The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is there one gut-punch scene where the subtext falls away and the characters really lay into each other?

A producer was giving me a long list of notes on a script, and then he tacked onto the end, as if it were self-explanatory, “Oh, yeah, and make sure you add one of those scenes that an actress will demand before she agrees to play the part.” Huh? What scenes? “You know, one of those scenes where she takes a stand and then breaks down and cries.” Um, okay … I dutifully added such a scene. 

Only months later did I really start to understand why. The American Horror Story pilot got a very mixed reaction, but one thing all the reviews had in common was a puzzlement that Connie Britton was willing to do such a cheesy show right after her acclaimed five-year stint on Friday Night Lights.

Watching the pilot, I wondered that, too, until I got to the gut-punch scene. Britton and husband, Dylan McDermott, have been ignoring their marriage problems throughout the episode, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, they finally let each other have it, and I finally understood that note. This one scene is so strong it would have lured anybody into the role.

If a story is all text and no subtext, it’ll suck. On the other hand, if the subtext never erupts to the surface, that can be just as bad. Once and only once, let the emotions come roaring out without a filter. Let your characters hit each other with everything they have and tear each other apart. Again, the trick is to first roll the rock uphill as long as you can. The more scenes you have of sublimated emotion and indirect conflict, the more tension you will build. Stars like Connie Britton understand the power of those sublimated scenes, too, and they love to play them. But once they’ve created all that potential energy, they’ll want to release it.

Yes, you should have as few direct confrontations as possible and let your characters trick and trap each other instead. But eventually all the tricks and traps are for naught, and the characters have no choice but to rip into each other directly. When all else fails, let them go for the gut punch.

Rulebook Casefile: The Ultimate Gutpunch in The Fighter

In “Little Women”, Louisa May Alcott has one of my favorite lines in literature: “Being good would be easy if we could do it all at once.”

Dicky in The Fighter wants to become a good person, and he “turns a new leaf” almost every day of his life, but it never takes. The pain of his failures overtakes him and he once again seeks out crack because of the relief it brings: “You feel like everything is ahead of you.” After all, he was once the “Pride of Lowell”, the scrappy young fighter who knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard, and then he lost it all. His troughs are all the more painful because his peak was so high. Any modest success he achieves now will only be mockery of his past glory, so why try?

It’s not that Dicky doesn’t have people who love him: He has friends and family who demand that he do better and snap out of his addiction, but it never works. Then he meets Charlene.

Dicky has returned from prison, determined to become Micky’s trainer again, but Charlene and Micky’s new handlers forbid it. At first Micky sides with them, then changes his mind and lets Dicky back in the ring (causing Charlene to storm out), then changes his mind again and kicks Dicky out after all. Dicky realizes that he must reach out to Charlene and work things out. He hates her, but he knows Micky needs her.

• Dicky: I ain’t got no use for you either, but my brother loves you, and you can’t just run away because of me, he don’t deserve that, alright? So I will quit, if you want me to quit.
• Charlene: You’re full of shit.
• Dicky: Swear to god, I will quit if it means you come back, but I want you to think about something. Micky has a chance to do something I never did, and in my time I never had.
• Charlene: Oh yeah: “My big chance was with Sugar Ray Leonard!  I’m so great!  I’m the pride of fucking Lowell! Oh yeah, I fought Sugar Ray Leonard!” I heard it.
• Dicky: I’m here to make things right.
• Charlene: Okay, let’s make things right. Number one: you didn’t knock down Sugar Ray Leonard. He tripped.

Then she just looks at him.  Boom. Gutpunch. Dicky’s manic energy deflates. He flounders, and tries to gutpunch her back, but he soon acquiesces, implicitly accepting her terms. 

He thinks that offering to quit (and thereby acknowledging that Micky needs her more than him) is the ultimate abasement, and so that’ll win her over. But she has another abasement in mind. It’s not enough to take away his present position, she sees that she has to take away his past position as well. He can’t help if he keeps pretending that he’s passing the mantle on to his brother. He can only help if he admits that it was never his.

