Learning deep POV from movies? How can a movie demonstrate a literary technique that takes readers deep inside a character’s mind and experiences? It doesn’t seem possible, but when I watched the 1953 thriller Inferno, I realized the movie had a lot to teach writers about this device.
A Little Background on Deep POV
Every writing professional hits newbies writers over the head with the command “show, don’t tell”. But unless someone explains how a writer is supposed to write in a “show, don’t tell” manner, the advice means nothing.
Deep POV is that manner. A writer pours herself into the point-of-view (POV) character in a scene and sees the story world like a player in a POV video game, like Minecraft, does. The writer restricts his narrative to what the POV character feels and thinks in the present moment. If your POV character is fleeing for her life, she can’t ruminate on the injustices her sister has committed against her over the last twenty years. She only thinks of how to escape or turn and attack her pursuer. Deep POV gives a writers a structure that makes info dumps, such as backstories, very difficult. In every piece of fiction, some things just need to be told to the reader, but the writer has to slip these in a natural or logical way using deep POV so as not to destroy the illusion that the reader is perceiving the literary world through the mind of the POV character.
Inferno brings this technique to the screen.
A woman and her new boyfriend leave her injured husband to die in the desert, and the movie divides into two story threads: scenes with the wife and boyfriend trying to lead authorities astray as they look for the husband and scenes with the husband trying to survive in the Californian desert with a broken leg. Robert Ryan, the actor who plays the husband, is alone in all his scenes. So he does a voice-over to let the audience know what he’s thinking. All his thoughts pertain directly to the situation he’s in. The director didn’t add flashbacks to show how the marriage went on the rocks, which I think would ruin the suspense of the film. When the husband’s thoughts do wander, it makes perfect sense for the scenes, such as when he’s dying of thirst and he remembers how water is more plentiful during the springtime in the desert.
Another aspect of show, don’t tell is not stating the emotions characters experience, but creating gestures, facial expressions, and dialogue to convey their emotions. In Inferno, Robert Ryan’s actions and expressions perfectly match his thoughts and feelings. When he tells himself a joke, his half-smile conveys the humor but also how dumb he thinks it is. When he sits by a campfire, considering what to do with his wife and her boyfriend if he escapes, his face is grim and determined. When he thinks the boyfriend has returned to make sure he’s dead, he freezes as the awful realization of who is looking for him sinks in. Then he frantically puts out a signal fire he started and flings himself under a stunted tree. All these actions show his terror.
Robert Ryan is such a masterful actor that he makes all his scenes alone compelling. Even though his character isn’t likable at the start of the movie, he makes you sympathize with the horrible situation he’s in. If you like adventure or crime movies, you should go out of your way to find Inferno.
What other movies have you seen where you feel you’ve really climbed into the mind of a character?
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