Rulebook Casefile: National Pain in “Get Out”

I always say that if you really want your story to resonate with the a lot of people, it should tap into National Pain. Is there any better example of this than Get Out? Here’s Peele in a discussion with Chance the Rapper on the DVD:

• All the great horror films have something to say. They have a real horror that they’re about, and the issue of racism had been ignored in this genre, and I felt like this meant to fill in a gap, a missing piece of conversation. Maybe this’ll fuck shit up in the wrong way, I don’t know. Art and communication is the one tool we have against the true horror of the world which is violence, so I hope that this is an inclusive experience, and that it inspires people to just talk. We’re also in need right now for things that are going to bring us together as people, so hopefully this movie creates a collective creative catharsis, in a way.

In the commentary, he talks about how he wrote the script under Obama but shot it under Trump:

• When President Obama was elected, we entered this era that I call the post-racial lie: “We got a black president, it’s done, we’re past it.” And many of us know that race is very much alive and racism is alive and it’s the monster that was simmering beneath the surface of the country for a while, and so I felt like this movie was originally meant to address that. Now we live in a completely different era, and it’s been fascinating to see how this movie’s journey has led up to this moment, where now I feel like it’s more relevant in a way than ever.

Interestingly, he says that the shift from Obama to Trump was the reason he changed the ending:

• By the time I was shooting it, it was quite clear the world had shifted, racism was being dealt with, people were woke, and people needed a release and a hero, which is why I changed the ending and had Rod show up at the end.

(I say in my checklist that movies should reflect the way the world works, and that’s far more true of the original ending, but I agree with Peele: Everyone needed to stand up and cheer instead of seeing how it would actually go down. The brilliant solution was to give us that moment where we think he’s going to be arrested, and that hits us like a ton of bricks …but then it’s Rod, and our horror turns to elation. He’s giving us both emotions.)

It’s interesting to try to parse exactly what the movie is saying about the Obama era. One key question that can’t be answered: Is Dean telling the truth when he says he’d vote for Obama a third time? Is that just a lie to put Chris at ease, or does he mean it? Obviously what Dean’s group wants is white minds in black skins. Is Peele saying that that’s what Obama represented to some pseudo-liberals? (Chris is neither surprised nor impressed when Dean tells him this.) Peele says in the commentary that in America, “all black people are in the Sunken Place” One can’t help but wonder to what degree that he’s talking about Obama specifically.
 Peele first became a household name (and got to meet Obama) because of a recurring skit on his TV show where he impersonated Obama’s placid exterior while his sketch partner Keegan Michael Key acted out Obama’s hidden angry side. It was hilarious, and painful, and cathartic: Obama fans were gratified to finally get to see the anger that surely must be trapped under the surface of “No-Drama Obama”, possibly in his own personal Sunken Place.  It’s unimaginable what Obama must have gone through as he endured constant racial hatred from Fox News, but he rarely let it show.

Peele is grappling with profound national pain, but he’s doing so in an entertaining, even thrilling way, without a lot of speeches.  His metaphor does the work.

Rulebook Casefile: A Small Thematic Detail in “Lady Bird”

In the opening moments of Lady Bird, Lady Bird and her mother are wrapping up their college visit trip around California, and they finish listening to the audiobook of “The Grapes of Wrath”.

The book, of course, is about a road trip from hell: The Joads are victims of the dust bowl in Oklahoma, but handbills lure them to California, promising a life of ease (“You can just reach out and pick fruit off the trees.”) They arrive to find that California is not nurturing after all, but rather brutally inhospitable. The daughter’s newborn baby dies, but she finds a man starving to death and offers him the only succor he’ll find in California: the grown man suckles her breast milk.

Just enough of the audiobook plays in the movie that, if you’ve read the book, you’ll be reminded of that ending, but if you haven’t you wouldn’t know what was going on. Any meaning the audience gets from that detail is dependent on the knowledge of the book we bring with us. But if you do know the book, the thematic meaning is rich.

Lady Bird is with her own un-nurturing mother, roaming California backroads looking for a place that will take them in, but she lacks high enough grades to impress them (She ain’t got the do-re-mi) and she concludes over the course of her road trip that California is not a state where she’ll feel nurtured. She wants to live through something. She is rejecting the breast violently when she jumps out of the car.

The main role the audiobook plays in the film is just to indicate that they’ve been at peace for 21 hours of driving, enjoying something smart together, but tensions are just waiting to explode as soon as the pacifying agent is turned off. But Gerwig had a choice to make: Which book? Writing involves dozens of such choices (and directing involves hundreds of such choices), and each is a chance to pack the story with more meaning, even if it will only be meaningful for a subset of your audience. Make meaningful choices every time you get the opportunity.

