4
As we have seen, stories cast in restorative three-act form tend to be conservative, suggesting an orderly, clear-cut world in which characters control their own fates and action is redeemable by motive. These stories don’t speak to the more ephemeral sense of experience that we mentioned in the previous chapter. To express a more disjointed world, changing content is not enough; structure, too, must function in more ambiguous ways. Sometimes, it is placed in the foreground and made very obvious. By calling attention to itself, structure suggests the artificiality of form over the chaos of day-today experience. At other times, structure becomes flattened and apparently minimized, creating the illusion of documentary randomness.
We can comfortably define the restorative three-act structure, because it provides a framework that tends to promote the story, or, as Syd Field says, if you know the three-act paradigm, “you can simply ‘pour’ your story into it.” 1
However, counter-structures, which evolve organically from less preplanned needs, are as open-ended and various as are the stories from which they grow.
The following examples are not meant to indicate preexisting categories or a definitive list but rather to demonstrate some of the options open to the scriptwriter.
Structure in the Foreground
We will start by looking at a central paradox that governs all art. By definition, art demands some shaping to give it a meaning. The problem is how then to represent a world whose organization seems elusive at best. One way to do this is by making structure obvious. By calling attention to itself as the fundamental organizing principle, this use of structure exaggerates its artificiality. Because it is shown to be artificial, it organizes the story without reducing the feeling of chaos underneath.
Ironic Three-Act Structure
In Chinatown, Syd Field clearly demonstrates how acts function. The first act ends when the real Mrs. Mulwray shows up at Gittes’s office. As Field points out, this spins the plot around: “If she is the real Mrs. Mulwray, who hired Jack Nicholson? And who hired the phony Mrs. Mulwray, and why?”2 Gittes must find out who set him up. The second act ends with the discovery of the eyeglasses in Mrs. Mulwray’s saltwater pool, apparently implicating her in the death of her husband. Having shielded her from the police inquiry and then becoming her lover, Gittes now realizes his mistake.
The act structure clearly delineates the development of Gittes’s character, from the cool outsider to the emotionally involved lover. By the time he makes love to Mrs. Mulwray, we know that he’s tied up with the same personal demons that drove him out of Chinatown in the first place. We can speculate on those demons—an unwillingness to take orders and the inability to separate personal commitment from professional judgment—whatever they are, his super-cool indifference in the first scene, during which he gloats as his client studies pictures of his wife’s adultery, has changed into a personal entanglement that goes beyond simple justice in the second act.
We believe that Gittes will overcome this personal entanglement because of the self-conscious detective story genre that Chinatown plays on. We know that the detective will spurn love in favor of justice, will destroy highly placed criminals because he lives on the margin of society, and will be most dangerous when apparently defeated.
However, while evoking the classic detective genre, Chinatown also distorts it, setting up another line of expectation. Unlike the classic detective whose failure to fit into the domestic world is presented as heroic, Gittes is portrayed as somewhat incomplete. We sense a sorrow under his glibness and a loss we will later learn is connected with Chinatown. Unlike the classic detective whose life, not his emotions, turns on the working out of the plot, Gittes’s whole personality is threatened by his growing involvement with Mrs. Mulwray. We don’t expect him to be sitting calmly at his desk the day after Mrs. Mulwray is shot, waiting for whoever comes over the transom, the way we do with Sam Spade at the end of The Maltese Falcon. At the end of Chinatown, we believe Gittes is emotionally destroyed.
Chinatown evokes not only the detective genre but also the restorative three-act genre in which a character’s vulnerability is exposed, addressed, and then overcome. This double expectation of triumph—justice will be done by the detective and he will overcome his vulnerability—is turned topsy-turvy when the criminal, Noah Cross, defeats the detective by getting away with his crimes, and Mrs. Mulwray, the only person to have touched Gittes since his last fling in Chinatown, is shot. The story gains its power precisely because of the extent to which it invites us to believe that our expectation of a happy ending will triumph over a darker reality. When our expectations are not met, the darker reality seems all that much more oppressive, because it has penetrated the apparently safe frame of the story.
Ironic three-act structure, then, involves setting up the expectation raised by coherently developed act breaks and foiling it at the end. The extent of the unexpected turn of events is tricky, because, even though it breaks the logic of the acts, it must conform to a deeper story logic to satisfy us.
For instance, although Buck Henry’s screenplay The Graduate follows the restorative form (with Ben busing off triumphantly with Elaine), Mike Nichols’s film adds a twist to this ending. Nichols focuses on the lovers in the back of the bus for what seems to be an uncomfortably long time, allowing them to reveal themselves. At first, they look at each other apparently with joy, then they stare forward without a word, until we become uncomfortable. Have they triumphed, or are they condemned to the same unfulfilling life that Mr. and Mrs. Robinson started in the back of their Ford?
