on poodles

I started this all the way back when Yuri!!! on ICE first hit the airwaves, and I pretty much say everything I want to about the subject. I could polish it up more but I don’t feel like it, so enjoy what is effectively a rough draft that will never be finalized.

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setup and payoff is probably one of the oldest and most recognizable tricks in the book for any writer or director. in order to integrate an important plot event (such as the main character’s dog dying), you first introduce the fact that the dog exists, then hint at it’s importance or relevance, and then deliver the main event, the narrative punchline. it draws on the simple idea of cause and effect, but is a fundamental building block of good narrative cinema.

take billy wilder’s 1960 classic The Apartment. towards the end of the film, salaryman Baxter explains to his colleague Fran that he once purchased a gun to commit suicide, but accidentally shot himself in the leg when a policeman passed by. later, when Baxter is moving out of the titular apartment, he finds the gun and briefly looks it over before putting it away. at film’s climax, Fran is climbing the stairs to the apartment to confess her love to Baxter when she hears a loud gunshot noise, and immediately assumes the worst. spoilers: wilder primed the audience by setting up the existence and previous use of the gun so they would believe that Baxter had shot himself, when in reality, he had just popped a bottle of champagne. the payoff in this case is a very convincing misdirect that heightens the emotional climax of the film. [note also that to this end, the champagne had been presented but not connected with Baxter.] by adding in seemingly innocuous plot points, a director is able to set the stage for a relevant event in the plot, and make it resonate more.

before yuri!!! on ice became the cultural phenomenon it had become by the end of 2016, it was just another show airing in the fall season. it instantly stood out to me as one of the more promising shows of the year for a multitude of reasons, but the particular moment that had me smiling with tears running down my face was around the middle of the first episode. we had already seen that yuri (the japanese one) was considerably shaken by the news that his dog had died, but the audience was disconnected from whatever emotions he felt towards Vicchan. later in the episode, of course, it is revealed that he saw his idol, viktor, with a beautiful brown poodle, and in his admiration, got one of his own. this was where Yamamato Saya really impressed me, in taking the quintessential hollywood practice of setup and payoff, and inverting it to draw a huge emotional response out of the viewer.

this method draws so much more out of the scene than the reverse. we understood that yuri was distraught by the loss of his dog, but as an audience we didn’t expect any extra background on why he was so attached to his poodle. leaving those feelings to marinateunexplained until a flashback later in the episode made the reveal all the more potent, as everything comes crashing in at once rather than being slowly built up. you could say that this is not payoff and setup, but rather just a slightly disguised form of setup and payoff. i disagree with this idea, and hold that it is a different form of narrative development because of the nature of each plot point. vicchan’s death is a concrete, narrative event. it is the punchline – not just because it happens chronologically later, but because it happens at all. Baxter explaining his attempt at suicide and examining the weapon involved were less the destinations on the narrative map than part of the road connecting the two. in the same way, vicchan’s death is a pin on the map. after seeing the pin, we see the string leading there, which through retroactive explanation makes us realize the root of yuri’s feelings, further extolling his idolization of viktor.