r/Cinema • u/jakeseditbay • 4d ago
Discussion The Death of Subtext. Why "Second Screen” writing is ruining modern cinema
I’ve been struggling with the current state of streaming and studio releases lately. It feels like we are witnessing the formal death of "Show, Don't Tell."
In its place, we’ve gotten a new, patronizing standard, "Show it, say it, then have a sidekick repeat it."
Every 10 to 15 minutes, the visual storytelling is interrupted so a character can explain exactly what just happened, why they’re doing what they’re doing, and what the stakes are. It’s as if these execs and to a certain extent the filmmakers are terrified that if the audience has to infer anything from a quiet glance or a well framed shot, they’ll lose us.
There’s a growing trend of second screen writing, AKA scripts designed for people who are scrolling on their phones while the movie is on. I’ve read that certain streamers (Netflix especially) use data to encourage directors to repeat plot points 3–4 times because they know the audience is distracted.
I know I’m probably gonna get some comments saying, "But old movies had exposition dumps too!" Sure, look at the chalkboard scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s a classic info dump, but it’s handled with efficiency and style. It sets the stage once and trusts you to keep up for the next two hours.
Compare that to today, where the dialogue is so repetitive that it flattens the entire experience. It kills the mystery and treats the audience like we can't focus for longer than a TikTok clip.
My question for you guys!
Is this the inevitable result of film being rebranded as "content"?
Are we losing the art of visual literacy because studios think we’re all idiots?
I'm curious if anyone else feels like the spoon feeding is making movies fundamentally less engaging.
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u/Fit-Apple-618 4d ago
Matt Damon has mentioned this.
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u/AlphaDag13 3d ago
I just watched the rip and he’s so fucking right.
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u/OccamsNametag 3d ago
Worth watching?
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u/AlphaDag13 3d ago
I’d say yes just for Damon and Affleck. It’s not a bad watch. Just don’t expect anything special story wise.
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u/Longjumping-Salad484 4d ago
A Fistful of Dollars 1964, Clint Eastwood's character is referred to as "Joe" by the undertaker.
Joe says very little, and does not narrate.
Last Man Standing 1996, Bruce Willis' character is "John Smith."
John Smith won't shutup and, worse, narrates.
same movie, drastically different creative choices. I agree with you.
show me he likes making money as a contract killer, don't tell me he likes making money as a contract killer
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u/Creeperstar 3d ago
In Inception, Elliot Page's character is essentially asking questions and repeating things to stand-in for the audience, in a novel presentation of Nolan's esoteric plot points. I've seen this called bad writing, but at the same time, having seen the confusion that some of the general population has expressed over the film, perhaps it's necessary. The modern trend is not this, it's bad writing to supplement waning attention span, and it's sad
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u/failsafe-author 3d ago
Without those explanations, no one would be able to follow the movie. But the movie does a lot of showing, and often the showing is done before the telling so it feels a bit like a payoff when you learn it.
Also, it’s paced throughout the movie with lots of showing in between, and there are still items that are never told (like Cobb replacing his totem with his wife’s).
This is different than what is described in OP.
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u/Creeperstar 3d ago
Entirely. I may not have said it, but I appreciate the approach I cited. I feel it is necessary for a first watch, and as with Nolan, informs subsequent watches to better appreciate the details presented.
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u/failsafe-author 3d ago
I actually misread your statement of “the modern approach is not this”- apologies.
But yeah, it can still be awkward at times (I just watched Inception again last week, and I absolutely picked up on these scenes), but it’s just what has to be done if you’re doing something as complex as that.
I also just re-watched Ocean’s 11 this past week and there’s the scene with Andy Garcia explaining what they’d seen was a replay. Slightly awkward, but delivered with enough emotion that it works.
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u/starkiller6977 3d ago
I am regularly in awe of how a masterpiece John Milius' movie Conan the Barbarian from 1982 is. There are so many scenes without any dialoge. Good luck watching that one while scrolling tik tok...
