Anyone who's ever studied screenwriting knows that character is key. Knowing who a character is, their background, who they care for and why they're doing what they're doing, are all essential for telling an engaging story. Right?
Recently, I watched The Shallows, a shark-based survival thriller from a couple of years back that threw this entire concept into a new light for me, by having a character's backstory and context feel unnecessary. Every scene that attempted to establish details about who the protagonist was and why they're here came off as incredibly uninteresting, and for once I don't think it's just bad writing. It's bad writing and something else. And I think that 'something else' is worth exploring to see whether there is some hidden intricacy of screenwriting here or if I'm just trying to over-analyse a mid-tier Jaws ripoff that the writer couldn't be arsed to redraft.
So here's the premise of The Shallows: a girl goes surfing on a hidden beach and is attacked by a shark, leaving her stranded on a rock a short distance from the shore. With her injuries worsening, the tides rising and no sign of the shark giving up the hunt, she must find a way to get back to safety before it's too late. That's it. Simple right? Could practically be a short, an interesting supposition considering how the story is structured: in a film that's under ninety minutes already, it takes the best part of half an hour before our protagonist even ends up in the above scenario.
Instead, the film opens with a flash-forward that hints at how the film will end, followed by a lengthy sequence where our protagonist reveals key details of who she is and why she's going to this beach and what familial connections she has as she speaks to a nice local who's driving her there. Albeit he, at least, is sort of important later. Then when she reaches the beach there's another long scene as she video calls her sister only for her dad to join and start lecturing her about her studies, and very unsubtly telling the audience most of her life story. This is what's called an exposition dump and it's generally agreed to be the worst possible form of explaining anything to an audience; the dialogue equivalent of just handing someone a textbook and instructing them to read it. But not only were these scenes lazy, and actually pretty laughable too, for all the wrong reasons, but they were also almost entirely superfluous.
The only things we actually need to know are thus: the beach is secret and thus mainly empty of potential help, and our protagonist is a medical student who surfs. That's it. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant to the scenario. We don't need to know she has a sister who's back at the hotel, we don't need to know she's got a dead mother who told them about the beach, we don't need to know this is a pilgrimage and we don't need to know her dad is concerned. None of these characters are involved in the plot or have any effect on the outcome of Nancy's plight (oh yeah, the protagonist's name is Nancy, by the way), and consequently could be comfortably deleted from the film with no repercussions.
It feels like they've attempted to make Nancy a more fleshed-out character by adding a load of extra character relationships, but these really don't tell us anything about her. We learn so much more about the kind of person she is from her interactions with an injured seagull than we ever do from her family. In fact, the only real addition offered by knowing about Nancy's family is that she has a motivation to live, but I assumed that much from the fact that she's trying to get back to the shore in the first place! She's not like Padme Amidala, losing her will to live as one loses a contact lens in a crowded locker room. You don't have to explain the motivation for something as inbuilt and universal as basic survival needs, and those are pretty much as complex as The Shallows' character motivations ever need. It just isn't the kind of story that requires in-depth character context.
In something that's more character-focused, like a romance or a drama, then this kind of extended backstory is more relevant since the story is pretty much pivotal on the very essence of these characters and their backgrounds and social relations. If we don't know anything about this hunky charming man or what he stands for, how can we empathise with the leading lady who falls for him?
While something like a horror film doesn't really need this because their stories operate on a more primal level. Here's a human, here's a nasty monster who wants to eat the human. Who will win? It doesn't matter if the human's from Stoke-on-Trent or if they prefer jam to marmalade because we already automatically sympathise with their desire not to be eaten by the nasty monster (I mean, unless you're into vore, I guess. No, don't look that one up, it's not worth it). The desire to not be killed is just naturally hardwired into our species and so as a character motivation, it not only transcends boundaries of race, class and taste in fruit preserves in terms of relatability but by the same metric, also transcends the need for an explanation since every human on the planet naturally understands it.
It's pretty much the same concept as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: the closer your protagonist's motivation is to the bottom of the pyramid, where all the universal needs like food, water and air are, the less you need to explain them. While if their motivations are higher up the pyramid, focusing on more complex things like self-actualisation or self-esteem, then the need to explain the motivation is much more pressing.
The ultimate question then is, is this a matter of genre or merely the format of the story? Is The Shallows' attempt at character context misplaced because of its horror-y trappings or because the story itself is just too straightforward to require it?
Midsommar, for example, is a horror film that's also incredibly character-focused, so even though its characters are still motivated by a desire to survive, they also have way more complex, personalised struggles which drives a lot of the horror they're put through. And so while it, too, spends a while establishing it's main characters' backgrounds, it is entirely necessary for the rest of the film to work, unlike The Shallows.
I imagine format is more likely the culprit, since The Shallows could have very easily been a thirty or forty minute short if it had skipped its waffly intro and started on the shark attack, and probably would have been stronger for it. "Arrive late, leave early", as the old adage goes. This issue of context could be as simple as trying to over-explain a story that has nothing to hide. But then while short films tend to gravitate towards simple characters to fit the restraints of the format, that doesn't make character context mutually exclusive: not all short films focus on inherent universal needs, and some will inevitably need to establish their character's background.
So what is the answer? I don't think there is one, or at least, not one that can easily be rationalised in a post of this length. Consider this instead, a starting point for a wider discussion: Is there a correlation between genres and character complexity? Can a story have too much context? Or is all this just the ravings of a lunatic who got bored during an exposition scene?
Yeah, that sounds a lot more plausible now that I've written it out.
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