New Video: Irony

Remember how shocked you were when I put out a new podcast episode, after more than a year away?  Well get ready to be flabbergasted, because here’s a new video after more than two years!  When I launched my book in late 2016, I had an ambitious plan that I would have a new video every other week from then on and a podcast episode on all the off weeks.  Ha!  Turns out that videos are a lot of work.  But I'm very happy with the four I’ve made and I’ve wanted to do a new one on irony for a while.  And I’m mostly talking about a movie we haven’t already discussed to death on the blog!  Let me know what you think, please.

(I’ve also replaced the Moment of Humanity video with a cleaner version, since kids like the videos.  No more 40 Year Old Virgin opening shot!)

Rulebook Casefile: Choosing Between Goods is Always Stronger

As I said before, many critics said that Ava DuVernay was unfair to LBJ in Selma, but as Amy Davidson-Sorkin pointed out in “The New Yorker”, DuVernay was actually more than fair in at least one way. I’ll quote Davidson-Sorkin this time:

• Reading [Taylor] Branch’s account of that period, it is revealing how distracted Johnson was by Vietnam. In the days when the scenes of violence in Alabama should have been his focus, he was in endless meetings with Robert McNamara about a secret order to begin a bombing campaign. “It was this crisis that had shortened his patience for King’s visit from Selma,” Branch writes. There is not much mention of Vietnam in “Selma”; in this, the filmmakers did Johnson a kindness.

If DuVernay’s goal was really to turn LBJ from the co-hero of the movement into the villain, as many affronted LBJ supporters claimed, surely Vietnam would have been the way to go. All she had to do was honestly depict those McNamara meetings. And of course including Vietnam would have been dramatic: Death! Explosions! Great betrayals! Tragic downfalls!

Instead, her Johnson says that he can’t do what King wants because he’s rather use his political capital on his War on Poverty. In a great use of objects to physicalize the plot, he’s actually got his plan in a leather folder and tries to hand it to King but King refuses to accept it and forces Johnson to put it down, literally and figuratively.

DuVernay (and/or credited writer Paul Webb) knows that great drama comes from choosing between goods, not from choosing between good and evil (as would have been the case in a choice between voting rights and Vietnam). Good vs. evil is a no-brainer with a pat solution, but good vs. good is an anguishing choice. Ultimately, of course, we know that Johnson brilliantly pushed through both the War on Poverty and voting rights, but in the movie, it’s a tough call that’s left unresolved, which is always good with a thematic conflict. We like it when a story tips towards one side of a thematic conflict but leaves the question open and not fully resolved. That makes a story meaty.

Storyteller's Rulebook: Let Absurdity Clash with Meaning

“A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is beloved by nerds everywhere, many of whom, like myself, are atheists, and indeed Adams defined himself as a “radical atheist”, but he followed that up with “I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.”  Indeed, let’s look at that prodding.  First we get this exchange, about the Babel fish:

• Now, it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some have chosen to see it as the final proof of the NON-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
• “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
• “But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don't. QED”
• “Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn't thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
• “Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

But of course, God is right there having this conversation, isn’t he? He doesn’t stand up to logical scrutiny, so he must go, but only after he created the universe: “In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very unhappy and has widely been regarded as a bad move.”

So, setting aside what we know of Adams, the theism of the book is ambiguous. What about Christianity specifically? Right there on the first page, we get praise for Jesus...

• And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change…

Then there’s the issue of the larger quest. We later find out that humankind has a greater purpose. It has been determined that the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is “42”, but then what’s the question? It turns out that Earth were invented to discover that question. In other words, life on Earth is a search for meaning.

By the fourth book, Earth has been recreated, and presumably that search is still going on, but the characters get distracted by another quest, to find “God’s final message to his creation”. The fact that they even seek this out is telling. It turns out the message is “WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.” So we get the sense that Adams, and by extension, his characters, are really deists: God created us, and gave us a purpose, but then we banished him with a “puff of logic” and now have to search out his meaning on our own, using the scraps he’s left behind.

We love these books for their absurdity, but Adams’s grappling with God give them a lot of their power. Absurdity is more powerful if it clashes with meaning.

