The Blank-Slate Shot: When Films Ask, "Who are You?"
The ultimate question of identity occurs in a key kind of image found in so many great movies
I learn more from my students than they learn from me.
Some years ago, teaching a useful 1989 film in an “intro to film class” — that would be Cameron Crowe’s “Say Anything,” famous for its iconic image of John Cusack raising a boombox above his head — a student analyzed the party-scene from this movie in an analysis paper.
He took a hard look at the following image and ended up writing a lot about it. Which is intriguing, because if you and I were to glance at it, we might notice nothing at all.
After all, it’s just a standard close-shot, the image of a character’s face.
No, said the student, look harder. At this scene in the movie, the main character is asked how he was able to go on a date with the other main character, a female who would seem to be his opposite and his superior.
“I’m Lloyd Dobler,” the Cusack character states, with this blank-background image of him on screen.
That statement of his identity, his very name, is not anything to pass over.
This image, at this point in the movie, is a fundamental declaration of what this movie is about: courage and honesty, in a tough teenage-world of fake imagery and white lies. The young characters struggle with who and what they will be. The Dobler character is asked later in the movie what he wants to do for a living when he grows up, the most typical and among the most vexing questions that young Americans still receive. He wishes, however, not to be typecast as a vocation. He wants to be who he is, Lloyd Dobler, in his own Seattle-based Gen-X way.
Anyway, this image has some of these ideas, and more. It’s a blank canvas of sorts. The character is on the screen, vulnerable, nothing in the background but an empty background all of the same color.
It’s as if the movie is asking us to consider the character in a vacuum. Who is he? Who will he be?
Funny enough, the dialogue in the movie prompts him to make a literal identity declaration: “I’m Lloyd Dobler,” as if that’s enough and he doesn’t need to become a type or stereotype. He needs nothing else, no other people and nothing in the background, to show us what he is.
Once the student alerted me to this shot, and especially to what’s happening in itvisually combined with its thematic resonances, I started noticing this kind of shot in other movies, a whole lot of them.
It’s almost always the same: close shot of main character, blank background, significant moment in the film where a character is at a personal-identity crossroads.
This kind of shot allows us to see the character’s vulnerability and uncertainty, especially as to who they are and what they will become. And because it’s a blank-canvas, it allows us to project our answers for that character onto them. The blank background invites us to color in the scene for that character, essentially filling out the question for ourselves as to who they are.
For those reasons, I’ve taken to calling this shot “The Blank-Slate Shot.”
Who knows, maybe I’ve missed when this kind of shot has been named and discussed in film criticism. If you know it by some other name, please let me know.
This shot comes up in one of the Western film’s ultimate-identity moments at the movies, “Lawrence of Arabia.” Right before that movie’s intermission, T.E. Lawrence is crossing from the wild Arabian desert back over to Egypt, sight of the British consul in WW1.
Here, he’s crossing the Suez Canal, symbol of empire and civilization.
At this point, he’s asked the identity question of identity questions by a man calling out to him across the way, “Who are you?”
And it’s no surprise, it’s a Blank-Slate shot, where he’s caked with desert sand and accompanied by his young Arabian guide. In the last two hours of the movie, he’s gone from upright English gentleman to “wild” Arabian warrior, survivor of the world’s harshest deserts, and — brutal for him psychologically — a killer who likes to kill.
“Who are you?” Not exactly an English gentleman anymore, right Lawrence?
You can also find this shot a few times in “Blade Runner,” which as you know is another movie about identity — and literally, because some of the characters are not human, and a few don’t know that they aren’t human!
I invite you to find the Blank-Slate Shot and send in your observations. We can probably come up with a lot of fascinating variations on it.
And one thing I know, you can guarantee that many of the best directors have used it, knowingly or not, to probe and prompt the question of identity for their characters, and for us.