The Book that Breaks All the Rules, Part 5: Commit to your Genre

Martin has an odd relationship to his genre. We begin with a raid north of the Wall where our rangers are killed by zombies, who are pretty clearly supernatural (with maybe a 1% chance that it’s not supernatural.) Much later, we get another zombie attack, this one more clearly supernatural. Finally, we end with dragon eggs hatching. But that’s only 3 out of a whopping 72 chapters. In the other 69 the drama is mostly socio-political. Occasionally magic beasts will come up in conversation, but they always seem to have the status of dubious legends. Every time someone mentions fairy folk or giants existing years ago, there’s another character to ridicule the whole idea.

So who is Martin’s ideal reader? Is he writing for those who prefers the realistic push and pull of historical fiction, or does he truly want to be the American Tolkien and fully embrace his fantasy setting? Is his biggest influence not Tolkien but, as he has intimated, the French author Maurice Druon, author of the “Accursed Kings” historical fiction series?

You’re supposed to establish a genre in the opening pages and then consistently deliver the familiar pleasures of that genre. You’re supposed to assure one type of reader that you will satisfy them and then pay off that promise.  That first scene breaks the rules.

Does he get away with it? Pretty much yes. I know that there are some readers who put the book aside when they realize that they’ve been falsely led into reading a socio-political book, saying, “Eh, not enough magic.” But for most readers, it’s actually kind of cool: Yes, he’ll give us some magic, but he’s also confident in his ability to make the intrigue just as interesting while we’re waiting, and we enjoy those 69 chapters just as much as the other 3. We get just enough genre thrills, but spend most of the book feeling like we’re maybe smart and sophisticated enough that we don’t need them.

But there’s definitely a tension: Martin sets up a situation in which zombies and dragons are on the very fringes of the narrative, literally and figuratively, but he also tells us that he comes to sing to us of ice and fire. Much is made of the fact that the zombies and dragons will play a bigger and bigger role in later books, even though they’re barely glimpsed here.

Yesterday, I proposed one reason Martin has been slow to turn out more books. Here’s another: Maybe he never really wanted to write about these magical creatures, and included them only to sell his fictionalized history to the fantasy crowd, but he’s set up a situation where he’ll have to write that stuff more and more, and he’s just not interested in doing that. Let HBO handle that stuff.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Establish the Worst Things That Could Happen

“Holes” uses a classic trick: it establishes the two worst things that could happen, then those things of course happen. First, after the two “usually”s I mentioned last time, we get an “Always”

• But you don’t want to be bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard. That’s the worst thing that can happen to you. You will die a slow and painful death.
• Always.

Then we’re told that there are no fences at the camp because anyone attempting to run away is guaranteed to die in the desert. Of course, before the book is over, Stanley will survive both getting swarmed by lizards and attempting to run away from camp.

This is an area where you can benefit from your reader’s ability to guess where you’re going based on other books they’ve read. Sachar could tease us in his narration and say, “Little did Stanley suspect that soon he would do just that,” but he doesn’t have to. He knows that we’ve read books before and we know that if it gets an “Always”, then we’re about to see an amazing exception. That “Always” is all the foreshadowing he needs.

Best of 2017, #1: Lady Bird

What a wonderful film.  Our top two movies are so similar: Both were created by performers who weren’t known as writers or directors but both turned out to be geniuses in disguise.  It makes you wonder who else is sitting on hidden talents.  Some old rules this reminded me of:

Begin When the Problem Becomes Undeniable, End When It’s Resolved: What is the story of this movie? If I was describing it to someone, I would probably say “It’s the story of a girl’s senior year of high school,” so the most obvious structure would be to begin with an aerial shot of the kids entering school on the first day and end on another aerial shot of her flying off for college, but the movie is smarter than that.

This is a movie with several plotlines, but Gerwig knows she has to choose one storyline to predominate, begin the movie when that problem becomes undeniable, and end when it resolves. Gerwig probably could have structured the movie around Lady Bird’s relationship with her best friend, or her attempts to lose her virginity, but she ultimately decided that the conflict with the mom was the emotional heart of the movie, so she begins a little bit before the school year (iirc) with the moment that relationship becomes open warfare, and then she actually keeps the story going a little bit into college to find the moment when that storyline resolves itself, because Lady Bird has to go away to get some perspective on their relationship.

The Trailer Scene: So let’s talk about the opening scene, because it’s a great example of a “Holy Crap” moment that’s necessary to make a trailer work. The movie is a low-key coming of age story, and those are notoriously hard to sell. The trailer does include the best moment in the movie, when Lady Bird asks her mom, “What if this is the best version [of myself]?” and her mom gives her that wonderful look, but that’s not really a great trailer moment. Even if your movie is very realistic, it’s good to have one moment that strains that realism to the breaking point to put a moment of outrageousness in the trailer, and jumping out of the car while her mom is driving is a perfect example. It’s not so extreme that it would make the news, but it’s definitely nothing the characters will ever forget.

