A Lesson in Story Telling with Images looks at the Coen Brother's Meal Ticket, from their 2018 film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
This follows Lesson 1 and Lesson 2.
The focus here will be on how much or how little to show and to tell.
I will start by comparing the opening and ending scene.
The third and bleakest segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, “Meal Ticket,” is a tough sell – a slow moving, visually muted tragedy featuring two nameless characters who hardly speak to one another. One is almost mute, uttering no more than a dozen lines; the other speaks only in quotations. Out of the Coens’ entire eclectic filmography, “Meal Ticket” most recalls the ordeal of the hapless artist in the similarly downbeat and wintry Inside Llewyn Davis. It centers on a limbless performer (Harry Melling) – “The Wingless Thrush,” an advertisement informs us, “Thespian Orator and Popular Entertainer” – and the hulking, fur-clad impresario (Liam Neeson) with whom he travels from frontier town to frontier town, trying to eke out a living with dramatic recitations of Shakespeare, the Bible, Shelley’s Ozymandias,and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Arguably, the impresario is also the protagonist, but once again, we are mostly shown his hands and the stage being set up.
1: We are made to wait as the spectators start to flock to see the show. Like these spectators we can only see the curtains over the stage and then the reverse shots of the audience as it gathers.
2: We are offered two closeups of two different spectators, mirroring our expectancy of what we are about to see.
3: The curtains open. We are as surprised as the spectators to see such a disabled person with no hands and feet reciting, Shakespeare, Shelley etc.
4: If we could look at our faces, our surprise would be the same as the spectator in close-up.
The film is acting like a spectator, where we get to see bits and pieces of what we are allowed to see when the director thinks fit. We become one of the audience and what we are about to see is a performance.
In between performances we see another type of performance: A glimpse of offstage where the impresario feeds the helpless perform, helps him with his toilet etc. When he goes to a brothel, the fact that he turns the helpless limbless performer around, does not allow neither him nor us to see but we know what is happening on the bed. This is a telling of a story through non-images, by not showing.
Enter a new protagonist. A chicken that can count numbers. As throughout a series of dissolves, we have been shown the passage of time and a number of performances - even with the winter snow intensifying - we have noticed the number of spectators and the money in the impresario's hat dwindle. But once again nothing has been said about the fall in popularity or feasibility of this performance.
However, there is a large crowd interested in another kind of entertainment: The counting chicken. The impresario buys the chicken and now our poor hapless performer has been out-staged by a chicken. The irony does not fall on deaf ears - the wise poetical wisdom of the performer and a chicken who can count and do simple maths. Once again, nothing is said - there is no exchange of words or dialogue between the impresario and the performer: Only the above reverse shot scenes with the performer eyeing his competitor in the wagon.
Now, we come to the final scene: Surely this is when all is bared and shown. But this is not the case. The impresario, stops the wagon and goes next to a bridge. He looks down at the river below. He picks up a stone and throws it down. Now he returns to the wagon. All this scene does is too raise suspicion that the impresario is thinking, meditating or even rehearsing the performer's murder. What we do learn, is that the performer is now useless to the impresario. We also learn that the impresario had only taken care of the performer because he had been a money making tool - no love, respect or sympathy. Nothing, has been said about this though. It is our guess and our gut feeling but it has not been shown or told. As the impresario smiles we even think that nothing of the sort is going to happen.
There is no reveal: Only the above shot that shows the chicken in a cage and the performer missing. The obvious conclusion is that the performer has suffered the fate of the stone dropped in the river, but we have not seen it. There is no evidence, no proof in the picture or the telling.
This lack of showing or telling therefore makes use of our gut feelings, making us look for the missing pieces in the puzzle and it is these missing pieces that best 'Tell' or "Show' a story.
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