I’m still, after all these years, a big Buffy and Xena fan, and this week I found myself in a thread about the relationship between Faith and Buffy that’s been openly discussed by the writers and the actors for years – and half the replies were people insisting, with real conviction, that there was never anything there at all.
It wasn’t subtle. In the nineties and early noughties, studios frequently wouldn’t let creators put a same-sex relationship on screen outright, so the people making the show played up what became known as subtext instead, right in front of an audience they knew was watching for exactly that.
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the script for “Enemies” had Faith kissing Buffy on the mouth. What aired was a kiss on the forehead – changed at the last minute, widely believed to be the network’s call. In Xena, a side character once announced, hand in hand with another woman, that she’d finally realised something deep down about herself: she was a “thespian”… and that’s without all the snoggage between the female leads, disguised as everything from a body swap to needing to pass magical water mouth-to-mouth.
Back in the Buffyverse, even Angel got in on it – Spike telling Illyria, with Angel standing right there, that the two of them had never been intimate… except that once. Fried Green Tomatoes did the same thing in reverse, taking a relationship that was explicit on the page and dialling it down to “close friendship” for the screen. None of this was accidental. Every one of these was placed deliberately, by people who knew precisely what they were doing and precisely who’d notice.
Yet decades later, plenty of people looking at the exact same material insist it was never there at all – not “I read it differently,” just never there.
It reminded me of something that happened after Tip Toe finished – Russell T Davies’ Channel 4 drama about two neighbours in Manchester, brilliantly played by Alan Cumming and David Morrissey. The ending left us with a few lines on screen about what happened to the central characters, including a false claim about the central gay character, with the implication that it had been invented to justify the homophobic killers’ actions.
I’d worried, in an earlier newsletter, that some viewers would take that line as fact, rather than sitting with the nuance the writing actually offered. Within weeks, someone considerably further right than me politically asked, entirely seriously, that I thought about Alan Cumming’s character turning out to be a ‘paedo’ – a twisting of the narrative never supported in the actual story. It wasn’t there. It was never there, aside from a plot device to show how online narratives could be skewed to distort the truth and vindicate wrongdoers.
The same thing applies to the rest of us putting a message out into the world. You can be as clear as you know how to be, place the thing directly in front of people, and some of them will still see whatever fits the story they already believe about you, your industry or the world. People will always do this with information that threatens a worldview they’d rather keep, regardless of how plainly it’s stated.
By making sure you have total clarity about your messaging, you can reduce the room for that kind of misreading, though I’m not convinced it can ever be eliminated completely.
Something to try this week:
Take one piece of content you’ve put out recently and read it as your most sceptical, most resistant potential client might. Where’s the gap they could drive their own interpretation through? Tighten that, and let the rest go – you were never going to reach the ones who’d already decided not to see it.
Let me know how you get on.
#UnleashYourAwesome