The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the hero’s inner struggle climax shortly after (or possibly at the same time as) her outer struggle?

Catharsis only comes about because of crisis. We put off personal change until the last possible moment, at the crux of the crisis or afterward.

The inner conflict should not end too early. Once when a producer was quickly summing up the problems he had with my script, we got to the third act and he said, “It’s very exciting, but after a certain point it all runs downhill.” I asked him to explain, but he couldn’t, since he considered the point self-evident. I thought he was crazy. Was he saying I didn’t have enough conflict? There’s no way: It was an over-the-top, one-man-against-an-army-of-crazies finale. How does that roll downhill?

I think that now, years later, I’ve finally figured out what he was saying. My hero hadn't run out of exterior conflict; my hero had run out of dilemma. He still had a lot of bad guys to be defeated, but he no longer had internal tension caused by those actions.

Once I figured this out, it was an easy fix: I had to send my good guy into the final confrontation still seeking the temptation the bad guy had offered. I had to push the good guy’s final rejection of that temptation as late as possible, right at the heart of the climax. The hero’s dilemma should be exacerbated by the conflict, and vice versa, until the last moment, when the resolution of the dilemma and the resolution of the conflict should happen at about the same time.

• In any movie where it might be all in the hero’s head, the inner struggle and outer struggle automatically end at the same time, such as in The Babadook and Groundhog Day. 
• The hero of How to Train Your Dragon reconciles with his father during the heat of battle. 
• Die Hard is very tidy: Willis wins his wife back by shooting the bad guy dead. 

Note: Sometimes the inner struggle happens early in sports movies. In both Breaking Away and The Fighter, the emotional breakthroughs happen before the hero competes at the end. The real story is over, and the final triumph is essentially a victory lap.

Every hero must complete both an outer journey and an inner journey. These journeys should overlap at certain points, but not the whole time. Sometimes you can create a finale where the hero completes both journeys at the same moment (such as using the force to blow up the Death Star in Star Wars) but not always. Often, the hero must complete them at different times, but it’s good to have the culminations of these journeys both happen near the climax. Sometimes the hero completing the inner journey allows them to compete the outer journey right afterwards. Sometimes completing the outer journey allows them to complete the inner journey in the epilogue.

On first viewing of Get Out, the viewer is not super aware of Chris’s inner journey, though we can tell it’s there: He’s trying to forgive himself for doing nothing when he mother was dying in the street from an accident. We see Missy elicit this information from him while hypnotizing him, and we see him admit his feeling of guilt to Rose later, but then, since the outer journey is so exciting, we don’t really think about the inner journey very much.

But Peele is doing a lot of subtle work to make sure we feel Chris’s inner journey on a subconscious level, even if we don’t think about it. Only when you listen to the DVD commentary is all this work made explicit.

We can’t know this on first viewing, but Chris’s inner journey begins when he hits a deer on the way to see Rose’s parents. He insists on getting out to see if the deer is alright, but finds it dead. He then insists on calling the police, despite the fact that doing so often ends poorly for black men. To Chris, the deer is his mom, and he’s still trying to save her.

Later, when Chris has his bizarre encounter with Georgina, and sees her cry, he suspects that she may be a victim in some way, which also makes him think of his mom.

Later, when Chris is held captive in the basement, there’s a huge buck head on the wall. According to Peele, this represents Chris’s dad. It shouldn’t have been up to Chris to make sure his mom was okay, it should have been up to his dad, who “wasn’t in the picture.” Chris escapes and kills Rose’s dad by stabbing him with the points of the buck’s head. He is not only displacing Rose’s father as the dominant male in the house, he’s replacing his own dad. His mom is the deer and he is the rescuing buck his dad couldn’t be. As Peele says:

• The buck is of course not only a used not only to describe strong black men in the past, but is a symbol, the male version of the doe that he hits.

But Chris still needs to take one more step to resolve his inner journey. When he’s driving away from the house, Georgina, controlled by the grandmother’s mind, runs out to stop him but he accidentally hits her with his car. He then starts to drive away, leaving her limp body in the road behind him. Then he stops. He can’t leave her, even though he knows that the real Georgina is buried deep inside her and may never be able to be rescued. He just can’t leave a black woman dying in the street like his mom died. So he goes back, gets her unconscious body, and puts it in his driver’s seat.