Best of 2017, #2: Get Out

Not the Way the World Works (but that’s okay): I always have a problem with movies where the hero says, “This guy has framed me for murder, so I’ll just kill him and everything will be okay,” but the most ridiculous example had to be Collateral, because of the racial element. If a black cabbie kills a white man in a nice suit, even if there’s a black woman there to vouch for him, then forget it, he’s getting the chair. This movie doesn’t have the frame element but could be accused of the same “get away with killing white people” problem, and indeed the original ending was Chris getting hauled away, but I think they get away with a happy ending here by simply letting us have that moment of horror when Chris sees the police lights and raises his hands and we suddenly realize how all this will look…but then the relief washes over us when it’s his friend. We know it’s bogus, but at least the movie let us glimpse what would really happen before giving us the less-realistic-but-more-satisfying stand-up-and-cheer ending.

Mystery Plotting: I could rehash them here, but I’ll just point you to this list of Easter eggs showing the movie’s meticulous plotting and imagery. One reason this movie made so much money is because people were watching it twice, and finding it even more satisfying the second time, which usually isn’t the case with “big twist” movies.

National Pain: How do you solve a problem like Trayvon Martin? How do you address that pain in a movie? You can make a movie like Fruitvale Station about the facts of the case, and that would certainly be worth making, or you can make a movie like this, about the growing horror black men feel that they’re not safe in white neighborhoods. Drama is how it is, genre is how it feels, and they’re both equally valid.

Best of 2017 Runner-Up #7: Dunkirk

I didn’t see this movie until it came out on DVD, and I knew very little about it. All I knew was that it was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, that it had four movie stars in it, and that it told the story of the Dunkirk invasion in many locations: on the beaches, in the air, and on the water. Based on these three facts, I naturally assumed that it was going to be another bloated 3 hour mess, with lots of Churchill speeches, etc.

It wasn’t until I got the DVD in the mail that I was shocked to see a 106 minute runtime. Had Nolan actually made a non-bloated movie?? When I watched it, I discovered that it did have some of Nolan’s usual problems:

• As usual, the cinematography was too muddy, which meant that I couldn’t tell the two black-haired beach-heroes apart, and I also couldn’t tell whose plane was whose in the aerial dogfights.
• It’s got yet another overbearing Hans Zimmer score…

But the movie works, and even Zimmer’s score works. Because so many stretches of the movie were dialogue-free, Zimmer had enough room to play, for once. How did Nolan make such a slim, elegant movie, after making so many messes?

• We have three stories, but they’re all based around the same event. To do this, he mixes up the chronology, creating a gradual realization for the viewer that the three locations are on slightly different timelines. One storyline happens over the course of two days, one over a day, and one over an hour or two. I’m not crazy about this, because I never fully understood it, but it undeniably makes for an exciting movie. Each storyline gets a nice mix of action and silent stretches in a hypnotic pattern.
• He’s tapping into modern-day national pain, both in England and America. Once again, it feels like the Nazis are winning, making it all the more terrifying to see the moment they seemed to win the war in the last century.  It’s a timely reminder that the Nazis weren’t destined to lose by the tide of history: They almost won, and in the end they only lost because a bunch of people fought really hard.  
• Almost every Nolan movie before this had its fair share of ludicrous plotting (which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.) I didn’t think he could handle reality. He must have found it very liberating to have a movie where didn’t have to constantly ask himself, “will they buy this next plot turn?” He’s not selling anything, so he’s not falling all over himself. He knows we’ll accept it, so he relaxes.

Best of 2017 Introduction, and Didn’t Make the List: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Hi guys! So it was a pretty good year for movies. Unlike previous years, where my list had lots of idiosyncratic choices, my list is mostly Oscar nominees this year. I don’t know if this means that I’m changing or the Oscars are, but I suspect it’s the latter. My top two probably wouldn’t have been nominees in previous years.

As usual, I’ll mention the movies I haven’t seen first: The Darkest Hour, It, Atomic Blonde, Logan Lucky, Mother, Downsizing, and others I’m not thinking of.

How we’re going to do it this year is first we’re going to talk about four movies that didn’t make the list (one today, three tomorrow), then I’ll talk about five runners-up (for three days), then I’ll do my top five (with maybe a couple of days on #1). So let’s start with:

Didn’t Make the List: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

There’s a lot to like about this movie, especially Frances McDormand’s fierce and funny performance, but boy oh boy did it fall apart. Here are three problems:

Moral murkiness: People have been saying that this is a prescient “MeToo” movie, but is it? Going in, I only knew that this was a movie about a righteous mother who was upset that the police had made no arrests in the rape and murder of her daughter. Based on that, I assumed that this was going to be the case where everybody knew a rich man’s son did it, but the cops wouldn’t arrest him for political reasons. Instead it was a very different movie, where it quickly became clear that a good cop had really exhausted every angle of the case and just came up short.

