What do most of Robert Altman’s films, and screenplays like Crash and The Tree of Life have in common?

They’re all ensemble pieces.

So why do so many screenwriting teachers warn against writing for ensembles? And should you dare to write an ensemble piece yourself?

Check out this new video for Scriptmag, in which I answer a student’s question about writing ensemble pieces, and give you some guidance about approaching ensembles in your own work.

If you’d like to learn more about The Tree of Life, don’t miss my upcoming Seven Act Structure seminar The Tree of Life & Hegelian Dialectical Structure.

Is your fear of cliche killing your writing?

In this video I recently recorded for Scriptmag, I discuss the screenplay for Crazy Stupid Love and how you can engage with your cliches in a healthy way, in order to set your creativity free and and create the kinds of fresh and exciting scenes you dream of writing.

100 Rules and How To Break Them

Rule #5:  Show Don’t Tell

That you should “show” instead of “telling” is perhaps the most sound advice any screenwriter can follow.

After all, movies are visual, and it’s almost always more interesting to see someone do something right now in the present than to hear them talk about doing something, explain about feeling something, or worst of all reminisce about having done something in the past.

In general, telling leads to boring exposition that slows down your story, undermines your visual storytelling, and turns your characters into talking heads.

Showing, on the other hand, forces you to make exciting choices for your character, leading you naturally to the compelling images that drive your character’s journey forward and help your audience to connect to your story.

For all these reasons “Show Don’t Tell” is a mantra drilled into the mind of almost any student at almost any writing program in almost any genre anywhere in the world.

It’s just a good thing no one told Nora Ephron, or she could never have written When Harry Met Sally.

Here’s an Academy Award nominated script that somehow manages to break nearly every fundamental principle of screenwriting: monologues that run on for pages, characters that recount entire phases of their histories, and a multitude of scenes where characters do nothing but tell.

Had Nora Ephron taken the final draft of When Harry Met Sally to the average screenwriting teacher, she probably would have gotten a kind and supportive lecture about easy ways to “fix” her script simply by using “show don’t tell.”

You can probably imagine it now:

“Why don’t we just SEE Harry’s relationship with his ex-wife, rather than hear him talk about it during a baseball game?”

Yup, there goes the famous “doing the wave” scene at Yankee Stadium.

When Harry Met Sally works BECAUSE of it’s “telling” scenes, not in spite of them.

That’s because When Harry Met Sally is a movie about storytelling.

It begins with a story told by an elderly couple directly to the camera. And it ends with similar story told by the elderly Harry and Sally.

The movie is about the stories people tell themselves and each other about their relationships. These stories provide the fundamental structure of the screenplay; to tell the story in any other way would undermine the very instincts that made it worth telling in the first place.

Furthermore, by allowing the characters to tell their stories to each other, Ephron is able to keep her focus on the characters that matter, even as she covers large periods of time when they are apart.

We’re watching the story of Harry and Sally and Jess and Marie, not the story of Harry and his ex-wife or Sally and her ex-boyfriend.   These are the hot relationships in the movie, and the only characters we care about.

So, though these characters may spend half the movie “telling” their stories to each other, by allowing them to spend all their screen-time together, Ephron is actually showing us the story that matters.

When to follow the rules? And when to break them?

Make no mistake, it takes a heck of a lot of skill to write a story like When Harry Met Sally and make all that “telling” work for you. Ephron uses all sorts of advanced screenwriting techniques to keep her story moving, her drama building, and her characters growing, even as she breaks all the rules of this traditional principle of screenwriting.

In most cases, if you find yourself “telling” in your script, it’s worth at least asking the question of whether or not you’d be better off “showing” the scene dramatically. And if you’re not sure, it’s probably worth at least scribbling out a scene or two to find out.

But the most important thing to remember when it comes to “Show Don’t Tell” or any of the other so-called rules of screenwriting, is quite simply this:

The only rules that matter are the ones that serve your script and your intentions.

No matter how many screenwriting books you read, or how well meaning your teachers may be, when you start to listen to other people’s rules, rather than listening to your own voice as a writer, your writing is going to suffer.

So learn the rules. And then forget them. Listen to your script. Listen to your characters. And listen to the mentors who guide you toward your own rules.

That way, the rules you really can reveal themselves to you.

Se7en: How To Avoid A Dud Ending

Check out this new video I recently recorded for Scriptmag.com and learn how to discover a great ending for your screenplay.

100 Rules and How To Break Them

Introducing my new series “100 Rules and How To Break Them!”  Each week, I’ll be analyzing one of the so called “rules” of screenwriting, and exploring both why they exist, and how to break them in interesting ways that make your writing better and your stories more powerful.

RULE #1 – WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW

One of the most misleading ideas in screenwriting is that as a writer you should “write what you know.”

On its surface, this is a brilliant idea.  After all, writing what you know means you’re a whole lot less likely to get into trouble in your writing—and even your fiction is a whole lot more likely to be rooted in truth.

As anyone who’s ever told a lie can tell you, building on pure fiction is like building on quicksand.

Things might look so much easier for awhile, but pretty soon one fabrication piles upon another until you’re spending all your time trying to keep your story from from collapsing on itself.

Writing what you know makes things so much easier.  Rather than reinventing the wheel, you get to focus on something you know profoundly well, conjure it for your audience, help them to connect with it, and take them on a journey in relation to it.

But of course, if great writers truly only wrote what they knew, some of the greatest works of fiction would never have existed.

I think it’s safe to say George Lucas never spent much real time “a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away”.  Nor were JRR Tolkien or Peter Jackson ever abducted by Gandalf.

You don’t have to be a serial killer or an FBI agent to write “The Silence of The Lambs”.  You don’t have to be a mobster to write “Goodfellas”.  And you don’t have to be a pet detective to write “Ace Ventura.”

As writers, we know on some level that our job is to invent.  We are creators of fiction…  So how are you supposed to write what you know, when you’re conjuring a world you never lived in, or a character whose life you’ve never experienced?

The trick with writing what you know is not to write what you know literally—it’s to write what you know emotionally.

George Lucas may not have known Darth Vadar—but he was deeply connected to the idea of the force.  That’s what makes the early movies so powerful—and its absence is what makes the later movies so easily forgettable.

JRR Tolkein may not have dwelled in middle earth, but he clearly understood the nature of addiction:  the irresistible urge to put on the precious ring of power—even knowing that it draws the dark lord closer.  And the way the end of that addiction—with the destruction of the ring by the ultimate addict, Gollum, also means the end of the age of magic, and the beginning of the age of man.

What a great writer does is not simply to write the literal truth of what he or she knows.  What a great writer does is to translate what she knows into a fiction that tells the truth even more powerfully than the literal truth ever could.

Check back next week for the next article in the “100 Rules and How To Break Them” series.  

In Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 of this series I discussed the Hegelian dialectic between Nature and Grace represented by Jack’s father and mother, and the way that dialectic is used to give structure to the film.

The Dialectic Within Jack

Just as Thesis and Antithesis are embodied within the characters of father and mother, so too are they embodied within Jack. And it’s through Jack’s wrestling with both sides of the dialectic that we experience his journey, in relation to his mother, his father, his community, his God, and most importantly, his brother.

Jack’s journey is an evolutionary one. The first phase takes him away from the Grace of his mother, and toward the violent Nature of his father—a nature Jack pushes even further than his father would dream, by letting go of love almost entirely and succumbing to hatred, jealousy, and betrayal in their rawest forms. He rages against the mother who loves him, contemplates killing his father while he works under the car, and betrays the trust of his adoring brother when he shoots him with the bb gun.

The second phase of his journey takes him back toward his mother’s Grace, as he makes peace with his brother, and tries to once again be deserving of his brother’s trust and love.

But just as Nature failed to protect him, so too does Grace.

Despite Jack’s love, his brother is taken from him, leaving him completely alone in the world, isolated from his family, his work, and from God.

Eden is lost, and to find his way back, Jack must somehow find a new Synthesis that reconciles the dialectical opposites of Grace and Nature in his world and in himself.

The Dialectic of Images

This is what it means to truly wrestle with a question—to push both sides of a dialectic to their extremes of success and failure, and expose how they both work and don’t work in the universe.

But Malick pushes his dialectic to a cosmic level, which transcends time, space and even character relationships. In almost every image of the film, he captures the omnipresence of death within beauty, and beauty within death. Nature within Grace, and Grace within Nature.

In the big picture, his opposing styles of storytelling for an even bigger Hegelian dialectic, between the vastness of the earth, time, universe and God captured in the meditative sequences, and the small, family drama of earthly realities, pain, and beauty that seem so important in the family story, and so small when juxtaposed against the scope of the universe—building toward a profound synthesis, which doesn’t try to answer the question, but instead to surrender to it.

And in that surrender, to finally find catharsis.

The Dialectic of The Film Itself

Like movies such as Memento and 500 Days of Summer, The Tree of Life tells its story in a non-linear way in order to capture the essence of its main character’s experience.
Rather than unfolding linearly, the story unfolds dialectically, stepping into the swirl of memories in Jack’s mind, and juxtaposing moments of Grace and Nature from his past and his present.

But it’s actually the strong linear journey, and the character driven dialectic underneath all these flash forwards, flashbacks, and meditative sequences that allow the film to jump around in time so effectively.

Once you’ve created a strong linear journey for your character, you can slice it up, flash it back, take it out of order or toss it like a salad. You can play around like an experimental jazz artist, departing from the beat and then finding it again. And if you do it right, your audience will delight in putting together the pieces, and figuring out how they are connected.

But if you start tossing before you know the real structure of your film, you’ll be left with the kind of cooking no one wants to eat.

Learn More About The Tree of Life with Jacob Krueger’s Exciting New Seminar Jan 10, 2011

THE TREE OF LIFE Seminar

And Hegelian Dialectical Structure

Wednesday, January 11th, 7pm-9pm

Dialectic structure is not just for epic art house films. Learn how to use this unique type of structure to breathe life into your characters move your film forward. LEARN MORE

As discussed in Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series, The Tree of Life is built around a dialectic between Nature, as represented by Jack’s father, and Grace, as represented by his mother.

When using a Hegelian Dialectic to structure your screenplay, it’s important to remember that your characters are more than just the ideas they represent.

They are also people, complete with complexities, contradictions, and competing motivations that have nothing to do with your dialectical structure.

In The Big Lebowski, The Dude may represent the hippy thesis, but he’s also a character who loves White Russians and bowling, and spends most of his time pursuing one of these things.

In There Will Be Blood, Daniel may represent capitalism, but he also is a character desperate for a family connection and someone he can confide in.

Even Darth Vadar loves his son, and secretly wants to overthrow the Emperor and rule the galaxy with him.

Character and Dialectic

Rather than fixating on the structural role your character plays in your dialectical structure, you can think of the ideas your characters represent as a kind of North Star—something to navigate by as you construct their choices.

If you spend every moment with staring up at the sky, you’re going to spend most of your time crashing into trees. But if you keep your eyes on the instinctual path of your character, and allow yourself to remember that North Star is there to guide you when you need it, that dialectical idea will help you discover the most profound structure possible for your character’s journey.

Grace and Nature

What makes both the father and mother function so well as characters in the The Tree of Life is that in addition to representing dialectical opposites of Grace and Nature, they both love their children more than anything in the world, and want to protect them from suffering.

The problem is that they have opposing views of how to do this—and in good Hegelian fashion, neither of their views work in the universe.

The Thesis of Nature

The father believes that the Nature of the world is violent and destructive, and he’s right. And that’s why he wants to make his sons tough, so that other people don’t walk all over them, so that they can express themselves as artists, control their own destinies, and not have to compromise the way that he did.

We’ve seen this type of character before in movies like Billy Elliot, The Return and A Prophet— in fact there’s even an archetypal name for him: the terrible father.

But Brad Pitt’s character is more than just an archetype or an intellectual thesis. And that’s what makes him care about him, and keeps him from being a cliché. Unlike the terrible fathers we’ve seen in the past, who want to quell the artistic expression of their children, Brad Pitt’s character wants only to foster it. He loves his children, hugs his children. He is loyal to his wife, and makes sacrifices for his family. His tough Nature is the North Star by which he navigates. But its not his sole reason for existence.

The problem with the father’s Thesis is that it doesn’t ultimately protect him, his family or his children. Rather than earning him his son’s love, his lessons in Nature only destroy the beauty in his family and in Jack, turn his sons against him, tear apart his marriage, and pit brother against brother.

For all his toughness, he can’t protect his patents from the courts, himself from a lost job, or his children from suffering. And his rage at his failures only manifests in more violence against the people he most loves.

The Antithesis of Grace

In dialectical opposition to the beliefs of the father, the mother inherently believes that the world is beautiful. And she’s right too. That’s why she wants to play happily with her sons at every moment, love everyone and everything. That’s why she infuses their life with joy and bliss and their genuine love for one another.

But her Grace doesn’t ultimately protect anyone either. Because she can’t stand up to her husband, or defend her children from his violence. As Young Jack accuses her in a moment of rage, she lets her husband walk all over her—and all over them. Her love cannot protect her children from suffering or from death. And for that failure rather than earning her love from Jack, it only earns her his anger.

