Has anyone seen any of those Facebook “morality” videos that are like “This person hurts that person and learns an important lesson”?
In theory, they’re pretty cute and harmless. In practice, I find myself trapped in this weird Junji Ito-style horror world of unnecessary exposition where no one seems to be capable of remembering the past except the person speaking. When you think about it, it’s actually pretty horrifying!
Most of these videos are by Dhar Mann Studios. There is nothing wrong with the premise behind many of the videos, but the execution of the script sucks so hard and I don’t get why they do so well!
But I thought that they were a great way for us to have a look at what makes dialogue that over-explains so damn unnatural and even eerie.
Let’s look at the first video I want to cover.
In this video, a man genuinely forgets his own past and it is brushed off as though that is completely normal. His wife needs to remind him that he was a janitor before he was a successful businessman. When I say that she has to remind him, I mean, he genuinely just forgot God knows how many years of his life for the sake of plot contrivances. Yikes!
If this were real life, or a decent script, things would have gone so differently. When his wife brings up that he literally has the same background as his daughter’s new boyfriend, he wouldn’t say “what do you mean”. Or, at least, if he did, she wouldn’t have been so calm about it.
He could have been like “it’s not the same” or “you don’t know what you’re talking about” or “what because I was a janitor too? Things were different back then” or something to acknowledge that he actually remembers his past…
Or he could have scoffed at her comparing them (to show that it didn’t occur to him that she was talking about the fact thay they were both janitors) and said something like “I have a degree”. The “what do you mean” feels so sincere that it seems like he is genuinely concerned that he forgot something, which then brings out this silent “is this the first time he’s forgotten a huge part of his life?” If they wanted to go for something more like he just wasn’t thinking about them being similar in the same way she was, he could have said something like “what’s that supposed to mean” or “I’m nothing like him”
Or, if he had said “what do you mean”, his wife would probably have been rather alarmed in real life. I mean, did her husband forget HOW THEY MET? How much of his life does he need reminding of? Is this early-onset Alzheimer’s? Maybe he should go to see a doctor.
The fact that he’s just like OHH YEAHHH THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME makes it seem like he often forgets his young adulthood. In which case, that’s seriously worrying that everyone around him treats what could be a symptom of a serious medical condition so casually… without any reference to him often forgetting things or anything.
Why? Because it’s more convenient for the script and the flashback if they can spoon-feed the audience like children when they don’t really need that at all. It ends up all feeling so fake it hurts.
And that’s without mentioning the fact that, if she did need to remind him of his own life, she would have probably said things like “you remember, right” or “how could you forget” and not spoken to him as though he is some third-party who never experienced HIS OWN LIFE.
This one is a little more subtle. There are quite a few here, but let’s take the one when the wife reveals she’s pregnant.
In that scene, the husband says “We can’t afford to have a baby right now. Our cafe is just starting to take off!”
Um, the wife should already know that the cafe is taking off. Like, her lack of reaction when he says it seems to say it’s not news to her. If she didn’t know, surely she’d acknowledge what he said with a “that’s great but…” She doesn’t, though, so we’re led to assume she already knows.
But she doesn’t say “I know”. She doesn’t say “so you’ve said 100 times already” like you would if someone kept telling you the same piece of news as though you’d never heard it before. She doesn’t say “I understand” or “I get that” like you would if you did truly see where a person was coming from, but want to keep the baby anyway. Nope! So, it leads us to the conclusion that she’s also part of this creepy horror world where everyone needs to be reminded about their own lives – past and present, apparently. You can probably see why I almost named this thread “Dialogue and the Existential Horror of Facebook Morality Videos”.
If this were a good piece of dialogue and the wife already knew about the cafe, the husband would have made it clear that she should know. He might have said something like “we can’t pay for a baby and a cafe at the same time” or “but the cafe is doing so well. We need to focus on that” or "hello?! Did you forget about the cafe?!
Of course, this is all to help you to understand how to improve your own work! I mean, clearly he’s more successful that I am, so I guess he can just laugh at me, but his dialogue sucks.
@Writers feel free to write your own analysis of sucky dialogue in morality videos on Facebook! If you want me to do more, let me know!
Like. Your memories serve only to affect the narrative arc of a given piece. The first one is framed so that the revelation that the dad was also a janitor is a surprise, a shock. But… Yeah. That isn’t natural. That isn’t how it would happen in a real conversation. He should know all of this already, and his wife should be a lot more shocked than she is that he seemingly forgot all of it. So did he just pop into existence when the video started? Scary to think about.
“Why am I so miserable? Oh yeah… My boss killed my wife last night, that’s right…” Like. okay 