This is in some ways a braver choice, but it means that the movie actually feels more emblematic of the MeToo backlash: A woman is so upset about a rape that (according to one conversation in the movie) she wants to throw civil rights and due process out the window and now she’s lashing out at her own allies and hurting her own cause! Not surprisingly, this is a movie written by a man.

Not the way the world works: There’s nothing inherently wrong with wading into morally murky territory like that, but it’s a tricky line to walk, and this movie drunkenly veers all over it. McDormand’s character starts off with the notion that this police department is too scared to make arrests, but soon she’s taking advantage of that to a ludicrous degree. The first hint is when she viciously hurts the dentist and the police let her go, but then she firebombs the police station and the cops don’t care! (A cop later confirms that they knew she did it, as of course they would.)  That’s not the way the world works. Not to mention that one of the cops engages in an assault so egregious that it’s crazy he doesn’t get arrested, even in a corrupt town. It’s ludicrously over the top.

The Sorkin Stammer: But this is what I most dislike about the movie. The movie is in some ways critical of McDormand’s self-righteousness, but at other times it indulges it to an annoying degree, pitting her against stammering straw men in a way that’s supposed to make us stand up and cheer but just made me roll my eyes. Nothing is worse that her denunciation of the priest, who just sits there sputtering, letting her score all the points. Here’s the thing about priests: they love to be denounced. That’s their comfort zone. They’ve trained their whole lives for that.  I didn’t buy it.  Always avoid the Sorkin stammer.

Tomorrow: Three acclaimed sci-fi movies

Interweaving an Irreconcilable Theme: The Archive

Well, it’s happened again, I went searching for my Theme series only to discover that I never did one!  As with  Dialogue, I apparently just stitched that portion of the Checklist together out of Storyteller’s Rulebook pieces, so I have to dump all my Theme pieces here and let you put it together yourself!

• Storyteller’s Rulebook #7: Movies Are About Change, TV is About Fate
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #12: Depth is Found in Holes
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #41: Drama Is How It Is, Genre Is How It Feels
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #44: Leave A Question Unanswered
• Storyteller's Rulebook: The Rule of Evidence, Part 1
• Storyteller's Rulebook: The Rule of Evidence, Part 2
• Beyond Good vs. Sucky, the Conclusion: Theme
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #51: Nothing's Wrong Until You Make It Wrong
• Storyteller's Rulebook #64: Know The Way The World Works --Any World
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #65: The Mastermind Exception
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #66: If You Laugh At Death, You Suffer the Consequences
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #68: Don't Flip That Metaphor!
• Storyteller's Rulebook #70: If You Want To Be Lean, You Have To Be Dense
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #71: Screw-Ups Don't Screw Up All Day Long
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #72: Beware the Dark Side (Of Bio-Pics)
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #76: Redemption Requires Actual Guilt
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #81: Dare To Confront the Great Hypocrisy
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #95: Money Is Too Generic. Be Specific.
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #96: The Difference Between Literature and Entertainment
• Storyteller’s Rulebook #100: Theme = Good Vs. Good
• Rulebook Casefile: Unintended Consequences in The Apartment
• Storyteller's Rulebook #112: Audiences Are More Interested in Ethics Than Morals
• Storyteller's Rulebook #119: Great Genre Stories Must Be Metaphors
• Storyteller's Rulebook #120: Reboots Must Re-Establish the Metaphor
• Storyteller's Rulebook #121: Don’t Presume Your Premise
• Storyteller's Rulebook #:133 Tough Decisions Must Have Tough Consequences
• Storyteller's Rulebook #164: Ideas are the Enemy of Observations
• NOW You Can Revise, Step 3: Build a Theme Tree
• Know More Than You Show, Conclusion: Theme
• Storyteller's Rulebook #188: Have Something Authentic to Say About Your Setting
• Storyteller's Rulebook #192: Tap Into Real Life National Pain
• Rulebook Casefile: Exchange of a Symbolic Object in Iron Man
• The Big Idea, Addendum: The Ironic Conclusion
• Storyteller’s Rulebook: The Ending Should Lean Towards One Side of the Thematic Dilemma
• Storyteller’s Rulebook: More Thoughts on Object Exchanges

The Many Ironies of Casablanca

As I update the old checklists, I thought it would also be good to take some time along the way to look deeper into irony. As we did with Blazing Saddles, let’s run through fourteen ironies you can find in Casablanca:

Your story will be more meaningful if you present a fundamentally ironic concept (which will sometimes be encapsulated by an ironic title).

• The least patriotic American has to save the Allied cause. (The title is not ironic.)