This, at long last, is what Dicky needs to hear. He can stop trying to live up to his glory days because they never existed. He’s just who he is, that’s all he’s ever been, that’s all he’ll ever be, and that’s all he needs to be. He loses his past and gains a future. This is the best kind of gutpunch: brutal, incisive, and absolutely necessary.

P.S. This also backs up another old post:

• The few times that someone has told me what my problem was and actually hit the nail on the head, they were people who hated my guts and never wanted to see me again. In each case, I wasn’t happy to hear it, and I tended to let them know it. Only later did I sheepishly realize that they had actually told me something I needed to hear.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES, a few.
Alien	YES, literally, with Ripley and Ash.
An Education	YES. A sequence of them: Her teacher finally lays into her, she finally lays into her parents, headmistress devastates her.
The Babadook	YES. the finale. “You don’t know how many times I wish it was you, not him, that died.”
Blazing Saddles	NO. Nobody is confronted about their flaws.  No masks ever fall away.
Blue Velvet	Yes and no: the subtext falls away when Dorothy shows up at Jeffrey’s house, but Jeffrey and Sandy still don’t have it out openly.
The Bourne Identity	YES. when Bourne and Conklin finally confront each other.
Bridesmaids	YES. Very much so, at the shower.
Casablanca	YES. the night scene in Rick’s apartment.
Chinatown	YES. One of the most famous.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  literally, when he hits his wife.
Do the Right Thing	YES. There are several, but that is explained by the heat making everybody irritable.  It’s clear that there wouldn’t normally be this many confrontations.
The Farewell	YES. Sort of with her uncle.
The Fighter	YES. a few.  When Charlene says she won’t let Dicky back in Micky’s corner unless he says that Sugar Ray tripped, that’s a hell of a gutpunch.  Also when Micky says “I thought you were my mother too.”
Frozen	YES. When Anna confronts Elsa in the ice palace.
The Fugitive	YES. Not really with Gerard, but yes when Kimble finally confronts Nichols (who responds by literally punching him in the gut).
Get Out	YES. Quite literally.
Groundhog Day	YES. The end of the date sequence for her, the I’m a god scene for him.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. Lots, actually: the last two scenes with father and son, two scenes with Astrid.
In a Lonely Place	YES. the final confrontation.
Iron Man	YES. Late at night with Tony and Pepper.
Lady Bird	YES. Several.
Raising Arizona	YES. they discuss splitting up.
Rushmore	YES. the scene where Cross finally lets him down harshly.
Selma	YES. The tape scene, certainly.  Johnson and King, on the other hand, never really lay into each other.
The Shining	YES. Pretty much, when Wendy finds the pages.  But even then, she’s able to let him have it with the bat, but still not verbally.
Sideways	YES. Miles has one as Maya is dumping him, and Jack has one after the ostrich attack.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. the big “Lambs” scene.
Star Wars	YES. Somewhat, when Luke and Leia confront Han.
Sunset Boulevard	YES. two in a row, when Joe confronts Betty and then Norma.

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is exposition withheld until the hero and the audience are both demanding to know it?

Writers hate exposition (long scenes where someone sits down and explains the plot). Not only is exposition clunky, dull, and uninvolving, but it’s just so … so … uncool. Cool writers are those who come up with elegant ways to include exposition and still get the story across. Letting characters explain everything is admitting defeat. 

The worst offenders of the dreaded “exposition dump” are supposedly the James Bond movies. (In the Austin Powers spoofs, for example, Bond’s boss, M, is replaced by a character named Basil Exposition.) And indeed, in some of the more lazily plotted Bond movies, like Tomorrow Never Dies, the first we see of Bond is when he saunters into M’s office for a new assignment and gets smothered in facts while he listens blandly, even though the audience has no reason to care at this point.

Distaste for this sort of thing has led some writers to try to do away with exposition entirely. Certainly, when I was a kid, we would fast-forward through all talking scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark on VHS. Problem solved, right? But no, that doesn’t work, either: We had no idea what was going on!