The ending works because the ironic reading keeps us close enough to restorative expectations to satisfy ourselves, while at the same time teasing us with something more. Thus, although we had expected both Benjamin and Gittes to triumph, we can reconstruct the logic of their failure by rethinking what has gone on before. The fact that Ben seems to have nothing to say to Elaine is consistent with the circumstances of their courtship. Thus, ironic three-act stories don’t break the structural logic so much as they turn it in other directions.
Exaggerated Ironic Three-Act Structure
By contrast, at the conclusion of Blue Velvet, Sandy and Jeffrey regard mechanical robins as though they were real and buy into a notion of small-town happiness without ever addressing the implied voyeuristic perversity that earlier involved Jeffrey with Dorothy. Nothing quite adds up, yet because we are aware of this from the beginning (by the exaggerated small-town images), the playing out of the film still somehow satisfies us. Unlike Chinatown, which lets us believe the story might all work out, Blue Velvet never ceases to remind us of its ironic distance.
From the opening credit sequence, we are teased with the multiple meaning of images. The heightened icons of innocence—the white picket fence, the yellow tulips, and the slow-motion fire truck—set against Jeffrey’s father’s stroke both suggest and parody small-town harmony. The presence of evil is constantly overstated, so that everything, from the heavily underscored pan shot of the Lincoln street sign (after Jeffrey had been warned to stay away from that neighborhood) to Frank’s gratuitous use of the word fuck, serves to make us suspicious of, rather than comforted by, the simple good/evil dichotomy.
Despite the multiple meaning of the images, Blue Velvet relies on the three-act structure to drive the story. The tension between the restorative organization and the exaggerated representation of small-town life gives the film its particular irony.
The first act comes to a close when, determined to pursue the mystery of Dorothy and the disembodied ear, Jeffrey breaks into Dorothy’s apartment and steals her key. The long second act follows Jeffrey’s growing involvement with both Dorothy and Sandy, to the point that he is warned off the case by Sandy’s father. Jeffrey’s impotence is underscored at the act break when, powerless, he watches a man he knows to be criminally implicated visits Sandy’s father. The final act kicks toward resolution when Dorothy shows up at Jeffrey’s house naked and beaten. This event leads to the final showdown, after which order is restored to Timberton, but it is an order as artificial as the mechanical birds.
Does Blue Velvet rely on the three-act structure? Yes. But set against the exaggerated representation of good and evil—the stagy meetings in the malt shop and the dreams of the robins coming home—the three-act structure seems equally artificial. The undeveloped decision to go after Dorothy, the coincidence of the toilet flushing that covers the honking of the car’s horn, the banality of the evil, all exemplify and parody the structure and its happy ending. Like Chinatown, Blue Velvet uses the three-act structure, but whereas Chinatown teases us with the possibility of a restorative ending, Blue Velvet, by making both its structure and the world it represents into a cliché, mocks even the aims of restoration: Restore what? A small-town myth that existed only in the movies?
One of the classics in film history also uses this technique. Jean Renoir produced Rules of the Game in the spring of 1939, and it opened in Paris just weeks before the outbreak of World War II. Rules of the Game borrows liberally from French farce. The butler is named Corneille, the hijinks upstairs are matched with the amorous misadventures downstairs, and both the conflict and its resolution are infused with a Mozartian delight.
However, it doesn’t all quite fit. Both by evoking a genre from the past and by miming its innocent tenderness while exposing its incongruity, Renoir is able to suggest that the closure the film achieves comes from the artifice of art, of genre, rather than from any order in the lives being portrayed. We are invited to appreciate the magnificent symmetry of the form while also recognizing the impotence, rot, and isolation of the particular social world that form represents. Less than 9 months after the film’s release, the German army tore through France in 10 days, and that impotence was revealed to the rest of the world. The film is simultaneously exquisitely beautiful and starkly terrifying.
Filmmaker as Antagonist
We don’t watch After Hours for very long before we are aware that something is off center here, too. But, unlike in Blue Velvet, where the characters do not know that the birds are mechanical, in After Hours, Paul gradually becomes aware that he is being affected by something that exists outside of the story. At a climactic moment, as the camera pulls up and away, Paul gets on his knees and yells into the lens, “Why are you doing this to me?” This action breaks down the fundamental assumption of realism—that no one in the story is aware of being observed. Once this happens, the whole notion of a structure that organizes the story for a viewer, but is not apparent to the characters, is undercut. Instead of the structure being concealed behind the actions of the character, it becomes the exact opposite—both obvious and antagonistic to the character. The character becomes aware that something is controlling his life, and, in this way, he must face how limited his freedom is. He is forced to fight something so deeply embedded in his existence that he can’t step outside and confront it. As we see in Chapter 22, this tension between the character and the narrator can be a way to express the tension between our illusion of complete freedom and the subtle ways that, unbeknown to us, the outside pressures of society, class, gender, and history condition our choices.
