It has always been a major question for me regarding the perception of a movie or any kind of visual narrative form, how the viewer tolerates various discontinuities in time and place if they are acknowledged anyway.
Since I became in touch with the technique of set-ups and pay-offs in a seminar last semester, I tried to focus on very little things. Those "little" things however, turned out to have quite an impact on how those time and place jumps manage to bother us so little. But at first, a small comment on the mentioned set-up and pay-off technique. A set-up describes an small detail, a casually expressed sentence, a small movement of camera and many other means, appearing rather irrelevant at first sight. But as mentioned in thousands of articles, absolutely nothing you see in a movie is done accidentally or without a particular purpose. So, of course these little details or whatever exist, because they are want to be seen by you. Thats where the pay-offs come in. To confident the viewers perception these set-ups are revisited (much) later in the movie, explaining why this little detail is actually so important. So in case you weren't aware of that or just didn't know how to label this technique, now you know.
Let's not theorise this any further and investigate Jason Bateman's "Bad Words" from 2013. I think the set-ups and pay-offs in general are especially important in character driven movies to feed the viewer with diegetic recurring motives to create a more fluent and finalising plot. Although I am sure that they are much more set-ups and pay-offs in "Bad Words", I like to focus on few examples I found most interesting. And before I start, I did not pick the ones that created the "wow-i-totally-get-that-because-of-the-thingy-mentioned-before-it-all-makes-sense-now" effect.
I think those passing by your conscience are the most effective ones.
Maybe its a good idea to clear up any confusion regarding the title of this article - "not all girls have nipples". This is a quote from Chaitanya Chopra (Rohan Chand), who is absolutely sure, that not every woman is blessed with nipples. Of course Guy Trilby (Jason Bateman) disagrees substantively and the following scene shows Guy, Chaitanya and a prostitute in a dark barkstreet, looking at her bare breasts.
Why do I think this is an good example? Imagine witnessing this scenery without Chaitanya mentioning his persuasion on distribution of nipples on females. All you see is an adult in his 40's sitting next to a twelve year old (looking actually even younger). Then they suddenly leave, you follow them, and they pay a prostitute to expose her breasts. Pretty weird, mh?
So, we need Chaitanya to set up the next shot, so we can start to familiarise with that imagination. Of course not only this preparation of the next scene makes us not uncomfortable. Many other factors, especially the way they start to bond, embodied in the little toy car, are counted among.
Another quite obvious but none the less essential set-up is Guy saying "I never saw my father". Because this topic is quite overused, one tends to oversee its basic but efficient function. After all, Guy behaves like a total jerk to get back at his father, who shines in his absence as a father. This set-up plays a key role, because it (more or less) justifies Guys ridiculous behaviour towards nearly everybody. But at first, you fail to connect these two things with another.
Finally, lets look at what I think is the archetypical form of a set-up - the bet.
It is the ultimate justification of discontinuities in time and place because the viewer urges towards the pay-off, he simply does not care. Here we find Guy betting against Jenny Widgeon (Kathryn Hahn). She states: "I would never let your near my vagina again, not for a million dollars!"
I think the images speak for themselves.
My point is, that despite the aesthetic of being a sophisticated movie-specialist, detecting every little reference to earlier scenes, it is worth talking about the more obvious but nonetheless essential set-ups and pay-offs which round off every narrative and every transition.
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image sources:
All screenshots are taken from "Bad Words"
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