The modern equivalent of my nine-year-old mind-set can be found in the later Harry Potter movies, where they left all the boring “story” parts out. If you want to know what’s going on, I sure hope you’ve read the books. Actually, I hope you’ve read them three times, because I’ve read them twice and still couldn’t keep track of the characters onscreen or what’s significant about each plot turn. It is like watching a three-hour trailer for an even longer movie: “Here’s a bunch of creepy-looking suspense scenes! Don’t they make you wish you knew what was going on?”

These movies prove there is such a thing as too little exposition. You can’t just cut the entire story out. As we’ve already established, the audience can’t care about the story until they care about the hero, but once they are invested in the hero’s problem, then they’re going to want to know everything the hero wants to know. Once we’re firmly perched on the hero’s shoulder, the audience will want, nay demand, to figure out everything at the same time.

This brings us back to a point that keeps popping up: A scene is not about something happening; it’s about a character’s attitude toward something happening. That’s even more true for exposition. Audiences hate to listen to exposition if the hero isn’t having an emotional reaction to the news, but, as with everything else, they will feel something if the hero feels something. When it comes to exposition, upsetting news is the best news.

If you look back at some of those James Bond movies, you might notice a few do a better job than others with all the dreaded exposition. In the best of the recent ones, like Goldeneye or Casino Royale, we first meet Bond on a mission, operating with little information, and it’s only when things get bollixed up that he storms into M’s office demanding to know the whole dirty story.

That makes the exposition a lot more interesting. Don’t give the hero or the audience any information they aren’t demanding to know.

Every scene should reverse an expectation, and exposition scenes are not exempt. If you need a scene in which the hero hears a five-minute speech revealing the nuts and bolts of his grandfather’s corrupt business empire, then take some time first to roll that rock uphill before you release it. Let the hero brag in a previous scene about how proud he is to know our country was built by great philanthropists like his grandfather. Now when he hears the ugly truth, the audience will identify with the turmoil it causes within him as each painful word lands.

Here’s another part of withholding exposition: A major character’s backstory shouldn’t be revealed in the same scene as that character’s first appearance.

As we’ve already established, you shouldn’t reveal a backstory unless it’s ironic, and irony is defined as any meaningful gap between expectation and outcome. Without that gap, there’s no meaning. You must first establish one aspect, then ironically reverse it once the audience has had some time to accept the original notion.

This gap can go either way: A character’s ironic backstory can be revealed at least one scene before she appears, or at least one scene later. If the latter, it should ideally be revealed one or more scenes after someone asks about it to no avail. Audiences don’t care about backstory unless they’ve been specifically denied it. Then they’ll crave it.

Let’s compare these three situations:

• The all-at-one-time version: A guy shows up to volunteer and says, “Hi. I used to be a member of a gang, but now I’m trying to go straight, and I’m here to help.” 
• The backstory-first version: At the volunteer center, community organizers hear a gang member who hassled them in the past is looking for them, and they’re told to be on the lookout, but then he shows up and claims he wants to help. 
• The backstory-a-few-scenes-later version: Our point-of-view character sees a volunteer show up, “I’m here to help.” The boss snorts and replies, “Sure you are. We don’t need any trouble here,” and the volunteer slinks away. Our point-of-view character asks, “What was that about?” “Nothing.” Only later does the point-of-view character decide he really needs the extra help, leading him to ask around and find out about the volunteer’s violent past. 

The first version is terrible, but the next two work much better. Of course, the other two take more time, but it’s worth it.

