Ken
James, who is preparing a screenplay of Samuel R.
Delany’s Dhalgren, responds to my comments on expectation.
Dear Ron,
This is your "Dhalgren" scriptwriter again. Just
read with pleasure your last blog about information, expectation, cities, film,
and poetry. Having recently come back from
As a screenwriter and teacher of screenwriting (and a
self-proclaimed "structure junky"), I enjoyed your remarks on
mainstream film structure. I was particularly taken with this:
"In more formulaic
·
Chaotic introduction of detail that gradually sorts into
elements of plot, character, genre, etc.
·
Machinery moving the plot from point A to point B
·
A car chase or similar FX-heavy conclusion Almost all the
pleasure for me occurs in the first of these three movements."
You’ll be pleased to hear that in the film industry, this
three-act structure you discern is known as… "three-act
structure". It’s the basic template for essentially every film out
of
An important additional element of the template is that
what drives the narrative from Act One into Act Two, and from Act Two into Act
Three, is a binary, either / or decision on the part of the protagonist. The
Act One decision is the "complicating" decision (and in the most
conservative films, it’s a morally "bad" decision, a moral error),
and the Act Two decision is the "resolving" decision (conservative
version: the "redemptive" decision) to undo the complications that
followed from the Act One decision. Act Three plays out the consequences of the
Act Two decision, for good or ill.
With my students I like to use "The Matrix" as a textbook example of
3-Act structure. (But any Keanu Reeves film will do – as well as any Tom Cruise
film, or any film showcasing a Youthful Young (Male) Character’s Coming Of
Age.) 30 minutes into the film, the character Morpheus presents the protagonist
Neo with the choice of whether to eat "the blue pill or the red pill" – one of which will
allow Neo to forget the existence of the Matrix, the other to commit to the
destruction of the Matrix. At the point in the film where Morpheus presented
those pills, I was the only person in the theater to burst out laughing. You
couldn’t have a more obvious representation of the binary Act One decision than
that! And, as inevitably as "shave-and-a-haircut" is followed by
"two bits", 60 minutes later Neo decides to be honest and admit that
he has been told by a reliable source that he is not the savior everyone thinks
he is – which turns out to be the redemptive decision. And the last half-hour
of the film – Act Three – plays out the consequences of that decision.
Probably the single most crippling aspect of three-act
structure is that once the protagonist makes his or her Act Two decision, there
is no more internal conflict. The tension of Act Three is purely external: will
the protagonist succeed in resolving the crisis or not? That’s the reason both
for the "car chase or... F-X-heavy" aspect of conclusions to
mainstream films, and for the fact that they almost never dramatically work:
all conflict has been displaced onto the external landscape, so there are no
questions left for the audience to ask, particularly questions involving
emotional identification.
I believe something similar goes on at the end of Act One,
when the protagonist makes his or her first big decision. It’s at that moment
that all the other aspects of the film that are in play – all that
"data" coming at the viewer so stimulatingly in the first act – are
decisively put into the service of character decision and action. And at that
point, for me as well as you, most films become a lot less interesting. In particular,
they become a lot less visual; in terms of the amount of informational weight
being carried by the visual part of the film after Act One, you might as well
be reading a book.
However, over the last ten years or so there has been a
welcome trend in commercial film (even if it’s coded as "alternative"
cinema) toward the acceptance of ambiguity and structural complication as a
legitimate element of "entertainment". My guess is that the main
instigator of this trend (and remember I’m talking about mainstream American
film, not the avant-garde or non-US commercial films that have been doing this
forever) was Quentin Tarantino’s "Pulp Fiction" – which played
brilliantly with structure – as well as Tarantino’s oft-quoted accompanying
critical observation: "I’ve got nothing against linear narrative. I’m just
saying it isn’t the only game in town." This was a great remark, as it uses
the kind of macho language
Best,
Ken James