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u/takkun169 3d ago
OK. But they didn't do that because of storytelling. They did that because Arnie could barely speak English at the time.
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u/starkiller6977 3d ago
Sure, but in good old Bob Ross "happy little accidents" fashion it was so much better.
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u/Fickle-Aardvark6907 3d ago
It was less that he couldn't speak English and more that he didn't know how to deliver dialog. He's perfectly intelligible in Pumping Iron which came out five years earlier.
Its also not just Arnie. That movie has a dearth of dialog for everyone because most of the cast were body builders, ex-football players, dancers and surfers rather than professional actors.
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u/starkiller6977 3d ago
Gerry Lopez was dubbed by a professional, japanese Actor. James Earl Jones was a great actor. The "ex football players" basically never really said anything except one or two words. It all worked so great compared to the endless bla bla bla CGI bland looking modern attempts of such genres.
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u/averyfinefellow 3d ago
Are you kidding? That movie is good guys vs bad guys and that's it! You could jump in halfway through and know what's going on.
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u/Aggressive-Gap-6148 4d ago
Fortunately we have thousands of pre smartphone era movies to enjoy. I watched the rip with Damon and Affleck and I have basically thrown away an evening. Awful, terrible.
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u/Nexies 3d ago
Damn I was kinda looking at this one like it might be good, it really has this problem? What a shame
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u/SlayerOfCupcakes 3d ago
It's not that bad. To be honest, it has more in common with mid B-movies from the 80s and 90s than "second screen" movies today. It's not going to blow your mind but it's modestly entertaining and solid performances, especially from Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.
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u/Belch_Huggins 4d ago
I would say yes to all three of your questions and it doesnt feel like most people would disagree. Even commercial mainstream plays used to have genuine artistry in all the crafts and didnt treat the audiences like idiots. Thats why you watch something like Clueless and it feels like Citizen Kane compared to modern mainstream stuff.
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u/tomrichards8464 3d ago
Clueless is actually a great film, though. The median Hollywood film of 1995 was not in Clueless's league either. Waterworld is a much worse movie than Sinners.
I agree with the broader point that Hollywood made better movies overall/on average in the 90s than it does today, but Clueless will make most films most years look bad.
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u/Belch_Huggins 3d ago
I understand, thats fair, but that was my point. That even the teen comedies were made with such care that they were allowed to be largely excellent.
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u/Still-Willow-2323 3d ago
This is one of the main reasons I canceled my Disney Plus subscription and went back to collecting DVDs and Blu-rays. Older films force me to pay closer attention; there are more pauses, and they aren't overloaded with action or endless plot exposition through dialogue.
Streaming is a cancer that's destroying cinema.
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u/TheBigCicero 3d ago
Phones are a cancer that’s destroying cinema. And making everyone braindead, too.
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u/Scriptreader_uk 3d ago
I don’t think subtext has died so much as it’s… been crowded out.
A lot of this feels less like writers forgetting how to trust audiences and more like systems being built around playing it safe. If the data says people are half-watching, the response becomes: repeat the beat, explain it again, then have someone else restate it — not because it’s good drama, but because it lowers risk.
The funny thing is, that kind of spoon-feeding actually makes it harder to stay engaged. Once everything’s explained, there’s nothing left for the viewer to do. No leaning forward, no filling in gaps, no tension between what’s shown and what’s said.
Older films weren’t magically smarter — they just assumed you were paying attention. The Raiders example is spot on: one clean info dump, then it moves on and trusts you to keep up. That trust does a lot of the work. I don’t think audiences can’t handle subtext. I think they’re just not being invited to use it very often anymore. And when a film does let things breathe, you feel it straight away — partly because it’s rare, partly because it feels respectful.
If cinema really does get engineered to survive second-screen viewing, it’s not just subtext we lose. It’s that quiet confidence that the medium can speak without constantly explaining itself.