Audiences instinctively hate when a character is introduced along with an info packet. Trying to do it at the same time is like saying, “Here’s who this person is, but wait he’s actually much more interesting than he seems if you’ll just let me explain!” Nobody wants to hear that. As with everything else, if the character cares, then the audience will care.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES. Info about Trish comes out slowly, for instance.
Alien	YES. We get only scant details of the situation: who these guys are, what they’re doing, who they work for, what industry they’re in, what the alien is, where it came from, what was the deal on that planet, etc., and we don’t mind at all.
An Education	YES.
The Babadook	YES. They know everything but it takes us a while to catch on.
Blazing Saddles	YES. why Bart is in the west, why the quicksand is important to the story, etc.
Blue Velvet	YES. Jeffrey jumps in with very little information.
The Bourne Identity	NO. we often find it out before the hero does, and then see the hero figure it out later, which creates repeated beats and makes the middle twenty minutes sag a bit.
Bridesmaids	YES. The story of the bakery comes out slowly.
Casablanca	YES. They don’t even reveal Rick until we’re eager to meet him, and they tease that long flashback for a long time before they deliver it.
Chinatown	YES. Exposition is doled out very slowly and carefully, with no info-dumps.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  Information about the mafia set-up and Joe’s mission comes out slowly.
Do the Right Thing	YES. There is almost no exposition, but what little there is (such as why they have their pizzeria here) comes out gradually and naturally.
The Farewell	YES. There’s no exposition.
The Fighter	YES. it’s expertly parceled out, particularly our growing awareness of the magnitude of Dicky’s (and therefore Micky’s) problem.
Frozen	NO. it’s all dumped on us at the beginning, but they do a great job with it, interweaving it with a song.
The Fugitive	YES. Well, we begin with a massive info-dump, but the intercutting is so well done that it feels fine.  After that the exposition is dribbled out and well done.  Even with Kimble’s flashbacks, we only get the flashbacks as we need to get them (we don’t see the one-armed man until we need that part.)
Get Out	YES.
Groundhog Day	YES. Curse is never explained. We don’t find out her history until he needs to know it to seduce her. We never find out his at all.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. There’s a voiceover info-dump at the beginning to introduce the bizarre world, but it describes each aspect as it plays its part in a big battle, piquing our interest about each one as it’s explained. From that point, the additional exposition dribbles out.
In a Lonely Place	YES. we don’t find out anything about his past until his present is compelling.
Iron Man	YES. We’ve gotten to like him and then seen him suffer before we find out who he is, so now we care enough to find out.
Lady Bird	NA: Not much plot, not much exposition.  They never explain why she has a hispanic brother.
Raising Arizona	Nope, we begin with a massive ten-minute info-dump.
Rushmore	NO. it’s awkwardly dumped on us in the first scene.
Selma	YES. The recent history of the movement is not delivered until SCLC and SNCC are fighting about it.
The Shining	Not really, we get a pretty big info-dump about the past right up front.
Sideways	YES. Info about the marriage and the women leaks out slowly.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Very much so.
Star Wars	YES. We start out with a massive onscreen info dump, but the exposition is parceled out deftly from that point on. Breaking up the video playback into two sections is a nice trick.
Sunset Boulevard	Somewhat, we get a few big info-dumps, but Max’s story drips out nicely.

The Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the hero have at least one big “I understand you” moment with a love interest or primary emotional partner?

We’ve all had the experience. You’re sure you’ve met your perfect match. You rhapsodize for hours about everything that made you fall head over heels, but at the end, your friend just shrugs and says, “Are you kidding me?”

The problem, of course, is that your hormonal response is distorting your reality, and your cool-eyed friends are evaluating the shelf life of this new relationship dispassionately, asking, "Do these two have enough in common? Will they treat each other well? Do they need each other?"

It’s great to capture the subjective experience of falling in love, of course, though novelists have a much better chance of doing that than screenwriters.

Screenwriters can try to cheat, like West Side Story did, by using subjective camera effects to capture Tony’s besotted vision of Maria, but even back then, viewers just rolled their eyes. The camera eye is not the hero’s eye, and we will always see more than he sees, no matter how much Vaseline you smear on the lens.

But in some ways, the screenwriter has the advantage, because a well-written story in any medium will capture both the subjective experience and an objective perspective on this relationship. Allow the audience to be both the besotted hero and the dubious friend.

So this is one case where you don’t want to “write what you know.” Don’t trust your own distorted memories of love and/or heartbreak. Instead think back to your friends’ relationships. Which relationships did you root for, and which infuriated you? Which ones endangered your friends, and which saved them? Most important, how did you know they were right for each other, maybe even before they did?

