How to Manage Expectations, Addendum: Know the Dramatic Question

As I wrote the preceding series, I kept circling around a definition that I never really nailed down: What is the “dramatic question”? 


The primary purpose of the dramatic question is to let the audience know when the story will end.  What will constitute the final victory or failure? 

In many stories, the dramatic question is so obvious that the writer doesn’t have to worry about clarifying it: Will the couple find true love?  Will the hero defeat the villain? Who killed that dead body that was discovered in the first scene?

But in other stories, the dramatic question is not immediately obvious, so the writer has to carefully shape it in the audience’s minds.  I’ve given the examples of Charley Varrick and Never Cry Wolf a few times now, but in both cases it still would have been fairly obvious that the movie was over, since each movie ends with the hero leaving town.  In these cases, the question was intended to make an anticlimactic ending more satisfying. 

But let’s look at stories that truly need the dramatic question to be stated.  The Godfather is a long, sprawling movie.  Our hero Michael even leaves town in the middle, hangs around in Sicily for a half hour of screentime, and then comes back for the final stretch.  The primary relationship, between Michael and his dad, ends halfway through when his dad dies.  The secondary relationship, between Michael and his fiancé Kay, seems to end when Michael weds someone else in Sicily.  Why doesn’t the audience get (overly) frustrated? 

Here, too, the end date is planted in our mind subtly at the beginning of the movie, when Michael tells Kay, “In five years, the Corleone family will be completely legitimate.”  So the dramatic question becomes, “Is that true?”  No matter how many ups and down and beginnings and endings Michael experiences over those long five years, the ultimate question remains unanswered, so the audience is willing to go along for the ride towards that five-year deadline without saying, “Jeez, I thought this movie was over an hour ago!” 

This, I now realize, is the primary purpose of framing sequences, flashforwards, and past-tense voiceovers: If a story (American Beauty, for instance) does not have an obvious dramatic question, then you must pose one at the beginning by indicating what event we’re building towards in the future. 
Keeping a movie going past the end of the dramatic question is exasperating for the audience, even if they like the movie.  In The Big Sleep, the original mystery is solved 2/3 of the way through, leaving the audience baffled as to why the movie keeps going.  And Gone with the Wind never fails to exasperate me: The war ends, Tara is restored, the couple seems to break up definitively, then get back together definitively, then marry, then have a kid, then on and on and on.  Even when Rhett finally leaves Scarlet at the end, I don’t really buy that it’s for good.  What is the dramatic question here??  Unlike in The Godfather, this sprawling epic saga doesn’t seem to have a pre-established end point. No dramatic question unites the movie. 
Tomorrow: Unfinished business…