Stay tuned for the final article in the series, in which I’ll discuss the way dialectical structure creates a drum beat for Malick’s fragmented narrative, and the ways you can apply these lessons to the structure of your own screenplays.

Learn More About The Tree of Life with Jacob Krueger’s Exciting New Seminar Jan 10, 2011

THE TREE OF LIFE Seminar

And Hegelian Dialectical Structure

Wednesday, January 11th, 7pm-9pm

Dialectic structure is not just for epic art house films. Learn how to use this unique type of structure to breathe life into your characters move your film forward. LEARN MORE

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I discussed how Terence Malick gives shape to central the question of The Tree of Life through the choices of his main character, Jack. The structure through which Malick gives shape to those choices is known as a Hegelian Dialectic: one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal as a writer.

Who is this Hegel guy anyway?

An 18th century German Philosopher, Hegel certainly wasn’t a screenwriter. However our craft, and many of the best movies ever written, owe him a debt of gratitude.

Hegel believed that if you took a thesis (something you believed strongly) and forced it to do battle with an equally powerful and irreconcilable antithesis (a belief that runs deeply counter to the original thesis), you would end up with a synthesis which would somehow bring unity to the dialectical opposites of thesis and antithesis, and in this way lead you closer to the truth.

In dialectical screenplay structure, thesis and antithesis stop merely being philosophical ideas, and take human form, in our characters and the belief systems they represent. As those belief systems come into conflict, our characters are forced to change, driving to a synthesis that transcends their original belief systems, and leads them closer to the truth in relation to the question of the film: the question the with which the writer is wrestling in him or herself.

In many Hollywood movies, the thesis and antithesis of the Hegelian dialectic is boiled down to a “good” protagonist and an “evil” antagonist.

But while good vs. evil might be the oldest Hegelian dialectic out there, in the best movies, protagonist and antagonist transcend simple good and evil, and come to represent powerful ideas with which the writer is truly wrestling: ideas which the writer is questioning in him or herself.

Just like great philosophers, great writers don’t stack the deck for one side of their argument.

No matter what you believe as a writer, to truly make the most of a dialectical structure, you must step into the world view not only of the protagonist, but the antagonist, crashing their ideas against each other as if both were true, and pealing back the layers of their true and false assumptions as you search for a synthesis that somehow reconciles their irreconcilable differences.

This isn’t just true for art films like The Tree of Life.

In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vadar represents the Dark Side of the Force and Luke Skywalker represents the Light Side. But their dialectic transcends simple good and evil, because Luke doesn’t know that Darth Vadar is his father, and doesn’t realize that he also has the Dark Side in him. In the Synthesis, good does defeat evil, but at a cost that changes Luke forever, and costs him both his hand and his black and white view of the world.

In The Big Lebowski (which I’ll be discussing in detail in my upcoming seminar The Big Lebowski: Seven Act Structure) The Dude represents the non-violent hippy thesis “the dude abides” and John Goodman represents the antithesis of “this will not stand”, tempting The Dude away from his values and into a “war” for his stolen Persian carpet. (A satirical examination of the way the grown up hippy generation was seduced into The First Gulf war.)

In There Will Be Blood, the thesis of Capitalism in the character of Daniel and the antithesis of Church in the character of Eli do battle literally to the death, forcing both thesis and antithesis come to grips with their failures and hypocrisies, driving to a synthesis in which “Church” is left dead in the bowling alley, and “Capitalism” has destroyed everything he has built.

The Tree of Life is built around a dialectic between Nature, as represented by Jack’s father and Grace, as represented by his mother.

Stay tuned for the next article in the series, in which I’ll be discussing both the content structure of that dialectic in The Tree of Life, and how you can use the lessons of the film to inform your own writing.

Learn More About The Tree of Life with Jacob Krueger’s Exciting New Seminar Jan 10, 2011

THE TREE OF LIFE Seminar

And Hegelian Dialectical Structure

Wednesday, January 11th, 7pm-9pm

Dialectic structure is not just for epic art house films. Learn how to use this unique type of structure to breathe life into your characters move your film forward. LEARN MORE

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed the question around which Jack’s journey in The Tree of Life is built:

“Why Should I be Good If You’re Not?”

Struggling in a world in which both God and Father can act in such contradictions of beauty and violence, Jack the son is left with a profound question: will he build his life in their image, or in another.

Structurally, this question is raised in both the present and the past story with two powerful inciting incidents, both involving the death of a child.

You Let A Boy Die

No one could forget the moment early in The Tree of Life, when Jack’s mother receives the letter, and with it, news of her son’s death.

Thinking in traditional screenplay structure, this moment provides a powerful inciting incident for the film as a whole, ripping a hole not only the family’s universe, but the universe of the film itself. We slip from a character driven drama into an epic sea of juxtaposing images, dinosaurs, births, and big bang cosmology that at once seems to dwarf and echo the problems of the family:

How can the world possess such beauty and such violence at the same time? How can a woman whose only philosophy is “love everyone and everything” be punished in this way? Where is God?

Two Levels of Structure

In creating the structure of a screenplay, it’s important to think about the moment that incites the film as a whole—that opens the door to change, introduces the central question of the film, and locks the audience into the journey of the movie. And whether you’re writing an art film like The Tree of Life or a Hollywood blockbuster, it’s vital that you get to this moment as quickly as possible, to create the feeling that your movie is moving, and to create the lens through which the audience can interpret the events of your story.

When you’re building a movie that jumps around in time, you actually have two different layers of this structure: the primary linear structure of the main character’s journey, and the secondary structure of the way that information is revealed the audience.

For the audience, the journey begins when Jack’s mother receives the letter. But for the main character, Jack, the journey begins much earlier, when a boy dies right in the middle of a “perfect” day at the local swimming hole, and Young Jack is forced to confront the fact that neither life, nor God, is what he thought it was.

Young Jack whispers his dismay to God.

“Where were you? You let a boy die. You’ll let anything happen.”

For Jack, as for his mother and father, the fruit of knowledge of good and evil leads to a fall from the Eden of his childhood.

Two Inciting Incidents For Two Linear Structures

These two moments of unexpected death provide the two inciting incidents that get the structure of The Tree of Life moving forward, propelling both threads of The Tree of Life’s narrative structure:

The Fall From Eden: The story of young Jack’s fall—from an idyllic childhood where death was present but not perceived—to his gradual disillusionment, with God, his father, his mother and himself, leading up to the moment where his brother dies and all hope of Eden is lost.

The Return to Eden: The story of grown Jack’s (Sean Penn) surrender—through which he finally comes to terms death of his brother, the opposing philosophies of his parents, the beauty and ugliness of the universe, and the inexplicable nature of God.

For the audience, these two threads are chopped up and juxtaposed one against another in a way that transcends time and captures the emotional feeling of Jack’s experience.

But on the primary structural level, these two threads comprise a single linear journey for the main character, as he first loses and then seeks to return to Eden.

Finding The Drum Beat of Your Movie

Every movie needs a drum beat—a clear structure that lets us know where we are and helps us imagine the road ahead, so that we can hope for, be disappointed by, or pleasantly surprised by the turns that the story takes.

And this is doubly true when you are building around a structure as complex as that of The Tree of Life.

Commercial movies tend to have more of a rock and roll drum beat—while The Tree of Life is more like experimental jazz—leaving the beat behind for extended sequences of improvisation—and then returning to the beat to get the story flowing again.

We first see this jazz-like improvisation in an extended way with the epic montage of big-bang images early in the film. But just when it seems like we’re just going to drift in an endless meditation, we find the beat again with a much smaller big bang: Jack’s birth, and the idyllic memories of his early childhood-a childhood filled with beautiful moments where death is present, but not perceived.

Each of these moments foreshadows the road ahead, preparing us for the inciting incident in Jack’s journey, when the boy dies at the swimming hole, the question of the film arises and his fall from Eden begins.

Hegelian Dialectic and the Drum Beat of Life

The Tree of Life is quite obviously a film about ideas—about characters grappling with profound questions (and even narrating those questions aloud in the voiceover soundtrack which punctuates the piece—as if the audience were listening through God’s ears).

But for all its poetry, The Tree of Life is also a film. And as a character in a film, Jack cannot simply ask his questions with words; he must grapple with them through action.

As the writer, this means Malick must take the profound ideas he wants to explore, and bring them into active conflict through the characters of the film, the actions they take, the choices they make, and Jack’s journey in relation to those choices.

The structure through which Malick gives shape to this journey is known as a Hegelian dialectic.

Stay tuned for the next article in this series, in which I’ll be breaking down the Hegelian dialectical structure in relation to The Tree of Life, The Empire Strikes Back, The Big Lebowski, and There Will Be Blood.

Learn More About The Tree of Life with Jacob Krueger’s Exciting New Seminar Jan 10, 2011

THE TREE OF LIFE Seminar

And Hegelian Dialectical Structure

Wednesday, January 11th, 7pm-9pm

Dialectic structure is not just for epic art house films. Learn how to use this unique type of structure to breathe life into your characters move your film forward. LEARN MORE

SPOILER ALERT: You may want to come back to this article after you have seen The Tree of Life.

Often as writers we get so hung up on linear, narrative structure that we forget that there are completely different forms of screenplay structure that can be equally moving and powerful.

What makes Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life so extraordinary is the effortless way it weaves traditional linear storytelling—the story of the family– with long meditative sequences of breathtaking images of the vast beauty and wanton destructiveness of the universe.

But don’t let Malick fool you, underneath the melodic rambling of The Tree of Life is a rock solid structure, which provides the drum beat for the entire film.

The Fundamental Question

Despite all its jumping back and forth in time, its shifting perspectives, its God’s eye view of the universe, its whispering voiceovers, its dinosaur sequences and its meditative imagery washing over us like ocean waves, at the fundamental structural level, The Tree of Life follows the story of Sean Penn’s character, Jack, as he searches both past and present for the answer an unanswerable question:

“Why should I be good, if you’re not?”

On the spiritual level, Jack is asking this question of God, as he tries to reconcile the vastness, wonder, and beauty of the universe with the senseless death of his brother: the problem of a world where death is always present, even in the most idyllic memories of his early childhood.

On the physical level, Jack is asking the same question of his loving but abusive father, played by Brad Pitt, whose often misguided love both protects Jack and is slowly destroying him. As young Jack’s adoration for his father and desire to “be good” devolves into disappointment and hatred, he is forced to reconcile not only the dual sides of his father’s nature, but also the dual sides of his own– wrestling with a profound and unanswerable question of how to be good in a world where the love of both God and father seem to shift inexplicably from beauty to violence.

Great Movies Are Built Around Big Questions

What’s wonderful about building a movie around a question to which you truly don’t know the answer, is that it forces you, as a writer, to take a journey as profound as that of your characters.

Searching for a deeper understanding of the world is what writing is all about. And that’s not limited to experimental films like The Tree of Life. Even Woody Allen’s new comedy Midnight in Paris is built around a profound question “would my life have been better if I lived in another era?”

Think about movies like Michael Clayton, A Few Good Men, The Social Network, or Solitary Man and you will see the fundamental questions at the center of these other commercially successful movies.

What Questions Are You Asking in Your Writing?

Think about your own writing. What are the questions that haunt you? What are the questions your screenplays are asking? Are they questions you care about? And are you truly wrestling with them through your character’s journey, or trying to tie them up with a neat little bow?

Stay tuned for the next article in the series: “The Tree of Life: From Question To Structure”, in which I’ll be exploring Inciting Incidents of The Tree of Life—and the ways Malick uses an idea from philosophy in order to give shape to his character’s journey.

Learn More About The Tree of Life with Jacob Krueger’s Exciting New Seminar Jan 10, 2011

THE TREE OF LIFE Seminar

And Hegelian Dialectical Structure

Wednesday, January 11th, 7pm-9pm

Dialectic structure is not just for epic art house films. Learn how to use this unique type of structure to breathe life into your characters move your film forward. LEARN MORE

In parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series, we’ve looked at The Lincoln Lawyer, Win Win, and Away From Her to explore the way real world and imagined rules function in creating the reality of a movie.

The Rules of the Genre

Rules In Comedy

I’ve explored these concepts in terms of “serious” movies  because these are the films where writers most often feel constrained in creating the rules of their world.  But of course in comedies, the rules also matter, and you still have to sell them. You just have zanier ways of doing so.

For example, in Superbad, we all know the rules of how cops behave.  And we know that a kid with a fake ID that says McLovin isn’t going to fool anyone.

So when McLovin gets caught by the cops, the writers, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, get to have their cake and eat it too!  They not only make him (and the audience) squirm about what’s going to happen to him.  They also get to surprise everyone’s expectations when the cops seem to accept the ID as real, and sweep McLovin off for the joy ride of his life.

This sequence with McLovin not only sets up the rules for the cops– it sets up the comic rules for the whole movie– a world where absolutely anything can happen:  where Jonah Hill can get run over five times without getting hurt, where women don’t know basic feminine hygiene, and where cops can end up setting their own car on fire.

As in other comedies like The Proposal, What Happens in Vegas, and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, writers create the rules that serve their movies, not by ignoring the “laws” of the real world, but by selling their own rules dramatically in relation to those laws.