I know that for me, jumping out got a big laugh when I saw the trailer and made me want to see the movie. It assured me that this wouldn’t be that kind of movie (which is to say, the kind of movie Gerwig usually stars in), too low key to care about, or too cool for school. It assured me: This is going to be a comedy, and you’ll be allowed to laugh.

Reversible reversible behavior. But this is a realistic movie, and it’s going to also score points by undermining our traditional narrative expectations in favor of greater realism. One great little moment: Whenever a character, especially a teen character, insists on an alias, we also await the moment when they drop the façade and admit their real name, because that’s classic reversible behavior, and sure enough this movie delivers that moment when Lady Bird is at her first college party, but then it wonderfully undercuts that breakthrough. She admits her name, but then the boy asks her where she’s from and she panics and lies. One step forward, one step back. This is what we want out of realistic movies: clever subversion of tropes in a way that makes us think, “Finally a movie that’s willing to show how it really is!”

Best of 2017, #3: I, Tonya

Two thoughts on this movie:

A new tool: The fake-out redemption scene. This movie has a scene in it that’s very similar to a scene in my play, and I think it works well in both places: Like so many stories that seek to redeem a terrible person, this movie features an even-worse parent. I’ve talked about this before with Kind Hearts and Coronets, Downhill Racer, “The Sopranos”, and Trainwreck: Our hero may be bad, but they come by it honestly, and at least they’re better than their terrible parent.

But these scenes can be just as unsatisfying onscreen as they are in real life. We want some human connection between parent and child. We want a breakthrough and maybe some redemption. But you also want to be true to your character, and if your parent is awful enough to justify terrible behavior, then they may be unredeemable. So you can cheat to sneak in such a scene: You can have the parent finally tell the child what they’ve always wanted to hear, and give the kid some emotional catharsis, but only because the parent is manipulating the child.

In the scene in which Tonya Harding’s mom finally tells her what she wants to hear, my first thought was “I don’t really buy this plot turn”, then I realized that Allison Janney was good enough to sell the scene if it were genuine, so if I wasn’t buying it, there was probably a good reason for that. Then I realized, “Hey, this is just like the scene I wrote!” It was a fake-out and I thought it worked well, putting a nice button on their relationship, even if it was fake.

Tricky tone: The big question with this movie is, “Should a movie with this much domestic violence be this fun?” Is it trivializing the violence? Turning it into entertainment? …Worst of all, does it treat this violence as no big deal because the victim is Tonya Harding?

But ultimately, I would say the movie answers all these questions satisfactorily and pulls off its tricky tone, and it all comes down to one moment: That first out-of-nowhere face-punch. Because of the movie’s fun, rock-fueled uptempo tone, I was totally unprepared for the domestic violence to begin, and it hit me in the face as well. I felt the shock, betrayal and fear that comes with that punch all the more because of the tone, and that’s what you want when you tell stories: to make the audience feel the same pain the hero is feeling.

After that punch, the uptempo and humorous tone continues, despite the violence getting worse, but the friction is maintained. The fun tone kept me thinking, “Surely the violence will end. There will be redemption. This will become a love story again.” And of course, that’s just what Tonya is thinking as she goes back to him over and over. The tricky tone keeps us in her head, keeping the violence continually shocking and painful, specifically because it violates the tone. It thought it was a very effective tool.

Best of 2017, #5: The Florida Project

Despite the undeniable raw power of this movie, I was somewhat reluctant to have it on the list, because, as I’ve talked about in past years, the main thing I look for these days at the movies is humanity. Do these characters seem fully human to me? Have the writers found universal humanity in the hearts of their characters? For many of the most acclaimed films these days, the answer is no. 

And at first this seemed like another example. In this bleak look at the lives of a six year old girl and her prostitute mother living in an Orlando hotel room, I feared that the writers were looking at these characters too much from the outside: Look at these wretched lives, and despair!

My fear as I watched was that neither the creators nor the audience were fully inhabiting the movie, frozen out by our ice-hard hero.

But then she finally melts. Just as the movie has rolled the rock uphill for as long as possible, CPS shows up to (finally) take Moonee away from her terrible mom, and at first Moonee barely reacts, then she runs away to a neighboring hotel, finds her one friend, and bursts into some very-well-earned tears. Suddenly, after 100 frozen-out minutes, we’re allowed in, assured that yes, she’s human, heartbreakingly so, and it’s all worth it.

On another note, was I the only once who kept thinking of the documentary Queen of Versailles while watching this? Although one is fiction and the other non-fiction, they make a good pair, both about unloved kids being raised by crooks in the shadow of Disneyworld, with the only difference being that one family is filthy rich and the other is filthy poor.

How to Manage Expectations (aka Tone): The Archive

This section got completely cut from the book at one point, then put back in at half its original length, so there’s lots of good stuff here that didn’t make it into the book...

