On Foreshadowing

One of my favorite (and, as far as I’m concerned, one of the most effective) devices in storytelling will always be foreshadowing. As a writer, there’s nothing quite like dropping clever, sometimes hardly detectable hints for the audience to pick up on at some point. There’s a subtle deviousness to it that is really just a pleasant byproduct of foreshadowing’s necessity.

As an audience member, the thrill of being able to piece together a story based on clues provided by the writer is unmatched. I think there’s an inherent human desire to discover, and foreshadowing allows everyone to satisfy that impulse. This is why the mystery genre is so popular — each tale begs you to solve the puzzle yourself, as though you were an aid to the investigation.

Part of watching a film or reading a book is feeling involved in the narrative. This is something every writer strives to achieve with his or her audience, and it can prove difficult, especially when the subject matter is something perhaps unrelatable to most. Through foreshadowing we can achieve that sense of involvement; I’d like to say its bringing the “mystery” quality to every story, regardless of genre.

Also, foreshadowing serves to tie one’s story together in the end. Plot developments need to make sense narratively, and it helps to let the audience catch a glimpse of what is to come in order to prepare them. This is especially useful if the transitions in your tale are more or less unexpected, non-canon, or difficult to grasp for any other reason.

My favorite example of a film that expertly uses foreshadowing is 1993’s The Sandlot. Sure, its one of my favorite childhood movies, but it stands alone as an example of what solid narrative structure as a foundation can do — and foreshadowing contributes immeasurably to the story’s overall draw.

I’d like to address just the first two scenes, when an older Scott Smalls (Tom Guiry) provides narration as a form of backstory, while at the same time leading you into his “office” from which he will tell the tale of the Sandlot. As he walks into frame, he’s wearing a hat with a fish on it that we see the other lead, Benny (Mike Vitar), remove from his head later on. Already we’re getting hints, though we as an audience may not know.

Smalls’ narration describes, at first, the moment in which Babe Ruth called his shot in the 1939 World Series. It’s the first thing he says, and already we’re introduced to Babe Ruth, who plays a massive part in the “big event” of the film (thanks David Trottier) and serves as an idol whom all the boys on the Sandlot team revere. Also, the event itself — the calling of the shot — is later compared to Benny’s own “omen,” when he knocks the guts clean out of a baseball.

He goes on to say that “nobody believed it, because nobody had ever done it before.” The same can be said not only for what Benny did to the aforementioned ball, but also his courage in defeating the film’s main antagonist, The Beast…though I won’t give away the details.

But the next sentence is absolutely oversaturated with foreshadowing: Smalls refers to Ruth as “The Great Bambino,” a nickname for the ballplayer that, later on, causes our protagonist a great deal of trouble. Then he mentions how the calling of the shot transformed Ruth from hero to legend; the motif of heroism and becoming legendary is speckled throughout the film, most importantly in a vision that Benny has which gives him the motivation to join Ruth’s immortal ranks himself.

Then Smalls smoothly transitions into mentioning Benny and his own legendary status as the camera pans to a picture of the Sandlot team in their youth. We then see the boys on the field, and as Smalls explains that Benny got him out of “the biggest pickle [he’d] ever be in,” Benny, who is up to bat, promptly finds himself in a pickle of his own — though it is that which is defined in baseball as “when the baserunner is stranded between two bases and is in jeopardy of being tagged out.

I could go on, because every word of dialogue from this film speaks to another part of it; it runs over itself in a reflexive sort of way that makes the entire story seem credible, yet as though its contained in its own bubble. It ties the ending to the beginning, bringing the piece together as a whole that can stand up on its own two legs.

On the other end of the spectrum, if a film has absolutely no foreshadowing and reveals a twist ending that doesn’t square up narratively, your audience will be left in dire straits. There are, of course, exceptions, as M. Night Shyamalan can speak to.

My prime example of a film that fails to prepare its audience for a suprise ending is The Usual Suspects. While discovering that (and I will ruin the ending here) “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey) was, in fact, Keyser Söze was an engaging change in the plot’s direction, I found no way in which I could have possibly figured that out. The entirety of Verbal’s story is revealed to have been pulled from the miscellaneous whatnot on the bulletin behind his interrogator, Dave Kujan’s (Chazz Palminteri) chair, which we never catch a glimpse of at all in the entirety of the film — at least not enough of one to possibly piece together the tale Verbal was spinning. Needless to say, I was rather disappointed.

While it certainly is arguable that the foreshadowing in The Sandlot is laid on syrupy thick, it still managed to work and create what is, in my opinion, a classic coming of age film. That’s because foreshadowing is a vital thread of a solid story. Without it, the entire banner would unravel.

So use it as springly or as liberally as you like — just make sure you do.