What is dialogue doing?

Imagine you’re an actor, reading for a part. The character’s broken down and the line you have to nail is “This can’t be happening - I’m losing my mind”. You bang your hands on the table in front of you - an improvised dash - and yell the line at the car, because that’s how the scene is written. Now imagine the director fills you in on some context. This exact scene is something the character has seen in a vision. The prophesy is coming true. “This can’t be happening - I’m losing my mind” takes on a new dimension and you give a different reading.

What does your voice sound like with each delivery? How does your volume modulate? What shape does your mouth make? How does your body language shift?

We’ve all heard some variation of the “~70% of communication is non-verbal” statistic. Whatever the real percentage is, we get the gist; and the gist is a pretty good summary of what non-verbal communication is communicating in day to day life: the substance or general meaning of something, sans the details. Our facial expressions, micro-expressions, tone of voice, pace of speech, energy levels, gestures and body language all contribute to the gist.

So how to get the gist across on screen?

The characters in Succession consistently talk around the truth, say the opposite of what they mean, or say exactly what they mean but in a way that suggests that they’re joking; yet their context, their relationship dynamics, and how they say what they’re saying, communicates to us an entirely different (yet intended) meaning.

Subtext is hard to write, but it is especially hard to write with limited time and resources, with people reading over your shoulder, and with the knowledge that even if you do somehow get it right on the page there are countless opportunities for it to get misinterpreted as it makes its way to screen.

People all along the commissioning and production pipeline will question the motivations of characters. Will ask for exposition to be taken out. Will ask for subtlety to be clarified where it’s too vague. The aim is not to expose and not to confuse. To complicate matters, the tipping point from over-exposition to confusion varies for each writer, viewer, and commissioner. But if exposition and confusion exist on the same spectrum, then when we receive or give the note “too much exposition” there’s a secondary note buried in there: “not enough subtext”.

To put characters in a scene and have them say (or not say) what they do not mean (or what they really mean) and have the audience understand that they do not mean what they just said (or that they do), and that they might in fact mean many other things instead (and do) — things that are relevant to this story and to these characters — the writer has to not only understand human psychology and human behaviour in every day life, but work that understanding into the constraints of a created story world, to help the audience make sense of it. It’s a tough gig.

Subtext is a rare and endangered keystone species. But if makers leave subtext out of the main text, my hunch is the whole ecosystem falls apart.