The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is there an epilogue/aftermath/denouement in which the challenge is finally resolved (or succumbed to), and we see how much the hero has changed?

Real life is mostly epilogue. The ramifications of our crises linger for years, and we’re never sure if it turned out right. In fiction, we want tidier concluding moments, although not too tidy. 

• In exciting stories like Speed, this is often the moment when the hero and heroine take a breather and confirm that they really do care about each other, which often results in a first kiss. 
• The surviving heroes of The Great Escape get dragged back to prison, content in the knowledge that they’ve caused a huge distraction. 
• Many comedies, like Date Night, wrap up the dilemma (the marriage problems, in this instance) in a quiet scene just after the climax, which is fine. 
• 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. This can work, too.

Rulebook Casefile: Reversible Behavior

An interesting thing I noticed when re-watching Ghostbusters was how muted and subtle the character arc was.  Our hero, Bill Murray, never has a midpoint disaster or a spiritual crisis. He never seems to doubt himself or get humbled.  He seems like the same cocky rogue all the way through…or is he?

He does in fact change quite a bit, and it’s set up very nicely through reversible behavior.  In the very first scene, Murray’s paranormal researcher is sabotaging his own ESP experiment just so that he can hit on the test subject.  He doesn’t truly believe in or care about the supernatural, he’s just using it to get dates.  

This scene is neatly reversed two thirds of the way in, when the new object of Murray’s affections, who has so far resisted his advances, throws herself at him.  He’s very tempted, but instead he forces himself to admit that she’s possessed, and he now values solving her problem more than scoring with her.  It’s not played like a big moment, nor should it be.  By subtly contrasting this scene with the first, the movie allows us to notice the difference for ourselves, whether consciously or subconsciously. 

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES, he consummates at his wedding.  There’s even a nice moment where he kicks a floor waxer out of their suite, showing his newfound assertiveness.
Alien	YES, she gives a matter-of-fact unapologetic account of blowing up the ship, then goes to sleep with the cat.
An Education	YES. She’s happy at Oxford, with a new boy, pretending that she’s never been to Paris.
The Babadook	YES. It’s half-resolved/half-succumbed-to.  It’s interesting that some behaviors are reversed (She talks about her husband and let’s others do so) but some aren’t, (the basement is still verboten, he son is still violent)
Blazing Saddles	YES. He gives a speech then rides off into the sunset with the Waco Kid.
Blue Velvet	YES. he’s embraced his parent’s idyllic life and possibly married Sandy, but we see the Robin eating the beetle and we have to wonder if he’s crushed or absorbed the evil, which are two different ways of reading that image.
The Bourne Identity	YES. he tells her that he has no ID and smiles.
Bridesmaids	YES. She enjoys the wedding, bonds with Lillian, accepts the cop’s love.
Casablanca	YES. this time he stands up to the Nazis, then he goes off to join a Free French garrison in Braziville with Louis.
Chinatown	YES. There’s just a brief moment after the finale, when he’s told “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
Donnie Brasco	YES.  His family accepts him but he’s disgusted by his medal.
Do the Right Thing	YES. He talks to Sal the next morning.
The Farewell	YES. She returns home to New York, feels overwhelmed, then stops on the street and shouts “Ha!”, which she refused to do before.  We then find out that the grandma is still alive six years later.
The Fighter	YES. Interview, Dicky says, “He put Lowell back on the map.” Micky says “We”.  “Who’s the pride of Lowell now? Right here.” Points at Micky. “I gotta go.”
Frozen	YES. She’s happy in love, able to live outside the castle, and reconciled with her sister.
The Fugitive	YES. Kimble saves Gerard this time. Gerard also has reversible behavior: “Don’t tell anybody.”
Get Out	YES. He rediscovers peace-making and chooses not to choke Rose to death (but Peele points out that he ultimately leaves her to die alone in the road like his mother died).  Rod delivers the moral: “I told you not to go in that house.”  Chris presumably agrees.
Groundhog Day	YES. Succumbed to happily: he says “Let’s live here.”
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. He is accepted by the village and is physically transformed.
In a Lonely Place	YES. he watches her walk away and declares himself dead inside.
Iron Man	YES. He tries again with Pepper, but fails, and then tells the world who he is.
Lady Bird	YES. She goes to church and then calls her mom and leaves a message admitting that she loves Sacramento and her mom.
Raising Arizona	YES. They send gifts to Nathan Jr. as he grows up.  Maybe they’re able to have kids, or maybe that’s just a dream.
Rushmore	YES. he introduces his real father to everyone, and his selection of song “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger,” lets us know that he’s learned.
Selma	YES. Johnson certainly shows how much he’s changed with his “We shall overcome” speech.  Has King changed?  He’s certainly wearier and bruised, and feeling more guilty about the deaths.   We see onscreen graphics telling us what happened to everybody.
The Shining	NO. an ambiguous final scene was cut out, leaving us with a quick cut to black as soon as they get away.
Sideways	YES. He drives north and knocks on her door. There’s no reversible behavior…they could have ended with him drinking merlot to show he’s changed, but that would have been too on the nose (no pun intended.)
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. She says lambs stopped screaming.
Star Wars	YES. He’s now a celebrated hero.
Sunset Boulevard	YES. Earlier in the climax, when he finally has the strength to resist Norma, even when she threatens suicide.

