Over-Explaining in Art

The temptation to make yourself the teacher-god in your creative works

At my parents’ home, we have a VHS copy of my favourite movie, Amadeus (yes, this Substack is a reference to it). This videotape is special, not just because it’s been rewound and rewatched countless times since I was a little kid, but also because it’s the only form in which the theatrical cut can be watched today. Ever since Amadeus became digitized in the early 2000s, the only available version—whether on disc or streaming—has been the director’s cut. This newer cut adds several scenes, none of which are essential. Worst of all, this subtraction by addition indulges in over-explanations that actually undermine the intelligence of some of the most important characters. As much as I love Amadeus, I don’t think I’ve watched the director’s cut more than once or twice, and I’m still waiting for the day I can watch the theatrical cut without having to travel back in time to get a working VCR.

The biggest flaw with the director’s cut is a scene that many proclaim as filling in a plot hole: Why was Mozart’s wife, Stanzi, so mad at Salieri near the end? Here’s the set-up. Mozart is debt-ridden, drunk, and dying, overworked by having to simultaneously compose The Magic Flute (for money) and the Requiem Mass (for his father’s “ghost,” who’s actually Salieri in disguise, trying to induce Mozart’s early death and steal his music). Stanzi has taken their children and fled from Mozart. After Mozart collapses while conducting his opera, Salieri takes him home and throughout the night, at Salieri’s nefarious insistence, Mozart dictates his Requiem to his deceitful enemy. But in the morning, Salieri’s plans are foiled when Stanzi returns and locks away the score. And as she’s doing this, it’s clear that she has a deep loathing for him.

I’ve always thought it was obvious why she’d hate Salieri. First, earlier in the film, she secretly goes to him to ask for help in finding teaching jobs for Mozart, who loves the extravagant lifestyle without the earnings to support it. When Salieri looks at the sample scores Stanzi has brought, he is aghast. Not because the music is terrible, but because it is transcendent. All his copium-huffing about how Mozart is just some fluke of a “performing monkey” is no longer tenable and he is faced with the devastating truth that Mozart, seemingly without even trying, is unfathomably greater than he will ever be. Shell-shocked by this realization, Salieri simply walks out on Stanzi.¹

Well, there it is. From that moment, Stanzi would’ve known there was something at least weird about Salieri. I like to imagine that Salieri, being the cleverly flattering man he is (he did climb his way up from village boy to Emperor Joseph II’s court composer), somehow made amends afterwards. Maybe he even threw a job at Mozart here and there. But Stanzi would’ve never forgotten that telling encounter. While both she and Mozart are often portrayed as innocent and juvenile in the movie, she has moments where she shows herself to be smarter than Mozart, like when she demands some upfront payment for The Magic Flute (whereas Mozart is easily swayed by unreliable promises of box office percentages).

The lack of specificity in why Stanzi hated Salieri is therefore a testament to her intelligence, that in addition to being Mozart’s cute wife, she was able to suss out Salieri’s treacherous nature when nobody else could (most importantly of all, her celebrated genius husband). Perhaps she’d even tried to warn Mozart before, only to be dismissed because Mozart desperately wanted to believe he still had some friends in high places.

So what does the director’s cut reveal? It turns out Salieri tried to force Stanzi to have sex with him in exchange for professional favours for Mozart. And just like that, all the intrigue and freedom to fill in the gaps yourself are gone. And Stanzi becomes just another damsel-in-distress. Salieri tried to Weinstein her. Duh, she’d hate him.