• How to Manage Expectations, Prologue: Every Criticism is the Product of an Unmet Expectation
• How to Manage Expectations, Step 1: Choose a Genre
• How to Manage Expectations, Step 2: Choose a Sub-Genre or Two (But Not Three)
• How to Manage Expectations, Step 3: Pay Off Two Genre Expectations For Every One You Defy
• How to Manage Expectations, Step 4: Set the Mood
• How to Manage Expectations, Step 5: Plant the Right Questions...
• How to Manage Expectations, Step 6: …And Evade the Wrong Questions
• How to Manage Expectations, Step 7: Put A Frame On It
• How to Manage Expectations, Step 8: Drop One Shoe, Then Wait
• How to Manage Expectations, Step 9: More Fun With Foreshadowing
• How to Manage Expectations, Addendum: Know the Dramatic Question

Storyteller’s Rulebook: The Difference Between Drama and Melodrama is “Would It Make the News?”

I saw a lot of bad indie movies back in the day, but surely one of the most annoying was Blue Car. The main storyline involved a girl having an affair with her teacher, but there was also a subplot –a subplot!- in which, if I remember correctly, her seven year old sister commits suicide.

This is a note I give all the time: It’s too much. I love a good ripe melodrama as much as the next man, but melodrama involves a certain over-the-top tone. Blue Car was played as a straight drama, but the events were beyond the limits imposed by that genre.

Here’s the difference: Would it make the news? Seven year old girls don’t often commit suicide. It’s a huge deal. There would be think pieces about it. But in this movie, it’s so unremarkable that it’s not even the main topic of the movie.

I’ve said before that Moonlight was a little too bleak for me, but it’s a good example of how far you can push drama without going into melodrama. A boy getting beaten up by one boy and then breaking a chair over the back of another boy is violent and shocking, especially if you know the real circumstances, but it wouldn’t make the news, so it’s drama, not melodrama.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Your Genre is Your Taskmaster

This is possibly the number one mistake I see in the manuscripts I read.

You’re written forty pages of great relationship drama and you know that it’s the best thing you’ve ever written. You’ve created deep and rich three-dimensional characters, you’ve imbued them with your own history and pain, and you’ve put them on a collision course, forcing them to deal with their issues and with each other.

But your manuscript begins with an action sequence, has intermittent action sequences throughout, and ends with blowing up an underground lair. Your genre, inescapably, is action, and that forty pages of relationship drama has no action, which means that it has to go, or be significantly transformed.

Your genre is your taskmaster. Action needs action every twenty pages or so. Comedy needs frequent laughs, etc. So what do you do with all that great relationship drama? If you don’t want to lose it, you have to find a way for it to serve the action. The relationship confrontations need to be inextricable from the life-and-death confrontations. The interpersonal breakthroughs need to result in plot breakthroughs. Clocks must always be ticking.

Great writing that violates your genre isn’t great writing. Everything must serve your genre. You either have to jettison a lot of the relationship drama, or you have to jettison the action elements. Good Will Hunting started out as an action script, until they realized that they were doing a better job with the backstory than the frontstory, so they just got rid of the frontstory. Nobody missed it.

Best of 2016, #2: 20th Century Women

The Problem: None!

For those of you who haven’t seen it: Annette Benning plays a single mom in 1979 with two boarders in her rotting California home, trying to raise her teenage son. It’s a crime she didn’t get an Oscar nomination.  (And neither did Amy Adams!  All so that Meryl could get her 50th nomination??)

What I Loved About It: Everything! It was such a relief to get this bracing blast of real life after all the grim brutality offered up by so many of the other movies. It turns out that life is a pretty interesting topic. This movie felt like it could have been made by Eric Rohmer, which is about the highest compliment I know how to pay.

Rulebook Casefile:

• Find Unique But Universal Details: I had never heard of the pass-out game they play (that almost kills the son), but it seemed so real to my experience of adolescence, so I readily accepted it.
• Find the Internecine Conflicts: Looking back on punk, and looking at what it means in retrospect, it would be tempting to show them clashing with preppies all the time, but as an actual punk in 1979, you were far more likely to get caught up in clashes between art punks and hardcore punks. It is our internecine conflicts that dominate our waking hours, not our larger societal roles.
• Impose a Dramatic Question: This movie’s great strength is that it’s a free-ranging slice of life, but you still have to impose a bit of structure in order to make it feel like a coherent story. In this movie, at around the 20 minutes mark, Annette Benning asks the two women in her son’s life to help raise him. Then, near the end, she tells them to cool it. That’s all the structure you need, and Mills hangs his whole sprawling loosey-goosey movie on that rickety frame, which works just fine.

Best of 2016, #3: The Invitation

The Problem: None! Now that we’re in the top three, we’re down to movies that I unreservedly loved.

Warning: I know that not many of you saw this movie, and it’s best if you see it like I did, knowing next to nothing about it, so I would recommend that you read no further, go check it out, and then meet me back here. Unfortunately, I must include mild spoilers from this point on (albeit nothing you couldn’t guess from the trailer)

What I Liked About It: It’s a great movie about L.A. Like our last movie, it’s a great movie about self-destructive grief. It’s a great movie about how we all gaslight ourselves, especially in the age of Trump. We tell ourselves, “The world can’t possibly be this sinister. It’s not so bad. I must be crazy.” Then the bloodbath begins, and we ask, “Why didn’t I trust my terror?”

