USING – AND AVOIDING – FLASHBACKS (THE SEQUEL)

My article Using – and Avoiding – Flashbacks has received quite a response, including this post from blogger David Fried:

Hey, Michael, 
 Love your flashbacks article, though I'm having trouble reconciling the conclusion with the body. Your suggestion to tell, rather than show the backstory to the audience runs antithetical to everything else that's ever been said about effective writing…. Though I'm certain that there are a million movies that have used the Prologue to their detriment, I suspect there are far fewer bad movies that use, for example, the Parallel Plots device. And if you glance at the IMDb Top 250, a very high percentage of them employ one of these techniques - particularly if you look at the top of the list. (To read David’s entire post CLICK HERE.) 



I appreciate David taking the time to dig so deeply into the article. But since he challenged some of my statements, I thought I’d better clarify what I said. 



My intent with the article was to identify the various forms flashbacks can take, in order to give writers a better understanding of this device, and when it might be appropriate. When, at the conclusion of the article, I advise writers not to use flashbacks, I perhaps should have worded it differently and said use flashbacks only as a last resort.

My goal was (and remains) to discourage writers from automatically creating a flashback as soon as they want to reveal something from the past. 



The “bad” examples of flashbacks David would like to see occur mostly in screenplays that never got produced, or in early drafts of scripts written before I began coaching the writers. The good examples are from films where the screenwriters clearly pondered many other ways of revealing the past, and wisely concluded that some form of flashback worked best.



I also should perhaps have omitted the Prologue from the list, since technically it doesn’t flash “back” from anything; it’s the opening sequence of the script. But since it occurs in the past, prior to the main body of the story, and since it serves many of the same functions (anticipation, curiosity, foreshadowing, echoing and exposition), I included it. 



But my point remains: flashbacks are overused devices in the majority of scripts I read (not in the majority of produced films). Consider the top 25 box office hits of all time listed on Box Office Mojo. Of those 25, I couldn’t identify a single one that used a simple flashback. Finding Nemo has a prologue, Titanic tells two parallel stories, and Iron Man has a big action teaser (all of these are explained in the article). But unless I’ve forgotten something about the others, none of them contains any form of flashback. And three out of twenty-five hardly indicates a commonly used device. 



Even referring to the IMDb movie list David cites, I don’t recall a flashback of any kind in The Godfather, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Schindler’s List, 12 Angry Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Empire Strikes Back or The Dark Knight – and only the Parallel Story device in The Godfather Part II and Pulp Fiction – leaving only The Shawshank Redemption, which opens with a combination Prologue and Single Past Incident. Again, three out of their top ten films hardly indicates frequent usage. 



As for contradicting that old maxim “show, don’t tell,” I wanted to point out that once in awhile the most powerful way of eliciting emotion is through a character telling us something from their past, and allowing the audience’s own imagination to create the images – especially when the past event is particularly painful. This is how we learn of the death of Neytiri’s sister in Avatar, for example – and seems to me a far more moving revelation than if we had to flash back to actually see her slaughtered by mercenaries. 



I hope that clarifies any confusion about my article – or at least stimulates more discussion, and makes you think twice before resorting to a flashback in your own screenplay.


- Michael Hauge