A lot of making your story structure feel complete and crystalline is the successful implementation of plant-and-payoff. There are some writers like James Cameron, Joss Whedon, and Christopher Nolan who are very good at this plant-and-payoff pattern. Then there are the other writers and stories - and let's just use the example of the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland, which is just riddled with instances where it tries to manufacture plant and pay off by just repeating more or less random bits of dialogue from earlier and hoping that it will have acquired some sort of significance in the interim.
But as far as this goes, one of the things about this that people often get wrong is you have to set it up properly. There was a Cinema Sins video on The Avengers that didn't get this.
Cinema Sins is a video series that consistently manages to list every problem that doesn't matter, every little niggle that does not actually affect the dramatic impact of the movie. In this case, for some reason, it pointed out that Captain America had made good on a bet that he had never explicitly agreed to, and when it said that I wanted to rend my hair from my head, because that's the f***ing point you moron. Of course they didn't agree on it because that would be telegraphing the plant, that would have told the audience that this is going to get paid off at some point, leaving us counting the seconds until the payoff finally arrives.
That was actually one of the best examples of plant-and-payoff in the movie, because it establishes the plant in such a way that when it does get paid off, everyone remembers the setup but at the time no one would have known if and how that first line might come up again.That is more or less an ideal execution of plant-and-payoff. The setup is a good and quippy enough line that it stands on its own, but at the same time memorable enough that when we see the callback some half hour later, we all get it.
But as far as this goes, one of the things about this that people often get wrong is you have to set it up properly. There was a Cinema Sins video on The Avengers that didn't get this.
Cinema Sins is a video series that consistently manages to list every problem that doesn't matter, every little niggle that does not actually affect the dramatic impact of the movie. In this case, for some reason, it pointed out that Captain America had made good on a bet that he had never explicitly agreed to, and when it said that I wanted to rend my hair from my head, because that's the f***ing point you moron. Of course they didn't agree on it because that would be telegraphing the plant, that would have told the audience that this is going to get paid off at some point, leaving us counting the seconds until the payoff finally arrives.
That was actually one of the best examples of plant-and-payoff in the movie, because it establishes the plant in such a way that when it does get paid off, everyone remembers the setup but at the time no one would have known if and how that first line might come up again.That is more or less an ideal execution of plant-and-payoff. The setup is a good and quippy enough line that it stands on its own, but at the same time memorable enough that when we see the callback some half hour later, we all get it.
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The other extreme, as I mentioned, is Alice in Wonderland - the Tim Burton version - which tries to turn Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk into a plant-and-payoff, which doesn't work because the phrase has no relevance to story, theme, or character. Lewis Carroll originally included it precisely because it was a non sequitur. The movie does this a lot, and it just doesn't work because they are basically just picking out random lines of dialogue and hoping that the audience will find something of staggering brilliance in the phrase that was not immediately apparent the first time. But whatever.
I admit you have to walk a bit of a tightrope to make this work, not being so overt that the audience makes you immediately, but not using just any old line either. The latter is important not only because getting it wrong devalues any future use of the technique elsewhere in the film, but more significantly because at its best, plant-and-payoff speaks to some larger theme or arc in the film.
The Captain America plant-and-payoff reinforces Cap's character as scrupulously honorable, but also serves to underline the grandeur of the spectacle by showing us that Captain America is as amazed by the reveal of the helicarrier as we are. In James Cameron's Avatar, we are very clumsily invited to marvel at the scenery. Michelle Rodriguez says "You should see your faces" as the cast stare dumbly at a green screen. The Cap example is all the more resonant for its silence. All the talking was done in the plant, so the payoff doesn't need dialogue. Gold star.
The Captain America plant-and-payoff reinforces Cap's character as scrupulously honorable, but also serves to underline the grandeur of the spectacle by showing us that Captain America is as amazed by the reveal of the helicarrier as we are. In James Cameron's Avatar, we are very clumsily invited to marvel at the scenery. Michelle Rodriguez says "You should see your faces" as the cast stare dumbly at a green screen. The Cap example is all the more resonant for its silence. All the talking was done in the plant, so the payoff doesn't need dialogue. Gold star.
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