Documentary Randomness
In contrast to the previous examples, other scripts flatten and minimize structure, creating the illusion of documentary randomness.
Indifferent Three-Act Structure
Badlands has two distinct turning points that resemble act breaks—the moment when 14-year-old Holly runs off with her boyfriend, Kit, who has just killed Holly’s father, and the moment when, after several murders, Holly finally decides to leave Kit. Certainly, these two decisions would function very well in a redemptive mode, suggesting a story about an adolescent’s mistake and the realization of its costs. The difference in Badlands is that Holly, who provides the blank, emotionless voiceover narration, does not seem to learn anything.
Let’s look in detail at the treatment of Holly’s decision to run off with Kit. On page 19 of the script, Kit shoots Holly’s father in the back. Holly kneels by her father, then goes into the kitchen, followed by Kit. Then Kit, followed by Holly, comes back into the living room, feels Holly’s father’s heart, and says, “He don’t need a doctor.”
Cut to Kit dragging Holly’s father into the basement (script page 20). An indefinite period of time has passed. Kit picks up a toaster and brings it up to the kitchen, where Holly slaps him. She walks into the living room. He follows and then decides to leave for a while. She sinks down on the couch.
Cut to the exterior of the house at night (script page 21). More time has passed. Cut back to the interior. Holly comes up the stairs and looks through the bedroom window at two boys playing outside.
Cut to the train station (script page 21). Same time period. Kit puts a coin in the slot of a gramophone booth and makes a record on which he confesses that Holly and he plan to kill themselves. Kit leaves the booth.
Cut to gasoline being poured over the piano (script page 22). Leaving the record playing, Holly and Kit set the house on fire and run to the car.
Cut to Holly collecting her books from her locker at dawn (script page 23). In a voiceover, she tells us she could have sneaked away, but her destiny now lay with Kit, for better or for worse.
What has been carefully cut out of this sequence is the moment when Holly decides that her destiny lies with Kit. In place of this moment, we have static, almost tableau-like scenes that seem inappropriate to what is happening. Because we do not see them as transitions or attempts to come to terms with the killing, we can only try to make sense of them by attributing our own emotions to them and assume that Holly is mourning her father. However, our assumptions of Holly’s mourning are confused when, inexplicably, she runs away with Kit. When her voiceover expresses no feeling at all for her father, we realize that we have no way to penetrate the images. Why is everything photographed so beautifully? Why does the main character have such limited reactions? We don’t know. But what better way to convey the coldness we associate with a mass killing spree than that eerie, inexplicable distance?
To understand the power of this oblique structure, we can look at a film like Bonnie and Clyde. Despite the number of bullet holes, the violence in Bonnie and Clyde feels like abstract movie violence, while the killing in Badlands casts an unrelenting oppressiveness over the viewer that lingers long after the end of the film.
Badlands uses a technique worth noting. As we watch, we struggle to relate the time of the voiceover to the time of the events in the movie. Because the voiceover seems so immature and so undisturbed by the violence it is describing, and because it seems to cast Holly’s actions as adventures in a romance novel, we tend to place it very close to the time of the images. However, as this movie draws to a close, we learn that Holly is speaking from a perspective distanced by a number of years from the events on the screen. This makes the perspective of the movie even more chilling. Although this much time has passed and she has thought about what she has done, Holly is still unable to recount the horror or even the unromanticized dreariness of what she has gone through.
Ironic Two-Act Structure
She’s Gotta Have It makes no attempt to answer restorative expectations. In fact, the film ends with a deliberate flouting of our expectations. We expect Nola Darling, having lost the man she seemed to love, to abandon her free-spirited lifestyle, but she does not. Yet, we find Nola’s declaration of indifference perfectly satisfying, unlike our response to Chinatown, in which we would be totally lost if Gittes declared that he was no longer interested in Mrs. Mulwray. In Chinatown, we move through a clear first-act transition when Gittes, threatened by Mrs. Mulwray, decides to take her on. This transition engages us and draws us into the second act; our participation commits us to its playing out. She’s Gotta Have It has no such first-act turning point. In fact, its flashback structure discourages a linear, three-act reading. Nola moves ahead of us throughout the whole film. Although we first assume that she has a monogamous relationship with Jamie, we are not explicitly told this. When we later learn about her other lovers, we are learning about something that has already been decided, rather than participating in a newly made decision. Thus, unlike Gittes in Chinatown, we are not implicated in the shaping of Nola’s life; we are presented with her lifestyle as given.