Give yourself permission to do the same in your own writing.

In parts 1 and 2 of this series, I’ve discussed how movies like The Lincoln Lawyer and Win Win take real world rules and dramatize them to create a journey for a character.

But what about when you feel like you need to completely make up a rule to make your story work?  Or when the real world rule you are working with seems like it might unbelievable to an audience?

When you need to invent a “rule” in order to make your script work or convince your audience to accept a real life rule which flies in the face of their expectations or beliefs, the question to ask yourself is not “is it true?”

The question to ask yourself is “how do I sell this to an audience?”

Movies Don’t Come With Footnotes

The good news is,  nobody’s going to be whispering in your audience’s ear when you fudge the details or make up a rule that isn’t technically correct.  Unfortunately, nobody’s going to be there to tell them “no, this really happened, in real life!” either.

As writers, we often want to believe that just because something happened, the audience will accept it as true.  But often, audiences are much more happy to accept fiction that seems believable than reality that doesn’t– especially if it makes things hard for your main character.

The good news is, you can shape what your audience believes, by setting up the rules (real or imagined) in ways that are viscerally and dramatically powerful for your main character.

Selling The Rules of Away From Her

In Away From Her, the main character drops his Alzheimer’s suffering wife off at a nursing home, only to be informed that he has to leave her for a full month so that she can “adjust”.  

Now, perhaps somewhere in America there truly is a nursing home with such a rule.

But more likely the rule exists because the writer, Sarah Polley, needs that separation (spoiler alert:) so that when the husband finally returns for his “joyful reunion” with the woman he loves, he can be shocked to discover a totally different person the woman he left– a woman who has forgotten him completely and fallen in love with another man.

That’s the movie.  And if Sarah Polley doesn’t sell the rule, whether it exists or not, that movie doesn’t happen.

In the real world, you might spend time with your wife every day, and then one day realize you’re with a totally different person.  But in a movie, with characters we are just getting to know, it takes a strong juxtaposition to create that feeling.

Polley uses the rule to create that juxtaposition.  And she sells it by allowing the nursing home to have a reasonable rationale, and allowing the husband to fight against that rule with everything he’s got- a fight that only further dramatizes his connection to his wife when she finally asks him to go and he reluctantly gives in to her request.

Create The Rules That Amplify The Truth

In this way, writing a script about law is a lot like writing a fantasy.  People know that there is no such thing as goblins and that little boys don’t get to be king by pulling a sword out of a stone.  But if you create the rules of the world properly and in a dramatic way, the audience will be happy to go along for the ride, because it gives them access to the story they want to experience.  And more importantly, closer to the essence of that emotional truth the writer is communicating.

Stay tuned for the final installment of this series:  What Are The Rules of Your Script: Part 4: Superbad and the Rules of Genre

Win Win: Make The Truth Work For You

If you read Joe Tiboni’s blog, you may be surprised to discover that the real-life lawyer who inspired Paul Giamatti’s character in Win Win never assumed guardianship of a client (for money or otherwise), never committed a client to a nursing home against his will, and never was on the brink of losing his law practice.

What you will learn is that Joe Tiboni is a good guy, who used to wrestle with screenwriter Tom McCarthy, who did once have a water heater blow up in his office, and who does have a true passion for representing the elderly and bringing attention to unfair elements in the law that cause them suffering.

Write a movie in which the “real” Joe Tiboni waxes poetic about the ins and out of the laws of elderly care, and you may feel like you’ve done a great deal to awareness about some very important issues.

But you probably won’t have an audience that’s listening.

Even “issue” movies are never about the issues.  At least not for most of your audience.  

To make an audience care about the finer points of elder-care law, you’ve got to make it personal.  And that means it has to deeply affect the life of your main character, and force that character to undergo a life-changing journey.

As discussed in Part 2 of this series, The Lincoln Lawyer accomplishes this by forcing its character to personally deal with the horrifying complications that result from an “unfair” law.

Win Win takes the opposite approach.

Rather than making Paul Giamatti’s character the victim of an unfair law, Win Win makes the law matter dramatically by (spoiler alert): allowing the main character to exploit it for his own gain– by taking guardianship of a mentally disabled elderly client for money, and then committing him against his will to a nursing home.

Every main character needs to have a problem.

Even if your character is based on someone as wonderful as Joe Tiboni, unless they have some kind of unresolved problem they need to deal with, there’s no reason for them to have to go through the experience of the movie.

(As you know if you’ve ever written a main character, movie life tends to treat them pretty harshly).

Now that doesn’t mean you have to turn your main character into a bad guy at the beginning of the movie.  Do that, and you’re going to lose the thing that made you want to write about a person like Joe in the first place.

We’re not talking about completely fictionalizing a character.  We’re talking about looking more closely at a real life guy like Joe, and asking yourself “under what circumstances would a guy like this make a mistake?”

Make The Truth Work For You

Using the real world stuff that connected him to Joe Tiboni:  the broken water heater, the high school wrestling they were never any good at, and the genuine dedication to the elderly and his family that makes Joe worth writing about, Tom McCarthy simply sets up the rules of the world to create circumstances in which it would be believable that a guy as good as Joe do something as wrong as exploit his own client.

To do this, he must change some of the facts:  transforming Joe from a successful lawyer into a struggling one, putting him into a crisis where he truly needs the cash to survive, and then creating the moral dilemma of the law in a way that a good guy like Joe could reasonably convince himself he wasn’t hurting anyone.

Once he’s done that, he really gets to have his fun, by making the character deal with the ramifications of his mistake when he finds himself first saddled with his client’s troubled grandson, and later unable to protect the boy he’s come to love without risking his own legal career and his last chance of providing for his family.

By allowing his main character to make and struggle with a mistake, Tom McCarthy takes the law out of the intellectual realm and makes it visceral for the audience– forcing us to wrestle with the law as powerfully as his main character does.

Stay tuned for Part 3 in the series:
Away From Her: Create The Rules That Amplify The Truth.

Here’s a great question I recently received from a student

Question:

I’m working on a [comedy] script right now about [premise deleted]… and I’m doing a little bit of research on the laws surrounding International Marriage Brokers and Immigration.

What’s your opinion on how to handle the laws, and how strictly to adhere to them?  I’m thinking of movies like The Proposal, What Happens in Vegas, and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry as examples… I’m guessing the accuracy in the way they address the laws is less than 100%?  — Josh B.

Answer:

Unless you’re writing for lawyers, what matters most when it comes to laws in a movie is not what the actual law is, but what the audience believes the law is.

In the real world, all kinds of unbelievable laws exist, and all kinds of laws that everyone believes exist actually don’t exist at all.

But for audiences, the only laws that exist are the ones they believe.

That doesn’t mean you’re stuck with the notions your audience enters believing.  And similarly it doesn’t mean that you are held to the strict reality of those laws as they exist in the universe.

What’s more important is that you set up the rules and the laws of your character’s world clearly, and then force your character to play by those rules.

Does this mean you should just ignore the laws of the real world?

Absolutely not.  Often there’s more fun to be had by exploring the truth than simply making up a law that’s convenient for your script.  But that doesn’t change the fact that your audience isn’t coming to learn about the finer points of legal theory.  They’re coming to watch a movie.

Dramatically, the law only matters in relation to the pressure it’s putting on your main character– so as with most things in a movie, if it makes your character’s life harder, most likely your audience will accept it.  And if it makes your character’s life easier, most likely they will start to doubt it, whether it is true or not.

As a writer, your job is to sell the audience on the laws of your script

People always talk about “willing suspension of disbelief” when people watch movies.  But I don’t think that’s what happens at all.  I think that subconsciously people come to identify with your main character.  And when he or she reacts believably to the “realities” of their world, the audiences comes to believe in those realities as well.

For laws that audiences generally are aware of and believe in, “you have the right to remain silent” for example, that’s a pretty easy job.

The law is already active in your audience’s consciousness, so even if your version is missing some of the finer nuances, as long as you gently remind them, in a dramatic way, that the law exists and that your character has to deal with it, most likely your audience will happily accept it easily as the reality of the script, even if your interpretation of that law glosses over some of the details.

The Lincoln Lawyer and the Law

For example John Romano’s script, The Lincoln Lawyer, does this with Attorney-Client privilege– the idea that a lawyer cannot under any circumstances, disclose anything a client has said to him in confidence, and that even if he did, such evidence would automatically be inadmissible in court.

Now I don’t know for sure whether Attorney-Client privilege extends to cases where the client is (spoiler alert:) killing the lawyer’s friends and threatening the lawyer’s kids, and attempting to frame the lawyer for murder.

I’m no lawyer, but I’d guess that in the real world, there’s a loophole for that.

But the important thing is, within the world of The Lincoln Lawyer, there is no loophole.  And we can experience that viscerally, because of the way the “law” of Attorney-Client privilege is established dramatically early in the script, and the way the main character is forced to grapple of not being able to simply say the truth throughout the story.

There may be a couple of lawyers in the audience hemming and hawing.  But for the majority of the audience, that law becomes the law, and they get to enjoy the movie by accepting its rules.

What Are The Rules Of Your Script?

Want to know more about how to set up the rules of your script so that audiences will believe them?

Over the next week, I’ll be exploring the way rules are established in three great scripts of completely different genres:  Win Win, Away From Her and Superbad.

The Vampire Cowboys’ new play, THE INEXPLICABLE REDEMPTION OF AGENT G, is more than just a hilarious genre bending, kick-ass-ninja-stage-fighting, comic book romp.

It’s also a profound look at what it means to find and follow your voice as a writer, the inexplicable questions of identity and the challenge of telling a true story in a truthful way.

Theatre’s Answer To ADAPTATION

The process of adapting a true story into a form that really captures its essence is one of the most challenging tasks of any writer.

In AGENT G, playwright Qui Nguyen wrestles for the third time with a reinterpretation of his first play, TRIAL BY WATER, the critically reviled “true-life” melodrama of his 9 year old cousin’s journey from Vietnam to America– during which their boat was lost at sea, and the passengers, including Qui’s young cousin, resorted to cannibalism to survive

Feeling that he has failed to capture the essence of the story in his earlier attempts at the play, Qui (who is also a character in AGENT G) attempts to reinterpret the story Vampire Cowboys style– complete with the theatre company’s requisite kick ass stage combat, ninja chases, hilarious genre shifts, and a musical showdown with Qui’s hero, the legendary playwright David Henry Hwang.

In wonderful and surprising ways, this comic reinterpretation leads Qui closer to the “true truth” of the story than any of Qui’s more serious early attempts.

What Does It Mean To Tell The Truth?

At each step of the way toward this “truthful” telling of the story, Qui finds himself confronted by his characters, his fans, his mentors and even his wife– each of whom have their own ideas of what the play should be, and each of whom he desperately wants to please.

As Qui strips away the layers of smoke, mirrors and self deception to find his real story, he’s forced to confront what it really means to be a writer, and what it takes to look honestly, and fiercely, at one’s own writing.

In his attempts to write a “commercial” piece, build the story around his hook,  please his teachers, emulate his heros, impress his audience, honor his cousin and to answer the well-meaning, but misguided notes of people who didn’t really understand his writing, Qui comes to realize that he abandoned the essential truth that brought him to the story in the first place– not just in this amped up, tongue in cheek, action hero reinterpretation of the story– but also in the “true story” melodrama he was once so proud of.

Following The Truth Of Your Own Story

As Qui strips away the layers of art and artifice that obscure him from the story he truly wants to tell, he reminds us that writing is not a paint by numbers process of “filling in the beats” of your outline, but a mystical and complex journey through countless rewrites, reimaginings, and reinterpretations of what the real story might actually be.

He reminds us of the dangers of the wrong way turns of misguided feedback and the challenges we go in getting to truly know our characters, our stories, and ourselves each time we approach the blank page.

And most of all, he reminds us the mysterious and inevitable process which with each draft slowly draws us closer to the truth of our own story, our own voices, and our own inexplicable redemptions.

February 7 – March 4, 2012

At THE BECKETT THEATRE
Theatre Row
410 West 42nd St (Btw 9th & 10th)

As discussed in As discussed in Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 of this series, Christopher Nolan’s screenplay Inception is deeply rooted in the principles of hypnosis.   Learning more about these principles may not only change the way you approach your own writing, but also help you understand new ways that you can break through writer’s block and build the writer’s life you’ve been seeking.

Can The Words You Tell Yourself Really Change Your Life?

You’re walking down the street.  You see a crack in the road ahead of you.  You visualize yourself stumbling over it.  Imagine the embarrassment of people watching you fall.   A little voice starts in your head.  “Don’t trip.  Don’t trip.  Don’t trip.”

What happens?

You trip.

If you want to understand why, try telling a child “don’t look through that window” or telling yourself “don’t imagine a pink elephant”.

It’s almost impossible, right?  That’s because your subconscious mind is just like a child.   It ignores “don’ts” entirely and accepts only the positive parts of your suggestions:  “look through that window, ” “imagine a pink elephant.”

