Implied Sound and Dialogue
To quote David Lynch: "films are 50% visual and 50% sound. Sometimes sound even overplays the visual." A good soundtrack, or lack of sound altogether, can make a good film great. The lack of a backing track to the now classic chase scene in Bullitt (1968) was a genius move which no doubt helped the film achieve accolades at the Academy Awards for Editing. It's hard to imagine that scene with any sound at all, other than the raw roars of the Charger and Mustang. Similarly, it's almost impossible to imagine any films in the Star Wars franchise without the fantastic score of John Williams.
However, despite the black and white uses of sound, there are the films that take a more experimental route with what is heard and not heard. Sometimes a sound can imply an action or emotion, or a sound can act as a metaphor for an internal struggle. This is expertly, and famously, done in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) during the dinner scene between Michael, Sollozzo, and Captain McCluskey. In this scene, the internal conflict Michael has is represented by the sound of a train, initially quietly, but towards the climax of the scene, we hear the train sound grow to a screeching crescendo, before Michael takes his steps into a much darker path.
I was recently teaching a college script writing class in which I was asked for advice on dialogue in a quite delicate scene at the denouement of the story. The scripted dialogue was meant to be a suicide note, read as a voice over, left to neglecting parents. The student's main issue with the dialogue was that he found it to be "cheesy".
Drama isn't easy to pull off in a script, especially when the message you're putting across is a very serious and sensitive one of vulnerability, angst, jealousy, and insecurity. Your character can come across as totally unrealistic, cringy, or "cheesy." It takes a lot of character development, strong acting, and clever writing to achieve all of those emotions via a spoken bit of dialogue, especially through a voice over. But there is a way around it...
Even if you are a student filmmaker, or you're making an indie film but don't have access to Al Pacino level actors, but you really want to film a scene which would require some delicacy and tact; just imply what you want to say.
My advice to this student was to not explicitly say anything even close to "mum, dad, I'm going to kill myself and it's your fault." Not only does that sound cheesy and lazy, it also prevents any chance for the audience to read into what might be being said by him, the filmmaker.
Fortunately, because a lot of the issues this character had came from the arguments his parents were having, and because those arguments were mainly situated in the kitchen of the house, the student and I were able to decide what methods there were to tell this story without spelling it out in black and white.
Eventually, we settled on the idea that the sound of the kettle boiling would be the trigger to the depressed characters' downward spiral to suicide. In a similar fashion to Pavlov's Dog, this character would attribute the sound of the boiling water in the kettle to arguments between his parents, which would then lead to the final scene: the suicide note being read by one of the parents in a strangely empty house, with just the growing sound of the kettle boiling before a cut to black and a much more ambiguous ending.
Is it a perfect film? No. But giving the audience the chance to read this sound effect, and its affect on this young character amid the arguing of his parents, before ending the film with the unsettling whistle of the kettle, we have created a much more interesting movie. Subtle hints towards a recurring sound and no explicit yes or no as to whether this character is dead is, to me, much better and slightly less cliche than: "mum, dad, our kid, I'm going to kill mysen."
If you're writing a film and worry that what you're trying to say may not come out as well as you intend due to the seriousness of the topic, think of other methods such as sound cues or even visual cues or colours which could imply your message, rather than explicitly spell it out.
Remember to respect your audiences intelligence. They don't want to be spoon fed a narrative. Challenge them. Give them the ability to make their own minds up about what your film meant. It may take your script to new heights.
