In a movie, you typically have 90 to 120 minutes to tell a story. That’s not much if your story is interesting.
What are the reasons for the popularity of B stories in movies?
I understand having two plots in movies which make a big deal out of having two different viewpoints. For example, in a crime procedural which centers around a face-off between a criminal and a detective, it could make perfect sense to have two plots.
In stories which contrast one approach with another, that can make a lot of sense.
Yet often what I understand to be the B story pretty much just prevents the movie from being completely focused on the main plot,
So, what are the different reasons why a movie, TV show etc .might incorporate a B story? What purposes is it effective at serving?
Counterpoint. You can’t run the main plot all the time - the audience gets burned out. A good “B” and maybe even “C” plot can keep them interested and engaged. The ancient Greeks discovered this.
The “B” plot can also hook the audience into caring about the protagonists more. For example, in Avengers: AoU, a certain directorial decision late in the movie was made much more impactful by the time spent on the “C” plot involving Hawkeye’s family.
In T.V. shows, it makes sense to me. You may have a number of characters, not all of whom can be worked into the A story in a given week. So in my mind the B story is there to keep the audience from wondering: “Hey, where’s so-and-so while all this is happening?”
In a movie where you’ll probably never see these people again, I’m not so sure.
Agreed. I love steak but between every few bites I want a sip of wine to cleanse the palate or a fork of vegies or potatoes to give a more balanced experience. Too much of even a very good thing can feel one dimensional.
It adds depth to the characters and story. If you just focus on the story of the cop negotiating with the bank robbers, the other characters are essentially props and the audience feels no emotional attachment to them. But if you have a subplot where two of the hostages start talking and are falling in love, the audience cares about those characters and what happens to them. Now the audience wants those two people to live on top of wanting the cop to defeat the robbers.
Bart Simpson: Why did a vision of my future include a story about Homer and Lincoln’s gold? Indian Fortune Teller: I guess the spirits thought the main vision was a little thin.
I can’t, off the top of my head, think of a movie with a “B” storyline that’s totally unrelated to the “A” storyline. The Wikipedia entry for subplot uses Rear Window as an example, and I’ll go with that because Rear Window is a pretty straightforward movie set largely in a single location. The main plot is of course about wheelchair-bound Jimmy Stewart spying on his neighbors and coming to suspect that one of them has committed a murder. The secondary plot is the Stewart character’s romance with Grace Kelly and how she wants to get married while he’s reluctant to commit, and there are also a few minor subplots about the other neighbors Stewart has been observing.
Would Rear Window be improved if all the subplots were dropped and the same amount of screen time was devoted to the main murder plot? I’m having a hard time imagining much more that could be done with that storyline without it becoming obviously padded. The Stewart character’s limited mobility means he can’t do much investigation beyond just looking out his window, and throwing in a bunch more looking out the window scenes would be pretty dull – especially with the little slice-of-life subplots involving the other neighbors cut. These subplots help to lighten things up a bit at the beginning and end of the movie, but when a neighbor’s dog mysteriously dies this serves to build tension and gives Stewart even more reason to be suspicious that someone is up to no good.
One could try to rework Rear Window as a short film that focused on the murder plot without any padding, but it’s crucial to that plot that the Kelly character serves as Stewart’s proxy and goes over to the other apartment to snoop around. If the romance subplot is cut then either this character is cut too or she become just a sort of puppet who does Stewart’s dirty work for him for no apparent reason. Without the romance subplot we’d also know a lot less about the Stewart character’s personality.
Much of what I said above could apply to TV shows as well, but it is fairly common for TV shows to have a B plot that doesn’t have a major influence on the A plot. As tim314 says, in a TV show with an ensemble cast this can allow viewers to keep up with favorite characters without everyone having to be crammed into the A plot. One episode’s B plot could also be a way to introduce characters or situations that will be important to a future A plot, and cutting away to the B plot allows the story to skip over parts of the A plot that would be boring or that must be held back for dramatic reasons without the transition seeming awkward.
It can also allow the show to shoot around an actor who needs to be absent for some reason.
In dramatic works there are still practical reasons why a subplot can be helpful, such as allowing for costume and set changes in theater or simultaneous shooting of scenes in a TV show or movie. Glee tended to have a lot of storylines running at once, which I assume was partially due to necessity. In order to produce a weekly series with several big musical numbers per episode, some actors must have been in the recording studio or working with the choreographer while others were on set shooting one-on-one conversation scenes. A show with a lot of action sequences would have similar demands.