She’s Gotta Have It does have something akin to an act break. After Jamie leaves her, Nola decides to drop her other two lovers and go back to him. However, because we have not been involved in Nola’s initial decision to have three lovers, and because we are not positioned to see the taking of the three lovers as a first-act mistake, we do not feel this break serves as a consequence of some earlier misdirection. Unlike a traditional second-act break, we have no sense of her coming back into sync with us. Rather, we stand outside and watch, wondering what she is going to do without being able to prejudge her actions. When she does not stay with Jamie, we are left trying to put the pieces of the story together to figure out why.
One-Act Structure
Although She’s Gotta Have It is structured in two acts, Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets has no act breaks at all. Mean Streets follows one line: Charlie’s attempt to find salvation in the streets by backing Johnny-Boy. Within the first 10 minutes of the film, we learn that Charlie has guaranteed Michael’s loan to Johnny. When Johnny throws away what little money he has, Charlie pulls him aside to get it sorted out. This scene has all the makings of a first-act curtain. We know, even though Charlie does his best not to notice, that Johnny is a disastrous credit risk. Yet, as Charlie’s decision has already been made, all this scene does is affirm and deepen action that began in the backstory—Charlie will stick with Johnny until the end.
At the beginning of the film, Charlie is warned against guaranteeing Johnny’s loans. This is essentially a second-act scene, a scene that heightens the cost of the decision traditionally made at the end of Act I, and one that the rest of the film continues to develop. Throughout the rest of the movie, Charlie is repeatedly warned off Johnny-Boy, while at the same time Johnny becomes the source of Charlie’s salvation—a cross he has chosen to bear. This pressure slowly builds until Johnny, fleeing with Charlie, is killed, leaving Charlie to live without salvation.
Without plot turns, without small victories or misdirections, a one-act script is extremely difficult to sustain for 2 hours. But, when it succeeds, it carries a relentless accumulation of power that is hard to achieve in a more segmented story. Such a story starts with a conflict that is already well engaged and runs through a long, slow, second-act arch. Frequently, the conflict is so intense and fundamental; it is beyond a defining, third-act character resolution. For example, Charlie’s struggle between salvation and family is no closer to a resolution at the end of Mean Streets .
Although divided into thirds, Stranger Than Paradise provides a similar example. Each of its three parts moves in the same direction and gives us the same single-minded directionality that we see in Mean Streets. Whatever itch Eddie is seeking to scratch, his trips to Cleveland, Florida, and, finally, Budapest propose the same kind of solution. Eddie will feel displaced wherever he is, which we knew right from the beginning of the film. Thus, rather than reveal or expose character, flattened structure tends to confirm and deepen what we already know. It also tends to cast doubt on any possibility of change. What will Eddie discover in Budapest? We don’t know, but would be surprised if he finds it to be any different than Cleveland. In Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls, the central character, after spending a dull, grueling day and night as a prostitute, decides to quit. Because we are never invited to ask why she’s become a prostitute in the first place, because this has been predetermined before the film starts, we regard her decision with skepticism.
Mixed Modes
We have artificially separated forms into those that place structure in the foreground and those that flatten it. In practice, most alternative screenplays use both tendencies. Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine/Feminine is a perfect illustration of playing out the tension between two opposite ways of approaching structure.
Masculine/Feminine, which follows Paul’s involvement with the rising pop singer Madeline, is subtitled “15 Precise Acts.” The action is punctuated with numerical intertitles, which progress erratically toward the number 15. For instance, we don’t see number titles for a time, and when we do we see 4, 41A, then nothing, then 7 and 8 in the middle of other titles. These numbers, however erratic, provide an obvious and self-conscious structure. We know the film will be over by the time we reach 15.
By contrast, the scenes are flat, under-lit, and highly documentary in style. They are structured like imperfect interviews, with the suggestion that the most important information is always that which cannot be said. Words are a poor approximation of what is meant; the world appears heavy, opaque, uninterpretable, and impervious to emotion. Characters are observed at a distance. There are few transitions, and all point-of-view shots are ambiguous.