What You Conjure Becomes Reality

Combine the words “trip, trip, trip” that your subconscious mind hears, the image that flashes in your mind of yourself tripping, and the genuine feelings of embarrassment that come with that image, and suddenly those words aren’t just words anymore.  They’re a post hypnotic suggestion, delivered with all the power of the most convincing hypnotist in the world: you.

At this point, to the subconscious mind, these words exist as if they’d already happened.   As if they were true already.  As if they were unavoidable.

As unavoidable as Mal’s thinking that her life wasn’t real, once the post hypnotic suggestion was planted in her mind, by a person she trusted, using the image systems that they had created together.

As unavoidable as Robert Fischer finally feeling free of the burden of his father’s disappointment, once the inception of the post hypnotic suggestion of his father’s love was completed.

As unavoidable as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Cobb, accepting those kids as real, whether they actually are or not.

To your subconscious mind, there is absolutely no difference between what really happened, and the story you tell about it.  Deliver the message in the right way, and the subconscious mind will react as if it were true, regardless of the facts.

Sounds Pretty Scary Right?

Until you realize that even the truth of your true experiences is not necessarily true.  That in fact the post hypnotic suggestions you are giving to yourself are just stories, like any other stories, and as story tellers, we can choose the kinds of tales we want to believe, based on the same objective facts.

Five people witness a car crash.  And afterwards each presents an entirely different story of what happened.  Even though they all saw the same thing.  The facts don’t change.  The only thing that changes is the perception of those facts.

Just as a writer can make small changes in the execution of a script adjust the value of a scene within a movie, so too can you adjust the stories you tell yourself about the events in your life,  to completely change the value of what those events mean to you.

So the questions become, not what is true, but what story are you telling yourself about the truth?

Robert Fischer’s Inception

In Inception, the father has been cruel to the son.  These are the objective facts.  But they are not the end of the story.  The process of the movie doesn’t change the objective facts, it merely changes the story the son is telling himself about his father, from “my father is disappointed in me” to “my father believes in me, and is trying to inspire me to pave my own way”.

Same facts.  Different story.  It’s not REALITY that changes his life.  It’s the story he’s telling himself about it.

Mal’s Inception

In Inception, after accepting a post-hypnotic suggestion from her husband, Mal tells herself the story that her real life isn’t real, and plunges to her death, losing the beautiful relationship she and Cobb have created together.  It doesn’t matter whether the story she is telling herself is right or wrong.  What matters is that she believes it.

Cobb’s Inception

In a way, the person incepting himself most powerfully throughout Inception may be Cobb himself.  At each step of the journey– three steps down, and three steps back up– someone tells Cobb to “take a leap of faith”.  And by the end of the movie, he finally does, by telling Mal that she isn’t real, killing off the part of her he’s holding onto, and taking a leap of faith back to his old life.

Cobb tells himself that his relationship with his children is real, and gets to enjoy it as if it were, whether the top is still spinning or not.

Once again, it’s not reality that changes Cobb’s life.  But the stories he is telling himself about it.

And of course the same is true with the stories you tell yourself about your writing.

What if you chose to tell yourself you were really a writer?  What if you chose to believe the dream was real?

What step would you take to chase it today?

Take A Leap of Faith

If you’ve enjoyed this series of articles about Inception, I invite you to take a leap of faith in yourself.  Check out one of my upcoming Screenwriting Workshops and take the first step toward being the writer you know yourself to be.

As discussed in Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 of this series, Inception is built around a three step down and three step back up structure that closely mirrors the techniques of classical hypnosis.  But just as the story is built around dreams within dreams, so too may it be built around an inception within an inception.

Is Robert Fischer The Only One Dreaming?

The spinning top at the end of Inception certainly leaves us wondering if Cobb is awake or simply at another level of his own dream. The question doesn’t have a clear answer, however the evidence that Cobb may in fact be dreaming goes far beyond the last image of the movie.

The most obvious evidence that Cobb may be dreaming is the “dream logic” that seems omnipresent in his affairs.  Cobb’s big problem– that he needs to get back to America to see his kids– only makes sense within the dream logic world of the movie.  In real life, of course, Michael Caine could simply put those kids on a plane to Europe, and Cobb could see them without performing any inception whatsoever.

Similarly, in the real world, executives don’t buy entire airlines before even finding out they need a plane, nor can a simple phone call from a high powered foreign executive forever clear the name of a man wanted for murder.

It’s possible that this could all be dismissed as sloppy action movie writing, however within the context of the film, even Mal points out the problem of Cobb’s dream logic, when she confronts him with the fact that Cobb’s “real” world is a lot like a dream, in which he’s being hunted by governments, corporations, and mercenaries, just like a persecuted dreamer.  Mal’s disturbing worlds raise the possibility that all of the characters in his world are in fact simply archetypal projections of his own subconscious, filling up the architecture of the dream he constructed.

Is Cobb Incepting Himself?

What makes Mal’s theory most compelling is the way that the post hypnotic suggestion with which she wants to incept him, to “take a leap of faith” are repeated, again and again, by different characters in Cobb’s “dream”.

These words are first spoken by Saito, when Cobb (believing himself to be living in reality), asks Saito for a guarantee that he will be able to clear his name, if he effectively carries out the inception.  Saito responds: “You don’t.  But I can.  So, do you want to take a leap of faith, or become an old man filled with regret, waiting to die alone.”

But these words,“take a leap of faith,” did not originate with Saito.  They originated with Cobb.  They’re the words with which he incepted Mal when he convinced her to lay down on the railroad tracks.  The words which she repeats to him, as she tries to get him to jump from the building.  The words she carries out in action when she jumps without him– an image which is echoed by the completion of Robert Fischer’s journey, when he and Ariadne get their first kick back to reality, by jumping from the top of the building in Limbo.

Even the post-hypnotic suggestion with which Cobb intends to incept Fischer is a variation on this theme: an invitation to take a leap of faith in his father, and to believe that his father has taken a leap of faith in him.

Finally in classical hypnotic form, these words come full circle when Cobb repeats them to Saito, after chasing him all the way to limbo to deliver the message to his friend.  “take a leap of faith”.

Internalizing The Post Hypnotic Suggestion

In this way, Cobb comes to accept and internalize his own post-hypnotic suggestion (just as Mal has internalized the suggestion Cobb incepted in her, and Robert Fischer has internalized the suggestion Cobb incepted in him).

The question of course is whether the “leap of faith” he is intended to take is a leap from a building, or a leap of the mind, in which he chooses one reality over another, and accepts those children as real, whether they really are, or not.

Check in next week for the final article in the series:  “Inception Part 7: Can the Words You’re Telling Yourself Really Change Your Life?”

Just as the real hypnotic script discussed in Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 of this series uses a three step structure to hypnotically bring about a change, the structure of the film Inception also takes three steps down, and then three “kicks” back up, to plant the post hypnotic suggestion of breaking up his father’s company in Robert Fischer’s mind.

The film begins in conscious reality, or at least what seems like conscious reality.  Robert Fischer is in a plane, and Cobb builds trust with him by returning his “lost” passport, before inducing trance by drugging Robert and entering his dream.

First Step Down: A Secret Safe

Robert finds himself in what he thinks is Los Angeles, where he is taken hostage by Cobb’s crew.  Eames impersonates family friend Peter Browning, and convinces Robert that he has been tortured for the combination to Robert’s father’s secret safe– a combination only Robert knows.  In the safe is his father’s last gift for Robert, a secret will that splits up the company.  Robert’s doubt of his father is so intense that even in a dream he can’t believe Browning’s story.  Even on his death bed, Robert’s father only had one word to share with him: “Disappointed”.  Ultimately, the numbers need to be extracted at random from Robert’s subconscious before Robert can be put back to sleep for the next step down…

Second Step Down: Browning’s Secret

At the Los Angeles hotel, Robert meets Cobb, who tells him that he is dreaming, and that he is there to protect him.  Once again using Eames’ skills of impersonation, they trick Robert into suspecting Browning, who admits that he staged the kidnapping in an effort to prevent Robert from accepting his father’s challenge to break up the company.  This experience begins to cast down upon the story Robert has been telling himself about Browning, and about his father, and to shift his trust from one to the other. Desperate to understand, Robert enters what he believes to be Browning’s dream.  As Robert is put back to sleep in the hotel room, he finds himself…

Third Step Down: The Father’s Secret

Robert attempts to infiltrate the snow fortress which he believes holds the secrets of Browning’s mind.  After Mal’s untimely appearance and a brief misadventure in Limbo, he is rescued by Cobb and Ariadne and returned to the inner chamber of the fortress.  Inside,  he discovers himself alone with his father, at the sick bed where his father once expressed his devastating feelings about Robert in one painful word: “Disappointed”.

“…because I wasn’t you…” Robert tells his father sadly, sharing the story he’s been telling himself about his father’s words.

“No, his father corrects him… disappointed that you tried.”

And at that moment, everything changes for Robert… and he is ready to open the safe.

The Post Hypnotic Suggestion

From the moment Robert’s story changes, so too does every element of the way his subconscious mind perceives his world.  And that’s why, when he opens the safe, what he finds is not just the will, but a symbol of his father’s love: the old pin-wheel from the photo Robert has always carried with him– his last memory of a loving relationship with his father.

And with that pin-wheel comes the healing Robert so desperately needs.

Whether the story is true or not.

Three Steps Back Up In Inception

As you saw in last week’s hypnotic script, in classical hypnosis, at this point a hypnotist would return the client to each level of the dream, allowing to see how the new story they have accepted will forever change those images, and building toward an even more powerful moment of healing, which anchors the larger change the person is seeking.

To some degree, Christopher Nolan does this as well, for example, by allowing the snow fortress (and with it, the secret that was once kept from Robert) to collapse.  But for the most part, Nolan reduces the three steps back up process to a series of three “kicks”: Fischer and the team falling with the collapsing snow fortress, Arthur blowing up the weightless elevator in the hotel, and Yusuf crashing the van into the water.

But even though Robert the character doesn’t go through each of the three steps back up– as an audience, we experience the whole journey, witnessing each step down from a new perspective as we race back up toward consciousness…

From a character perspective, this makes a lot of sense.  Because ultimately, Robert may not be the only one dreaming…

Cobb’s Inception

Just as Inception is built through a “dream within a dream” structure, it may also contain an inception within an inception.

Just as Robert is being incepted to break up his father’s company, so too is Cobb being incepted to “take a leap of faith”.  He’s the one we truly care about– in whose transformation we are most deeply invested– and through whose dream architecture we actually experience the story of Inception.

Stay tuned for next week’s article, in which I’ll be breaking down Cobb’s journey as it relates to hypnosis and Inception:  “Is Robert Fischer The Only One Dreaming?”

As discussed in parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series, Christopher Nolan’s screenplay Inception is deeply rooted in the principles of hypnosis.   Learning more about these principles may not only change the way you approach your own writing, but also help you understand new ways that you can break through writer’s block and build the writer’s life you’ve been seeking.

The Post Hypnotic Suggestion

Just like the idea, in Inception, that Robert Fischer’s father really loved him, a post hypnotic suggestion is an idea, delivered in deep trance, that the subconscious mind accepts as if it were true.

Post hypnotic suggestions are incredibly powerful, in that when done right, they become anchored in your consciousness, and begin to bring about real life changes in your every day reality.

As suggested in Inception, these post hypnotic suggestions only work if certain conditions are met:

• They are in alignment with the person’s beliefs.  (In other words you can’t “incept” a kind person to be violent, even though you can “incept” a person who desperately wants to write to take action).

• The person chooses to accept the suggestion.  This is why post hypnotic suggestions are more likely to work if they’re given by someone you trust– such as a respected teacher, a great hypnotist, or a person you can depend on (in the case of Inception, Eames masquerades as Peter Browning, the one person Robert truly believes in, to surreptitiously deliver the post-hypnotic suggestion)

• The suggestions, and the “dream” images used to get the person to them, are phrased in the right way for that particular person, using their own language, and their own symbolic systems.

The magic book used in last week’s hypnotic script is just one of many ways of delivering a post-hypnotic suggestion.  Just as the classical three step model is only one of many ways of using hypnosis to bring about profound change.

How Are You Incepting Yourself?

The truth is, you’re delivering post-hypnotic suggestions to yourself every single day, in the words you say to yourself, and the soundtrack running in your head.  And these suggestions can be even MORE powerful than the ones a hypnotist provides, because they are already perfectly aligned with your belief systems, come from a person you trust (yourself), and are perfectly phrased in the way that only you can say them.

So if post hypnotic suggestions really are this powerful– are so transformative, as suggested by Inception, that a person like Mal will continue to accept them as the truth, even if they are not true.  Are so powerful that a person like Robert Fischer can heal his whole relationship with his abusive father based on a simple thought.  Then its worth asking yourself, what are the post hypnotic suggestions that you’re giving yourself about your writing?  And what effect are they having on your writing life?

Stay tuned for next week’s article, in which I’ll be breaking down the structure of Inception in relation to the three step hypnotic technique.

As described in Parts 1 and 2 of the series, the organizing principles of Inception‘s “dream within a dream within a dream” structure seem to be drawn directly from a classical three-step approach to hypnosis.  This technique is used to help people create profound changes in their lives, by “incepting” suggestions for positive change into their subconscious minds.  Just as the architecture of Robert’s dream sequence in Inception is built around around the people, image systems, and beliefs Robert holds most dear, so too is a three step hypnotic technique built around the most resonant images for the person being hypnotized.