Rulebook Casefile: Establish the Nature of the Jeopardy. The Invitation is a fantastic thriller, but I hesitate to call it that. It has the structure of many great thrillers, where the real possibility persists for quite some time that everything might have a perfectly reasonable explanation (Think Rear Window). What makes this movie unique is how long it draws out that section of the movie. The sinister nature of the goings-on isn’t confirmed until the last possible moment, right at the beginning of Act Three.

So how do you draw things out that far? One way is to make every little line of dialogue or gesture seem ominous, because the filmmakers use lots of great tricks to put us deep inside the hero’s paranoid head. We jump because he jumps, even though we also keep our distance from him, doubting his sanity.

But the movie also uses a very simple trick. As our hero and heroine are on their way to this dinner party deep in the L.A. hills, they run over a coyote and mostly kill it. Once our hero realizes it can’t be saved, he casually puts it out of its misery with a mighty whack of a tire iron, then continues on his way as the credits roll. This is a way to establish that yes, there will be blood. Even as we doubt our hero’s paranoia later on, that disturbing moment of violence sets the tone. The first thing we saw was a killing, and we’re subconsciously expecting that this will once again become a killing movie. That sustains us during the long wait for the other shoe to drop.

Best Movies of 2016 #6: Birth of a Nation

What I Liked About It: You won’t find a more intense emotional journey than this movie (although our next movie is a close second). Better than any other film, this movie captures the intense outrage of life in slavery.

The Problem: As others have pointed out, the biggest problem with this movie is that they don’t show Nat Turner killing any kids, which is to say, while it does an amazing job capturing the horror of Turner’s situation, it refuses to grapple with the true horror of Turner’s actions in response.

You’ll recall that I had problems with 12 Years a Slave. I thought that movie had the ideal source material for creating an intense bond between the hero and the audience, because, as a free man sold into slavery of the worst kind for a limited amount of time, it had a situation that we could all could totally identify with, and yet I felt that movie was too cold and alienating to let us fully emotionally bond with the hero. This movie has the opposite problem: It commits to the task of forcing our full and total emotional identification, but in this case we have a slave whose story is not an ideal candidate for that.

One can try to argue that Nat Turner’s actions were justified, even when he killed kids, if one wants, but you can’t deny that he was a weird guy. We get brief flashes of Turner’s hallucinations, but not enough. It shows us his logical motivations, but glosses over the fact that one of his major motivations was a solar eclipse. If the movie had wanted to deal more forthrightly with the reality of Turner’s life and actions, it would have needed to forgo some of that intense identification and let us be a little alienated, wondering at the real man’s unknowable tinge of madness.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Horror Feels More Real When It Has Ironies. They say that Trump is too hard to parody because it’s impossible to exaggerate how evil or stupid he is. This too is the problem writers face when portraying slavery. One way to do this is to establish that this owner is “one of the good ones” and then show how inhumanly horrific slavery is at its “best”. Few scenes will stay with you like the one where a slave refuses to eat, so the overseer casually knocks his teeth out to better forcefeed him, all while the “good” owner watches, guilt-ridden, but silent. It’s that look of “What choice do I have? He won’t eat!” that finally drives home the horror, and makes the ending feel inevitable.

Best of 2016, #9: Arrival (Tease Your Twist)

Once again, I’ll start with what didn’t work:

The Problem: Most of the conflict in this movie is false conflict. We start with a very familiar sci-fi situation: Aliens have landed and the scientists want to communicate while the military doesn’t trust them. We’ve seen this a million times before, but this time the situation is tilted too far in the scientists’ direction. It’s way to obvious to us, and it should be obvious to them, that these aliens are super nice guys, but we still get scene after scene of the military freaking out needlessly. Meanwhile, we get a very cool story of watching a linguist decode this language, but the film doesn’t trust this story enough to carry the movie (and they may be right about that). (The most obvious example of false conflict is the fact that the military doesn’t warn Adams or Renner that gravity is about to realign itself. Why not give them a heads up on that? Just to give us and them a little false shock.)

The Meddler: The aliens needed to be even more alien, to the extent that they’re accidentally killing people, either by simply crushing them, or by emitting sounds that split eardrums, or by frying them with force fields, etc. This would up the stakes considerably. Now Adams would be putting her life at risk by entering this ship belonging to these aliens that can’t stop killing people, maybe accidentally, maybe not. Now the military would have a good reason to just wipe these people off the map and the scientists would have a much harder job to do convincing the military that no, these deaths were accidental and we just need to learn to communicate. Then the communication breakthrough would be far more consequential.