There are three big ways to have ironic characterization: Your heroes will be more compelling if they have an ironic backstory…

• Rick the cynic used to be an idealist

…an ironic contrast between their exterior and interior…

• Rick the cynic is filled with tender heartache

…and a great flaw that’s the ironic flip side of a great strength.

• He’s too cold-blooded, but the flip side is that he’s very cool.

Structure centers around another great irony: Though your heroes might initially perceive this challenge as an unwelcome crisis, it will often prove to be a crisis that ironically provides just the opportunity your heroes need, directly or indirectly, to address their longstanding social problems and/or internal flaws.

• Rick finds heroic fulfillment by being placed in a deadly situation and having his heart ripped up again.

Each scene will be more meaningful if the hero encounters a turn of events that upsets some pre-established ironic presumptions about what would happen.

• Rick has made it clear he doesn’t care if Victor makes it out of Casablanca.

Likewise, the conclusion of each scene will be more meaningful if the character’s actions result in an ironic scene outcome, in which the events of the scene ironically flip the original intention, even if things turn out well for the hero.

• When Rick discovers that Victor is with Ilsa, he suddenly has to care.

There are several types of ironic dialogue: On the one hand, there’s intentionally ironic dialogue, such as sarcasm.

• Rick is insulted, but says, “I stay up late at night crying about it.”

On the other hand, there’s unintentionally ironic dialogue, such as when there’s an ironic contrast between word and deed…

•  Strasser thinks he’s very much in control, but we can see otherwise.

…or an ironic contrast between what the character says and what the audience knows.

• Ilsa says she’ll meet Rick at the train station, but we know that she won’t have the chance.

There are the pros and (potentially big) cons of having an ironic tone, which is the one type of irony that most stories shouldn’t have, although it can be a useful tool for certain very specific types of stories.

• It’s tempting to say this movie has an ironic tone, because it’s full of cool, jaded sarcasm, but that’s not the way I use the term. This movie does not take a sarcastic attitude towards storytelling itself (as Blazing Saddles does, for instance) so I would say that it doesn’t have an ironic tone.

Finally, there are the thematic ironies that every story should have: The story’s ironic thematic dilemma, in which the story’s overall dilemma comes down to a choice of good vs. good (or bad vs. bad)…

• Romantic love vs. love of country

…as well as several smaller ironic dilemmas along the way, in which your characters must consistently choose between goods, or between evils throughout your story.

• It’s important to fight for freedom, but do you have any right to endanger someone’s life by asking them to come to a resistance meeting?

This will culminate in an ironic final outcome, separate from the ironic concept and the thematic dilemma.

• Rick finds fulfillment by sending away the woman he loves.

Rulebook Casefile: 12 Ironies in Blazing Saddles

Hi guys, I talk a lot about irony here and in my book, but I’ve never specifically focused on all the ironies in one story before. I just re-ran the checklist for Blazing Saddles, so let’s go back and look at all the ironies in that movies. Here are the thirteen ironies I list in my book:

Your story will be more meaningful if you present a fundamentally ironic concept (which will sometimes be encapsulated by an ironic title).

• A white old west town is saved by a black sheriff. (An ironic title is the only type of irony this movie doesn’t have)

There are three big ways to have ironic characterization: Your heroes will be more compelling if they have an ironic backstory…

• The black sheriff is a condemned track layer.

…an ironic contrast between their exterior and interior…

• Taking himself hostage reveals his internal contradictions

…and a great flaw that’s the ironic flip side of a great strength.

• He’s self-destructively defiant, which almost gets him killed, but the flip side of that is that he’s charming and funny, which saves his life many times.

Our examination of structure will center around another great irony: Though your heroes might initially perceive this challenge as an unwelcome crisis, it will often prove to be a crisis that ironically provides just the opportunity your heroes need, directly or indirectly, to address their longstanding social problems and/or internal flaws.

• Bart finds heroic fulfillment by being placed in a deadly situation

Each scene will be more meaningful if the hero encounters a turn of events that upsets some pre-established ironic presumptions about what would happen.

• He clearly expects a hero’s welcome when he rides into town, but does not receive one, to put it mildly. 

Likewise, the conclusion of each scene will be more meaningful if the character’s actions result in an ironic scene outcome, in which the events of the scene ironically flip the original intention, even if things turn out well for the hero.

• Bart winds up a hostage in his own jail.

We’ll look at several types of ironic dialogue: On the one hand, we’ll look at intentionally ironic dialogue, such as sarcasm.

• No shortage of sarcasm: “Dare I even say, president?” “Dare! Dare!”