In the end, it doesn’t work. She wakes up, still controlled by the grandma, tries to take over the car, crashes it, and presumably dies in the crash. But still Chris tried, and trying finally allowed him to forgive himself for not trying to save his own mother. As Peele says:

• When he went back for Georgina, he made the only decision that would free his soul.

What’s the point of including an inner journey so subtle that you have to watch the commentary to spot it? The hope is that, even if the audience doesn’t see it, they can feel it. We sense that there’s an elemental power in Chris’s use of the buck head. We sense that something deep is going on inside when he tries to rescue Georgina, even if we’re too caught up in it to think of his mom. “Know More Than You Show” doesn’t just apply to plot, it also applies to theme.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES, he flies through the billboard and admits the titular problem at the last possible minute.
Alien	YES. Pretty much.  She has no time to process her decision to break from the company until after she kills the thing.
An Education	YES. It is only after she’s been at Oxford for a while that forgives herself and put the affair in the proper context.
The Babadook	YES. The same moment.
Blazing Saddles	YES. Afterwards, he realizes that he’s got to go ride the west saving others.
Blue Velvet	YES. he comes shooting out of the closet.
The Bourne Identity	YES. he finally figures out who he really is as he confronts the bad guy.
Bridesmaids	YES.
Casablanca	YES. Shortly before, but it’s okay that the final confrontation with Strasser “rolls downhill”.
Chinatown	YES. The same moment.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  basically, it never really ends.  He’s still conflicted, even though it’s over.
Do the Right Thing	YES. The same time.
The Farewell	YES. She finally tells her Nai Nai one piece of truth, that she didn’t get the fellowship.  They bond as much as they can without the truth of the diagnosis coming out.
The Fighter	NO. Quite a bit before.  The last 15 minutes of this movie “roll downhill” a little bit, as Mickey solves his problems out of the ring well before the last fight.
Frozen	YES. At the same time.
The Fugitive	YES. to the degree that he has an inner struggle.  He finally trusts that Gerard trusts him, and his inner journey comes full circle.
Get Out	YES. Chris chooses to try to save Georgina and thus makes his peace with his mom’s death.  He fails to save her, but “saves” Walter just in time for Walter to kill Rose and himself.
Groundhog Day	YES. The same time.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. He reconciles with his father in the middle of the final battle.
In a Lonely Place	YES. after he is cleared, the real internal crisis comes.
Iron Man	YES. Afterwards, when he finally decides who he is.
Lady Bird	YES. She accepts her name, but then lies about where she’s from at a college party, then drinks herself into oblivion and wakes up at the hospital.
Raising Arizona	YES. after Smalls is dead, they hash out their relationship issues with Nathan Arizona.
Rushmore	NO. it ends earlier, and it ends offscreen.  They want us to believe that he’s buidling up to a school shooting, so they don’t show us that he’s dealt everything and moved on.  We just figure that out when we see the play.
Selma	YES. The victory seems to assure King that he made the right decision in turning back.
The Shining	YES. It never climaxes.  He’s still freaked out at the end.
Sideways	YES. After.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Symbolically: girl who’s about to be skinned stops screaming.
Star Wars	YES. He resolves his inner struggle at the final moment in order to succeed.
Sunset Boulevard	Well, shortly before. He finally finds his self-respect, then gets killed.

Rulebook Casefile: Cutting Out the Downhill Side of The Martian

It haunts me still, that baffling dismissal I got from my manager: “At a certain point it all rolls downhill.” I’ve spent years trying to understand it. One big clue comes from comparing the book and movie of The Martian.

The movie is very faithful to the book in the first half (the biggest change is that we get to see the evacuation sooner rather than later), but it has much bigger changes in the second half, which is to say that much of the second half was just lopped off. It almost feels like screenwriter Drew Goddard was simply typing up the book as he went, realized he was running out of pages, and abruptly cut to the climax. For instance, in the book, Watney accidentally shorts out the communication system, leaving him on his own again for months until he can reach the new site, and then his rover flips over on the way.