What I Liked About It: The performances, the tone, the science, and especially the whopper of a twist.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Tease your twist. A great twist can’t just land like a rock on the head of your audience. As with a murder mystery, you need to “play fair”, laying in a series of clues: Not that your audience wants to necessarily guess the twist before the reveal, but they want to feel like they could have and maybe should have. The beauty of this twist is that it’s teased out and revealed so gradually that you’re on the cusp of figuring it out about a half-hour before it finally hits you, which feels so gratifying. As soon as I heard Adams say “Your father’s the scientist”, I began to figure it out somewhere in the back of my brain, but that only meant it hit with more force, not less, when it was finally revealed.

Best of 2016, #10: Fences

So here I am back. I’m so sorry to disappear for so long, but it’s just hard to care about anything in the middle of this national nightmare. I’m just glued to the news and constantly freaking out. Everything I’ve ever fought for or cared about is being gleefully destroyed. It’s literally the apocalypse.

So there’s that.

Now let’s talk about this year’s movies. The bad news is that my negativity has spilled out in that direction as well. I thought pretty much all of the most prestigious movies of the year were overrated. Even when I went to write about my 10 favorites, I found I had more complaints about them than compliments. So in keeping with my sour mood, I’m going to have to split these in four parts each. A first part where I complain, a second where I meddle, a third part where I compliment some element of the movie, and then a storyteller’s rule that can be gleaned from the movie.

Problems: Fences was actually adapted by Tony Kushner, but he took off his name so the screenplay is merely credited to the dead original playwright August Wilson. Ostensibly, this was done out of deference, but one must suspect that this was also out of embarrassment over the fact that he just hadn’t cracked it (or Washington wouldn’t let him). The original play was set in a back yard, but almost none of those scenes have to be set in that back yard, and there’s no excuse for failing to open up the play more. At least range more around the house!

The Meddler: Once in the movie, there’s a montage between two of Wilson’s acts, and it goes a long way. We need more of those. This is a movie: We don’t need dialogue like “Where’s Cory?” “He had to go out to football practice.” Show us him leaving early and going to football practice, and have Troy see him go! Then show Cory at practice! One problem with this movie is that we never really believe it’s 1957 because the production design is so generic in this one back yard. Let us see this world! Convince us that it’s 1957.

For that matter, much of the text involves Troy being haunted by his traumatic past, which takes the form of certain powerful moments that he can’t shake. Intercut the  movie with those images, which can tell a silent story. Show us mysterious and painful images and then let him explain them later.

Ironically, one of the only times Washington does add an image to foreshadow something, it hurts the movie. Before Cory’s big confrontation with his dad, Washington shows him checking out a Marine recruiting station. Now we can already guess how the confrontation will be resolved, which makes it less tense (we aren’t wondering “What will he do if he’s kicked out?”), and it ruins the shock of seeing him in his Marine outfit later.

Finally, the movie could have been shorter. It’s 140 minutes, but those extra 20 minutes would shave off easily. The movie doesn’t really kick into gear until Troy admits to his affair almost an hour in. The scenes before that act to set him up as an imperious moralist, which sets him up to be exposed as a hypocrite, but each of those opening scenes could be chopped down. The scenes with his older son add the least to the movie, so they’d be target #1.

So why do I love this movie? Because it works wonderfully as a PBS “Great Performances”-style filmed version of one of the great plays of our time, acted by two of our finest actors.  Washington get truly jaw-dropping performances out of himself and Davis.  I can certainly understand why Washington was so loathe to alter a word of the text, but even without changing a word, there were ways to make this less stagey.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: One way to give shapeless stories some shape is to have characters make a bet, and then pay off that bet ironically. Here, Troy and Bono make a bet as to whether Troy will finish his fence before Bono finally buys a refrigerator. As it turns out, their friendship is pretty much over by the time they both accomplish their goals, so they don’t bother to ask the other who got there first, but the bet has added just a shade of stakes and urgency to the lackadaisical task of building the fence.

Straying from the Party Line: The Dangling Dramatic Question in Stranger Things

Is “Stranger Things” a series or a miniseries? In many ways, this feels more like the first hour of a miniseries than the first hour of a series.

• The premise is not established by midway through the pilot.
• The premise does not lend itself easily to mini-goals that can be solved within each episode.
• The dramatic question for this episode is not answered at the end of the pilot (What happened to Will?)

Indeed, I feel strongly that it should be a miniseries, and shouldn’t have a second season, but that ship has already sailed, so we’ll see how well they pull it off.

Of course, many of these things could also be said about the show this one most closely resembles: “Twin Peaks”. I’ve always felt that show should have been a miniseries as well, and utterly failed to sustain itself as soon as Laura Palmer’s killer was found. I’d be interested to know if any of you disagree with that. I’ve never heard anyone make a strong case otherwise.

I would say that this is the price to be paid for not answering the dramatic question at the end of the pilot: you establish that dramatic question as the driver for the whole show, and the show has to end when it’s answered.

