This topic was inspired by a class I took on Point of View. What caught my interest was “movie POV.” That’s my term, not the instructor’s; if he researched the term, he would have never used it.

Movies examples are frequently used to instruct fiction writers. If it’s a popular film, people are likely to have seen it; not everyone will have read Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, or The Da Vinci Code (all of which have had movies made from them).

But there are problems comparing movies to novels.

Time

Both movies and TV are limited by time. We’ve seen TV shows that ran short and had to fill time. An episode of Charlie’s Angels ran so short they did an encore of a dancing scene, which was exactly the same scene.

Others that run too long are cut to make them fit into the time. It also can:

  • Leave another scene referencing it hanging.
  • End abruptly, skipping the validation.
  • Diminish fan favorite characters.
  • Drop “unnecessary” scenes that would develop the characters.
  • Flubs in continuity.

Closeups

Movies and TV use a lot of closeups. This makes it easier to trim than a scene with a camera following the actors. This makes it easier for a writer to have “talking heads” in a novel and leave out the setting. You don’t see that much of it in a film with all the closeups!  

Stereotypes

To combat the time constraint, films and TV use stereotypes as a shortcut. You see those so often that you know the guy with the big nose is a villain without the movie or TV show having to tell you. But it leads to unfortunate stereotypes.

Cliches

Hollywood is the land of cliches. They will take one type of story or character and do it to death. The amnesia storyline…the character losing his sight…lead character getting poisoned…

(Says she who started with an amnesia story for a first novel.)

Movie POV

This is a one-dimensional POV because movies only have two forms of exposition: Sight and dialogue.

I’m reading a series now where a character was branded on her palm by her enemy. It’s a brief paragraph in the opening chapters of the series. A film? They’d have to show it happening in a flashback.

Sight can be used for unique aspects of the story. In the behind the scenes for NCIS, the production team discussed making sure viewers instantly got the visual images. You can see that all over the show—pictures of the victims and suspects; maps. In Kill Screen, a computer game is trying to breach the Pentagon’s firewalls. As the characters try to reach the servers, we get a visual “ticking clock.” It’s an image of the Pentagon surrounded by walls, each one disappearing as it’s breached.

That’s a good thing to study and to use it only of the five senses, not just sight. What’s going to get an instant impression?

Where it doesn’t work as well is foreshadowing. In the J.D. Robb books, Eve Dallas gets an inner ping on the villain. It’s subtle, done in the words themselves. So subtle, you don’t notice it and guess immediately the killer’s identity.

But in a film, it’s visual. An actor can show his suspicion of a person he encounters, but paired with closeups, it telegraphs the discovery. That’s probably why the villain is often shown committing the crime (better than the “feet” committing the crime though!).

Dialogue is the other way to convey exposition. This leads to “information dumps.” In one TV series, a character—who would have not needed to ask—said, “I don’t understand this mission. Can you explain it again?” Given it was a military setting, the question would have worked better from two seamen complaining about the mission’s extra work. But it would also have taken more time.

Movies and TV shows can still help with fiction writing. But it should also be paired with understanding of what movies can’t do that books can.