After an interview process during which the hypnotist gathers images that have emotional power to the writer, the hypnotist would then induce a trance in the person, creating a dream like journey– a series of three images down into hypnosis, and three images back up–  in which each image leads them deeper into trance, and closer to the transformation they are searching for, just like a dream within a dream.

The following is an example of how this technique could be utilized to help a writer break through writer’s block, by constructing a three step sequence of images with emotional resonance to the writer.

Three Steps Down

For example, if the writer loved the water, the first image might be of them floating in the ocean, feeling incredibly free.  The temperature of the water is exactly the temperature that that is right, and as they float along it feels like the water is caressing their skin.  In the distance, there is a dolphin splashing effortlessly through the water.  The dolphin dives deeper into the water and they find themselves longing to dive down with that dolphin…

This image would lead them to the next sequence, just like a dream within a dream.  Again, working with images that have emotional resonance to the writer.  So if they loved children, we might bring them to a scene at a playground, watching a young child playing happily, creating dream worlds full of magic and creativity, so carefree and playful, completely in touch with their most creative part, just as the writer once was.  The child invites the writer to join them…

This image would lead to the next dream within the dream.  The third level down into the writer’s subconscious, and the third step closer to the transformation they are seeking.  Perhaps they find themselves in a magical forest, where they are approached by someone they completely trust.  This could be a religious figure, like the Buddha or Jesus, a mother or father, or a teacher that they believe in.  The teacher leads them to a special place, a cave, a clearing, a secret room or chamber just for them.

And inside this secret place is an old leather bound book, in which the secret they need to bring about their transformation is written…  all they have to do is read the words, and they will already be transformed….

Those words are the post-hypnotic suggestion.  The key to change, which the subconscious mind will act upon and accept.  Just as in Inception, the hypnotist doesn’t even need to create the suggestion.  They simply need to create the book, and the subconscious mind will populate it with the suggestion it most needs right now…

Three Steps Back Up

Once the post hypnotic suggestion is delivered, the hypnotist brings the writer three steps back up, using different versions of the same images to anchor the suggestion, and project a positive future for the subconscious mind in which the person can experience the positive results of the change they have made, as if they had already occurred.

So taking the example previously discussed, as the writer exits the special place where the book was hidden, they can already feel how the secret contained in the book has transformed them.  As they find themselves in the magical forest, it’s like looking through new eyes… everything is so alive and magical.  It’s like there’s a story in every branch, every leaf, every sound.  Stories the writer is curious to explore, and excited to tell…

Their curiosity then carries them back once again to the playground, where they find themselves playing with the child, recapturing that childlike bliss that writing has always held for them, and always will, if they merely take the step today to open themselves to it.  As they see the child’s smiling face, they recognize that face… as a younger version of their own.  At that moment something shifts inside of them, some inner knowing, as they realize what that means…

…Ask that child, that younger self, if they would like to see the great future that lies ahead.  And they discover themselves back back in that ocean.  Only this time the adult and the child swim together with that dolphin, effortless, happy, free.  The dolphin dives, and the writer and child dive with him, together, swimming all the way to the bottom, where they discover a magical reflecting pool, in which they can see their own future.

And reflected in it, writer and child see the future that lies before them, the days of satisfaction as they work on their screenplay, the eager scribbling of endless ideas, a friend or trusted mentor guiding them, the completion of their first script, and then their next, and next, and next…  a crowded movie theatre in which a movie plays.  Their movie.  The one that’s been waiting inside them, just begging to be written down.    They can hear the applause of the audience.  The laughter.  Or maybe even the tears.  They can feel the pride welling up within them…

“How did I get here?” asks the child.

“We did it together” the writer tells the child… and it all began with the step we took today.

The Power of Hypnosis

If you’ve read this script, you already have some sense of how the hypnotic process works.  If the suggestions were right for you, you may have even seen yourself in that ocean, in that playground, in that magical forest, and in that secret room.  You may have discovered your own post hypnotic suggestion waiting in your own book, or simply felt the feeling of knowing even if you no longer remember the words.

And if these suggestions were right for you, with them you have already taken the first step of becoming the writer you want to be.

The images I used in this script are drawn from Jungian archetypes, but of course these images take on even more hypnotic power when they are shaped directly from your own symbolic systems, your own beliefs, and your own dreams.

Stay tuned for next week’s newsletter, in which I’ll be discussing post-hypnotic suggestion in relation to Inception.

As I discussed in last week’s article, the organizing principles of Inception’s dream within a dream within a dream structure almost perfectly mirror the classical hypnosis training one receives at a weekend certification class in hypnosis.

To understand how a movie can be built from this kind of organizing principle, you first need to know a little about hypnosis.

The Standard Three Step Hypnotic Technique

Weekend certifications in hypnosis generally teach a three step technique which corresponds almost perfectly with the “three dream” technique the characters in Inception are using to convince their subject, Robert Fischer, to break up his father’s company.

Just as the architecture of Robert’s dream sequence in Inception is  built around around the people, image systems, and beliefs Robert holds most dear, so too is a three step hypnotic technique built around the most resonant images for the person being hypnotized.

Dream Research and Hypnotic Research

A hypnotic session using this approach begins with an interview, during which the hypnotist gathers images that have emotional power to the person being hypnotized.

For example, if you were using this method to help a blocked writer pick up the pen after a long period of procrastination, you might begin with images that are not even related to writing, but which capture some of the emotions the person wishes they had when they were writing.

The hypnotist would then induce a trance in the person, creating a dream like journey– a series of three images down into hypnosis, and three images back up–  in which each image leads them deeper into trance, and closer to the transformation they are searching for, just like a dream within a dream.

With each step down, the value of the image is established, and with each step back up, the meaning of each image is deepened and adapted, associating that image with the change the person is seeking, and anchoring that change on a deep subconscious level– as if it had already happened.

The Power of Images

Movies are built around images, because movies are hypnotic.  They carry us out of our own world, and transport us into the dream world of the writer.  Each sequence of images leads us deeper into trance, until we begin to respond to the movie as if it were real, feeling real emotions for characters we know don’t actually exist.

We cry for losses that never happened, feel embarrassed for social gaffs that never actually occurred.  Our hearts race as if we were standing in the character’s shoes– as if their fear was our fear, or their love our love.  We root for them, we care about them.

And we begin to care about their images systems as if they were our own.

When Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Cobb, sees his children but cannot see their faces, we begin to long for their reunion just as he does.  And when those children turn around and reveal their faces to him, it’s hard to fight the rush of emotion.

Are You Getting The Most Out Of Your Images?

As a writer, you can use the three step hypnotic process to craft a profound journey for your character.  Think about the images that most powerfully capture your character’s experience on the way down toward the heart of their journey, and how you can return to those images in new ways on the way back up in order to anchor and deepen the change your character is experiencing.

And while your at it, think about the hypnotic images that play in your own head as a writer.  What images do you chose to focus on?  What images are holding you back?  And how can you revisit, deepen, and adapt those images in order to anchor the future that you are seeking?

Whatever images you choose, if you get them right your subconscious mind will respond to them as if they were real– just like you do at the movies.  Perhaps it’s time to create some new variations.

Stay tuned next week for my most exciting Inception article yet– a powerful hypnotic script that uses the principles behind Inception to help you overcome your own creative blocks.

By now, you and everyone you know have probably seen Inception.  You’ve read reviews that wax poetic about its dream like nature, its visual innovation, and its extraordinarily ambitious thematic aspirations.

Perhaps you’ve even heard me lecture about Inception, and the ways I feel it could have pushed its themes even further.

The Hypnotic Basis of Inception

One of the truly interesting things about Inception is that its structure seems to be based upon the principles of hypnosis.  In fact, the organizing principles of the dream within a dream within a dream structure of the film almost perfectly mirror the classical hypnosis training one receives at a weekend certification class in hypnosis.

Your Screenplay’s Organizing Principles

Why is this important to you as a writer?  Because as writers we all need organizing principles around which to structure our character’s journey.  Usually we think of such structures in terms of acts and themes, but as Inception demonstrates, the truth is that almost any source of inspiration can become the organizing principal of your story:  from a question, to a character trait, to a work of art or piece of music, or in this case to a classical hypnosis certification class.

As writers we are not only students of screenwriting, we are also students of the world.  And the good news is: you can utilize the hypnotic principles behind Inception not only to inspire the way you create the structure of your own movie, but also to open up new avenues toward building your life as a writer.

An Exciting New Series of Articles

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be discussing the hypnotic principles behind Inception, and ways of applying them to your own writing.  I’ll also be describing ways that you can draw upon your own experiences to create organizing principles for your own movies– and harness those ideas to create unity for your script and profound journeys for your main characters.

To that end, we’ll not only be talking about the things that work in Inception, but also the things that could have been pushed further, to make the film even more dramatically successful and emotionally powerful.

Finally, we’ll be discussing ways that you can apply hypnotic principles in your life as a writer, in order to break through writer’s block, heal old wounds to your confidence, overcome procrastination, and create a better relationship between your writing and your editing brain.

Check back next week, for the first article in the series:  INCEPTION:  Understanding Hypnosis For Writers

As discussed in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of this series, the structure of Toy Story 3 is built around the theme of loyalty, and desperate desires of both its protagonists and antagonists to be loved and played with by children.  Love is the currency of Toy Story 3, the one thing that every character wants, and the one thing that has true value. In order to earn that love, the characters must each come to terms with loyalty in their own unique way, and come together to overcome the corrupting force of the greatest antagonist to loyalty: doubt.

Let Your Characters Earn Their Happy Endings

Just as the choices we make in response to the challenges of our lives define us as people, so too do the choices the toys make define them as characters.

In overcoming Lotso and the doubt he represents, the toys come to terms with their own lack of faith, and recapture their loyalty to Andy and to each other.

In doing so, they earn the true fulfillment of their own greatest wish, when Andy bestows them on a little girl, and plays with them one last time before moving on to the next phase of his life.

And that, of course, is why we cry.

Because as silly and zany as Toy Story 3 might be, it draws its structure upon the real emotions, the real desires, and the real losses that we all share as we grow older, say goodbye to old phases of our lives and move on to the new ones.

The desire to be played with.  The desire to be loved.  The desire to relive those cherished memories one last time.

Every Journey Begins With A Want

Just as the journey of your character begins with a simple want, so too does your journey as a screenwriter.  Take a moment to think about what you want today.  And what steps are you ready to take to achieve it.

Then come check out my upcoming screenwriting classes, now available here in New York City, and streamed live ONLINE via the internet.

Your journey begins today.

As discussed in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this series, Toy Story 3 does a brilliant job of exploring diverse aspects of the theme of loyalty, through an emotional structure built upon the toys’ shared desire to be loved and played with by their owners, and the gigantic obstacles that stand in their path.

In this context, one of the things that makes Toy Story 3 so emotionally powerful is the way the question of loyalty, and the desperate desire to be loved, governs not only the actions of the good guys, but also the base desires of Lotso, the evil strawberry-scented Teddy Bear.

Choose The Right Antagonist

Just like our protagonists, Lotso believes he has been abandoned by his owner.  But rather than remaining loyal to his owner or his nature, he has become twisted by his feelings of betrayal, and lost his ability to love  and be loved.  Even when the good toys risk their own lives to save him, Lotso chooses betrayal over loyalty, and anger over love, abandoning the other toys to death by incineration at the garbage dump.

Mustache Twirling Villains Don’t Scare Us

Whether you’re writing a comedy like Toy Story 3, a drama like The Squid and The Whale or a thriller like Cape Fear, the most dramatic antagonists are usually frighteningly human.  They too have needs and desires, and in their map of the universe, they see themselves as the hero or as the suffering victim.

By humanizing Lotso, the writers of Toy Story 3 deepen the emotional journey of their main characters, by exploring yet another variation on the theme of loyalty.  Lotso is more than just an external threat to the toys, he’s a physical manifestation of the danger of giving up on loyalty, and the way the desperate desire for love can twist a character into an evil mockery everything he once represented.

In this way, Lotso becomes more than just an antagonist.  He becomes a walking symbol of toys worst fears, about Andy, about the world and about themselves.

Check in tomorrow, for the final installment of the series: “Let Your Characters Earn Their Happy Endings.”

As discussed in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, the structure of Toy Story 3 is built around a simple desire shared by its characters, and unified around a simple theme, loyalty.   As Andy grows older and heads off to college, the desperate desire of the toys to be loved and played with leads them to question their loyalty to Andy, and his loyalty to them.  This leads the toys to seek out a new home, and new love, at a daycare center, only to discover that the very thing they most want is likely to be their destruction.

But one of the things that makes the structure of Toy Story 3 so successful is the way it explores different variations of the same theme, though the journey of its main character, Woody the Cowboy, the one toy Andy still loves enough to take with him to college.

Push Your Characters To The Limit

Unlike the other toys, who turn their back on Andy when they think he doesn’t love them anymore, Woody is a character governed by his loyalty.  But it’s easy to be loyal when you’re the most loved toy in the toybox.  So Woody too must be tested.