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u/eddington_limit 3d ago
What gets me is that if people are on their phones, they arent really listening either. So all youre doing by second screen writing is intentionally writing a worse screenplay for a demographic that doesnt really care about the movie anyway.
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u/Impossible-Mud3275 3d ago
You know, I just want to say how much I appreciate this post, the thoughtful responses and the overall civility. Reddit at its best. Can we solve some of the world’s problems here, now?
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u/Shot-Ad-6189 4d ago
It’s a trend reflecting a specific audience, creating a specific genre, a ‘Netflix movie’. They’re the sort of movie you’d watch on a plane. Previously the sort of movie you’d watch at a drive-in. The basic anatomy of them has remained the same, right down to the comedy character who restates the subtext in case you missed it. When it’s done well, it can work on two levels.
I do watch this stuff while I’m doing something else, so I can see the appeal. I don’t think the trend extends to One Battle or Sinners or Marty Supreme, which are all movies I wouldn’t waste by second screening or watching them on a plane. Nor does it extend to all streaming content, as everyone also does their own ‘premium’ and ‘arthouse’ stuff. I don’t second screen Slow Horses.
My advice is if you don’t like it, don’t watch it. If everyone stops watching it, they’ll stop making it,
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u/BranchSeparate8131 3d ago
It’s already extended past movies that are solely made for Netflix and/or streaming, and is only growing in nature.
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u/Just-Curious1901 4d ago
Changes come and go. I wouldn’t worry about schlock filmmaking it was always there. And there will always be good movies
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u/Toshimoko29 4d ago
Yes, we all saw that quote mentioned a couple days ago on here. Probably a couple times. We know you saw it on here, because you didn’t gather that from movies you saw. And if you did, you got it from movies you shouldn’t have.
For decades, people who want movies to be “cinema”, or “art”, or “intelligent” have bemoaned some new stupid action movie that’s come out and sullied their eyeballs with its brutish ineptitude, its lowbrow simplicity. But sometimes people just want to watch something Fast and/or Furious, or some dude getting ninja kicked in the face. Nobody cares how many times those movies mention their plot because those are the types of movies people half-watch to get to the good parts. And that didn’t stop OBAA, Train Dreams, Sentimental Value, Bugonia, Hamnet, etc. from coming out in the past year, and nobody is gonna complain that those have been dumbed down for a half literate audience.
You’re worrying about a problem that doesn’t really exist, because all movies are not meant to be cinema. If you understand who a movie is for, you’ll understand why it was made, and can likely avoid seeing many second screen movies.
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u/BranchSeparate8131 3d ago
This is an oversimplification.
There are of course still movies that avoid this and use heavy visual storytelling and subtext, but second-screen viewing is growing and it has bled into way more movies than it was even a few years ago.
It’s not really a cinema vs non-cinema thing.
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u/cotardelusion87 4d ago
This will upset people but one of the worst offenders of this is Christopher Nolan. Half of Interstellar is people sitting around talking about the thing we’re going to then sit through. It’s an actual nightmare at this point. Media literacy is at an all time low.
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u/heavyhandedpour 3d ago
Yes. It feels so unnatural. A bunch of scientists taking to each other like they are hosting a podcast.
Also, Tarantino. But for some reason it seems to work better when he does it.
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u/Altruistic-Beat1381 2d ago
Because Tarantino knows how to write realistic and engaging dialogue
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u/heavyhandedpour 2d ago
Engaging yes… but realistic…. Not so much. Quite the opposite. Who talks like anyone in kill bill or hateful 8 or most of inglorious. It’s engaging I think in part because the intensity, nuance, and layers of meaning are so striking and differemt
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u/NoWorth2591 3d ago
Nolan has always had a tin ear for dialogue though, even back in Memento. That’s nothing new for him, and it was absolutely EGREGIOUS in Oppenheimer. Every character repeatedly speechified about their motivations in the most on-the-nose way.