The change works fine. Once they’re gone we don’t miss those additional incidents, but does that mean that the book didn’t need them either? No, I still like having them in the book, because they return us to the grizzled-loner status of the first hundred pages, and put Watney back in charge of his own story, but in the movie, it would feel like a repeated beat, and a ramping down of the story when it should be ramping up (the flipped over rover, in fact, happens because Watney is literally on a downward ramp!) Books can ramp down, but movies can’t. In movies, you have to keep the pedal to the metal until you go off the end of the cliff.

Or, put another way, we expect our movie heroes to climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in only one direction: Watney gets physical survival, then connection with others, then a greater moral dilemma (is it worth having the others return for him on the slim chance he’ll live?). Once we get to the top of the pyramid, we don’t want to descend again, losing communication and then losing safety before finally re-establishing both just in time to take off.

Like Watney, screenwriters must beware when going downhill, lest their rovers flip over. Best not to risk it.

Next: #1!

Straying from the Party Line: Wrapping Up the Drama a Little Early in The Fighter

Here and here, I say that the dilemma needs to last right up until the climax or sometimes past it. Either the climactic action resolves it, or it gets resolved afterwards in an epilogue. This is because any climax that happens after the resolution of the dilemma will feel meaningless as the story “rolls downhill.”

In fact I previously pointed to this very movie as an example of how to do this right:

• Ward is famous today for the three knock-down, drag-out title fights he fought against Arturo Gatti. But you won’t see those here. The writers took a good look at his life, decided that the best story was Ward’s struggle with his own family, and then ruthlessly pared that story down to its essence. We begin when Ward finally becomes aware of that problem and we end when that problem is ultimately resolved. The Gatti fights came about because Ward had solved his problems outside the ring, so they have no place here.

So instead of showing the Gatti fights, they ended with the fight in which Ward wins the championship belt from Shea Neary, but even then, the emotional dilemmas (with his brother, his mother and his girl) are still resolved a few scenes before that fight, and the championship fight we see is merely the payoff to that resolution...and that’s fine.

Another movie with a similar structure is Breaking Away: There too, Dave resolves all of his issues with his dad, his girlfriend, and his friends, and then begins the triumphant final bicycle race. As with The Fighter, the result is an exhilarating stand-up-and-cheer triumph, and we don’t really care that things are rolling downhill.

The implication is clear: sports movies get a little more slack. The alternative, after all, is to have the person the hero is having a problem with sitting in the stands, allowing them to silently communicate their emotional breakthrough just before our hero wins the match. It can be done, but it’s far from ideal, so it’s okay to wrap the emotional beats up a little early, and end with nothing but triumph. In some sports movies, the actual victory is just a victory lap.

(How much of an extension on the deadline do you get? Probably only about ten minutes, so don’t push it!)

Storyteller's Rulebook #202: The Internal Conflict Must Climax at the Same Time As (or After) the External Conflict

A short one today before the big climax tomorrow...

All-Too-Common Flaw #11! 

Pacific Rim feels like it’s over 90 minutes in, (which would have been a much better length, as Gravity showed us). Our heroes have successfully overcome their personal problems, learned to work together, killed every monster on Earth and received a hero’s welcome. But, as it turns out, there’s still 40 minutes left! To fill up the rest of the time, they have to generate up a new personal storyline, involving their boss’s illness, but it’s too little too late.

If they were going to stick with the mind-melding idea, then they would have needed to create a finale in which our heroes can’t finish the final monster off until they resolve the problem that’s been keeping them back the whole time. Then one of two things happen: either we see them solve it moments before they use the resulting power to kill the monster, or we see them kill the monster, then let them have a conversation later about how they were able to pull it off, and only then realize what they’ve achieved.

The point is that the flaw should be resolved either simultaneously with or after the external challenge is resolved, because as soon as the internal challenge end, the rest “all runs downhill.” An external challenge gives your movie visceral thrills, but the internal challenge gives it emotional power. If the thrills continue long after the emotion is gone, then it will feel empty and ultimately boring.