The structure of Toy Story 3 is designed to test Woody to the greatest extent possible, by forcing him to choose between the one thing he truly wants, to stay with his beloved Andy, and saving his friends from certain death at the hands of the daycare toddlers.

Remaining loyal to his friends, Woody risks losing the one thing he truly wants,  and proves himself worthy of Andy’s loyalty, and of ours.

In the process, he leads his friends to rediscover their own loyalty and their own faith, in Woody, in Andy, and in each other.

Wants Are The Foundation of Structure

As a writer, when you clearly establish your characters’ most deeply held desires early in the script, you arm yourself with the structural ammunition you need to build the kind of emotionally powerful story that moves your audience to laughter and tears.  Structure can then grow organically, as you inspire your characters to seek their desires, and create obstacles that test and challenge who they are, and what they believe in.

Check in for tomorrow’s installment: “Toy Story 3, Part 3: Create The Right Antagonist”

As I discussed in Part 1 of this series, Toy Story 3 does a wonderful job of building its structure around the greatest wish of its main characters: to be loved and played with by children.  When the toys feel that their owner Andy no longer cares about them, this desperate desire forces them to question their loyalty to him and seek out love and attention from new children at a daycare center.  By establishing the character’s most deeply held desire clearly from the start, the writers of Toy Story 3 give themselves the foundation they need for a great structure.

The Beauty of Unexpected Consequences

Great writers know that however beautiful or benign the character’s greatest wish may seem, they must explore both the best and the worst possible implications of fulfilling that wish.  And the toys of Toy Story get a heck of a lot more than they bargained for.

Trapped in a playroom ruled by a psychotic strawberry scented bear, and filled with insane toddlers, the non-age-appropriate toys are literally tortured by the fulfillment of their own greatest desire, played with nearly to death, until the best thing they can hope for is to somehow escape to a life of confinement in Andy’s attic– the very fate that they were fleeing when they came to the daycare center in the first place.

When you can make your main characters run from the very thing they most want, you know you are succeeding as a writer.

Toy Story 3 pushes this irony even further by exploring yet another riff on the theme of loyalty: the journey of the one toy Andy still loves enough to take with him to college: Woody the Cowboy…

Check back tomorrow for the next installment of the Toy Story 3 Series:  “The Foundation of Structure.”

If you’ve read the reviews, seen the movie, or talked to a friend, you know by now that just about everybody loves Toy Story 3.  Audiences cheer.  Critics gush.  Grown adults laugh and weep like children.  So what makes this movie work so well?  And how can you use its secrets to improve your own screenwriting?

Throughout the week, I’ll be exploring some answers to these questions, through a series of articles about the elements that make Toy Story 3 so successful.

Spoiler Alert: For those who have not yet seen the movie, please be aware that this series may reveal details of the story beyond what you’ve seen in the previews.

The Structural Engine of Your Character’s Desire

For all its emotional complexity, the engine of Toy Story 3′s structure is remarkably simple: a single want, shared by each and every one of its characters (just like it’s shared by each and every child): the desire to be loved and played with.

And the big problem which each and every character (just like each and every child and adult) must face is that kids get older, move on, and stop playing with their toys.  

How does a good toy stay loyal in a world like this?  And how does a boy stay loyal to the toys of his childhood?

These questions become the basis of the theme of Toy Story 3, and the glue that holds the emotional structure together.

Characters Who Shape Their Own Destinies

Like any good protagonists, these beloved toys aren’t just carried along by their fate.  Instead, they take action to control their own destinies.  Losing faith in Andy’s love, and believing they’ve been abandoned by the only owner they’ve ever had, they seek out a new life at a day care center, where their desperate desire to be loved and played with can be fulfilled by other children.

Of course, it can’t be that easy.

Check back for tomorrow’s article “Toy Story 3, Part 2: The Beauty of Unexpected Consequences”

Kick Ass! Does Just That…
It’s rare that you see a big budget action movie that succeeds on as many levels as Kick Ass! Hilarious, high stakes action sequences, directorial vision, fabulous characters, bold acting choices, and more-fun-than-you-can-shake-a-nunchuck-at combine to make Kick Ass! the kind of action movie producers and audiences alike can salivate over. (The audience last night was literally cheering through the credits when the movie ended).

The Promise of the Premise
Every movie makes its audience a promise– what I like to call The Promise of the Premise. This promise is the built-in anticipation that convinces your viewers to pay their 12 bucks on your movie instead of some other flick.

Fulfill the promise of the premise, and your audience will be happy to appreciate your deep meaning, thoughts about the world, brilliant dialogue, and symbolic image systems right along with it. Fall short, and it doesn’t matter how brilliant your writing is, no one is going to make your movie.

Make The Promise of the Premise Work For You
Unless Brad Pitt is knocking down your door right now, when it comes to selling your script, The Promise of the Premise is the only thing the producer can depend on.

For writers, the adaptation and revision process has many aspects. But for producers, there’s really only one aspect that’s important: narrowing the gap between The Promise of the Premise, and what the script actually delivers.

As a writer who wants your work produced, you can harness this knowledge to focus your adaptation and revision process– whether that’s you’re adapting an idea for a movie into an actual script, revising a rough draft into more polished form, or creating a film version of a true life story, a novel, or a comic book like Kick Ass!

The best movies don’t just fulfill The Promise of the Premise. They exceed it.

Make YOUR Premise Kick Ass!
From the title alone, you know the promise of Kick Ass!: A tongue in cheek, goofy as hell, ass-kicking good time in which the least likely super heroes in the world will triumph over some serious bad guys.

But what makes Kick Ass! so successful is how it takes that promise and pushes it to the extreme, exaggerating both the comedy and the darkness of the main character’s journey, taking it further than he, or his audience, could ever have expected.

The result is a movie that is not only a rollicking good time, but also captures the best elements of the comic book form, to say something real about personal responsibility and how hard it is to actually take action against the things that are wrong in the world.

Stop Selling Out, and Sell In…
Young writers often think fulfilling The Promise of the Premise means selling out. They then make the mistake of either rejecting the promise of their own premise as an affront to their artistic integrity, or trying so desperately to write something “commercial” that they end up creating nothing but a hollow shell as a movie.

Whether you’re writing a hilarious action spoof like Kick Ass! or a deep character driven movie like A Prophet, your job as a screenwriter is to discover your premise and push it to the max.

But The Promise of The Premise isn’t something you impose on your script from the outside. It’s something that’s already there, suggested in every facet of your characters journey, and in every word you write, just waiting for you to discover it and bring it to the surface.

That’s not selling out. That’s the art of the screenwriter.

And the good news is, you can learn it.
If you’d like to learn how to harness the promise of your own premise, I invite you to join my upcoming screenwriting workshop Adaptation & Revision, starting on Monday April 19th @ 145 W 28th Street, 3rd Flr, NYC.

Whether you’re starting from scratch with a new idea, working on a screenplay adaptation, or revising an early draft of an existing screenplay, this class will forever change the way you look at screenwriting.

Curious? Come check out your first session for only $20 bucks with no further obligation.

There are many reasons to brave the shocking violence of Thomas Bidigain and Jacques Audiard’s new film, A Prophet (Un Prophéte).  This brilliantly crafted screenplay, which takes you into the brutal world of a French prison through its main character, Malik, makes the prison world of The Shawshank Redemption look like daycare.  As you follow Malik’s haunting and deeply affecting journey, you are forced to empathize with people and actions you would normally consider unforgivable, and discover the humanity in characters whose defining traits are not only immoral, but downright horrific.

As screenwriters and screenwriting students, we often worry about the “like-ability” of our main characters.  In fact, entire books (Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat for example) have been crafted around the principle that unless your main character is a “nice” person– a saver of cats, a lover of children, a hooker with a heart of gold– an audience will be unable to connect with them or care about them.  Writers who cling to this principle often find themselves cut off from their characters, and with them, from their writer’s voice.   Much as we often do in our personal lives, such writers find themselves covering up their character’s “true self” for fear of offending some unknown audience who might judge, hate, or worst of all, stop caring about a character who doesn’t conform to society’s ideals.

The result, of course, is boring, lifeless, one-dimensional characters, who neither live, breathe, nor make mistakes: characters who are less real than the people who write them, and therefore not worthy of our attention.  Building your movie around a character like this is like taking a cruise in a leaky boat.  Without a real character around whom to build your structure, you’re going to spend most of your time bailing out water.

You spend all your time trying to create a character who is likable– only to discover that nobody likes them anyway.

So how do Bidigain and Audiard get away with it?  How do they manage to make an audience fall in love with a cast of horrible people– while you can’t even get anyone to care about the most noble character in your whole movie?

Read on.

But first, a spoiler alert.  If you haven’t already seen A Prophet get yourself to a theatre!  This movie is way too good to miss.  And far too instructive as well.

To understand how Bidigain and Audiard can make your heart break for characters who should, by every definition, be “un-likable”, we only need to examine one scene.  It comes toward the end of the movie.  Cesar Luciani, the white-haired Corsican crime boss, has spotted Malik, our hero, in the yard, standing with his new Muslim friends.  This is a huge change, especially in the racially charged atmosphere of the prison.  Up until now, Malik has spent every day in the yard with Cesar, forsaking his own Arab people for the protection of Cesar’s Corsican gang.   But today, everything is different.  Though Cesar doesn’t yet know it, Malik has betrayed him.  Cesar’s once powerful connections, both inside and outside the prison, are gone.  Malik is the only thing he has left.

Cesar gestures to Malik with a gentle nod of his head to come over.  But Malik doesn’t move.  Cesar nods again, more desperate now.  Still no response from Malik.

Cesar makes a decision.  He stands up, and walks across the yard toward Malik, crossing the invisible line that divides the Corsican from the Muslim prison population.  Malik sends two thugs to intercept Cesar, but the old man pushes right past them.  As weakened as he may be, we know what Cesar can do– his limitless capacity for violence.  And at this moment, seeing how much power remains in the old man, we fear for Malik.  It seems like truly nothing can stop Cesar.

And then, one swift punch from a nameless thug, and Cesar is lying on the ground, writhing in agony, exposed for exactly what he is– an old man for whose only remaining connection in the world has just been severed.

At that moment, your heart breaks for Cesar.

Even as you feel the emotion, you’re shocked that it’s even possible to feel this way.  After all, this is the man who targeted the young Malik, without provocation, and brutalized him until Malik was forced to bend to his will.  This is the man who forced Malik to commit the bloody murder that changed him forever, in a scene so shockingly violent that the man in front of me at the theatre started whimpering and waving his hands in front of his face, unable to contain his visceral reaction.

This is a man who has nearly removed Malik’s eye with a spoon, has beaten him, humiliated him, corrupted him, brutalized him, called him an Arab dog, and treated him like a slave.  A criminal, a racist, a brutal, corrupt man without a noble or kind bone in his body.

How is it possible that you can feel this way about this truly horrible person?  Can your heart really be breaking for him?

Of course it can.

Your heart breaks because you know Malik’s heart is breaking.  And of course it is.  Because at this moment, Malik is losing the best parts of himself: his compassion, his humanity, and even more.

This orphan, this troubled child, raised in a group home without ever knowing his father or mother, is losing the only father he ever had.

Cesar may have been a terrible father.  But he is nonetheless a father.  He has protected Malik, provided for his physical needs, given him protection, opportunity, power, access, leave-days from prison, and even the possibility of parole.  He has bestowed affection and praise.  He has turned Malik into a man– and into an image of himself.

In my classes, I often talk about archetypal structure: using supporting characters in a Jungian fashion to reveal the repressed aspects of your main character, and to force your main character to come to terms with the parts of himself that he doesn’t want to even admit are there.  In true archetypal fashion, Cesar is both the biggest threat to Malik– the key to unlocking the darkest aspects Malik’s personality– and the loving father Malik so desperately needs.

And at this moment, Malik has murdered him.

He’s done so literally, by betraying Cesar to the powerful Italian crime boss that Cesar had plotted to kill, and metaphorically, by leaving the old man trembling in the yard at the moment he most needs him.

For just as Cesar has been an archetypal father for Malik, so too has Malik been the closest thing Cesar has had to a son.

And at this moment, Cesar is losing him.

That’s why, at this moment, you find yourself silently pleading with Malik.

Go to him.  Go to him.  Don’t leave him there, trembling on the ground.

A “like-able” character would do it.  He’d run to Cesar, embrace him like a father, and the two men would be reconciled, like Billy Elliot and his own terrible father after the final dance sequence.

Malik doesn’t.  He makes the “unlikeable” decision.  And you understand.  You empathize.  And you care.  Because Malik doesn’t have a choice.  He has to steel his heart against Cesar, or Cesar will destroy him.

You empathize, because Malik is struggling with the same desire you are feeling as you watch him.  The voice in his head saying Go to him.  That desperate desire we all have: to reconcile with those who have most hurt us, to be a compassionate person, to have everything be okay.

Empathy doesn’t come from like-ability.  Just like back in high school.  Remember that annoying kid who always wanted to hang out with you?  It didn’t matter how nice he was.  You didn’t want to spend time with him.  Because he wasn’t being himself.  He was being who he thought you wanted him to be.