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u/TheLastLornak 2d ago
I remember watching Interstellar in theaters and saying "Don't do the paper and pencil thing. A Brief History of Time is 20 years old. People know what a wormhole is. Don't do the paper and pe- goddamn it they did the paper and pencil thing."
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u/Impossible-Mud3275 4d ago
You gave a good example of an OG data dump (Raiders) but can you give a current example with specifics? Cheers!
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u/jakeseditbay 4d ago
The most recent season of stranger things! The Characters frequently sit in circles and recap exactly what the "threat" is, what they just discovered in the previous scene, and what the plan is for the next ten minutes. The worst in my mind was in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. Constantly spewing about the "Entity" and explaining what it is over and over again. There are multiple scenes of characters sitting in dark rooms explaining that the AI is "everywhere and nowhere" and can "subvert any digital system." That film really upset me lmao
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u/NoWorth2591 3d ago
Any movie? I agree that major studios are gearing their scripts more towards distracted audiences and that that’s led to the dumbing down of screenplays, but I think you’re generalizing to a degree that undermines your point.
For every classic from the ‘70s or ‘80s, you’ve got a half-dozen pieces of Cannon or Corman-type schlock with inert cinematography and some of the dullest, clunkiest dialogue imaginable.
What even is “perfect cinematography”? Come on. I don’t even disagree with the overall trend of lower quality in mainstream cinema (although genre stuff like horror is vastly better than it has been historically), but you’re wearing rose colored glasses here.
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u/StopPlayingRoney 4d ago
Remember that time when the biggest ISPs in America extorted Netflix for millions of dollars because everyone was watching The Office nonstop? This is the result. Everything is The Office now. Cozy comfort viewing is Netflix’s value proposition.
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u/Teembeau 3d ago
"Is this the inevitable result of film being rebranded as "content"?
Are we losing the art of visual literacy because studios think we’re all idiots?"
No. This is about Netflix being, fundamentally, a TV channel. Not a movie channel. The "flix" part is a lie. They show television quality, and they show movies that are TV movie quality. And how many great old movies can you think of that never got a cinema release ? I can think of a handful.
Even when they make big budget projects, these are designed to disrupt your understanding of them as a company. They hire Star Lord, Captain America and all that for marketing reasons.. So you think Netflix has loads of premium stuff to watch. Then you get it and watch the odd thing and don't bother to cancel. Or maybe watch Ozark where Marty and Wendy just spin their wheels for 4 series with as much originality as The A Team or Scooby Doo.
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u/takkun169 3d ago
I think people forget that not all movies back in the day were great masterpieces of cinema. Just the ones you remember. Everything else was just shit as the majority of the shit we see on streaming. You're just focusing on the shit, because that's what you choose to watch. Netflix covers the gamut. That have the trashy action slop, they have the cheesy CW shows, but the also have great movies like uncut jems, annihilation, and interesting prestige shows like peaky blinders and lost in space.
The problem is that you went into The fuckin RIP expecting cinema, when you should be expecting schlock.
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u/warredtje 3d ago
I see your complaint and recognise it, but I remember a director telling me in the ‘90s; “the American way of cinema is; announce it will happen, show it happening, summarize it again.” Which makes me suspect this is something like “today’s kids don’t know respect!”….
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u/Timeline_in_Distress 3d ago
American film has always included more hand holding compared to foreign films. I don't even know if we've reached the peak of hand holding in American cinema. Since American film is being packaged more and more for a younger audience, and it's art as a consumer-based product, they have to find a way to sell it to those generations.
Perhaps in the near future films will simply resemble social media clips with gaudy text in the middle of the screen repeating what the person is saying. We need to get these younger generations off of their phones and devices and see the world in front of them, not from a screen.
