Brushing your teeth is not an action ordinarily associated with dramatic character growth, but in watching Stranger Than Fiction recently, it was enlightening to see how the filmmakers endowed this seemingly mundane action with symbolic significance.
Stranger Than Fiction, written by Zach Helm, is a delightful film about a joyless IRS auditor whose well-ordered life derails when he begins to hear his every move narrated by a disembodied voice.
At the beginning of the movie the protagonist, Harold Crick, does everything ‘just-so.’ As the narration informs us, “Every weekday, for twelve years, Harold would brush each of his thirty-two teeth seventy-six times. Thirty-eight times back and forth, thirty-eight times up and down.”
It’s a funny little scene, and the way in which Harold brushes his teeth tells us exactly what he is like as a character– a prim and proper accountant who is great with numbers but not with people.
Later in the movie, we revisit Harold brushing his teeth.
But this time Harold brushes his teeth differently. There is no ordered back-and-forth and up-and-down. He does not count the number of brushes. In short, Harold brushes his teeth like a crazy man.
This simple action takes on immense significance. We instantly recognise that Harold has grown. He is no longer the man he was at the beginning of the movie.
Just because he brushed his teeth.
So, how can little things be endowed with symbolic significance? How can a screenwriter create symbolic actions or objects?
Attention-Repetition-Variation
In Stranger Than Fiction, attention was drawn to Harold’s tooth-brushing. There was voice over emphasising the mundane, ordered manner of his action.
There was repetition— We saw him brush his teeth a few times. One way of signifying something as important is to repeat it. The audience clues into this, knowing that screen time is valuable, so something that is shown several times is there for a reason.
The final ingredient to help endow an object or action with symbolic significance is variation. There must be something different about the action or object (or relationship between a character and an object) to show growth.
When we were first introduced to Harold, he brushed his teeth a specific way. Prior to his growth, he brushed them the same way. It was the change, or variation, in Harold’s tooth-brushing routine that externalised the change in Harold as a character.
So, draw your audience’s attention to the symbolic action or object. Show it again, pre-growth, so that we know how the character acts or relates to the object/action in their current state. Finally, vary how your character completes the action or relates to the object once they have grown, so that we have a visual indicator of the growth that they have experienced.
Happy writing.
And remember that the little things count, so make them work for your story.