Empathy comes from allowing your characters to be who they are, and to pursue what they most want and need, against impossible odds.

Empathy comes when you make it hard, and allow your characters to make the decisions, right or wrong, that only they can make.

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t yet seen Where The Wild Things Are, you may want to check it out before you read this article.

Let’s set aside the question right now of whether or not Where The Wild Things Are is a good movie. Let’s set aside the question of whether you liked it or not (or were a little bit embarrassed for liking it as much as you did).

And if you feel like you wasted your twelve bucks on a movie in which essentially nothing happens, let’s set that aside too.

Love it or hate it, Wild Things is a movie worth studying, because of the bold and unique ways it is structured to reflect its authors’ premise, both in its most wonderful, and its most problematic elements.

PREMISE? WHAT PREMISE?
Wild Things is governed by a simple idea– or at least a strong suggestion– that we are seeing the whole world through the perspective of a young boy– as he works out his rage over his isolated life (and more importantly, his parents divorce) by playing with a bunch of stuffed animals in his room.

The writer-director team of Jonze & Eggers make a very strong (and very risky) decision that nothing in the world of the Wild Things is going to exist outside what a boy Max’s age could reasonably imagine. This is embodied in every element of the film:

In the dialogue and actions of the Wild Things (who reason and dream and play and rage and even accept the impossible just like children).

In a plot limited to events that a moderately intelligent child could be expected to dream up–more interested in reflecting the way children play (with exaggerated simplicity, loose ends, and non-linear and non-sensical elements) than it is with telling a linear narrative story.

In the production design– which looks a lot more like what a child like Max might think was “cool and magical” than what we’ve come to expect from the grown up Hollywood minds that bring us movies like Harry Potter or Pan’s Labyrinth.

In Where the Wild Things Are, boats to magic lands show up out of nowhere, Wild Things instantly accept little boys as Kings, and torn off arms drip sand and not blood. We are in a little boys world of stuffed animals, and if things seem cheesy, overly simple, or just plain goofy, it’s because they’re supposed to.

Because of these choices, the experience of Where The Wild Things Are completely violates almost everything we’ve come to expect in a Hollywood movie. We come expecting magic and spectacle, and are given only the simplest special effects. We come expecting a smooth ride, that’s safe for kids, and fun for adults, and instead are taken on a chaotic journey that floats along the impetuous currents of Max’s joy and rage. We come expecting a “well-made” film, and instead experience the inner world of a child at play.

STRUCTURE? WHAT STRUCTURE?
Most Hollywood movies are built around simple structural rules. If a character shows up at the beginning of the movie pretending to be King, the movie isn’t over until he’s learned what it is to be a real King. If a character shows up at the beginning of the movie in a land where a bunch of otherwise lovely creatures are filled with rage and misery, the movie isn’t over until he’s healed their pain (and his own) and found a way to bring them peace.

As you probably noticed, Wild Things doesn’t play by these rules. Max doesn’t heal the Wild Things. Max doesn’t learn how to be a good King. Max doesn’t even “finish” the story. Rather, he leaves abruptly (if reluctantly) abdicating his crown like a child called inside for dinner.

For the most part, nothing happens in Wild Things. And yet, from a character perspective, so much happens.

The difference is that unlike almost every other Hollywood film of its genre, Wild Things builds its structure not linearly and logically, but emotionally and symbolically, through the use of archetypes.

WHAT THE HECK IS AN ARCHETYPE?
Archetypes are an idea derived from the work of psychologist Carl Jung, and later seized upon by Joseph Campbell and a slew of his disciples as they sought to better understand story. You could spend years studying the different ways different critics, professors, and authors of screenwriting books have described and categorized archetypes.

Fortunately, you don’t have to.

Your job as a writer is not to categorize or memorize archetypes, but to understand them. And understanding them begins with this simple concept:

An archetype is a character who embodies some repressed element of your main character’s psyche, and exists structurally in your movie to force your character to deal with that repressed element.

All movies have archetypes. Big Hollywood movies. Tiny independent movies. Broad Comedies. Serious Dramas. Even big dumb action movies. They all have archetypes. They have to. Otherwise, your main character would never have to deal with the repressed elements in his or her psyche, and wouldn’t have to go through the story.

The difference is that within Wild Things, instead of existing in a traditional linear plot, these archetypes exist within an emotional and symbolic one.

THE NORMAL WORLD
One of the truly remarkable things about Where The Wild Things Are is how quickly screenwriters Jonze & Eggers establish all of the real world emotional and symbolic elements that will comprise the structure of Max’s mythical journey. His isolation and loneliness. His emotional and physical pain. His feelings of betrayal by his sister and his mother. HIs feelings of being left behind as his mother and sister build relationships with new people that he doesn’t like or understand. His shame at being out of control. And most importantly, his violent and destructive reactions to those feelings.

These emotional elements have symbolic counterparts: The Snowball Fight That Ends In Tears. The Destroyed Fort. The Heart He Made For His Sister (which he destroys when he trashes her room). And the moment in which he Bites His Mother after seeing her with her new boyfriend.

THE EMOTIONAL/SYMBOLIC WORLD OF THE WILD THINGS
On a metaphorical level, Max’s journey in the world of the Wild Things is quite simply an attempt of a child’s mind to make sense of his own destructive rage. Each emotional and symbolic element of the normal world has its Wild Things World equivalent, creating a system of metaphorical mirrors through which Max ultimately can see himself and his world more clearly (as he self soothes his way through the guilt and trauma).

The Wild Things bite, just as Max bit his mother. The Wild Things destroy their homes, Just as Max destroyed his sister’s room. Max attempts connect with the Wild Things by building a fort and throwing dirt clods, just as he once built a snow fort and threw snow balls at his sister’s friends. The connections are simple, giving the movie the clarity and through line it needs to take the audience along for the journey. But also complex, honoring the complexity of Max’s pyschology, as he navigates the complexities of his parents divorce and his feelings about it, by navigating his relationships with one archetypal Wild Thing after another.

CAROL: The loving, but violent father, with whom Max’s mother no longer wants to live despite Max’s love for him, and whose behavior Max is emulating in his own.

KW: The perfect mother figure, who “inexplicably” no longer wants to live with Carol, and is instead enamored with “boyfriends” Bob and Terry, the owls that neither Max nor KW can understand.

JUDITH: The embodiment of his jealousy and discontentment– who feels like it’s Max’s job to make her feel better, just as Max wants his mother to do for him.

Even Max himself is an archetype: the quintessential Jungian “Hero”. The developing Ego that wishes to be King of his own world.

Over the course of the story, by interacting with his archetypes and attempting to do for them what he wishes to do for himself, Max develops empathy and understanding that prepares him to return to his new world. He is forced to confront who his father really is, who his mother really is, and even who he really is. He is forced to confront the consequences of his choices, and the terrifying idea that he may not be in control, that he may not be King, that he may, in fact, just be a “boy, pretending to be a wolf, pretending to be a king” and that in fact Kings may not exist at all.

It ends with the gift of a heart that Max has made. Not coincidentally, it looks a lot like the one he once made for his sister, and destroyed at the beginning of the movie.

Linearly, not a darn thing happens. But metaphorically, emotionally, and symbolically, Max undergoes a profound change. He must, otherwise he wouldn’t need to go through the story.

THE WRITER’S JOURNEY
On an archetypal level, Max’s journey echoes the journey of every writer. We must reduce ourselves to children, allow ourselves to play, breathe life into our own archetypes through the words and actions of our characters, create metaphorical and symbolic equivalents for the confusing and contradictory events of our own lives, and ultimately create a structure that forces us to unearth our own repressed emotions, and takes us, and our main characters, on a journey that changes us both forever.

Though your own work may not be as structurally radical as that of Where The Wild Things Are, if a movie in which so little happens can create such a profound journey for its main character, imagine what exploring these emotional, archetypal, and symbolic elements could do for your own work.

Curious about archetypes, emotional and symbolic structure and how to apply them to your own writing?  Learn more in one of my upcoming classes.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but thought this David Brooks NY Times Article about the film was an interesting discussion of character. I’ll weigh in with my thoughts after I’ve seen the film.

Movies are a lot like professional sports. The things we notice tend to be the big plays, the brilliant scenes, the moments that make us say “wow!” But what actually makes movies work is a lot like what makes sports teams successful: not the brilliant moments, but the fundamentals. In football, those fundamentals are blocking and tackling. In movies, they come down to the fundamentals of character: strong wants, huge obstacles, and a profound journey that changes the character forever.

When these elements are working, it’s easy to forget them. Just like it’s easy to forget those big ol’ offensive linemen blocking for the quarterback. But when they break down, bad things happen. And suddenly you’ve got big problems.

Just like professional athletes, even the best writers can lose sight of their fundamentals, especially when they’re striving to make the most out of an exciting premise, push their writing to new levels, or come at a scene in a new way. Once we’ve learned the fundamentals, we tend to take them for granted. And sometimes we forget that we need to practice our fundamentals, even as we strive to master the fancy stuff.

Because fundamentals tend to breeze by unnoticed in truly successful screenplays, sometimes it can be even more valuable to analyze problematic scripts, where the fundamental mistakes, and the problems that stem from them, can be seen more clearly.

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t yet seen Surrogates and plan to, you may want to stop reading here.

Michael Ferris & John D. Brancato’s script Surrogates is built around a truly seductive premise: a new technology that allows people to experience the world entirely through robotic surrogates. It asks a profound question: what would happen if you could look exactly the way you wanted to look (ie. a man one day, a woman the next), and do whatever you most wanted to do, without any physical risk to yourself. How would it change society? How would it bring people closer together? And how would it keep them apart?

Clearly, this is a question worth exploring. Yet, despite its brilliant premise, as a story, Surrogates falls flat, mostly because the writers forget their fundamentals.

Your Premise is Only As Seductive As Your Main Character’s Journey.

As a writer, if you’re spending your time explaining the world of your story, you’re probably boring your audience. It doesn’t matter how interesting the world of the story may be, or how many brilliant nuances you’ve created. If things aren’t happening, your movie isn’t moving. This is especially true of an action movie like Surrogates. Things have to happen quick. If you spend your precious pages feeding information to your audience, you’re pretty much guaranteed to bring your story grinding to a halt.

In successful scripts, worlds are revealed through the actions of the main character. Contrast Surrogates with films like Gattaca, Pan’s Labyrinth or even Ferris & Brancato’s own highly successful thriller The Game and you’ll immediately see the difference.

These scripts drop you into the world, treat that world as a reality, and let you experience it as the characters do. They don’t waste time “telling” the audience what the world is like. Instead, slowly but surely, they reveal the rules of the world as the character pursues what he or she wants against incredible odds.

The tremendous obstacles that the world creates for the character reveal its nature in a visceral way, compelling the audience to imagine themselves within the world, as they root for the main character to triumph over its obstacles.

On the other hand, when you simply spoon feed the world as information, as Surrogates attempts to do, you accomplish the exact opposite. With no visceral link for the audience to connect to, the movie starts to feel like school. Before long, even the most potentially interesting details are reduced to a litany of boring information. The audience is left twiddling its thumbs, waiting for the movie to start; once you’ve lost them it’s hard to get them back.

Force Your Character To Change in a Profound Way

Bruce Willis plays Tom Greer, the one person (in mainstream society) who dislikes the idea of surrogates because he feels they cut him off from real connections that make life worthwhile. At the beginning of the movie, he begrudgingly uses his surrogate in his job as an FBI agent, but really just wants to connect person-to-person with his wife, who only wants to interact through her surrogate.

When a terrible weapon surfaces that can cause people to die while in their surrogates, it forces Tom Greer on a journey, through which he discovers… drumroll please… that surrogates cut people off from the real connections that make life worthwhile.

See the problem?

Tom has already gone through his journey before the movie starts. This leaves him with no place to go as the story unfolds. He doesn’t NEED the story to happen to him, because he already sees the surrogates for what they are. This robs every action he undertakes of any real meaning– we’re left with smoke and mirrors– “exciting” external plot twists duck-taped together with no visceral journey to support them.

Imagine if the action of the story forced Tom to become seduced by the world of the surrogates he once rejected, so that despite his expectations at the beginning of the film, letting go of his surrogate would be the hardest thing Tom had ever done.

Imagine if Tom felt a profound connection to his surrogates, and the action of the story forced him to realize what they actually were doing to him and his family, and then make a decision between the danger of connection and the safety of isolation.

Imagine if Tom’s wife was the main character– with her desperate need to live through her surrogate to avoid dealing with the death of her son– and was tested in the same way Tom was, by having to deal with life outside of her surrogate.

When characters don’t change, stories don’t move. And when stories don’t move, audiences aren’t moved by them.

Make it HARD. And then make it HARDER.

Of course there have been movies, especially action movies, that succeed despite the lack of a profound character change. Indiana Jones does confront his fear of snakes and reconcile with the woman he wronged over the course of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he’s still pretty much the same guy he was at the beginning of the movie. Similarly, by the time he gets to the third installment of the series, The Bourne Ultimatum, Jason Bourne has already, for the most part, come to terms with his identity.

