Alvin Sargent’s Ordinary People uses eight flashback points, spread throughout the movie, with each set of flashback scenes lasting no more than a handful of seconds. The entire story relies upon the audience following the linear progression of time and understanding that the present-day story is actually only a reaction to the past. The flashback points are the true plot, and the story could nearly stand on the flashbacks alone. Although this flashback is explanatory in nature, it acts as another character–one that holds the key to the family’s development–and cannot be ignored.
This recognition of the two distinct forms of flashback, one which is a referential, character-explaining scene that interrupts the story progression in place of exposition; the other form is a true alternate story structure that replaces the progression of the story in a linear-time telling. Ordinary People, however, uses flashback as a necessary agent in the script and, even though it is ten distinct flashback points, it could be viewed as a cousin of the form of flashback that brings the audience into the past and then returns them to the starting point, deftly.