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.

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Do all strands of the story and most of the characters come together for the climactic confrontation?

In real life, most projects (whether relationships, confrontations, or criminal enterprises) eventually culminate in success or failure, but this is usually a gradual process. Fiction heightens and compresses these moments, creating something far more definitive and impactful than real-life climaxes, which, let’s face it, are often underwhelming.

Most heroes win, some heroes lose, some lose by winning (the hero of Downhill Racer realizes how meaningless victory is), and some win by losing (Spider-Man sacrifices love for higher responsibilities), but in each case, the story climaxes and the hero has a catharsis.

• The hero defeats the villain in most thrillers and action movies. 
• Boy gets girl (and vice versa) in most romances (and also, for that matter, in most action movies). 
• The discontented heroes of Sullivan’s Travels and Rushmore, in addition to getting the girl, mature and find more inner peace. 

One reason many first-time writers insist on writing unhappy endings is that it’s a lot easier to write a story in which the hero fails. After all, you don’t need to master the structure of problem solving if your hero doesn’t solve the problem, right? But whether your heroes win or lose, they must see their problems through to their climax. An unhappy ending cannot arrive at an earlier point in this structure and bring the story to a premature end. Such endings are only tragic when the hero loses at the last possible moment. (Rick gets the girl and then has to give her away in Casablanca; Michael loses the last bit of his soul after defeating his enemies when he closes that door in The Godfather; Jack loses his life after saving the girl in Titanic.)

While audiences usually hate stories that don’t climax, you can use that tool to force them to think. Mutiny on the Bounty denies its antagonists a final showdown, forcing the audience to decide who’s right. Limbo pulls a similar trick when it ends right before the climax. In the case of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Blazing Saddles, the lack of proper finales is an "F you" to convention. Finally, Killer of Sheep, Funny Ha Ha, and Old Joy all end on quiet moments that provide little catharsis. All three are excellent, but it’s telling that each of these micro-budget movies was self-financed by the filmmakers. You may be able to tell a story without a climax, but you can’t sell it to a buyer. That doesn’t mean such stories aren’t worth telling.

Straying From the Party Line: The Lack of Closure in Silence of the Lambs

Just a short entry today, because Silence of the Lambs comforms to this checklist better than any other movie I’ve ever tested.  The one area that sticks out is one that also stuck out last time:

• Deviation: The strands of the movie never come together.
• The Potential Problem: As Jonathan Demme mentions in the DVD doc, he was really afraid that the audience would get antsy that we abandon Clarice for a long time while Lecter makes his escape.  By the same token, it’s odd that Lecter disappears from the story after his escape, and never gets an showdown with Clarice. 
• Does the Movie Get Away With It? In fact, it would have been easy to put Clarice at the escape, and one can imagine a version in which Clarice is the first to figure out what Lecter has actually done, and she’s the one who tries to warn the ambulance driver, a moment too late.  Presumably the only reason that they didn’t do this was that they wanted to stay true to the book.  In the end, it might have smoothed out the movie slightly, but it’s not really a problem.  
• By contrast, one can also imagine a version of the movie in which Lecter comes after Clarice, possibly even converging on Bill’s house at the same time, but that clearly would have been a much weaker choice.  The lack of closure between Clarice and Lecter is “unsatisfying” in the best way, leaving us shocked, impressed by the movie’s audacity, and unsettled about the problem of evil.  The only advantage would be that there wouldn’t have been a craving for the (inevitably disappointing) sequel. 

But, wait, before we move on to the next checklist, I’ve got more to say about neat tricks I admired while re-watching this movie, so let’s turn this into a Silence of the Lambs week! Tomorrow: Not calling attention to your structure...

Straying from the Party Line: The Lame Third Act Escalation in The 40 Year Old Virgin

So let’s talk about the weakest part of The 40 Year Old Virgin: The lame escalation that launches the final sequence of the movie.

At first, everything is escalating nicely, but soon it gets weird…

1. After a believable fight with Trish, Andy decides to revert to Cal and Jay’s advice: he gets drunk at Jay’s engagement party and hits on the bookstore girl, Beth. She’s into it and they go to her house.
2. At her house, Beth gets freakier and Andy loses interest. As he leaves her bathroom, he finds his friends in her bedroom. (We get a lame explanation that Jay once had sex with her and kept a key, an explanation that is both dubious and supremely creepy, but quickly glossed over.) They convince Andy to recommit to Trish instead, so he leaves and bicycles home (Why not go to Trish’s house?) Meanwhile, Cal goes into the bathroom to presumably to have sex with Beth, who doesn’t even know him. (We later see them together at the wedding.)
3. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, Trish’s daughter Marla has convinced her to go try to fix things with Andy, so Trish is waiting at Andy’s house. He gets there and finds her going through David’s box of porn, which shocks and appalls her. She also finds some pill and assumes that it’s a rape drug for some reason.
4. She storms out, and he has to chase her on his bike, finally crashing in front of her, confessing he’s a virgin and winning her over.