It seems to me that this was intended to be a miniseries until its huge success. The show just tied up too many loose ends at the end of the season. Mike and Eleven’s story felt like it had come to a natural and permanent conclusion. The boys were not ready to begin life as adventurers or demon fighters: One huge thing had happened to them and that was always going to be the big thing that happened to them. The teens’ story was even more finished and I have very little interest in seeing them again. Only Hopper seems like he has another season in him, and that’s a stretch.

What about you? Are you eager to see a second season? Can it possibly be as good as the first? Can it still involve the kids, the teens and the same adults, or should it jettison some of the old cast in favor of new faces?

Rulebook Casefile: Presuming the Premise vs. Accepting Genre Gimmes

Whoops, here’s one last post based on a comment on last week’s posts. Longtime commenter Harvey Jerkwater did something rather embarrassing: He read my book, and pointed out that I seem to totally contradict last week’s post. To wit:

• A related part of your book (just arrived; order from Amazon today, kids!) sparked two half-finished ideas...
• Per your analysis, Pacific Rim suffered from "presuming the premise." The filmmakers never explained the logic of the weird premise enough for the audience to stop asking "why don't they just [nuke the monsters or other logical step] instead of building Giant Fighting Robots?"
• But as this very blog piece points out, genre allows a certain level of presumption. Why does Elsa have ice powers? Because it's a fairy tale!
• This suggests two things:
• Maybe the creators of Pacific Rim thought that "giant piloted robots versus giant monsters" is an existing genre, and they were taking advantage of the genre's built-in features to "skip to the good stuff." This probably isn't what happened, but it fits the evidence. It may be a genre already -- a lot of Japanese animation seems to be a genre of "piloted giant robots fight" -- but if so, it's not popular enough for its cheats and assumptions to be accepted by the larger public.
• An analysis of the difference between embracing genre tropes/assumptions and "presuming the premise" might be interesting. They aren't quite the same thing, but they're related.

Indeed, Harvey, let’s dig into this. In that part of the book, I do indeed point out that Pacific Rim just asks us to go with the flow when they attack a monster with a giant robot instead of nuking it, but we won’t go along with that. As counter examples, I cite Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day as movies that presumed their premise in their first drafts, then got wisely rewritten to begin in the normal world and gradually get us to the outlandish situation.

So which is it? Why are Pacific Rim, Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day not allowed to presume their premises but Frozen and good superhero movies like Spider-Man and Iron Man are (and, in fact need to)? A few reasons.

• Harvey is right that monsters vs. robots isn’t enough of an established genre in America, so we’re not primed enough to accept that kind of absurdity. If we’d seen it a million times, we might be inured to it. Likewise, the genres of Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day were not well-established enough to begin in medias res.
• Frozen is asking us to simply accept something magical, but they’re not asking us to ignore a more sensible story direction, like fighting a monster you could nuke.
• Superhero movies like Spider-Man and Iron Man are not that different from Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day in that they do start in the real world. The “genre gimme” of putting on a costume only happens after the hero has been moved there somewhat logically. (This is one reason why almost all superhero franchises start with origin movies. 1989’s Batman is the one big exception, and it does get away with it by relying on genre gimmes, so it can be done.) 

So you can accept genre gimmes and get away with presuming certain aspects of your premise if it’s a very well-established genre (fairy tale, super-hero) and it doesn’t ignore a clearly superior option.

Rulebook Casefile: Wes Anderson’s Unique Imagery and Mood

Wes Anderson is one of those directors who defines “love him or hate him”…but really it’s both: many people who hate him will admit that there’s at least one they actually like, and even those who love him will admit there are some that are just too annoying.

How do you describe the mood of Rushmore? You might say odd, or delicate, or kooky, or precise. But there are also less charitable words that have been thrown around: Precious. Affected. Twee. Is that fair? It depends on you, and how successfully Wes has bewitched you into seeing things from his point of view. I definitely love Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, and I pretty much love The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic, but I find both Darjeeling Limited and Moonrise Kingdom to be a bit too much.

One thing that started to grate on me in Anderson’s later movies was the distinctive clothing choices. Anderson loves to pick a signature kooky outfit and stick with it in every scene. In Rushmore, however, it makes sense: At first, Max is at a private school where you’re required to wear the same outfit all the time, and Max is the most enthusiastic student, so we buy that he wears his blazer even off of school grounds. Then when he gets sent down to public school, it’s funny that he continues to wear it. Notably, however, as he begins to accept public school, he switches to new clothes: still kooky, such as a green felt suit, but Anderson isn’t afraid that we won’t recognize him, as he seemed to be with other characters in later movies.

It’s also to Anderson’s credit that he gives Max a bit of extra flair in some scenes but not others: Max’s red beret is stylish and distinctive, and it turned out to be a key piece of marketable imagery, appearing on the poster and DVD box, but it would be silly to wear it too much. Marketable imagery is essential, but a little goes a long way: Don’t sacrifice character or story logic in pursuit of a signature look, as Anderson does in some of his other movies.