Which finally brings us to my biggest problem…

Storyteller's Rulebook #112: Throw in a Left Turn

Yet another rule complaining about a recent movie! (106, 110) I’ve been a curmudgeonly moviegoer recently!

Young Adult is a very funny movie. Charlize Theron gives a great performance as a failed children’s author slinking back home to pick up where she left off*. Writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman both know how to twist the knife expertly, skewering shallow city-dwellers and banal exurbanites with equal relish.

There’s just one big problem with this movie: if you were to stop the projector a half-hour in and poll the audience about what’s going to happen next, most of them would guess correctly. By a half-hour in, once all the major characters are introduced, this whole movie rolls downhill. It’s painfully obvious what’s going to happen, every step of the way.

 

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few road bumps along the way, but bumps aren’t enough: you need at least one left turn. It doesn’t have to be a huge twist… You don’t need to reveal that everything the audience knows is wrong., but have the characters surprise us. (I think that Cody and Reitman thought there was a twist, in that Theron isn’t really redeemed at the end, but these days in independent movies that’s started to become the rule, not the exception. It’s not a daring choice anymore.)

Compare this to, for instance, The Color of Money. If you turned off the projector halfway through, most of the audience would guess that Tom Cruise was going to eventually reject the corrupt ways of Paul Newman and find a way to succeed without compromising his integrity. Instead it’s Newman, not Cruise, who discovers his conscience. When this plot turn happens, we’re shocked, but not baffled. In retrospect, the signs were there, but we didn’t notice them before.

 

The ending of Young Adult, certainly seemed inevitable, but not at all surprising. I think that Cody wanted to condemn her own main character, and so she didn’t allow the character to surprise her, or surprise us. If you set out to “nail” your main character, then you’ll probably have to use a hammer, and they’re going to end up flattened.

 

* Despite being totally miscast: We’re supposed to believe that this woman dejectedly eats fried chicken and Ben and Jerry’s?? Look at her!

The Big Idea, Part 12: Keep the Dilemma Alive

My manager, like many Hollywood types, doesn’t communicate very clearly. Once he was quickly summing up the problems he had with one of my scripts. When we got to the third act, he said “It’s very exciting, but after a certain point it all runs downhill.” I asked him to explain but he couldn’t, since he considered the point self-evident. I thought he was crazy. Was he saying that I didn’t have enough conflict? There’s no way: it was an over-the-top one-man-against-an-army-of-crazies finale. How does that roll downhill? 

I think that now, years later, I’ve finally figured out what he was saying. My hero didn’t run out of exterior conflict (or motivation, for that matter, which also sometimes happens). My hero had run out of dilemma. There were still a lot of bad guys to be defeated, but there were no more internal tension caused by those actions.

Once I figured this out, it was an easy fix: I had to send my good guy into the final confrontation still seeking the temptation the bad guy had offered. I had to push the good guy’s final rejection of that temptation as late as possible, right at the heart of the climax. The hero’s dilemma should be exacerbated by the conflict, and vice versa, until the last moment, when the resolution of the dilemma and the resolution of the conflict should happen at about the same time.

 

This means that the dilemma can’t be “should I fight back or not?” That’s the dilemma in Bruce Lee’s first movie The Big Boss (Originally released in the west at Fists of Fury) Lee’s fans have to sit there and suffer the whole time while Lee refuses to fight. Then he finally caves and the final half hour is spectacular, but it’s also inert because the dilemma is over. This movie gets it exactly wrong: its dilemma and conflict are mutually exclusive.Die Hard is very tidy: Willis wins his wife back by shooting the bad guy dead, but not every concept lends itself towards wrapping up the dilemma and the conflict at the same moment. Many comedies, like Date Night wrap up the dilemma (the marriage problems, in this instance) in a quiet scene after the climax. In movies like Rear Window, we see that the underlying dilemma (the different interests of Kelly and Stewart) has not been resolved at all, though the climax brought about a temporary truce. These are both fine.

The dilemma can continue past the climax, but it can’t end very far before it, or else everything will roll downhill.