Whether your first draft is one huge love story or the romance is a minor element, once you’ve gotten some notes, you may be shocked to discover that nobody sees what you see in the love interest.

The reason so many love stories fail, and so many lame love interests drag stories down, is that the writers have failed to add “I understand you” scenes. I’m a huge Harry Potter fan, but the series has a big flaw: Nowhere in the course of these seven massive books does Rowling ever put in a single “I understand you” scene between either of the main couples: Harry/Ginny or Ron/Hermione! Ginny is especially thin; she’s basically just “the girlfriend.” Hermione is the one who understands Harry, and they should have ended up together. Finally, years later, Rowling acknowledged her mistake in an interview with Wonderland magazine.

• I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment. That’s how it was conceived, really. For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione ended up with Ron. 

Of course, given that your hero starts with a false goal and a false statement of philosophy, it’s tempting to make the love interest the character who lectures your hero from the start. But then you risk drifting into another category of alienating character: Just as you don’t want a hero who just says no, likewise you don’t want a stick-in-the-mud love interest, such as the kind you find in Old School and many other man-child comedies.

Better “I understand you” moments don’t have anything to do with wanting to change the other person and everything to do with accepting: We don’t root for Beauty and the Beast to get together until the beast gives Belle his library.

Sometimes the hero finally meets someone who sees the world his way: In 1984, Winston truly falls in love with Julia when he’s feeling sympathy for the beaten-down old cleaning lady and Julia surprises him by saying that she finds the woman beautiful. She sees what he sees.

Sometimes you can establish that the two characters understand each other before they even meet. We know in advance that the heroes in Friends with Benefits will bond because we see they have an ironically shared dislike of relationships. And what could be more romantic than the song that drifts from Maurice Chavalier in the city out to Jeanette MacDonald in the country in Love Me Tonight, uniting their hearts before either knows the other exists?

Just as you must occasionally check with your friends to make sure you’re not blinded by love in real life, you must get notes to find out how well your fictional romance is playing with your readers. Don’t be surprised if you need to give it a firmer foundation.

Rulebook Casefile: The “I Understand You” Moment in Rushmore

In Rushmore, Max Fisher wants to manufacture a romance with his crush Miss Cross as quickly as possible, so this becomes another one of his elaborate schemes. Like any great writer, Max knows that he must create an “I Understand You” moment: a moment that makes her say, almost despite herself, “Oh, look, there’s a bit of kismet here, maybe we should be together.”

You can see him endeavoring to do this in his feigned “chance encounter” early in the movie. She is on the bleachers reading, so he just happens to choose the same bleachers for his own reading. He wants to seem to be a serious, thoughtful adult like her, so he gets out from the library “The Powers That Be” by David Halberstam, a forgotten icon of parlor-room intellectuals of a generation before. He’s hoping she’ll say, “Wow, this is no kid, this is a serious adult like me, and I’ve just met my soulmate.” But of course, it doesn’t work. He’s no adult, and it’s not going to happen.

Max finally meets a real romantic prospect towards the end of the film. At first, he sees that Margaret Yang is drawn to his energy, as many kids are, and so he uses her in his play without taking her interest seriously, ignoring her when she comes to his house. It’s only later, in a chance encounter, that he realizes that this is a kindred spirit.

He’s flying kites with his acolyte Dirk, only to discover that Margaret is flying her remote control plane in the same field. He then sees that she has made an adorable flight plan, much like the kind of thing he would make. That’s the “I understand you” moment, but what happens next really seals the deal: he finds out that she almost defrauded the navy into buying a science project that she faked. She is more mature and compassionate than Max, but she is, at heart, a dreamer and a schemer just like him.

For practical reasons, Margaret is the only real prospect for Max in the movie, but she can’t just be “the love interest” or else we will reject her. We the audience must decide for ourselves that they belong together, preferably before Max does. That way, we get the thrill of watching our hero belatedly make the right romantic choice, fulfilling our desires, not just his own.

