Giving or withholding dramatic information: a fundamental screenplay technique
The brilliant Japanese animated series Spy x family presents a textbook case of an information distribution technique, which consists in creating dramatic tension by concealing certain information.
As I showed in my Advanced Screenwriting Course, there are three types of “people” who can receive or conceal information essential to understanding a story:
- firstly, the audience – the reader, viewer, listener etc.
- then, each character in the story
- and finally, the narrator, when he or she is part of the narrative device.
Each of these people is likely to receive, conceal or transmit information, from or to others:
- the audience may be informed by the narrator or by characters
- the narrator may inform the audience and (rarely) be informed by characters, or inform them
- characters, above all, can inform and lie to each other.
The way in which information flows, or doesn’t, has a major impact on the course of the story, and on the actions of the characters.
A classic example of the narrative effect of information distribution occurs in many love stories, when one character falls in love with another and either hides it or announces it. The effect is redoubled when the two characters involved fall in love with each other, hide it from each other and then reveal it to each other, giving rise to emotionally rich scenes, misunderstandings, absurd arguments, dialogue full of innuendo and so on.
Thus, we could imagine an unfolding like this, based almost entirely on information distribution effects:
- the audience sees a lawyer behaving strangely with his secretary: he often looks at her, but as soon as she sees him he turns away; she tells him she needs to be alone with him to discuss
- an important case, but he replies that he doesn’t have the time and advises her to ask another lawyer
- this other lawyer, who was casually watching the scene, takes the lawyer aside and tells him that he’s figured out his little game: he’s got a crush on her! but the lawyer fiercely denies it
- the head of the law firm convenes a meeting to update the firm’s by-laws, which strictly prohibit romantic relationships in the workplace, in light of a scandal that has just hit a rival firm; this element reinforces the motivation of the lawyer, who is suspected of being in love with the secretary, to hide his feelings.
- the secretary, informed of the contents of this meeting, is sad: the audience suspects that she too is attracted to the lawyer, but that she too has a duty to hide it.
- the two characters struggle through a dialogue of the deaf between themselves and their ambivalent feelings for a number of scenes, with the audience taking pleasure in knowing clearly what each of them is trying to conceal
- until a point where feelings win out, and the two characters transgress the ban and confess their attraction to each other; which doesn’t lift the ban for all that…
- once they’re a couple, they’ll collude with each other, and with the public, to hide their relationship from all their colleagues
- but little by little, some of these colleagues will discover the forbidden love affair
- etc etc
Spy x family: when all the main characters play a double game and hide a secret
The Spy x family series is largely based on the distribution of information, and in season 1, on concealment.
One double-game… two double-games!
Episode 1 tells the story of a fictitious country’s top spy, named Twilight, who is given the mission (= the goal of the main plot) of creating a fake family, in order to get closer to a prime target, a politician from the enemy country. The spy then assumes – as narrated by an omniscient narrator – a false identity, that of Loid Forger, a psychiatrist.
This is the first effect of the distribution of information: this character, his secret service accomplices and the public know that Twilight is a spy, that Loid Forger is a cover; and all the other characters to come are unaware of this, which we also know. (Note that the very name Forger is a blatant clue: in English, an invention, a false document, is a “forgery”. It’s as if he were called Loid Faux Papiers).
As Loid Forger, Twilight goes to an orphanage to adopt a little girl. There, he meets little Anya, a charming 4-year-old girl.
But as soon as we meet her, we discover that this little girl has an extraordinary power: she’s telepathic and can read minds! Throughout the first season, only Anya and we in the audience know that she has this ability, creating a magical complicity between this character and us.
We see Anya distinctly hearing Loid’s whole inner monologue: he unwittingly reveals that he’s a spy, that he’s recruiting a girl to be his cover, and so on. She knows it, we already knew it, but now we know she knows it. This fact also creates a strong dramatic irony: while Twilight has just been presented as an outstanding spy, master of disguises, stealthy in action, in short, an expert in concealment, a little 4-year-old girl discovers all his secrets in 3 seconds!!!