On the other hand, we’ll explore unintentionally ironic dialogue, such as when there’s an ironic contrast between word and deed…

• The governor keeps talking about how important he is, but he has no power.

…or an ironic contrast between what the character says and what the audience knows.

• Before Bart meets Mongo, he says that Mongo can’t be as menacing as people say, but we’ve met him and we know better.

We’ll discuss the pros and (potentially big) cons of having an ironic tone, which is the one type of irony that most stories shouldn’t have, although it can be a useful tool for certain very specific types of stories.

• The ending of this movie adopts an ironic tone, and gets away with it. They ride off into the sunset, then get tired of riding and switch to a car.

Finally, we’ll look at the thematic ironies that every story should have: The story’s ironic thematic dilemma, in which the story’s overall dilemma comes down to a choice of good vs. good (or bad vs. bad)

• Good vs. good: Individualism vs. solidarity, standing up to people vs. winning them over.

…as well as several smaller ironic dilemmas along the way, in which your characters must consistently choose between goods, or between evils throughout your story.

• Bad vs. bad: Anger vs. subservience 

This will culminate in an ironic final outcome, separate from the ironic concept and the thematic dilemma.

• He saves the town but is too discontent to stay.

Best of 2016, #1: Zootopia

What I Liked About It: 2016 will always be remembered as the year the Klan conquered America, but it’s also the year that saw one of the best (and most entertaining) movies about racism ever made. My daughter loves watching it, then we get to have in depth conversations about the dozen levels of racism subtly portrayed, from benign to malicious, and what’s problematic about each.

So many Rulebook Casefiles! Next week, we’ll spend the whole week on how the movie sets up the climactic scene, so for now let’s focus on one object runner that’s not part of that scene: Nick’s badge.

• When Officer Hopps falls for the scam being run by Nick Wilde and his partner Finnick, Hopps naively puts a sticker-badge on Finnick, who is pretending to be a toddler.
• When Hopps extorts Nicks into working with her on his case, Finnick laughs at him and puts the sticker on him: “She hustled you good! You’re a cop now Nick, you’re gonna need one of these! Have fun working with the fuzz!”
• Later, when Hopps realizes that Nick has sabotaged the investigation, Nick sarcastically points to the sticker and says, “Madam, I have a fake badge. I would never impede your pretend investigation.”
• Later, Hopps has convinced Nick to apply to be a cop, but then offends him, causing him to throw away his application and rip the sticker off.
• Finally, after Nick graduates the academy, Hopps puts a real badge on him.

So the fake badge changes in meaning with each exchange: naïve maternalism, to badge of shame, to icon of sarcasm, to representation of dashed hopes, to earnest achievement.  Next week, we’ll focus on the exchange of three objects that are necessary for the plot, but this object is solely a source of meaning, and that meaning grows with each exchange.  

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 #4: Manchester By the Sea

(I know, I know, I’ve mostly just stuck to the Oscar nominees so far, but my top three aren’t, I promise)(I still haven’t seen Hidden Figures, by the way [didn’t get a screener], so no telling if that would have made it.)

The Problem: As with Moonlight, this one is pretty perfect, and I hate to criticize it. But also as with Moonlight, I just found its big plot turn to be such a downer that it was hard to love.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Unlike that movie, I thought that this one had far more humanity to it. Even when you’re going through horrible things, you just can’t be heavy all the time. Life moves on, to the extent that our two heroes keep getting caught up in the flow and forgetting to grieve (until they remember at certain moments). Lucas Hedges’s character isn’t going to just dump his two girlfriends because his dad died: Life must be lived.

I liked how this movie exemplified one of our old rules, Screw Ups Don’t Screw Up All Day Long. Casey Affleck’s character, in fact, has a problem in that he’s not screwing up as often as he’d like to. Unable to forgive himself for a horrible mistake, he really just wants to die, but he doesn’t want to kill himself, so he just vows to stay dead inside and throws himself in the way of danger whenever he can. Unfortunately, opportunities to live keep presenting themselves, and he can’t squirm out of the way fast enough. Women take an interest in him, forcing him to push them away, and his ex-wife forgives him, which is the last thing he wants. Worst of all, not enough people want to beat him up to satisfy his masochism, so he has to start bar fights on the flimsiest of pretenses in order to finally get the beating he feels he deserves.

Affleck is a screw-up, but you can’t screw up all the time. His life will always be a grand tragedy, but you can’t be tragic all the time.