There are other scenes that also over-explain and dull the mystery. One involves Mozart’s fling with a soprano, Caterina Cavalieri, with whom Salieri is in love. In the theatrical cut, after a triumphant opening night of The Abduction From The Seraglio, Cavalieri smashes a bouquet in Mozart’s face after she learns he’s engaged to Stanzi. Salieri, who witnesses this, then says in a defeated voiceover that that’s when he realized she and Mozart had slept together. But in the director’s cut, that voiceover doesn’t happen until after a scene in which Salieri, Mozart, and Cavalieri are all in her dressing room, where she drops not-so-subtle hints about her and Mozart’s relationship. So Salieri has seen her do the bouquet thing just moments before—not to mention seeing her and Mozart eye-fuck each other during the opera—and still, it takes him three minutes of blunt dialogue to get the point? He doesn’t even look to be in denial at first; he is just dumb.

Another unnecessary and damaging scene is when Salieri is shown telling the Emperor that Mozart molests his female students. We all know how underhanded Salieri is, but there is something jarring about this scene. In his old age, Salieri confesses to the priest that he sabotaged and ultimately murdered Mozart. But we’re not shown a lot of this, except for when Salieri dons the same costume that Mozart’s late father wore to kickstart Mozart’s descent into madness. In an operatic movie, it’s a fittingly operatic scheme. So to actually have to watch Salieri spreading false rumours like a Twitter villain diminishes the spirit of the movie. 

I have a big issue with these changes because they’ve made me reluctant to watch my favourite movie. I eagerly wait for the day the theatrical cut may come out. But on another level, they make me think of the dangerous temptations to not trust our audience. I have a good friend with whom I share a lot of my writing. I trust him because years ago, when I first gave him some fiction of mine to critique, he was bluntly honest in how non-compelling it was. In retrospect, I was still a raw writer then, prone to hit readers over the head with my most cherished points. Over the years, I’ve gradually tried to move away from that tendency as a fiction writer. But it’s not easy, so I understand its allure. Sometimes, it’s about preemptively addressing criticisms about character motivation. It doesn’t help that “I want to know more about X” is one of those routine critiques all writers have received, especially in lackluster workshop settings. At other times, it’s about living out a power fantasy as a supreme creator, to spread and enforce our viewpoints in the most doubtless way possible, where the ham-fistedness is indeed the whole point (see the “Tossed Salad Principle”).

At least the over-explaining in the Amadeus director’s cut is of the less annoying kind, in that the additional scenes are more about filling in perceived plot holes/divots. The more irritating kind of over-explaining comes in the form of authorial moralizing, where characters become obvious mouthpieces or novels become little more than thinly veiled manifestos of their authors’ beliefs and prejudices. Over-explaining tends to work quite well with non-fiction, so with the blurring of fiction, non-fiction, auto-fiction, false memoirs, and so forth, it’s no wonder that in her review of the novel Disorientation, Jessa Crispin notes that “More and more, when reading contemporary debut novels, it’s easy to think: ‘this could have been a personal essay.’”

If you’re going to write a thinly veiled personal essay, why even novelize it? Is it because you’ve read enough of Christopher Lasch and fear being labelled a narcissist?

Instead of fictionalizing personal material or otherwise reordering it, they have taken to presenting it undigested, leaving the reader to arrive at his own interpretations. Instead of working through their memories, many writers now rely on mere self-disclosure to keep the reader interested, appealing not to his understanding but to his salacious curiosity about the private lives of famous people.

— The Culture of Narcissism (by Christopher Lasch)

Or is it because there’s nothing higher in our society than being an artist, and it’s immensely flattering to think of your barely disguised life as art itself?

Being a creative author gives you unlimited power within the context of your creation, so it presents a unique test of your own self-control, self-regard, and maturity in how you exercise that power. I’ve frequently failed this test. Or I think I’ve passed, only to look back at my writings later and realize that I was delusional for thinking so. Just this past year, a short story of mine has undergone a rather massive transformation in shedding even more over-explanation (a development that’s made my aforementioned friend ecstatic). It’s been an illuminating experience to compare the latest version of my story with the one from a year ago (the first draft of which I finished about a year ago today, in the very same cafe in Seoul that I’m writing this piece in). I have to then wonder how my writing will look a year from now.

1. Youtube: “Amadeus Best Scene”