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In this chapter, we look at some of the practical consequences of placing the narrative voice in the foreground. However, we need to make one warning before we go on. As we said earlier in the book, most of the traditional screen-writing rules are designed to feature the dramatic voice. Because we will be looking instead at the narrative voice, some of the ideas in this chapter will not only seem different but will also be a violation of those traditional rules. This is intentional. Remember, the purpose of this book is not to ask you to adopt all these thoughts on alternative screenwriting but to make you aware of what is possible, so that you might look further. Then, if you decide to write a mainstream script, you make a conscious decision to do so.
Openings
Exposition in Mainstream Scripts
The beginning of any story must establish the tone, the relationships between the characters, and any necessary prior history (called backstory ). Exposition is traditionally handled as invisibly as possible—the action is never stopped to explain backstory. This treatment of exposition is based on two concerns:
- You want to keep up story interest by moving forward, even when conveying past information.
- You want to preserve the realism of the dramatic voice.
If the convention is that characters are being inadvertently observed in their day-to-day activities (if you assume they know one another and have a common past), then the characters would have no need to explain their pasts to each other; rather, they would simply act on them. By creating this implied commonality, you allow your audience to project the characters back in time. This gives your film a feeling of extension that goes beyond the 2 hours on the screen.
In practice, the writing of traditional exposition is very difficult, precisely because it must convey information without calling attention to itself. The amount of attention you can get away with varies with which voice you are emphasizing. If you emphasize the dramatic voice (the poet speaking in the voice of the characters), the exposition has to be nearly invisible. When you use the narrative voice (the poet speaking to the audience), you can be quite explicit about the handling of exposition. In Psycho, for instance, we have no problem with the subtitle identifying the time and place of the story, because it is superimposed over the opening panoramic shots of Phoenix that move us into Janet Leigh’s hotel room. Such a series of shots is overtly narrative. They seem to be saying to us, “At 2:43 P.M. on a typically beautiful day, Friday, December 11th in Phoenix, Arizona, two people have just finished making love in a hotel room.” However, if the same title superimposition occurred over the dramatic dialogue scene between Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins in the lobby of the Bates Motel, we would be annoyed at the authorial intrusion pulling us out of the ongoing drama.
Exposition using the dramatic voice generally comes from character ex-change. When the characters are new to one another, exposition can be quite easy and natural. The customs official in Niagara can ask Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotton why they are heading to the Canadian side of the border, because we assume this is something that customs officials do. In Melvin and Howard, Howard Hughes can ask Melvin Dummar where he’s going or what he does for a living, because it is the first time they have met. However, Galvin’s drinking buddies in The Verdict cannot credibly ask how long he has been a drunk, because we assume they have been drinking together for a long time and have no need to ask.
Exposition may be revealed between characters that know one another by heightening the conflict between them to such an extent that the conveyed information seems less important than does the subtext motivating the conflict. For instance, the angry Mickey, Galvin’s ex-partner in The Verdict, can reveal that he has been helping Galvin when he yells at the hungover lawyer, “I got you a good case, it’s a moneymaker. You do it right and it will take care of you. But I’m through. I’m sorry, Joe, this is the end.”1 This does not feel like naked exposition, because our attention goes to the subtext, the disappointment and disgust that motivates Mickey’s outburst. Trying to read Mickey’s rage and Galvin’s reaction involves us, makes us active viewers. The dialogue has motivation; it does not merely sit there. Only incidentally do we pick up the information.
Another form of exposition is called unreliable direct exposition. We expect a detective story to open with a client presenting a problem to the detective. This may be as up-front as possible; the only thing given is that the information has to be wrong or incomplete. As we, along with the detective, are known to be skeptical, we are actively involved in looking for holes in the story.
We can generalize and say that, except for small amounts of exposition that occur between people who don’t know one another (these scenes tend to have little dramatic interest and cannot be sustained), the trick to handling exposition is to misdirect our attention. If the writer develops sufficient conflict between characters, the reader will respond to the subtext, the unspoken tension between them, and absorb expository information without noticing it. If the writer doesn’t develop conflict, the dramatic voice is broken, and the reader can almost see the writer speaking directly and letting the reader in on what he needs to know and what the writer failed to dramatize.
Exposition in Alternative Scripts
Predictably, as many alternative films want to heighten the narrative voice, they don’t hesitate to use blatant exposition that intention-ally lets us know that we are watching a film. In She’s Gotta Have It, we push in on Nola Darling’s bed as she sits up. Initially, we may read this move as a narrative device (the filmmaker is bringing us in) leading into a dramatic scene (we expect Nola to react to someone in her room). But instead of responding to another character, Nola speaks into the lens, announcing her position in the movie. “I want you to know the only reason I’m consenting to this is be-cause I wish to clear my name, not that I care what people think, but enough is enough.” 2 Not only is information placed in the foreground even in this apparently dramatic mode, but also the whole convention of realistic cinema is exposed by Nola’s looking into the camera and speaking directly to us.