His last bar fight, in fact, shows him to be a screw-up-like-a-fox. He has to prove, once and for all, that he’s not fit to be a father, so he waits until the ideal opportunity comes along to stage a final screw-up, ensuring that Hedges will find the ideal home and making everybody’s lives better (except the poor guy he sucker-punches to make it happen)

Best of 2016 #8: Hell or High Water

The Problem: No problem really, I just thought it was somewhat slight for a Best Picture nominee. It’s very similar to No Country for Old Men, but so many scenes in that movie crackled with energy, whereas there was a lot less crackle here. I also thought it was too hard to make out what everybody was saying, which is getting to be more of a problem for me as I get older, which brings us to…

What I Liked About It: The inarticulateness wasn’t as bad as Loving, though. Loving did that thing where they have a non-American actor who thinks the way to act American is to squint and grunt a lot. This movie, on the other hand, actually had Americans playing Americans, which I greatly appreciated.

Another thing I liked in the “at least it wasn’t like those other movies” category was the lack of my least favorite movie trend: The squishy sound. This officially became unbearable to me with Drive: This idea that the mic should be shoved down the orifice of every wound so that we hear the squishy sounds therein. I was afraid of more of the same here, but this movie was gratefully squishy-free. It was just a nice classical Western-neo-noir like Charley Varrick or Red Rock West.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Understand the nature (and economics) of crime. Certain crimes are overrepresented in film, so that when we picture crime we picture Nocturnal Animals: Some stranger is going to rape and murder my wife and daughter! But that’s just our lurid fantasy of crime. The good thing about writing about bank robbery is that it’s one of the few crimes that actually happens more often than most people assume. There were about 5000 bank robberies last year, and a shocking number were successful. This movie presents a very believable portrait of how smart bank robberies actually work, and audiences appreciate a peek into the reality of actual crime.

Rulebook Casefile: The Thematic Question of Stranger Things

Let’s look at the second scene in the pilot for “Stranger Things”. After a scary glimpse of a monster killing someone in a government lab, we cut to four kids playing “Dungeons and Dragons” in a basement. Mike, is both the creator of the campaign and dungeon-master:

• MIKE: Wait... do you hear that? Boom! Boom! BOOM! That sound... it didn’t come from the Troglodytes. No. It came from something behind them...
• Mike slams a LARGE TWO-HEADED MONSTER MINIATURE onto the map.
• MIKE: THE DEMOGORGON.
• The boys stare. Shit.
• LUCAS: We’re all gonna die.
• MIKE: Will, your action.
• Will swallows. God, he wishes it wasn’t his turn.
• WILL: I -- I don’t know --
• LUCAS: Fireball him --
• WILL: I’d have to roll thirteen or higher --
• DUSTIN: Too risky. Cast a protection spell--
• LUCAS: Don’t be a pussy! Fireball him!
• DUSTIN: Protection spell -- !
• MIKE: The Demogorgon is tired of your silly human bickering. It steps toward you. BOOM!
• LUCAS: FIREBALL HIM, Will!
• MIKE: Another step. BOOM!
• DUSTIN: Cast protection!
• MIKE: It roars in anger --
• WILL: FIREBALL!
• Will rolls the dice. Too hard. The dice scatters to the other side of the room. It lands in front of the bedroom door.

So what all does this exchange do for the story?

• It foreshadows the fact that Will is about to be attacked by a real monster.
• It makes us love Mike, for whom this overly-dramatic performance serves as a comically vain moment of humanity.
• It introduces and differentiates the personalities of the rest of our ensemble.
• It provides the thematic question.

The good vs. good thematic dilemma that fuels “Stranger Things” is innocence vs. experience, represented here by the debate between protection (protecting both your safety and your innocence) vs. fireball (endangering yourself and your soul by killing). Will is forced to choose. It’s always great to begin a story with this sort of thematic question asked out loud, which not only establishes the theme, but resonates throughout the rest of the story.

This quickly leads to another thematic dilemma: After Mike is called upstairs, Will finds the die and discovers that it was a seven. Lucas asks, “Did Mike see it?” Will shakes his head, so Lucas says, “Then it doesn’t count.” When they get outside, however, Will confesses to Mike:

• Will: It was a seven.
• Mike: Huh?
• Will: The roll, it was a seven. The demogorgon, it got me. See you tomorrow.

Interestingly, this last exchange doesn’t happen in the script, reversing the meaning of hiding the roll. In the script, Will’s deception tarnishes him and seems to bring on his death, in a classic horror-movie sort of way (He chooses evil, therefore evil is done to him). In the finished version, it seems after Will’s disappearance that he was maybe too good to live in this world. The horror genre always invites us to blame the victim, one way or another.

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.