Informed of Loid’s true identity, Anya, a whimsical kid with a passion for a cartoon whose hero is a spy, sees in Loid an ideal father, and does everything she can to be adopted. She proves her intelligence to Loid by completing a complicated crossword puzzle: convinced, he adopts her.
The audience then regularly hears her monologues, in which Loid thinks he’s playing a double game, but Anya hears everything. The audience also hears Anya’s inner monologue, in which she acts as if nothing were wrong, while exclaiming “What a liar!” every time he tells her nonsense in his role as Loid Forger, creating a comic effect.
Three main characters lying to each other
In episode 2, Loid continues his mission to find a fake wife. He meets a pretty young woman, who is initially presented to us as a rather naive and incapable civil servant: that’s what the characters around her, other female civil servants and the audience believe. But when Loid meets her in the company of Anya, the latter hears the entire inner monologue of this young woman, named Yor Briar. This monologue reveals, both to Anya and to the audience, that Yor isn’t what she claims to be either: in reality, she’s a formidable killer, also busy playing a socially acceptable role as a petty town hall official, while she spends her nights “killing people”.
Again during this first meeting, the double-act situation becomes very comical, as both Loid and Yor seek to conceal their true identities from each other while agreeing to pretend to be a fake couple, while Arya hears all their thoughts, and us with her – which again reinforces the complicity between the audience and the little girl whose magical telepathy informs us. Initially, the scene is conflictual between Loid and Yor, but Anya, knowing who they are, sees to it that they do indeed become a couple.
From then on, the fake family lives together in a supposedly normal everyday life, where everyone does their best to hide their secrets from the other two:
- Anya never reveals that she hears their thoughts and knows who they are
- Loid never reveals that he’s a spy, even though he spends part of his time on missions.
- Yor never reveals that she’s a contract killer, even though she often thinks about all the people she’s slaughtered, and regularly displays impressive combat skills when it comes to protecting Anya, skills that stand in stark contrast to her cover as a lowly civil servant.
Once this narrative device has been set up, it is maintained for 25 episodes, in which Anya participates as much as she can, since she is informed of her adoptive father’s true aim, namely that she befriend the son of the enemy politician to enable Loid to get closer to his target.
Concealment extends to two other characters
The information-distribution effect is further complicated when the character of Yor’s younger brother enters the scene. This brother leads his sister to believe that he has a normal job, whereas he too is playing a double game: he is in fact a cruel secret police inspector, capable of torturing prisoners. He too will struggle to hide his secret, from Loid and Yor alike, but Anya will once again read him like an open book.
Also in episode 14, the blended family looks to adopt a dog. In the course of her adventures, Anya meets a “big dog”, a dog who has in fact been the victim of scientific experiments, before being instrumentalized by a group of student terrorists. This dog too has an extraordinary skill, which everyone but Anya is unaware of: he’s a medium, with visions of the future that Anya can understand. The information distribution effect is thus repeated once again in this crazy story: only the dog, Anya and the audience know what he’s capable of, while everyone else, including Loid and Yor, ignores him.
Use information distribution effects in your scenarios!
Spy x family is probably the most information-dispensing scenario I’ve ever seen, a brilliant exercise in style that’s both funny and captivating.
You narrators can draw inspiration from it in your scripts:
- Invent important facts
- Make them known, or hide them and then reveal them, to the public
- Circulate information between characters: A gives a piece of information to B, forbidding him to share it, but B tells it to C without A’s knowledge, while D spies in secret…
Great scenarios very often contain information distribution effects.
For example, in
- in The Godfather, when Michael Corleone is exiled to Sicily, he and the public are unaware that a bomb has been planted under his car, and only learn of it when it’s too late and his young wife accidentally falls victim to it
- in Pulp Fiction, Marsellus was unaware of Butch’s true intentions, and the public only finds out when Butch wins his boxing match even though he was paid to lose – but Butch bet on his own victory and won a fortune!