In Blue Velvet, the only thing we know about the hero’s father, Mr. Beaumont, comes from what we infer from the montage of idealized small-town life that opens the film. Presumably, Mr. Beaumont is the personification of this innocence. The narrative voice is placed so much in the foreground, is so intent on making us see the connections it wants us to see (rather than those we infer from the action), that, as Mr. Beaumont has his stroke, the camera glides away from him and sneaks up on the insects busily fighting on the grass below. As the insects function as symbols rather than as antagonists (they didn’t cause the stroke), the camera movement serves not so much to introduce conflict in the story, but more to make a self-conscious metaphor by comparing the generalized small-town innocence to the brutal nature that lurks below. Because the shot is so self-conscious, we view it as a wink at us, a connection made between filmmaker and audience, at the expense of the characters in the film.
The Location of Conflict
Let’s carry this idea of winking a little further. When Ben runs out of the party in The Graduate, the camera holds for a moment on Mrs. Robinson watching greedily from behind. She looks at Ben, not at us; if we had to draw a line to detail the tension of the scene, we would draw it from her look to Ben’s departing back. The tension remains with the protagonists and antagonists who inhabit the story world. But the tension does not have to remain imbedded in the fictive world. We can shift the conflict so that it runs between the characters in the story and the narrator, who frequently seems to stand in for us. Blue Velvet and She’s Gotta Have It both implicate us to a greater degree than do more classic scripts. We (as opposed to a character) look down, fascinated at the terrifying insects. We feel we must have maligned Nola and caused her to direct her opening outburst at us. As we will see, this has a profound effect on how we respond to the story.
A theoretical aside: In his famous essay on deep focus, 3 André Bazin praised the “ambiguity” of deep focus, which allows the viewer to choose what he or she would look at. Using narrative voice to lead us would seem to violate Bazin’s concerns, but we would argue that this is not the case. Deep focus or not, all films organize space to lead us through the frame. The question is to what extent the viewer is conscious of being led. The assertion of the narrative voice that we are talking about implies a certain self-consciousness. These films work by, in effect, posing a dramatic voice and a narrative voice in conflict with one another. The viewer must progressively decide to which voice she is giving most credence. A film whose narrative voice totally and consistently dominates the dramatic voice would have no interest to us.
Development
Focus and Build
One of the great paradoxes of dramatic writing is that even if you want to write a script that touches on issues that go beyond the events of the story, you first need to make the story strong and clearly focused. Instead of freeing the viewer, a script that wanders all over the place is generally so hard to follow that it loses its ability to stretch and take on larger issues. Therefore, no matter what your approach, we certainly encourage you to write with focus. However, we suggest a broader definition of what is being focused on. The trick to being able to write the middle of a story is to deepen the conflict set up in the opening of the film. In mainstream films, this deepening is driven largely by the forward motion of the plot. However, a script might also be organized around character insight, theme, irony, recurring motif, and even childish wonder—but it is not easy.
A number of scripts start with this looser sense of organization, but then the writer, fearing the lack of a story, seems to panic and reach for melodrama. The first 40 minutes of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial are as loosely structured as is any independent film, delightfully avoiding any single strong dramatic conflict, while instead concentrating on the wonder the children feel in dealing with the alien and, to a lesser extent, the problem of hiding it from their mother. A few shots of people searching the landing site with flashlights are thrown in to prepare us for the melodrama that comes later. But the central dramatic issue is how Elliott, so awkward around his older brother’s friends, finds an identity with E.T. Once the villainous adult scientists arrive, however, this issue gets lost under the mechanics of the quarantine, the operation, and the final chase. The first bicycle-flying scene, in which Elliott feels the transcendence of all human limitations, resonates with much greater richness than does the second flying scene, when the joy is framed in terms of kids escaping from evil adults.
Many writers consider the middle to be the hardest part to write, because it calls most directly on the resources of imagination. However you start, the trick is to carry through with the implications of the questions you’ve opened up. Sigmund Freud once said that his goal was to study something over and over again until it spoke for itself. This kind of unflinching, honest attention is necessary for a story to develop. Gross plot manipulation will always be a temptation for the writer seeking to keep the middle of her story alive. This must be rejected. The mechanics of drug dealing, the violence between the Pakistanis and the English, and the lurid details of the homosexual relationship between Omar and Johnny might all have taken over My Beautiful Laundrette, but they are not allowed to. By progressively unraveling the complex determination, ambition, and love that make up Omar’s character, while at the same time keeping the movie focused on the paradox of the well-to-do former colonial subjects and the poor English lower-class, the film sustains and develops its extraordinary resonance and insight.