Both of these scripts succeed for a simple fundamental reason. The writer makes it REALLY REALLY HARD for the main character. Jason Bourne never stops running– racing from one external obstacle to the next– and overcoming them in such unexpected and spectacular ways it’s hard to care if he’s changing or not. Similarly, Indiana Jones is constantly dealing with such fascinating and escalating challenges, there’s no time to wonder about his psychology.

Get this fundamental right, and you can get away with a lot.

Make it hard. And then make it harder.

Make it easy, and you get Surrogates, a potentially spectacular idea, that falls short because it gets seduced by its own premise, and loses track of the fundamentals that make movies work.

Learn More

Want to learn more about the fundamentals that make your writing successful? Come check out one of my upcoming classes.

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DRAG ME TO HELL
Screenplay By Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi

I just saw “Drag Me To Hell” tonight. Talk about a great example of how a well structured movie uses theme to craft a character’s journey. Spoiler alert: If you haven’t watched this movie yet, this might be a good time to dash out and see it. Then come on back and read all about it.

The theme of “Drag Me To Hell” is pretty simple: selfish desire leads to the soul’s destruction. The film begins with a woman who is genuinely good. And step by step, the structure of the film quite literally drags her to hell– not just through the terrible curse that she must contend with, but by causing her to make such immoral choices in her attempts to escape it that by the time it’s all over, she just about deserves her fate.

When we first meet Christine Brown, she is pure heaven. She’s sweet. She’s kind. She loves animals, and she cares about others. The first time we see her, she’s delivering good news to a nice young couple– she’s made it work for them to get the mortgage they need. Everyone is so happy.

And it’s just the beginning of the movie. So we know we’re in trouble.

Unfortunately for Christine, there’s something that she wants very badly– a promotion to be assistant manager at the bank. And her chauvinistic boss doesn’t think she’s tough enough to deserve it.

Uh oh.

Characters develop when we test their convictions, so the Raimis come up with a scene to do just that. “Oh, you’re really so good? Let’s see what happens when you have to choose between repossessing the home of a helpless old gypsy woman, and losing your only shot at that job you want so badly.”

What choice do you think she makes?

Selfish desire.

So, even when the old woman prostrates herself before Christine, begging for mercy, Christine still doesn’t budge. She wants that promotion. So bad she can taste it. And she’s willing to do something she knows is wrong to get it.

Next thing you know, she’s cursed. A demon is coming for her soul, and she’s got three days to stop it.

In her attempt to escape, Christine will violate almost every ethical code she once held. She will repeatedly deny responsibility for her actions (even during the seance in which they attempt to cast out the demon), lie about her decision to repossess the old woman’s home, and instead lay the blame on her boss.

She will slaughter her cute little kitten in an attempt to appease the demon’s lust for her soul (so much for volunteering at animal shelters).

She will even come close to murder (or worse), as she attempts to pass the curse on to some other victim instead (by re-gifting the button which marks her as the demon’s target).

Why? Because ultimately she wants to escape the curse more than she wants to uphold her values. Just like she wanted to get the promotion (and escape the “curse” of her unfair work environment) more than she wanted to show mercy to the old woman.

Of course, in a fair world, Christine wouldn’t have to sin. That’s what is so great about the structure of this screenplay. Her dominant trait is her KINDNESS. It’s only the unfairness of the world– the unfair job, the unfair curse– the sheer horror of it all, that forces Christine to choose between her desire and her morality. That’s how the writers test who she is, and force her to change.

Unfortunately, Christine repeatedly fails the test, slowly but surely letting go of what is good about her, and dragging herself to hell in the process.

And even when she decides not to re-gift the button to an innocent stranger, Christine does not fully recapture her morality. She doesn’t sit at the grave of the old woman, admit her wrongdoing and beg forgiveness of her spirit. Instead, she tries to condemn the soul of the woman she wronged, by re-gifting the button to her dead corpse. In the process, she also desecrates the old woman’s grave and commits the same sin her palm reader first assumed she might have committed– speaking ill of the dead in a cemetery).

Having come to this false victory by re-gifting the envelope she believes to contain the button to the old woman’s corpse, Christine thinks she has solved her problem. But she hasn’t. And not because of the mix up with the envelopes. Because she still cares more about herself than she does about those around her.

Selfish Desire.

So even though Christine (after she thinks she’s gotten EVERYTHING she desires) ultimately confides to her boyfriend that she was the one who chose to repossess the woman’s house, and that this was the wrong thing to do. When her selfish desire is tested one last time, she makes the same mistake all over again.

There is her boyfriend, standing with the button in his hand, and presumably damned to hell because of it. Does Christine try to snatch the button from him? Does she risk her life to save his?

No, she tries to escape, once again. Tumbles into the train tracks. And is carried off to hell.

Selfish desire.

It’s not the curse that damns Christine, it’s her decisions.

And it’s not the button that determines her boyfriend’s salvation. It’s the choices he makes.

Time and again, his desires are tested as well. And time and again, he does what is right, even when it means not getting what he wants. He makes the selfless choice for the love of Christine– agreeing to the palm reading, refusing the demands of his parents, giving her 10,000 dollars to see a spiritual advisor he doesn’t even believe in. He does all of this without even believing that Christine is haunted, and without thought of gain for himself. He does it because he loves her.

His morality remains intact, because his love is stronger than his selfish desire.

Hers does not, because her selfish desire is stronger than her love.

And the structure of the screenplay works because it tests them both, establishing their dominant traits, and then forcing both characters to grapple with the theme, by making active choices that drive the story and ultimately bring about their own salvation or their own destruction.

To learn more about theme and the way it relates to screenplay structure, check out one of my screenwriting workshops.

In my Monday class tonight a question came up about the difference between Message and Theme.

It turns out a perfect example can be seen in the “Watchmen”.

Theme is about the character’s journey. It reflects the want the character is pursuing, the value in that character that is being tested, and the way the character changes.

Message is about the writer. It’s what the writer wants you to believe. And in execution it tends to be preachy and unengaging, because it’s all about PLOT and INFORMATION, rather than about a character on a journey.

For example, “Watchmen” seems to have a very clear message that human beings are so consumed by hatred, that the only way to keep them from destroying each other is by giving them something even bigger to hate.

Clearly, this is a fascinating idea. and could even become a theme of a film. Yet in this film, the execution is barely watchable.

Why?

Partially it’s because the writers are completely overwhelmed by the exposition, trying so hard to fit in all the “information” they think their audience needs, that for half the movie they’re not telling any story at all.

But part of this is just the symptom of a bigger problem:

The film has a message that we discover loud and clear at the end, but no clearly articulated theme governing the storytelling to bring us to the point where we could accept the message.

Though some of the PLOT and the characters WORDS reflect this message, the way the characters are changing and the values they represent are mostly tangential to it.

In other words, the film is all MESSAGE and no THEME.

Unlike message, theme reflects the journeys of the characters in the story, tying them together, making them feel related, and bringing both the characters and audience to a point of catharsis, where the fundamental ideas they represent are challenged, and ultimately either transformed, destroyed, or strengthened.

Also, unlike message, theme explores the OPPOSITE side of the coin as well. Characters are allowed to fight both in support of and against the ideas of the theme throughout their entire journey, and may either transcend it or succumb to it in a way that leaves them expanded and transformed.

In this film, each character goes on an unrelated journey, and is only allowed to wrestle with the “message” at the very end, when the master plan is revealed. The result is a disjointed narrative that has nothing holding it together.

For our purposes, we’re going to assume that the THEME of “Watchmen” (if it had one) would be the same as its message:

“The Only Way To Save Humanity From It’s Self Destructive Hatred Is To Give it Something Greater To Hate”

A well structured movie would test this question by building its plot in a way that tests this theme at every turn. Its plot would force its characters to pursue alternative measures for saving humanity, tightening the noose as they met with failure or their successes were undone by humanity’s nature, until FINALLY they had no choice but either accept the truth as expressed in the theme, or to transcend it by saving humanity in spite of that realization. It would also force the characters to deal with their own hatred or capacity for hatred, and to confront the dark sides of themselves.

“Watchmen’s” characters never come close.

Spoiler alert: It would be hard to spoil a movie this unfocused, but if you haven’t seen it and plan to, you might want to stop reading.

MANHATTAN starts out passionately engaged in saving humanity, but withdrawn from his girlfriend. He then gets his feelings hurt when his girlfriend leaves him. Decides human life doesn’t matter at all. Then changes his mind and decides he does care about human life after all when he finds out his girlfriend’s father was the man who raped her mother (Why this leads him to care about humanity, I’m not sure). Returns to earth too late to save humanity (in fact, he’s been framed for a nuclear war), but in time to confront the bad guy. However, he discovers that world peace has sprung miraculously from the bad guy’s actions, as now the world has unified in its hatred of Manhattan and don’t want to destroy each other anymore. So he decides that the only thing that matters is the preservation of this myth (so much so that he decides to kill his friend to keep the secret of his innocence safe).

THEME: Caring more about saving the world than about your love life will make your girlfriend leave you. And then you won’t care about the world at all again, unless you find out she had a hard life, in which case you’ll start caring again, only to discover that the only real way to save the world is to trick them all into hating you, even if you have to kill your friend and allow millions of others to die in order to do so.

Because the THEME controlling Manhattan’s journey is both unfocused and not closely tied to the theme of the movie, his character bounces all over the place, and for no apparent reason. A bunch of unrelated plot stuff happens, and then Manhattan gets the message, delivered to him not through his own experience building up to this moment of catharsis but through the words of another character, and exposition via TV screen.

His personal journey with his girlfriend does not force him to confront this idea in any way (his own capacity for hate/his love for a human woman possibly capable of such hatred herself/etc). He neither exhausts the possibilities for saving humanity, nor tries and fails to accomplish them. The elements are there, but the theme fails to focus them. Therefore rather than feeling earned, the message feels superimposed.

The other characters are on even more tangential journeys.

The NITE OWL is pursuing an (at first) unrequited love with Manhattan’s girlfriend and the question of whether or not to start fighting crime again. There’s some brief allusion to the idea that he may have stopped fighting crime because people turned their hate on him. But neither his decision to fight crime again nor his winning of the girl is really related to this theme of coming to terms with inescapable human hatred, falling victim to it or transcending it. He starts fighting crime again because it’s fun. And she falls for him because (as best I can tell) he’s emotionally available, and Manhattan isn’t. I don’t think I need to tell you that “emotional availability leads to happiness” is a LOUSY theme for an action movie, and not related in any way to the message that this movie pretends to be exploring.

The closest the NITE OWL comes to wrestling with the theme of the movie is to get really sad at the end because he doesn’t want to accept human nature. Conceivably this could be a wonderful related theme for his character to wrestle with. But because the focus of his journey is on having fun again, and being emotionally available for the girl, his understanding of human nature is not really tested in an active way (he objects to COMEDIAN’S immoral ways but never does anything about them). His journey in no way prepares him to seriously confront the bad guy’s cynical idea of humanity, and therefore does little to draw the theme of this story into focus.

The SILK SPECTRE is on a journey of coming to grips with the fact that her mother was in love with a totally immoral guy who raped her, and that he is in fact her father. Again, fascinating stuff. But how it relates to any of the main action of the movie is beyond me. She’s also letting go of her emotionally unavailable boyfriend and trading him in for an emotionally available model. And, like the NITE OWL she’s learning to have fun again.

THEME: Finding a guy who’s available will lead you to happiness and reconnecting with who you really are.

Again, a nice theme for a romantic comedy, but totally unrelated.

RORSCHACH: At least he hates people and is forced to confront his hatred and the brutality and awful nature of humanity. Bringing him to the point where he is the only person who believes enough in humanity to tell them to truth is a brilliant idea, and well integrated with theme. The problem is, nothing happens in the plot to bring him to this point. His whole journey is preparing him to agree with the bad guy– the humanity he sees is beyond redemption– without a glimpse of hope or goodness. A theme based story would have forced him to change, by coming to terms with what’s good about the world, and in this way become the voice hope, even in his destruction. Instead, his character behaves in ways that defy understanding. The writer hopes to create a powerful moment by having Manhattan destroy his friend. But the action has no value, because the journeys of these characters have not made it inevitable.

THE COMEDIAN: Dead by the end of the first scene, The Comedian is barely an active character in the movie because his story happens in the past, and therefore primarily functions as exposition. There are two exceptions, the moments when his story thematically intersects with that of the Bat and Manhattan, forcing them both to confront the dark side of their nature. These moments could have become the structure of a theme based story, but in this execution, nothing ever comes of them. Which is a shame because he’s the only character whose journey is truly related to the theme: a super hero who wants to save the world, but can’t seem to overcome the dark sides of himself.

The sad thing is that “Watchmen” already contains many of the elements that could have been woven into a strong movie, focused by a complex theme that draws us toward an inevitable conclusion. Even looking over the harsh criticism I have written above, you can probably see elements that could have been woven together to explore the theme of the movie and draw it into focus.

Take a minute and think about how these stories could have been refocused. What would YOUR structure look like for this film? And what would your theme be?

Jake