beth drinks when sheâs at her rawest and her most vulnerable. Rio knowing that narratively, is telling us that Rio knows Beth.Â
Like I said in an earlier post, Rioâs gun has a lot of weight to it, and is typically accompanied with a shift in narrative tension. So why would that be? Well, the gun is dangerous. It represents Rio at his most dangerous. If it represents Rio at his most dangerous, it means that it generally also represents Rio at his most powerful, so you can infer from that that the gun is symbolic of power, which particularly comes into play when he gives it to Beth in 1.10 and again in 2.13. Rioâs giving Beth power which she gives back to him in 2.01, and seizes and then actually gives to Turner in 2.13 (which is very interesting to me generally, haha).Â
So yeah! I guess asking a story why, and paying attention to recurring imagery - both physical and more symbolic, is probably my biggest recommendation of where to start. If you notice an image repeating too, and donât know what it means, feel empowered to google it too! Thereâs no shame in that. Iâve done that plenty of times, haha, because we canât all be across everything after all. ;-)
Otherwise, Iâd really suggest listening to podcasts or interviews, and watching things that help to break down stories and creative and story-business process.Â
In particular, I really love TheNerdWriter and Lindsay Ellis on YouTube, I also watch/listen to a lot of interviews with writers and directors through things like The Hollywood Reporter roundtables, and podcasts like Australian Screenwriters, Scriptnotes, How Did This Get Made (which is v funny). Iâm also going to do a shameless plug here, haha, and say that I have a very-amateur podcast (full disclaimer - our audio quality can be not-great) with a friend too called Lady Parts which is about genre films, but particularly about roles and representations of women in those genre films.
There are also some pretty amazing books out there too. An entry-level one is Film Art (which is unfortunately a bit expensive!) but is an incredible resource full of screencaps and script pages which helps to break down choices and storytelling and imagery, and Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer (who wrote Annihilation!) which is more about writing, but is an incredible resource for understanding story generally.Â
I hope thatâs a helpful start, anon! And if anyone has any other tips, you should leave âem in the comments :-)
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