Here we arrive at one of Apatow’s strangest qualities: he makes very dirty comedies that betray some bizarrely outdated conservative beliefs. In 2005, what liberated woman would be offended to find a box of porn in her new boyfriend’s apartment? And even if that could happen, why on earth is it the final escalation of this movie?

In order to trigger a final crisis, surely it would have made far more sense for Andy to invite Beth back to his house? After all…

• It makes much more sense that his friends might have a key to let themselves in.
• We get one desperate bike ride by Andy, not two, which eliminates a repeated beat.
• Keener would have a genuine reason to get upset, finding Beth there.

Shifting to Meddler mode, I can easily imagine a version that works much better:

1. Beth is in Andy’s tub, but he thinks better of sleeping with her, so he backs away only to find the guys in his apartment urging him to make it work with Trish. They quickly explain the situation to Beth and she understands.
2. The guys realize that Trish has just arrived, so they try to sneak Beth out first, but they run right into Trish and improvise different lies about who Beth is, so she figures it out.
3. Trish confronts Andy who fails to explain, and Trish drives away. He catches up and explains that all of his behavior (including almost sleeping with Beth) was driven by his insecurity over his virginity. She understands and they kiss.
4. (Meanwhile, in the course of Cal sneaking Beth out, we get a hint that they’re hitting it off.)

Wouldn’t that be better? Have a genuine conflict instead of a lame misunderstanding!

Crazy Stupid Love was a very similar movie that did a much better job with a similar scene:

• Carell again plays a 40 year old who belatedly gets some advice on how to have one-night stands, the difference being that in this version it’s after his wife leaves him. At the midpoint, Carell and his estranged wife have a long-hoped-for rapprochement as they wait for a parent-teacher conference, but then it turns out that the teacher is one of Carell’s post-breakup hook-ups, and he never called her back. They both turn on Carell, understandably enough, and he again loses hope of getting his wife back.

I remember while watching that scene how refreshing it was to see our lovelorn hero suffer a deserved humiliation, rather than the mere misunderstandings that so often occur in romantic comedies. The 40 Year Old Virgin should have had the courage to take the same tactic, rather than concocting a lame misunderstanding to motivate the climax.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	Somewhat.  The guys improbably show up at Elizabeth Banks’ house, and send him off to go find Trish.  So Trish never meets the guys, but it all feels like one big finale.
Alien	YES. Everyone and everything left alive, yes.
An Education	NO. A final confrontation with David was in the script but was wisely cut out.
The Babadook	YES.
Blazing Saddles	YES. Lili and the mayor even show up at some point, thought we never see how.
Blue Velvet	YES. in a fairly cliché way, Sandy and her father burst in as he shoots Frank.  Dorothy isn’t there, though.
The Bourne Identity	NO. the girl isn’t there, but that’s fine.
Bridesmaids	Not really.  The cop isn’t at the wedding, which is weird.
Casablanca	YES. everybody’s at the airport (except Sam, whom Ricks sells to Ferrari after all, without getting permission or saying good-bye!)
Chinatown	YES. Yes, most everybody: his operative, all of the police, Cross, Mulvahill, Evelyn, Catherine, and Curly. Only Yelburton and the man with the knife are missing.
Donnie Brasco	NO. Not at all, Donnie disappears and misses the big confrontation / revelation of his identity.
Do the Right Thing	YES. Very much so.
The Farewell	NO. Very much not.  They all gather to watch the grandma read the faked results, but nobody confronts anybody.
The Fighter	YES. they’re all there at the fight.
Frozen	YES. Everybody is there except the trolls and the Duke of Weselton.
The Fugitive	YES.
Get Out	YES. everybody’s there.
Groundhog Day	YES. He literally brings the whole town together.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. Every single character is at the climax.
In a Lonely Place	NO. Almost, if they had all come together at the engagement dinner, things might have worked out, but the last piece of the puzzle doesn’t arrive until they’re alone, when things are too late.
Iron Man	YES. Only Rhodey isn’t there, but that’s fine (there’s a deleted scene where he shows up to help and it’s ridiculous)
Lady Bird	NO. she’s off at school in the final scenes without all the other characters.
Raising Arizona	YES. Pretty much.
Rushmore	YES. everybody’s at the play.
Selma	Sort of.  The whole movement marches across the bridge together, but Johnson isn’t there, and King isn’t at his speech.  (He was at Johnson’s side at the bill signing, but that isn’t shown. )
The Shining	YES.
Sideways	NO. Miles and his ex run into each other at Jack’s wedding, but Maya and Steph aren’t there.
The Silence of the Lambs	NO, just Clarice, Bill and the captive are there, not Crawford or Lecter, but that’s fine.
Star Wars	YES. Not in the same place, but all part of the same confrontation.  Everyone but Threepio takes part (even Artoo is in the X-Wing.)
Sunset Boulevard	YES. Betty comes over to Norma’s.