An “I understand you” moment will sometimes consist of one character entreating another for love and proving his or her case, but just as often, it sneaks up on both characters, unexpectedly proving to the both of them that they belong together (In this case, before he’s ready to hear it, and after she’s already given up.) 

 
Rulebook Casefile: An I Understand You Moment in Humans of New York

I think I’ll spend this week looking at lessons that can be drawn from “Humans of New York” posts. I’ll  start with this one, which is one of my favorites:

This exemplifies two rules: The importance of an “I understand you” moment at the beginning of a romance, and the importance of ironic positive developments. Presumably, both men came to the party determined to be antisocial sticks-in-the-mud, and then the two sticks saw each other across a crowded room. (Fun fact: I used to write songs in college, and one had the chorus “I don’t care and you don’t care so let’s not care together”)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Villains Can Create Fake “I Understand You” Moments

Well, folks I thought we were all done with Frozen, but I got an interesting comment on the original checklist post and I thought it deserved its own post. Jane says:

• I feel like one major problem with Frozen is that Hans and Anna actually have way better ‘I understand you’ moments than Kristoff and Anna do. They both connect over feeling ignored by their siblings, and their song is full of lines where they intuitively understand one another's way of looking at things (‘Jinx!’ ‘Jinx again!’). Every time they talk about finishing each other's sandwiches, I think, Maybe those two crazy kids can work it out.

I would go further to point out that Hans even “understands” the expectations Anna had before she ever met him: “I suddenly see him standing there, a beautiful stranger tall and fair…Then we laugh and talk all evening, which is totally bizarre, nothing like the life I’ve lived so far…”

Then she meets Hans and, as Jane says, they seem to be in total synchronicity. The filmmakers know that we’re primed to respond to “I understand you” moments, so they pile them on here, not just tricking Anna into falling for Hans, but tricking the audience, too. (“Aha, they understand each other’s childhood insecurities, and in movies that means we’ve found the real love interest.”)

But of course it’s all a lie. Hans is a psychopath, and he’s “mirroring” Anna: reflecting back to her magnified, fake versions of her own thoughts and feelings. He’s “reading” her to find out what she wants, deep down, and then instantly transforming himself into her ideal, in order to steal her throne.

The Frozen filmmakers are playing chess while we’re playing checkers. They understand our narrative expectations better than we do, and they’re masterfully manipulating us, just as Hans manipulates Anna. They know that we and she both crave “I understand you” moments, and they’re warning us against too-easy storytelling choices just as surely as they’re warning girls against psychopathic guys.

It’s interesting that there’s no one moment that we revisit in retrospect and say, “Aha, that was the clue that he was evil!” Even when we know the twist, the foreshadowing is almost invisible. But it’s there. In their duet, Anna is talking about love, but Hans is saying “I’ve been searching my whole life to find my own place,” which turns out to have a different meaning: He’s been looking for a throne to steal.

When we watch the movie for the first time, it all seems real, and we’re happy for Anna, but we’re also a little deflated: It was too easy, so there’s a suspicion in the back of our minds that maybe this isn’t really the one.

As we said before, Elsa’s love is hard, closed-door love and Hans’s “love” is easy, open-door love, and the movie is making it clear (eventually) that easy love is usually a bad thing.

And this is true in real love and real life: If it comes too easy, it’s probably fake. I noticed this when pitching screenplays: When I walked out of the meeting saying, “That could not have gone better!”, then it was always a pass. They would puff me up, tell me exactly what I wanted to hear, and then whisk me out the door so that they never had to see me again. When a meeting actually went well, it was grueling, as they picked at and poked and prodded my work, trying to figure out why they kinda maybe liked it. When you’re pitching, you want tough closed-door-open-a-crack love, not easy open-door love, which means you’re being blown off.

In movies, life, and love, if someone really understands you, then they’re not going to tell you everything you want to hear. 

 
Rulebook Casefile: The Lack of a False “I Understand You” Moment in Star Trek Beyond

I just watched Star Trek Beyond and boy is it limp. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not an utter horrorshow like the last one— If I had to pick one word to describe it, I would just choose “lazy.”