John Waters’s Polyester plays out in the opposite direction but is still true to the absurdity of its opening. Francine Fishpaw loses her husband to another woman, sees her son arrested for foot-stomping, and sends her pregnant daughter to a nunnery. Then, everything reverses—her children reform and she marries the dreamboat, Todd Tomorrow. When this falls apart, when her mother and Todd Tomorrow lie murdered at Francine’s feet, she can still stare up into the craning camera and yell, “We are still family.” Although we feel a surprising amount of tenderness for Francine, she has not reformed and the movie is not allowed to surrender to sentimentality. By the time Waters made Hairspray in 1988, his edge had softened and, unlike in Polyester, we are invited to regard the happy ending without irony.
Meaning and Action
In the traditional script, meaning must flow from action. Characters are defined by what they do, not by what they say. In an alternative script, there is greater freedom to bend the rules. In fact, such scripts frequently gain their power from proposing several competing locations for meaning. Where exactly does the meaning lie in Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre? Is it purely in the talk? Or in the reaction shots? Is it in the new way that Wallace Shawn sees the city after spending the evening with Andre Gregory? Or is it in the lack of action that makes us wonder whether Wallace Shawn’s insight, no matter how overwhelming, will lead to anything?
The Aristotelian notion that “action is character” becomes much more complex. What do we mean by action? Is character defined only by the capability to act (the classical notion)? Or might it be defined by the gaining of insight? Must character be at the center of film at all? Might not the organizing principle be one of theme, of the twisting of the family melodrama clichés, as in Polyester, of the narrative voice, or of some rich amalgam of character, theme, history, and society, as in My Beautiful Laundrette?
Closure
How We Know It’s Over
The music swells, the plot resolves, the hero and heroine kiss, the lights come up, and the movie’s over. After years of experience, we can pop in on an ongoing movie and know instantly whether it is about to end. A number of formal elements contribute to our sense of ending. One trick in writing effective third-act scenes is to cut down the scene’s opening. This pruning accelerates the rhythm and heightens the immediacy of the conflict. Of course, by this time in the movie, we should be sufficiently oriented so as not to need to be set up.
The restorative three-act model suggests that by the beginning of the third act, most of the character conflict has been resolved. Thus, third-act scenes tend to be external, the playing out of the stakes that were raised in the second act rather than the working through of character. Tactics are placed in the foreground. Hesitation tends to be directed toward overcoming obstacles, not scruples. We wonder how the character is going to achieve his goal, not what that goal is, or whether it is right or wrong. Of course, we are familiar with the tying up of plot: stop the film in the middle and try to identify all the questions raised. In most mainstream films, these questions will be quite clear-cut. If you make a list, you will find that invariably they are answered (or at least finessed) by the end of the film.
Most independent films do not end with such a complete sense of closure. These open-ended works make a different demand on the viewer. Mainstream films tend to generate a great amount of moment-to-moment tension, which explains their hold on us. But once they end, the hold tends to vanish. This how-does-it-come-out style of moviemaking is an essential consequence of restorative three-act structure. If you stop a more offbeat film in the middle, it is generally not as easy to pinpoint the tension that must be resolved, because the tension tends to be less urgent while at the same time more broadly resonant. The ending in such a script does not have to resolve one monolithic flow, as much as it has to finish one element of a multi-stranded flow while letting the others continue to play out in the viewer’s mind. Thus, the whole notion of story structure has to be rethought in open-ended scripts. Part of this requires displacing the location of the conflict.
The Relocation of Conflict
As we have said, in restorative three-act scripts, the conflict remains almost entirely with the character and the character’s particular situation. Rarely is there a cultural, social, historical, class, or gender-based element to the conflict. If the conflict exists totally within the story (i.e., totally within the control of the writer who is inventing fictional characters and giving them problems to solve), there is nothing to keep the conflict from being fully resolved. But if the conflict is designed to touch on the larger world right from the beginning, if we are asked to see the individual’s problems against an ongoing historical process, then we don’t expect the same kind of complete resolution. In fact, if we get it, we tend to think that the writer is naive for ignoring the long-term persistence of such problems in the world beyond the story.
In his excellent piece on open endings and ideology, the Israeli Eran Preis talks about writing a script on the Lebanon invasion.4 Preis’s lead character chooses to hide his hospitalization for paranoia, because to reveal it would mean that he has to leave the army, which is socially unacceptable in Israel. Yet word gets out. As he becomes increasingly ostracized in the army, he comes to see the problems of the militarized Israeli society. The film ends with him stripping off his army uniform and standing in the road as the tanks drive off. All we know is that he is no longer in the army. How he will live in the society that he no longer trusts and that no longer trusts him remains unresolved.
