A look at Rebel Ridge and The Zone of Interest
In the recent drama Rebel Ridge (Netflix) starring Aaron Pierre and Don Johnson, Pierre plays Terry, a man who ends up on the wrong side of the law through no fault of his own. In the tense opening scene, we see him riding a bike and listening to metal, oblivious to the police cruiser aggressively following him. In this day and age in America, we understand the potential ramifications of an unarmed African American being stalked by two angry white police officers. The context does the work of setting the tone for us, so we’re already worried for him before a line is spoken.
Context is about shared experience and understanding. It allows the heavy lifting of the story to be done by visuals and by situations, letting the writer focus on tone, dialogue, and character.
We’re all guilty of overwriting at one point or another. It can be an important exploratory part of an early draft where you’re getting clay on the table to carve away later. It can also happen because we haven’t developed the art of distilling a script down to its most streamlined components. Fortunately that’s a skill that can be grown.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
We often talk about writing visually, or letting the visual context work for you. Rebel Ridge is an excellent example of this. If there is such a thing as a quiet action film, this is it. Writer Jeremy Saulnier knows that the audience will make certain assumptions about who has the power in scenes and where the plot might go based on context. He allows these assumptions to do a lot of work, so he can focus on letting Terry navigate situations where his goals are constantly thwarted and the stakes are always raised.
Saulnier also uses context for an unexpected twist on Terry himself. Zsane Jhe plays officer Jessica Sims. Because she is African American also, we assume she must be the undercover mole in the corrupt precinct who will back Terry when push comes to shove. Terry makes this same assumption based on what he thinks is their shared context. But, as a woman who needs a job, she’s been ignoring the white supremacist corruption right in front of her, creating an unexpected reversal in the film. She puts her financial survival in front of her morality…until finally she doesn’t.
The ability for a character to ignore what’s right in front of them is a key theme in last year’s Oscar darling, writer/director Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a film where context works even harder to set up the story.
Because we all know about the horrors of World War Two, the Holocaust, and concentration camps, the movie doesn’t have to stop to explain anything when it sets its story in Commandant Rudolf Höss’s home next to Auschwitz. The context allows us to simply take in the horror of the Höss family going about the very banal work of raising a family, doing a job, and being totally fine with everything going on over the wall. The phrase “the banality of evil” has been used often in connection with this film. It reminds us that evil people don’t have to be obvious monsters. They can be a housewife able to ignore a genocide literally yards away because it’s an inconvenient detail as she builds the perfect home and garden. The movie never shows what happens in the camp up close, because Hedwig Höss never chooses to think about what happens in the camp. But we know.
That Hedwig is fine with Auschwitz shows us in stark black and white how dehumanized the camp’s victims are to her. No one has to speak about it or share their disagreement with it. Glazer doesn’t waste pages of dialogue on it. When Hedwig’s mother comes to visit, the fact that she leaves in the night—unable to sleep with the screams and the smell of the smoke, unable to live with the horror of the acts her daughter so blithely accepts—speaks volumes with no dialogue.
In this way, the movie brings to mind what Miles Davis said about jazz: it’s about the notes you don’t play. This is what writing from strong context allows you. You can avoid on-the-nose dialogue and unearned exposition. When you tap into something we already understand, you can skip the setup and the world building, leaving you with breathing space on the page that you can use to reach another level of sophistication. When the context you tap into is an event or dynamic we’re likely to have strong feelings about already, you can get even more mileage by playing with audience expectations. Neither Rebel Ridge nor The Zone of Interest read like newbie scripts. Though different, they both have subtlety and nuance. They both allow us to be surprised, and in this age of increasingly savvy viewers, if you are able to surprise, then you are a writer of elevated skill.
We invite you to explore how you can make your story’s context work for you.
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