We start off with an unexciting cold open, played for laughs, in which Kirk, standing still, gets attacked by little creatures. This ends quickly without any real jeopardy, then we have a dreadful 15 minutes of “character scenes” in which Kirk wallows in vague ennui. Then an alien woman shows up asking that the Enterprise save her planet (or something, it’s not clear.) As soon as the Enterprise shows up at her planet, it gets attacked and destroyed by some bad guys. Escaping to the planet below, Kirk realizes that the woman who asked them to come there did so knowing that they were being lured into a trap to be destroyed. At first she claims she had to do so to save her crew, and then she seems to be working with the bad guys maybe, and then she’s killed off unceremoniously.

The movie’s biggest problem is that this alien woman makes no impression on us before she betrays our heroes. Helping her is the entire motivation for the movie! In the whole epic scene in which the Enterprise gets destroyed, they’re sacrificing everything to save her, but she’s barely had any lines!

This movie needs what Frozen had: a fake “I understand you” moment. Kirk should be hesitant to help her until she reaches out to him with an impassioned cry of the heart that makes him care so much that he’s even willing to sacrifice his ship to help her in her cause (whatever that cause was. Again, it was unclear). They should bond deeply, and we in the audience should feel moved by her story.

Of course, it’s tricky, you don’t just want an unfair fake-out. As with Hans in Frozen, you want to be able to rewatch the movie and realize “Oh, I can see how she’s faking him out, and how what she’s saying can actually be taken either way.” But even the unfair version would be better than what they have. You can’t just assume that the audience will sympathize with a victim because we’re told (falsely) that she’s a victim. You have to make us feel that, or we won’t care (with good reason, in this case.)

(Another problem here is that the movie decides that, after 50 successful years of Star Trek, they’re suddenly going to worry about the language translation problem, so they have the woman speaking in her alien language, with a little automatic translator on her lapel repeating the words in English. Before this, for all intents and purposes, everybody in the Trek universe just spoke English, and that worked just fine. Why mess with success? The way they do it makes it even more impossible to empathize with her.)

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES. Trish proposes waiting on sex.
Alien	NO.
An Education	YES. Sort of: With her teacher.
The Babadook	YES. she and her son have it out.
Blazing Saddles	YES. He and the Cisco kid bond while discussing their pasts.
Blue Velvet	NO. Not really.  Nobody ever gets him.
The Bourne Identity	YES. He and Marie have several.
Bridesmaids	YES. with Lillian.
Casablanca	YES. they have it out.
Chinatown	YES. When Evelyn tries to overcome his reluctance to talk about Chinatown.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  ironically with Lefty, when they talk in the car.
Do the Right Thing	NO. nobody really understands Mookie.
The Farewell	YES. Her Nai Nai perceptively sees her problems, and her uncle sees her flaws.
The Fighter	YES. Very much so, after the first date.
Frozen	YES. When Kristoff points out to her that she barely knows Hans, and he clearly has her number.
The Fugitive	YES. the very end between Girard and Kimble
Get Out	YES. Well, there are several false “I understand you” moments.
Groundhog Day	YES. Phil keeps trying to engineer false “I understand you” moments with Rita, but ultiamtely they have real ones once he tells her.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. at sunset.
In a Lonely Place	NO. They never really understand each other.
Iron Man	YES. At the party
Lady Bird	YES. She and her mom each reach out to the other in one-way ways, her mom with the letters she didn’t intend to send, the daughter with a phone message.  Maybe Metcalf would have won that Oscar if she’d picked up the phone at the end.
Raising Arizona	YES. Many
Rushmore	YES. He tries to create fake moments with Ms. Cross, but then he has a genuine one with Margaret Yang, when he finds that she's created an adorable flight plan for her model plane just like he would make.
Selma	YES.
The Shining	Just between Danny and Halloran
Sideways	YES. a few.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Very much so: the lambs scene.
Star Wars	NO, which is why the sequel writers decided not to get them together after all.
Sunset Boulevard	YES. between he and Betty talking about their pasts.