How to Manage Expectations, Addendum: Establish the Nature of the Jeopardy

As I established before, establishing and maintaining your tone isn’t just a matter of letting the audience know that this will be light or grim or post-modern. It’s also a matter of establishing the general level of physical jeopardy (Marty in Back to the Future can ride his skateboard while holding onto people’s bumpers, so this isn’t a very physically dangerous world) and the nature of the jeopardy (the TV show “Leverage” foolishly sent the message that we shouldn’t take danger seriously.)

So take time to establish these things at the beginning every story. Be very careful in those opening scenes: your audience is on guard, asking themselves: “Is this going to be that kind of story or my kind of story?” Let them know the answer right away, so that you can self-select an audience that wants the sort of mood that you’re prepared to deliver.

Jeopardy tends to come in one or more of these forms:

• Lethal: Do we worry that the hero will get killed or harmed? Do events have grave physical consequences?
• Social: Are we primarily worried about the hero’s search for love and/or respect?
• Psychological: Has the hero’s mental well-being been threatened?
• Spiritual: Is the hero worried about the state of his or her soul?

So lets data-mine the checklists:

• Casablanca: Lethal and social. We see a man shot dead in the street for having the letters, then we see our hero get the same letters. We quickly discover, however, that he’s less worried about his own safety and more about an old humiliation he wants to rectify.
• Sunset Boulevard: Lethal and social. We see our hero dead right away, so we know the stakes, but he’s more focused on avoiding humiliation.
• In a Lonely Place: Social and psychological. We begin with Dix scaring himself with his own violence in a road rage incident, then we see him accept the judgment of some kids that he’s nobody.
• Alien: Lethal. It takes a while for the violence to begin, but everything seems very grave right away.
• The Shining: Lethal and psychological. We hear about the previous caretaker chopping up his family and the dangers of isolation.
• Blue Velvet: Lethal and psychological. The severed ear intimates physical danger, but we sense right away that the greater threat is the disturbed look at Jeffrey gives to that ear.
• Silence of the Lambs: Interestingly, the stakes aren’t really lethal (we never worry much about her safety) and certainly not social (she’s not trying to make any friends), but strictly psychological (“Don’t let him into your head.”)
• Groundhog Day: Social and spiritual. (We will soon learn, in fact, that there are no physical consequences in this world, even for death.)
• Donnie Brasco: Despite the setting, the stakes are social and spiritual far more than lethal (Donnie’s wife isn’t worried that he’ll be killed, she’s worried that he’s changing too much)
• The Bourne Identity: Lethal, psychological and social. He worries that he’ll be killed, that his mind is broken, and, eventually, that he’s a bad man.
• Sideways: Strictly social for both men. Miles is depressed, but he never feels psychologically unstable, just endlessly humiliated. For Jack, physical danger will rear its head toward the end, but even when he gets beaten up, he’s primarily worried about what his fiancé will make of it.
• How to Train Your Dragon: Equally lethal, social, and spiritual. If he fails at the training, he’ll be humiliated and he may lose his life, but if he succeeds, he may lose his soul.
• Iron Man: Lethal, social, and spiritual, he’s worried about death, humiliation, and the state of his soul.
• An Education: Entirely social. She feels like a heel at the end, but never feels her soul is in jeopardy.
• Bridesmaids: Entirely social. Again, she gets really depressed, but only in the form of severe humiliation, she’s not really mentally disturbed.

Interestingly, it doesn’t do us any good to check these movies to see whether the physics are realistic or stylized, because they all have realistic physics, even the “genre” movies such as Alien, Bourne Identity, How to Train Your Dragon, and Iron Man. (The closest thing to an exception would be Groundhog Day, but even there, you won’t find a lot of goofy physics, just goofy metaphysics). Clearly, I have a bias for such movies!

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…

How to Manage Expectations, Step 9: More Fun With Foreshadowing

We’ve talked about several forms of foreshadowing already, from obvious methods like using a framing sequence, flashforward, or voiceover to hint at what’s coming, to more subtle methods, like reversible behavior or imagery that create subconscious anticipation of an inevitable reversible.

But there are lots more methods of foreshadowing. Let’s list just a few:

• Most obviously, whenever a scene cuts away right before a big reveal, or when the camera refuses to show the face of an important person in the room.
• Interrupted dialogue: somebody sounds like they’re about to say something important, but they get cut off, leaving the audience to perk up their ears in hopes of filling in the blanks.
• Whenever we only hearing one side of the conversation, or even when we hear both but something still doesn’t add up, the audience assumes that this is a big clue (So let’s hope it is!)
• Whole unexplained cryptic scenes: Who are these people having some secret meeting that seems to have nothing to do with the story? What is that ally of the hero dropping off a mysterious package somewhere?
• Dangling questions: someone asks a leading question “why does this keep happening?” and gets no answer…
• Unpaid debts weigh heavily on an audience’s mind. In both Chinatown and The Godfather, a debt is incurred in the first scene that gets called in at an ironic moment later in the movie. Likewise with threats, or vows of revenge. Use them to keep the audience on their toes …until they finally forget about them, which is the moment you deliver the pay-off.
• Brian McDonald in “Invisible Ink” (I finally read it, J.S., and it’s great!) talks about “clones”: minor characters whose struggles mirror the hero’s in miniature. When one of those characters meets a bad end, it foreshadows doom for the hero as well.