Maintaining enough resolution to satisfy, while still keeping the story open, is very tricky. Generally, the immediate dramatic problem has to be solved, so that it must be posed in such a way that the larger issues still resonate. In a mainstream script, these issues, because they exist completely in the world of the story, are clearly resolved. We feel comfortable in guessing that, in Wall Street, Bud will get out of jail and that his father will remain proud of him. The Gekkos of the world will be written off as bad guys. There won’t be an analysis of American society or any suggestion that Gekko represents something that we all might share. By contrast, although the character in Preis’s film has solved the problem of whether he will remain in the army, we have no idea how he will deal with his society in the future. The question of how to live with Israel’s current militant response to a long and impotent history cannot be so easily answered.
In Godard’s Vivre sa Vie: Film en Douze Tableaux (in North America, My Life to Live ), the character Nana insists that she is responsible for her own actions and her eventual fate. A prostitute by choice, she falls in love and wishes to leave the business. But before she can, her pimp inexplicably seeks to trade her for money. The exchange is made, but the money is not what was promised, and Nana is killed, by accident, in the ensuing gunfight. The film ends. The arbitrary randomness of Nana’s death makes for a powerful and appropriate ending for this film. However, the very arbitrariness would be a disaster in a more mainstream script, because it does not answer such questions as: What motivated the killing? Who were the other guys? Why weren’t they set up earlier in the story? These would be fair questions, because mainstream scripts are based on clear-cut principles of causality and clear expectations set up in the first act.
If we want to deal with the randomness and lack of simple causality, we must establish these elements at the beginning of our film, and we must not raise expectations of answers to questions raised in the first act (unless we are planning to subvert these expectations). It is not enough to declare that the world doesn’t make sense anymore; we must incorporate this breakdown of order into the questions raised by the structure itself. For instance, the script of Platoon fails to chart the arbitrary lunacy of Vietnam (although there are some brilliant moments in which the filmmaking depicts this), because its structure—a clear villain in this most morally ambiguous war and an avenger who is able to take his revenge—is so old-fashioned and comforting. This dislocation must take place in the way the story is told, the way the narration is asserted.
In Vivre sa Vie, Nana’s claim, “I am responsible,” raises the whole question of our freedom of will in a mass society; the filmmaker’s intervention and explicit foregrounding of the narrative voice raise the question of the freedom of the characters from the narrating agency. This has a profound effect on how we understand stories. The form—the way the story is told—becomes as important (or more important) than the story. In effect, an equation is being made—the society that gives shape to our lives acts, in some way, as a narrator acts toward a character. Society educates us, presents us with choices, and determines what we fight against.
Narration defines, whether overtly or not, a similar range of choices for the characters contained within its story. If, as in a mainstream script, the narration is not acknowledged, then the characters are given the illusion of being free while we, as onlookers, know exactly what they have to face up to. This displacement leaves us protected, entertained but never implicated by the film. If, however, the narration is foregrounded, as it is in Vivre sa Vie (and, as discussed in earlier chapters, in Vertigo ), then we have to pay attention to it. We must ask from where it is coming. It is coming from a direct extension of our wish to have a story. It is in part an expression of our own desires. Thus, the conflict extends from the story world out to us. Rather than being left unscathed by the story, we are forced to question our desire to look on and enjoy.
The mainstream script tends to use structure as the invisible narrator of the story. This structure provides organization and meaning as though it evolved logically from the characters and the situations of the story. The alternative script tends to foreground structure as the voice of the self-conscious narrator organizing the material. With this change, the location of meaning tends to shift from being fully contained within the fictive world to running between the fictive world and the narrator.
This shift allows us to rethink how we can actually use structure. If the narrative voice is in the foreground, then exposition, typically rendered invisible in a mainstream script, can become an expression of the narrator’s presence. Development can be broader, apparent not only in how the characters act, but in their insights and perceptions. Closure can become much more open ended. In this chapter, we have only touched the surface of available options. But by identifying the location of the conflict and by figuring out exactly what you want to say, you can use structure as an expressive form, not as a predetermined given.
References
1. D. Mamet, The Verdict (Twentieth Century Fox, 1982), 6, http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Verdict,-The.html..
2. S. Lee, She’s Gotta Have It (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 279.
3. A. Bazin, “The evolution of the language of cinema,” In What Is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), 23.
4. E. Preis, “Not Such a Happy Ending,” Journal of Film and Video 42, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 18, 23.