Succession Part 2: How To Write Subtext In Your Dialogue

Succession Part 2: How To Write Subtext In Your Dialogue In the last podcast we looked at the engine of Succession. We looked at the way each episode was put together, and the way that all these characters come together in each episode to create the season. So today, rather than thinking globally, we’re going to think locally. Rather than looking at the big structure of the piece, we’re going to look at one little teeny-tiny scene from episode 7. And the scene starts, if you want to watch it, around 27:07 and ends at 28:20. So we’re talking about a scene that’s a total of one-minute thirteen seconds. What’s really cool about this scene is that it features all the secondary characters of Succession. These are secondary characters who are not only secondary characters for the audience but are also secondary characters within the social circles of their own family. These are the boyfriends and girlfriends, and wives and fiancées: Marcia, Willa and Tom. Marcia is the wife of Logan Roy, the Brian Cox character in this piece, the King Lear, the Rupert Murdoch, the great patriarch. And Marcia is a highly intelligent, complicated woman, and it’s pretty clear that she loves her husband. But it’s not entirely clear if she can be trusted or not. She seems to have her own agenda, and it isn't clear how much of that agenda is about protecting the husband, and how much of that agenda is about solidifying her own power. Willa is Connor Roy’s…well, let’s just call her a girlfriend. Actually she’s his paid escort with whom he’s madly in love, and who is putting up with his affection and his desperate desire for her to play the role of his wife and move in with him in order to further her career as an actress and playwright. Then you’ve got Tom, discussed in detail in last week’s podcast, who’s the trickster character, the fiancé and soon to be husband of Shiv Roy, the scheming and politically savvy daughter of Logan Roy. And Tom isn't the greatest person in the world. In fact, he’s the worst possible version of new money. He’s a person obsessed with the power and ridiculousness of being rich. He’s a guy who’s small in the family, so he throws around his power in places where he has it. But Tom is also deeply in love with Shiv, and deeply unaware that she might not be a person he can trust. And what’s happened in this episode is that the entire Roy family has convened for therapy. This meeting has been called by Logan, who has basically realized that if he doesn’t do something his share prices are going to fall. He needs to do something to create some kind of positive photo-op that suggests the family is coming back together after a big falling out between himself and Kendall that was way too public. So Logan has called for this reconciliation, and with the exception of Kendall, all the children have come willingly, a bit curious, surprised, and maybe even hopeful that dad actually wants therapy. And of course that isn't what’s really happening. What’s really happening is dad wants a photo op. Even Kendall Roy shows up, and that’s a big deal because Logan just placed an article through his media sources suggesting that Kendall, who in the previous episode failed a vote of no confidence on his dad, was back on drugs. This article has not only cost Kendall his faith in his father, it has also cost him any chance of reconnecting with the one woman he loves, his ex-wife, who now thinks he’s back on drugs even though he isn't. But Kendall Roy decides to show up, even though his plan to reconcile with his family doesn’t actually turn out well. He ends up at a bar instead, where he’s soon drinking and getting high with some locals. Regardless, everyone has descended on Connor Roy’s beautiful mansion in the desert for this big moment of reconciliation that isn't going to happen. And the secondary characters of Succession, Marcia, Willa and Tom, have all been kicked out. Willa is used to this. Everybody plays status games with her. She’s used to getting kicked out of family pictures, kicked out of family meetings. But this time, it isn't just Willa that has been kicked out. This time Marcia and Tom have been kicked out as well, and the family bloodline is being clearly enforced because who’s in that room and who’s out of that room really matters. And so this is why we’re going to look not at what’s happening in the room where the big drama is happening, but at what’s happening outside of the room. We’re going to use this scene from Succession to talk about a concept that’s extremely important to all screenwriters: subtext. Part of what makes Succession such a powerful series, part of what makes the performances so incredible, is the use of subtext by the writers. There’s a tremendous amount of subtext to almost every line in Succession. Which raises the question, what the heck is subtext? What does it actually do? How do you actually create it? For a lot of writers, subtext is just a place of anxiety, wondering, “does my dialogue have enough subtext in it?” without actually having a clear understanding of what subtext is and what subtext does. So let’s define subtext for a moment. Subtext happens when there’s a slight difference between the primary objective and secondary objective of the character. Primary objective is what the character is doing on the surface, and the secondary objective of the character is what the character is doing under the surface. Sometimes this is a conscious disconnect, where the character is consciously talking about one thing in order to imply another. Sometimes this is a subconscious disconnect, where the character truly believes they’re coming for one thing, truly believes they’re acting on one intention, when they’re actually acting on another. We’ve all done this. If you’ve ever broken up with somebody and decided that you have to return to their apartment and get your favorite pair of socks back so that you can finally have closure, you're consciously telling yourself the primary objective: “I’m going to go get closure.” What you aren't telling yourself is the secondary objective: “I’m going to try to get back together with my ex,” or, “I’m going to try to sleep with my ex.” Sometimes the gap between primary and secondary objective is very conscious. Sometimes it’s under the surface and the character isn't even aware of the secondary objective. They’re only aware of the primary. But what happens— when you can feel that secondary objective bubbling up underneath the primary objective, when you can feel that extra layer of pressure pushing up against what the character is doing on the surface— that’s subtext. When you start to think about subtext in this way, you don’t have to think about subtext like a technique. Instead, you can use your intuition to guide your writing of subtext. You can simply connect to the primary and secondary objective of the character. You can connect to, “What are they doing on the surface?” or, “What are they talking about on the surface?” And then you can feel the pressure between that and what’s bubbling up for them underneath the surface. And there are lots of different things that can bubble up. We already talked about objectives. I want to get closure: primary. I want to get back together with my ex: secondary. But there are other kinds of secondary objectives as well. There are emotional needs.  I want to get closure and get my socks back: primary objective. I want to feel love: secondary objective. I want justice: secondary objective. So sometimes it is a disconnect between a tangible goal and a primal core need driving under the surface, and in order to get in touch with that, all you have to do is get in touch with that primal core need in yourself. You want to feel those two things happening at the same time as you write the character, and just to look for the moment where—“Poof!”—that one thing bursts through the surface. The third kind of difference between primary and secondary objective that can create subtext is something called status games. And status games is something I would love to discuss a lot further in a future podcast. It’s also something that I cover in depth in my Write Your Screenplay classes. Status games are about the dynamics between people as they try to raise or lower their own and each other’s status in order to feel better about themselves. Status games happen all the time. They happen with every relationship, with every character. And I’m not going to go into all the different kinds of status game relationships because that’s a multiple hour lecture. But, if you think about your relationships with your friends, sometimes you raise your friend’s status in order to raise your own. And sometimes you raise your status in order to lower somebody else’s status: “Dude, you know that I know fashion, and that shirt…give me a break.”I’ll give you an example of this: “Hey, look man, you know that I know fashion, and, dude, that shirt looks awesome.” And sometimes you lower your status in order to raise somebody’s status: “Dude, I don’t know a damn thing about fashion, but that shirt is freaking awesome.” And sometimes you lower your status in order to lower somebody’s status: “Dude I don’t know anything about fashion, but that shirt… give me a break.” So there are lots of different kinds of subtext. There’s subtext where it is primary objective versus secondary objective, where you have a conscious goal and an unconscious goal, or a conscious goal and a second conscious goal that are in tension with each other. Sometimes it’s the tension between a primary objective— the conscious goal— and the emotional need underneath. And sometimes it’s the pressure between what’s happening on the surface, which in this example is a little bit of a fashion critique,