One of the rules of ancient Greek theater (and it was a literal rule, as these plays were performed in competition) was that there could only be three actors, plus a chorus and non-speaking extras. The three actors usually played multiple roles, so it wasn’t possible to have all the characters onstage at once and characters played by the same actor couldn’t do a scene together.
Good reasons were named. Thanks. If you can think of others or think of how B stories can best develop characters, make the audience care for characters or rinse the palate, please mention them.
Why that Greek theater rule?
If I ever learned this I’ve forgotten, and a quick Google doesn’t turn up an answer. I assume that it was mostly to keep the playing field even, though. If the most popular or well-connected playwrights had been able to cast as many actors as they wanted then they could have put on a much bigger show then their rivals or snatched up all the best actors.
In some TV series with multi-episode story arcs, plotlines may alternate between A story and B story status. A story involving two characters may be developed as a B story for several episodes and then be brought up to A story status for an episode.
Look at Agents of Shield for an example of this. You had what appeared to be B stories about Cal and Raina, Grant and 33, and Bobbi and Mack. Each of them had stories which appeared to be diversions from the main storyline. But each of their stories ended up with a climax that was part of the main storyline.
They could have theoretically ignored them as B stories and had Bobbi and Mack, for example, just revealed as undercover plants for Shield 2 when that story was revealed. But the audience wouldn’t have accepted something like that if it came out of nowhere. However, by working it up as a B story we believed they would betray the people they were working with.
So B stories can be a means to develop future A stories.
Obviously, not all movies do, nor even all tv shows - Murphy Brown often skipped B plots.
It just makes things feel a little dry.
Of course, a very skilled writer/director can work that to their advantage - Twelve Angry Men, or even something as non-intellectual as Rollerball - some of the intensity comes from never, never letting up. We never get a moment’s respite from the tension.
Here’s another example of a movie subplot that I just thought of – it came to mind because it was something added for the movie and was not present in the source material.
In the short story Brokeback Mountain, Ennis’s daughters are barely mentioned. After his ex-wife Alma angrily confronts him about his relationship with Jack, we’re told that he stays away from his young daughters for a long time and figures that when they’re older they can see each other more if the girls want to. It’s later stated that by the time the girls are in their teens he sees them once a month or so. They aren’t mentioned again, but this is truly a short story (it only took up about 10 pages in The New Yorker) and there’s not a lot of room to spend on supporting characters.
In the movie we see more of Ennis’s (Heath Ledger) relationship with his oldest daughter, Alma Jr. At the end of the movie she comes to visit him and invites him to her wedding. Aside from filling screen time and making the ending less depressing, this subplot helps to make Ennis more sympathetic and emphasizes some things about his character that are left more implied in the story. He’s in love with Jack but he also loves his children and wants to honor his responsibilities towards them, and Alma Jr. clearly wants him to be a part of her life. Running off with Jack would have meant giving up even limited contact with his daughters, which Ennis was unwilling to do, but he was also unwilling to completely cut things off with Jack. Without this subplot it might have come across as if Ennis didn’t really care about his children and refused to run off with Jack solely because he was afraid.
Every scene needs to have a point. Either it moves the plot along, or develops the characters in some way. The best scenes do both*, but if you can’t do both, creating a secondary lesser plot helps the character scenes have relevance.
*The worst scenes do neither. They try to save those scenes with either comedy, or gratuitous violence or nudity.
I don’t know if this is true. The point of most movies and television series is their entertainment value.
Sometimes they derive their entertainment value from the story or the character. But sometimes the jokes or violence or nudity is the entertainment value. The “plot” is just a vehicle for holding those scenes together.
Consider Duck Soup as an example. The mirror scene did nothing to advance the plot of the movie or develop the characters. It was just a funny scene. But this is Duck Soup we’re talking about. Does anyone think the movie would have been improved by cutting the mirror scene as unnecessary and adding scenes about the politics of Fredonia or the background of Rufus T. Firefly’s character?
Duck Soup may be an extreme example but the principle still holds. Sometimes you want a movie with plot and characters. Other times you just want to see Will Ferrell acting like an idiot or Vin Diesel doing a cool stunt or Jessica Alba wearing a bikini.
True to a point, but without the plot or character being advanced, a scene fails. Though you may not even notice that’s what’s happened (in fact that’s preferable).