The film plays on this paradox between the artificial and the documentary. By providing an explicit, overt, narrating structure (the progressive numbers), the script acknowledges its artificiality, freeing it from hiding the coincidences that determine all narrative structure. We cannot miss this sense of external control, the implication that the characters are not controlling their own lives. They seem lost in a world that provides them only with advertising slogans. Paul speaks to Madeline through a record machine, unable to find his own words to express his feelings for her. At the same time, this narrative presence is rendered suspect by the documentary style. No matter how many interview questions are asked and how hard the camera seeks to penetrate, the flat, opaque surface of the world reveals little, neither to the characters nor to the narrator.
One of the functions of narration is to signal the end of a film. In a mainstream film, the story ends without calling attention to whatever actually structures a sense of ending. The questions raised by that structure seem to resolve themselves. In Masculine/Feminine, by contrast, the end is intentionally arbitrary—the title, 15, flashes on the screen. Madeline and one of her roommates sit in a police station, answering routine questions. Everything is emotionless. We learn that Paul came into some money, bought an apartment, and, when showing it to Madeline, stepped back too far and fell to his death. The film ends. Self-consciously structured to the point of overt manipulation, Masculine/Feminine becomes a reflection of larger elements—advertising, culture, class, and history—that affect our lives, while at the same time, seeking, like Paul, to find meaning in a world that has lost emotion or connection.
Some Brief Additional Examples
We conclude with a few brief examples of alternative structures. We will return to many of these films later.
Julie Dash’s film, Daughters of the Dust, takes place on the day in 1902 in which the Peazant family is due to leave the South Carolina island of Ebo Landing to head north. The opening title leaves no doubt that they will in fact go, and so the forward narrative tension is diverted into a circular mediation on the departure’s meaning. The timelessness of this moment is rendered with particular perspective, because one voiceover narrator is the great-grandmother, Nana Peazant, looking back, whereas the other is an unborn child looking forward.
Swoon is based on the famous 1924 case involving Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb’s gratuitous murder of a young boy. However, rather than presenting this event as though we are there, our perspective is given context throughout by a number of anachronisms that emphasize the mediated notion of this history. We never forget we are watching these events from the viewpoint of today, and this mediation turns our attention from the event itself to the treatment of homosexual love in the 1920s and today and to the need to declare oneself through violent, defining actions.
Both Nashville and Slacker make a city and its culture (the films occur in Nashville, Tennessee, and Austin, Texas, respectively) their central focus. They do this by introducing a large cast of characters whose relationship to one another seems so tangential that we feel all that is unifying the story is the place itself. Nashville, however, repeatedly returns to the same groups of characters and finally brings the pieces together in an ending that either seems coincidental or so intentionally manipulated as to call attention to its organization. Slacker remains serial throughout, moving from incident to incident without returning to any of them. This flattens our expectation of an extended dramatic build, and instead, as we watch each incident, we struggle to make connections between it and the other incidents. The film seems to be structured around a random train of alternative lives whose very lack of direction defines a cross-section of the city.
To Sleep with Anger is structured around an ambiguity of genre. Harry, a trickster/storyteller, visits a middle-class family of old friends in Los Angeles and overstays his welcome. At one level, the conflict is between the old and the new, about a past catching up to characters, about personalities and how they change. However, underneath, the story is inflected with a hint of magic realism and, for most of it, we are never quite sure whether we are watching a family melodrama or a mythic confrontation, until the last 10 minutes, when the story declares itself in favor of the mythic. The celebration over Harry’s dead body that marks the end of the film pulls us out of the limited perspective of the family story and makes us understand that we cannot only respond to these characters through their individual histories but that we must also confront the larger cultural forces that inform their world.
Conclusion
We have demonstrated two contrasting alternatives to the restorative three-act structure. Sometimes, structure is emphasized and made very obvious. In this case, it calls attention to itself, suggesting the artificiality of form over the chaos of day-to-day experience. Ironic three-act structure twists the standard form, turning it in unexpected directions, whereas exaggerated three-act structure parodies the norm and undercuts the value of restoration. At other times, structure may be flattened and minimized, creating the illusion of documentary randomness. For example, indifferent three-act structure creates a sense of inevitability by not providing the standard insight into character motivations or the meaning of their actions. One- and two-act structures narrow the screenplay’s focus to just one conflict or goal and tend to confirm what we already know about the character or situation.
Many alternative screenplays mix structural emphasis and structural minimization, playing on the tension between the two impulses. Alternative structures should grow organically out of the needs of the individual work. The possibilities are infinite. In Chapter 6, we detail the specifics of creating the stories themselves.
References
1. S. Field, The Foundations of Screenwriting (New York, NY: Delacorte Press, 1982), 11.
2. Ibid., 9.