I used to think that this sort of obvious foreshadowing was just showboating by writers: They know what’s going to happen and we don’t so they’re rubbing it in our faces. But now I realize that heavy-handed foreshadowing is more often a way to tie together a plot that might not otherwise come together.

There are two reasons that time-travel stories use more foreshadowing than any other type of story:

• First of all, it’s easy and fun to do so: if your characters are already jumping backwards and forwards in time, then it’s easy to show us cryptic glimpses of what’s to come.
• But the far more important reason is this: TIME TRAVEL STORIES MAKE NO DAMN SENSE!

Think about that moment at the end of The Terminator when we realize that Reese is John’s father, or that moment at the end of Twelve Monkeys when we realize that Bruce Willis was traumatized by his own death. What were you thinking about? You were thinking, “Oh, cool, this was foreshadowed all this time but I’m only now putting it together!” What you weren’t thinking was, “That makes no damn sense!”

The more unbelievable it is, the more you have to foreshadow, they’ll be too busy saying “Ah-ha!” that they’ll forget to ask “Say what?” Source Code was another time-travel head-scratcher that papered over lots of problems in this way. (What about the guy that body belonged to??) It’s messy, but what are you going to do? People cut you a lot of slack with time travel stories…as long as you don’t let think about the contradictions. There’s a reason that Back to the Future is famous for having more plant-and-pay-off than any other movie!

Okay folks, that was supposed to be the end, but tomorrow, we’ll get a little backfill as I go back and clarify some earlier thoughts…

How to Manage Expectations, Step 8: Drop One Shoe, Then Wait

Once you create an expectation that something will happen, the audience will get more and more anxious until it occurs. This is how you wrap them around your finger.

Anton Chekhov famously said that if there’s a gun over the mantelpiece in the first act, then someone must get shot in the third act. He meant that the audience can outsmart the writer by figuring out the plot ahead of time, but now that his quote has become famous, it’s gotten turned on its head: It’s become another way for the writer to manipulate the audience.

It’s the job of the audience to try to outsmart the writer at every turn, but it’s the job of the writer to guess what their guesses will be and cut them off at the pass. Since audiences are now on the lookout for those guns on mantelpieces, writers can now use them to imply a death that won’t occur, or to trick the audience into guessing wrong about who will be shot.

You need to create subconscious anticipation. I’ve talked about how to do this in individual scenes, but it can be done over the course of a whole movie as well.

• As Chekhov pointed out, whenever a item of potential energy is introduced but not used up: an unfired gun, unused poison or dangling sword, obviously, but also any unrevealed secret or suppressed evidence. Those guns, too, must eventually be fired…
• Whenever characters say what they’re afraid will happen, or what their worst fears are, or their fondest wishes. Audiences will begin to anticipate that these things might come to pass, perhaps in an ironic way. It’s subtly set up throughout the first season of “The Wire” that McNulty’s most dreaded assignment is the docks, which is of course exactly where he ends up. As we race ahead of the plot in our minds, we know even before we see that final shot of him on the boat that the trap has been sprung.
• Whenever a character repeats a behavior compulsively, we wait for the moment when he or she can’t or won’t do it anymore. Likewise, when a character repeatedly tries and fails to do something, we begin to anxiously anticipate the moment he or she will succeed, for good or ill.
• Likewise with reversible imagery: whenever anyone preserves something fragile, we anticipate the moment it will break. Whenever something is literally or figuratively put on a pedestal, we wait until it is torn down. Whenever anyone invests any object or icon with emotional meaning, we begin to anticipate about what might happen to it.

But once you know how to use each of these to create anticipation, you must also know that the audience is guessing all of your tricks. If they’re playing checkers, then you have to play chess…

The Fighter masterfully plays with its audience. We see talented boxer Mickey take his crackhead brother Dickey’s lousy advice over and over, with more and more disastrous results… Then we finally see Mickey get better advisors and succeed while Dickey goes off to jail. But just then, when Mickey finally has his big shot, he gets lured into the prison where Dickey gives him one more piece of advice. The audience is writing in pain! No, not again! Mickey was so close! Sure enough, in the fight, Mickey finds himself doubting his new advisors and considering Dickey’s advice instead. He fatefully decides to take it, and as a result… he wins!

The moviemakers know that we think we’re two steps ahead, which gives them the ability to deliver what we least expect, a story of redemption that will bring the brothers back together. Crucially, they don’t just want to shock us, they want to astonish us. They use foreshadowing to trigger cynical assumptions in our minds because they want us to be ashamed by the power of this moment, when we suddenly realize that we were wrong to distrust our hero, and wrong to assume that his brother was irredeemable.

Tomorrow, we mop up our final odds and ends, as we explore additional types of foreshadowing...