Squinting in the Moonlight

 

Do you squint in the moonlight because it’s too bright? Neither do I. And neither does anyone else, except for the characters on TV shows from the 1950s and budget-sensitive (cheap) “B” movies. Why? Because of a cinematic technique called “day for night.”

This technique was often used in those old TV shows, to which I’m addicted. The addiction is not only for the nostalgia, but as evidence that I see things in them today that I didn’t notice when I was nine.

Part of my brain always wondered why the campfire wasn’t brighter as Bat Masterson and his friends drank their coffee and talked about how they would catch the bad guys when the sun came up. The same section of my cerebrum wondered why the headlights of Perry Mason’s car gave off so little light as he and Paul Drake arrived at a midnight crime scene. And I certainly wondered why everyone was squinting.

The reason is that it wasn’t really night when the scenes were shot. It was broad daylight with the sun blazing overhead, but the cameraman underexposed the film so it would have the semblance of night. (FYI, the term “cameraman” is not sexist. In those days, all camera operators were men.)

When you underexpose film, everything is darker. Depending on what is in the shot, the technique works. But if the shot includes a light source, believability is blown out of the water because campfires and headlights are darkened along with everything else.

Shooting day for night is cheaper than paying actors and crew overtime for night shooting and going to the expense of extra lights. I’m referring here to black and white photography, where the filmmaker could put a red filter over the lens to darken the blue sky and close the lens down an f-stop. It’s a bit more complicated in color. There, along with underexposure, a blue filter is used to simulate moonlight. Even though real moonlight isn’t particularly blue, we perceive it as such.

“Does he have a point that relates to communication?” you ask. Why yes, he does.

In fiction writing, we have a concept called willing suspension of disbelief. It amounts to a mutual agreement: the storyteller agrees to lie and the audience agrees to believe it. But the storyteller is still obligated not to do anything that would pull the reader/listener/viewer out of the story.

If there are mistakes in the story, the audience members’ belief in the story depends whether they notice the mistakes. And that all depends on what they know. And you, the writer, don’t know what they know, so you have to assume they know everything.

For instance, if you’re attempting to reconstruct a conversation that took place in a bygone era, be sure the characters are using the right language. I remember an episode of M*A*S*H, one in which the actors improvised many of their lines. The story was about a newsreel film crew interviewing the personnel of the 4077th, and when they got to Radar, actor Gary Burghoff goofed.

Radar is answering a question about his mission there, and he says something to the effect that it’s all about helping people and “that’s where it’s at.” That age-of-Aquarius-era expression didn’t exist at the time of the Korean War. Fiction or non, no anachronisms allowed.

No credible fiction writer wants the reader to be pulled out of the story. But if the viewer of that episode of M*A*S*H was born after the 60s, they would need an unusually sharp cultural awareness to pick up on the error. But it will happen with older viewers. The seams will start to show.

Maybe it’s less a suspension of disbelief than it is a balance between the audience surrendering to the story and maintaining an awareness of the techniques of storytelling or filmmaking. In nonfiction, there should be only belief. The storyteller should do nothing to alter that. The writer must take care in researching the background details.

Fiction and nonfiction are the same in that your audience must believe you and believe every word of the world you present to them. No writer wants to lose his readers. No speaker wants to lose her listeners. Pay attention to all of the details, because you have no idea whether your audience will notice the squinting in the moonlight.


Jay Speyerer has been a writer, a speaker, and an educator for more than 30 years, successfully helping people achieve their communication goals in memoir writing, e-mail, cross-cultural communication, and presentation skills. Want to communicate better? Find out how at his web site here.

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