Understanding Dramatic Irony

It’s a trick as old as Ancient Greek theater and if used effectively builds tension and empathy. In Oedipus, the Greek tragedy written by Sophocles, we are in total awareness of who Oedipus is and that he killed King Laius, but Oedipus himself doesn’t know this. It heightens the tension. In Disney’s Beauty & the Beast, since the beginning of the movie, we know that the Beast is actually a King, but Belle doesn’t. It creates empathy for the Beast. So, what is dramatic irony? Is it a tool or a way of telling the story, is it an end or a means to an end?

To put it simply, Dramatic Irony is a form of structural narrative, where we as an audience know something that the characters themselves are not aware of. Mad Men creator Matt Weiner is one of the huge proponents of dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is a skill he learnt as a writer on Sopranos and perfected in Mad Men.

The essence of telling any good story lies in these two things: making the audience root for the protagonist, and secondly, making the audience predict how the protagonist may react when forced in a situation. These two objectives as a story teller at first seem counter-intuitive because when you read the word, “making the audience predict the protagonist’s reaction” your brain tells you that it means “to correctly predict the protagonist’s reaction”; that is not the case. For a screenwriter, prediction is a double edged sword. Sometimes, it is essential to make the audience predict correctly – to test that they are able to relate to the character, and on other instances, it is equally important to subvert the expectations of the audience by not making the character react as the audience would – to shock them and engage them back in the story. Still confused, what I am trying to say?

Let’s take an analogy –

Suppose you are an adult who decides to play a game of football with a bunch of twelve year olds and it is assumed that your skill level at the game is higher than the children. Now, if at every play it is you, the adult, who comes out on top then the children will eventually lose interest and not play with you, losing at every play is not fun for them. In another case, suppose you let the children win at every play to encourage them. Soon, the children will realize that something is wrong, how are they able to beat an adult at a game where they can clearly see that they are inferior. They will lose interest eventually.

If the audience predicts the character’s behavior all the time, they may get a feeling that the movie is not that interesting as everything is predictable and probably they would have written a better one. If the audience is never able to predict the character’s behavior, then they are unable to relate with the character motivations, making the movie seem like an esoteric project.  A balance needs to be maintained at all times. And dramatic irony, accordingly, is that way of preserving this balance.

Let’s look at this scenario:-

The scene begins with us watching the progression of a funeral. Our protagonist is introduced here – a therapist, who has lost his wife. In the subsequent scenes we follow his daily routine as he navigates through life missing his wife. After a break of a few days due to his wife’s death, he is now ready to see patients. He has a new female patient on his first day back at work. As the conversation begins to unfold, the patient reveals that she attempted suicide after her husband died.

In the above mentioned scenario, we know something about the therapist that the patient doesn’t. It makes for a corny but an interesting situation to see how the therapy sessions may evolve. Will the therapist tell the patient that he too has lost a spouse? Will the therapy sessions may lead to something romantic? Will the relationship be strictly professional, or a platonic relationship may also develop? We don’t know but we have all these questions due to the presence of dramatic irony of the situation.    

Dramatic Irony engages the audience to wait and see what will happen due to the information gap that is prevalent between the characters themselves and audience’s understanding of the character. So, next time when you sit down to write a screenplay, think about the information that you may want to show the audience, or what you may want to hide from them. Thus, dramatic irony not only builds the expectations of the audience but may also be used to subvert expectations.