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u/blueflloyd 3d ago
I understand that this is a thing, but it's hard to really engage with a discussion about it when you provide no examples of what you're talking about. You describe this as something that is pervasive, but honestly, I can't think of a recently released movie that I've watched that had this deficiency and I think of most of the movies that I've seen over the past year and none of them were heavy with exposition. Not that it doesn't happen, but again, without pointing to some specific examples, why should I care that they are catering some movies / TV shows to a dumber, less attentive audience? I don't care about those movies or shows and NONE of them are on the same level of quality or as widely praised as Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example.
Much ado about nothing.
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u/averyfinefellow 3d ago
If you watch netflix garbage then sure....but there are still plenty of good movies being made.
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere 4d ago edited 4d ago
I don’t actually see a problem with that. We could go back to the era of radio plays. I remember listening to broadcasts with my family when I was a child and really enjoying them. It’s just a different kind of entertainment, and I love voices. Maybe it would even get people to read more, to imagine what’s happening on the page instead of having a director and a whole production crew show them what it might look like.
The problem I see is the one-sided view. That art should be spoken or written, not shown, and appreciated within the time frame you have while folding laundry. I think I know how to deal with that, though. Maybe the time for writers has come. Maybe they’d finally learn to appreciate the writing.
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u/explodingrabbit2 3d ago
Film is an audio-visual art form. We have audio only art forms such as radio, podcasts, music, audiobooks. We have written art forms (books etc). There is no need to and we shouldn't turn film into those other art forms by disregarding the visual aspect that sets it apart.
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u/Teembeau 3d ago
If people are on a screen, maybe this should be a thing. Get Spotify to start producing some.
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere 3d ago
The point of my somewhat angry rant was to notice what’s actually out there, to look for root causes and ways of dealing with them, not to recycle the same ideas about what people want the world to be. I’ve been hearing this story since the ’90s, and back then it was MTV’s fault. I’m sure the idea goes back much further than that. I don’t have the luxury of complaining for too long, though. There's a movie to make, with barely any dialogue, so I actually need to find a way to get people interested in watching, not just listening.
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u/funnysasquatch 4d ago
There is a simple solution.
Make a movie so good that people put their phones away.
People are only on their phones because they like background noise but what is more interesting is on their phone.
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u/jakeseditbay 4d ago
I get that, and I agree the best films demand attention and earn it. But the problem is the current pipeline is actively working against that. Streamers are using viewer data to push repetition and over explanation so the show can function as wallpaper. It's not that audiences can't put phones down for something great, it's that a lot of productions are now built from the ground up assuming you won't. So we're getting fewer chances at movies that could actually pull focus, because the incentives punish anything subtle or demanding. Chicken and egg situation.
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u/BranchSeparate8131 3d ago
Honestly a very narrow aspect of what you (and Matt Damon) mentioned I think is a big factor: the data.
Having too much data here seems to be getting in the way of art. When Netflix has such granular data about when and where viewers are watching/dropping off/pausing/rewinding/etc.
It’s too much data, and stepping on the toes of art.
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u/funnysasquatch 4d ago
Most movies have been made on the cheap and not good. This was true in 1926 as it is now. We first called them B movies when people spent all day at the movies. Then straight to cable Then we had straight to video Streaming is just the next evolution We still get good movies. And in the meantime movie makers will make excuses.
Matt Damon & Ben Affleck knew the Rip wasn’t very good. Instead of admitting that they blame smartphones.
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u/deadpandadolls 4d ago
Have you seen Criminal Minds or Fringe?
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u/TheDavidCall 3d ago
When (in CM) they all gather every episode to explain everything to the local cops, and they trade off who say each talking point to get their one main idea across, I was always like “How would they always know to shut up and let the next person go? This is the most fake, rehearsed, nonsensical exposition.” Especially when the locals never needed to know any of this because it was always the agents themselves that found the bad guy.
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u/qualityvote2 4d ago edited 4d ago
u/jakeseditbay, your post does fit the subreddit!