How's that for irony?
In which I actually talk about something besides my stupid personal life for a change.
A couple weeks ago, I watched Heroes with mlyn, and griped a lot about how poorly they use dramatic irony on the show, particularly with regard to Mohinder, who is quite possibly one of the prettiest men on the planet but who is also, as they're writing it right now, the dumbest.
Dramatic irony is one of those things that, when used well, can engage an audience of readers, playgoers, movie-watchers, book-readers, etc. The problem is, it's often not done well, and it's especially poorly employed on weekly TV series, where it can frustrate the hell out of audiences when they're forced week after week to see things the other characters aren't getting.
I see a lot of misuse of the term in my job, where writers often think it means just really intense irony, but it does have a specific definition. Dramatic irony:
occurs when a character onstage is ignorant, but the audience watching knows his or her eventual fate, as in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet.
This is really just a fancy way of saying the audience knows what's going on, but the characters onstage (film, page, whatever) don't.
I know people who advise writers in the development stage to stay away from use of dramatic irony, but if a writer knows what they're doing, they can engage the audience with that "OMG, don't go in the room!" quality. Fan writers, unfortunately, rarely seem able to really play with this concept (except, of course, the really good ones) and often end up making their characters near morons. Soap watchers know a lot about dramatic irony, because soaps employ it a great deal -- they start with a mystery, often, and then reveal who's doing the killing or who's the kidnapper or what have you, while we watch the rest of the characters try to puzzle it out.
But on a weekly basis, it can get tiring (which is why a good soap story will keep many other types of traditional plots going as well). And Heroes is a great example of doing it wrong. I adore the show, don't get me wrong -- it's the first new thing I've felt this fannish about since Angel died, and I live for Mondays with new episodes. But a few weeks ago, the poor use of dramatic irony really came to a head for me: Mohinder's constant ignorance about other people (the girl he just happened to meet in a hallway at a crucial time, half the people he spoke to in India, Sylar and Dale) while we're sitting there, shouting at our TVs for him to get a clue, threatens to undermine his character in a huge way. It's hard for people to believe in someone and root for them when they're this stupid.
As long as we're privy to what's happening with other characters, particularly Sylar, and watching Mohinder bumble through interaction after interaction with character after character, we're going to want to shout at the TV screen for him to get a clue. After a while, people give up on the character (even though OMG he's so pretty). You lose support for that storyline, even though we might love everything else about the show, and then it's a balancing act. In a comic, this can work if done right, but on the screen week after week, with Mohinder missing clue after clue, it's pushing the limits of our patience. I worry that Kring is going to ruin this character simply through poor use of dramatic irony.
By contrast, we don't have that at all with HRG or Hiro, or most especially, Nathan, whose back stories remain shrouded and who engage with the present tense of the story with an equal level of new discovery. Each time a layer is peeled back on them, we find out something new, and so even if they miss something important that we're already aware of, we forgive it.
Another series that has used dramatic irony incredibly well is Dexter, on Showtime this past fall. We know something the characters don't -- that Dex is a serial killer, but that he's a very specific serial killer. We actually end up rooting for him not to be caught, one of the strangest things I've found in my TV viewing recently (I hate serial killer stories. And there I was, almost beside myself that Dexter would have to throw his beloved victim blood slides in the ocean to protect himself!). Even though the Rudy storyline verged toward the dangerous side of dramatic irony, it never really got there, thanks to the way to Dexter was sleuthing about himself. Even though we were wishing others would see that Rudy was so obviously the Ice Truck Killer!!!11!, because we were seeing this through Dexter's eyes primarily, with his voice-over narration, the important reveals were still left for us to find out, and we weren't stuck in the position of wishing Dex and Deb and everyone else would just get a freaking clue.
And this points out another problem with the Mohinder "here's a ticket for the clue bus" issue -- Mohinder is our comic's narrative authorial voice. He has a voiceover in nearly every episode, introducing or tagging the storyline, in the same way the author uses those introductory panels in a graphic book. So for him to be so dimwitted about what's happening, while clearly dropping hints and asking big-picture questions in the narrative parts, is a huge mistake. We can't take him seriously as our authorial voice because he's as dense as a box of bricks the rest of the time. Dexter, OTOH, knows when he's missing something, and becomes all the more obsessed with figuring it out.
Mystery stories often use dramatic irony -- whether it's Columbo or the X-Files -- as part of the case-solving structure, and it usually works there because even if we do know who the killer is and what they did, part of the interest is kept going by us rooting for the detectives to figure it out and stop the next one. Of course, if Mohinder knew who Sylar was and what he looked like, then that part of the storyline would have no purpose, but unfortunately, he's made consistently wrong moves and been unable to identify what he should to answer his questions. If they drag it out much longer, he could become completely dispensable as a character, and I really don't want to see that happen. I love the show too much, and I think he has the potential to be much stronger. Just please, keep the irony down.
