A Short Expedition into Sweet Exposition

I know we've talked about exposition before, but a couple examples popped into my head recently…even though the examples are not recent.

When I was a youngster I loved the Hulk character. Today I remembered a specific issue of that comic, from way back, where the Hulk was in one of his nonverbal stages of life, and wandering around the interdimensional hub called The Crossroads. As this page tells us, he was banished there because he with his power and mindlessness, Hulk was a threat to all life on Earth.

The exposition on this page is long and involved all through the comic, and deals with what's happening with all the wacky dimension travel, and more importantly, what's going on inside the Hulk's mind, as the Banner personality begins to come back.



These comics had a LOT of captions/narration. When a character is alone, you need to either show their thoughts, or use narration of some kind. With the Hulk non verbal, narration was needed to explain everything. I think it's pretty essential to tell this story in a compact way - and I remember being enthralled by it when I read it as a kid. It does make me laugh a bit at how much text is in those comics though. There are other comics that are overwritten, with explanations that might be unnecessary.

What makes me laugh more is some of the ham-fisted dialogue that happens in movies or series to move the plot along and explain what's going on.

Case in point is a movie I love, Freddy Vs Jason. Freddy opens the movie with expository dialogue - it's excellent, though: short and to the point and interesting and sets the stage.
Freddy is using Jason to scare local teens and, through that fear, return Freddy to his full murderous power.
There's a moment when he says…

PIC "I'll let Jason have some funnn!"

It's funny to me because it's so on-the-nose…and who is Freddy talking to?
To be clear, I laugh with great love for this movie, and I think this was the way to do it for the most part.

Later, when the kids figure out the nature of Freddy and his plan, it's necessary to keep things moving, but it's downright unbelievable that these kids could figure out the nature of these supernatural beings and their motivations, and how to defeat them.

But it had to happen - they had to turn the monsters against each other…it's in the title, for Pete's sake!

I think my favorite exposition-delivery team, and story, is the Back to the Future series. Marty is our POV character, and Doc explains everything that's going on and how time will work in the movie. The chemistry between these actors and Christopher Lloyd's ability to deliver these long monologues in such a fun, entertaining way, so fast but easy to follow, is an extra layer of enjoyment for me with those movies.

I love when Doc actually uses a chalkboard to quickly explain alternate timelines to Marty, and to a 1980's audience, years before Multiverses were mainstream. In fact, that alternate-timeline explanation might be my favorite scene in the BTTF series, and my favorite exposition scene of all time. it's tense, exciting and suspenseful, and written and executed to perfection.

What kind of dork has a favorite exposition scene of all time???

Here's that scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfmdW3hiu8w&list=TLPQMjMxMTIwMjJukfuRhbf_8Q&index=2

Anyway, these were my thoughts today

How do you handle exposition? I try to keep mine tight, and short, and to a minimum required to understand what's happening (and set the stage for future payoffs). It's an effort to whittle it down and make it right, and I don't always succeed, to say the least!

See you next time!

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