The problem with dramas built around scenes where one character eloquently tells another character off — (and I am guilty of this sin, too; such scenes are all over the Andrea Cort series, which is at least a group of murder mysteries where one brilliant person gets to explain her epiphanies) — is that in real life people don’t stand still for being told off. They stop listening. They attempt to justify themselves. They bring in irrelevant shit. They try to drown out the speechmaker with indignant yelling of their own. In the end, they learn nothing.
Every movie ever made where the bedraggled hero addresses a hostile room and turns it to his side with a few hundred words of impassioned rhetoric is a lie. People don’t react to being told they’re wrong with slow claps. They react with tomatoes.
An exception can be made for scenes where the hero expertly manipulates an angry crowd into changing its mind to the attitude he prefers. But note that in such scenes he does not begin by telling them they’re wrong. He simply steers them where he wants them to go. See: Mark Antony’s eulogy for his fallen friend in JULIUS CAESAR. That is masterful. But it is not direct confrontation. It’s verbal jui-jitsu, a much more rarefied skill.
Comment By: Keith R.A. DeCandido
December 15th, 2015 at 10:45 am
That’s why I wrote ARTICLES OF THE FEDERATION, a novel starring the President of the United Federation of Planets. She got to give tons of speeches as part of her job AND she always had a captive audience. 🙂
—KRAD