Our First Video: Let Your Objects Do the Talking

Okay, guys, here’s a big change six months in the making: I’ll now be posting videos!  I had to relearn Final Cut Pro (the lobotomized version) to put this together, but I think it turned out well, so I’m glad I put that time in.

This one has actually been done for a while, but I’d intended to stockpile more before I posted this, because I’m now going to commit to posting one of these every week! Unfortunately, I’ve only got one more ready to go, so I’ve got a lot of work to do! Hopefully this huge deadline on my head will light a fire under me every week!

For our first weekly video, I cheated and combined several rules / blog posts into one, all about ways to use objects in your writing. I hope you like it!

Now I’ll be honest with you: My whole goal in making these videos is to get one hosted on a site like io9 or the AVClub, where they regularly host these sorts of videos, so I really need your help publicizing this video: Share it far and wide until someone up there likes me and posts this in a widely-seen venue. Please share it on Facebook, share it on Twitter, put it on your own blogs, etc. Please help me get these videos out in the world.

Let me know what you think! And look for another big multi-media debut soon! The site it is a-changin’.

Rulebook Casefile: Using Objects to Make the Theme Quieter

Taking care of someone else’s kids is always a strong comedic premise, so much so that “Louie” has used it three times, so it’s natural to start this show by following in those illustrious shoes.

But this show is a little more traditional than “Louie”, because Aziz Ansari’s comedy is more mainstream than Louie C.K’s. This will be a less abrasive show. In other words, it will have more learning and growing. But that’s tricky: How do you avoid the “Modern Family” problem, in which the characters end the sitcom by sitting down and telling us explicitly what this week’s theme was and what they’ve learned? How do you show that our hero has thought about everything he’s seen and learned a little bit about himself, without spelling it out ?

This show has a brilliant ending that quietly and humorously accomplishes this:

• Dev has dropped the kids back off with their mom when another friend brings over gourmet sandwiches. Just as they’re about to dig in, the kids come in the room: They’ve made their own sandwiches for everyone (peanut butter, lettuce and ketchup) and eagerly want everyone to eat them. Their loving mom announces that she’s going to eat their sandwich instead. Dev is clearly moved by the kids’ gesture of love, but decides to eat the gourmet sandwich instead, then tries to eat the mom’s gourmet sandwich as well, if she’s not going to touch it. Cut to credits.

This works for many reasons:

• It’s funny.
• It’s something most of us have experienced, but for whatever reason we haven’t seen a lot of onscreen before. These are the sorts of moment you desperately need to find. It reminded me of real situations I’ve been in with both my own and other people’s kids, rather than other sitcom situations.
• It’s a genuinely painful dilemma! On the one hand, how could he say no to those adorable open-hearted kids, on the other hand, how could he eat that disgusting sandwich instead of the delicious-looking one?

So we have learning and growing (or maybe shrinking) with no hugging or heartfelt declarations. Using the power of objects, kids are transmuted into sandwiches, allowing him to reject one by rejecting the other, and delivering an ending that’s funny and light instead of serious and leaden.

Rulebook Casefile: Thematic Details Throughout “Chinatown”

The Chinatown script went through a million changes, but the version that’s most readily available online is pretty similar to the final version, with a few notable changes. The biggest difference is that the villain is still named Julian Cross, not Noah Cross.

I talked before about how it’s good to go back when you’re almost done and tie more details into the theme, and this is a prime example. Not only did the biblical Noah survive the flood (just as Cross doesn’t care if a dam will break) but he also curses his son for seeing him in his drunken nakedness (just as Cross will doom his daughter after molesting her.) (Maybe the second one is a stretch on my part, but it fits.)

Indeed, water is everywhere in this screenplay:

• Jake’s first client Curly is a fisherman.
• The whole city is obsessed with the drought and the proposal from the department of Water and Power for building a new dam.
• When Jake is in a barbershop, a car overheats outside.
• Hollis takes Catherine rowing through Echo Park, causing Jake to say, “Water again.”
• Jake visits the orange growers and finds out that the Water and Power department has actually been poisoning their wells. When they shoot at him, it bursts his car’s radiator.
• Noah Cross runs a fisherman’s club, and the club sponsors the old folks’ home where the unwitting land owners live.
• Jake decides to get Evelyn and Catherine out of town on Curly’s boat.

That’s a lot of water, but I didn’t consciously notice most of these until I went looking for them.  The goal is for the theme to be omnipresent but not oppressive, and this screenplay accomplishes that admirably.

(I'm using “theme” more broadly here than I usually do, referring not just to the good vs. good dilemma, but to the “theme of water”, but if we stick to my original theme, “build the future vs. honor the past”, then water plays a strong part on both sides of that equation.)