A couple weeks ago, I watched Heroes with mlyn, and griped a lot about how poorly they use dramatic irony on the show, particularly with regard to Mohinder, who is quite possibly one of the prettiest men on the planet but who is also, as they're writing it right now, the dumbest.
Dramatic irony is one of those things that, when used well, can engage an audience of readers, playgoers, movie-watchers, book-readers, etc. The problem is, it's often not done well, and it's especially poorly employed on weekly TV series, where it can frustrate the hell out of audiences when they're forced week after week to see things the other characters aren't getting.
I see a lot of misuse of the term in my job, where writers often think it means just really intense irony, but it does have a specific definition. Dramatic irony:
occurs when a character onstage is ignorant, but the audience watching knows his or her eventual fate, as in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet.
This is really just a fancy way of saying the audience knows what's going on, but the characters onstage (film, page, whatever) don't.
I know people who advise writers in the development stage to stay away from use of dramatic irony, but if a writer knows what they're doing, they can engage the audience with that "OMG, don't go in the room!" quality. Fan writers, unfortunately, rarely seem able to really play with this concept (except, of course, the really good ones) and often end up making their characters near morons. Soap watchers know a lot about dramatic irony, because soaps employ it a great deal -- they start with a mystery, often, and then reveal who's doing the killing or who's the kidnapper or what have you, while we watch the rest of the characters try to puzzle it out.
But on a weekly basis, it can get tiring (which is why a good soap story will keep many other types of traditional plots going as well). And Heroes is a great example of doing it wrong. I adore the show, don't get me wrong -- it's the first new thing I've felt this fannish about since Angel died, and I live for Mondays with new episodes. But a few weeks ago, the poor use of dramatic irony really came to a head for me: Mohinder's constant ignorance about other people (the girl he just happened to meet in a hallway at a crucial time, half the people he spoke to in India, Sylar and Dale) while we're sitting there, shouting at our TVs for him to get a clue, threatens to undermine his character in a huge way. It's hard for people to believe in someone and root for them when they're this stupid.
As long as we're privy to what's happening with other characters, particularly Sylar, and watching Mohinder bumble through interaction after interaction with character after character, we're going to want to shout at the TV screen for him to get a clue. After a while, people give up on the character (even though OMG he's so pretty). You lose support for that storyline, even though we might love everything else about the show, and then it's a balancing act. In a comic, this can work if done right, but on the screen week after week, with Mohinder missing clue after clue, it's pushing the limits of our patience. I worry that Kring is going to ruin this character simply through poor use of dramatic irony.
By contrast, we don't have that at all with HRG or Hiro, or most especially, Nathan, whose back stories remain shrouded and who engage with the present tense of the story with an equal level of new discovery. Each time a layer is peeled back on them, we find out something new, and so even if they miss something important that we're already aware of, we forgive it.
Another series that has used dramatic irony incredibly well is Dexter, on Showtime this past fall. We know something the characters don't -- that Dex is a serial killer, but that he's a very specific serial killer. We actually end up rooting for him not to be caught, one of the strangest things I've found in my TV viewing recently (I hate serial killer stories. And there I was, almost beside myself that Dexter would have to throw his beloved victim blood slides in the ocean to protect himself!). Even though the Rudy storyline verged toward the dangerous side of dramatic irony, it never really got there, thanks to the way to Dexter was sleuthing about himself. Even though we were wishing others would see that Rudy was so obviously the Ice Truck Killer!!!11!, because we were seeing this through Dexter's eyes primarily, with his voice-over narration, the important reveals were still left for us to find out, and we weren't stuck in the position of wishing Dex and Deb and everyone else would just get a freaking clue.
And this points out another problem with the Mohinder "here's a ticket for the clue bus" issue -- Mohinder is our comic's narrative authorial voice. He has a voiceover in nearly every episode, introducing or tagging the storyline, in the same way the author uses those introductory panels in a graphic book. So for him to be so dimwitted about what's happening, while clearly dropping hints and asking big-picture questions in the narrative parts, is a huge mistake. We can't take him seriously as our authorial voice because he's as dense as a box of bricks the rest of the time. Dexter, OTOH, knows when he's missing something, and becomes all the more obsessed with figuring it out.
Mystery stories often use dramatic irony -- whether it's Columbo or the X-Files -- as part of the case-solving structure, and it usually works there because even if we do know who the killer is and what they did, part of the interest is kept going by us rooting for the detectives to figure it out and stop the next one. Of course, if Mohinder knew who Sylar was and what he looked like, then that part of the storyline would have no purpose, but unfortunately, he's made consistently wrong moves and been unable to identify what he should to answer his questions. If they drag it out much longer, he could become completely dispensable as a character, and I really don't want to see that happen. I love the show too much, and I think he has the potential to be much stronger. Just please, keep the irony down.