Making the Transformational Moment in Film

by Dan Fleming

  Thinking they have found some sort of “celestial” city, the group discovers that it presents some unique terrors – from crossing a multi-lane highway to encountering a nuclear submarine while rowing across the harbor, from getting stuck on the front of a speeding train to getting overwhelmed by a wall of TV screens. But they do find three metalworkers (who come to Griffin's aid when he is struck by a hit and run driver). Their industry crippled by recession (this was the mid-1980s we need to bear in mind), the three foundry workers are on a work-less night shift, their last before becoming unemployed. Caught up in the visitors’ otherworldly passion, they cast the beautiful cross for them in one last act of craftsmanship.

  The film's set pieces are stunningly visual experiences. Ulf gets caught in the middle of the road, his reverie over the prettiness of all the lights suddenly exploding in a frenzy of traffic noise and near-misses. Out in the moonlit harbor, Searle, Arno and Griffin, with a white horse they have stolen to work the pulley when they hoist the cross, balance precariously in a small rowboat when the monstrous shape of the USS Queenfish surfaces beside them and then disappears again into the darkness. The casting of their offering in the foundry fills the screen with the golden glow of molten copper as the form of the cross appears. Connor, who has gone ahead alone, gets stuck on the front of a speeding suburban train that carries him on a brief but terrifying journey into the city. Running through the city streets to find the church, Griffin is confronted by a bank of TV screens whose images offer their own visionary juxtapositions (including the Grim Reaper in an Australian television public information film about AIDS).

  The narrative that binds the film's visual set pieces together, and structures the story, is organized in a way that becomes superficially recognizable according to the various theories of effective screenplay structure. On the right, the narrative structure of The Navigator is explained using core concepts from Paul Joseph Gulino's sequence-based approach, Robert McKee's explanation of the story-driving “gap” between protagonists’ expectations and the results of their initial actions, and Dara Marks’ description of a transformational arc at work in powerful stories. These are some of the best ideas in the burgeoning (and not always so helpful) field of advice for screenwriters about how to structure a film, and these three sources overlap in significant respects so it becomes possible to map one level of the narrative structure of a successful film like The Navigator by drawing on all three. The film of course pre-dates any of these theories so, in a sense, its partial compliance with their models actually validates them. The breakdown on the right is very much a composite model, borrowing elements where appropriate and putting them together.

  A number of things become very clear. Inciting incident and “call to action” are embedded in just enough exposition of background for the setting and the characters to be quickly believable and engaging. Breaking through into the modern city is a key moment, defining the film's central fantasy and setting up the relationship of past and present. But the encounter with the highway, which presents a terrifying barrier and sensory overload for the visitors from the past, is a moment of awakening – getting to the city is only the beginning of their challenge.

  The long sequence based around the encounter with the foundry workers (which takes the film to its midpoint in terms of length) produces a moment of enlightenment for the three metalworkers, who get drawn into the visitors’ vision and for a while discover that they can be something other than the passive victims of circumstance (economic decline and unemployment). At this point, the people of the medieval village and the disenfranchised modern people represented by these workers become, in a way, a single collective protagonist in the film. The encounter with the impersonal forces of the modern world then takes on overtones of impending death, especially in the surreal encounter with the nuclear submarine. Finally, Griffin, whose visions have been impelling his companions forward and at the same time warning them, realizes that he is seeing too much and losing his way as a consequence. Blindfolded, in the film's second turning point, he gets them back on track and they reach the church. There they find that Griffin's brother Connor, who has gone on ahead while the great copper cross was being made, is now imperiled on the church spire, leading to the climax of Griffin raising the cross just as the sun comes up, and his fall from the spire seconds later. In the narrative resolution Griffin and his companions are revealed to be still in the mine, listening to the boy tell the story we have just witnessed. A coda sees Griffin's death from the plague that his brother had brought back from the outside world at the very beginning of the film.

  While this exercise is extremely informative about how a good screen story begins to work in terms of narrative structure, there is a problem with this whole approach if we leave it there. These classical ways of understanding narrative structure (typifying a now dominant approach to story in Hollywood) are all based on an Aristotelian focus on plot at the expense of what can be termed experientiality. The Aristotelian conception of plot (or what Aristotle called Mythos) as the first principle of drama was based on the idea of carefully articulated parts connecting beginning, middle and end. This Aristotelian view has been progressively elaborated into contemporary “systems” for describing the parts and how they articulate, especially in a film industry looking for successful formulas, to the point where these approaches to narrative structure seem to be identifying generative rules for storytelling. In other words, instead of describing some features of stories that already exist (as here) they seem to describe underlying rules for generating new stories.

  But generative rules are not themselves the basis of effective storytelling. As literary scholars such as John Holloway have demonstrated, transformation rules have a much stronger claim to explaining how narrative works at its best. Generative rules will tend to produce sameness, which may not matter much in the context of myths and legends that actively seek to produce a reassuring sense of the same symbolic “truths” being repeated time and time again, but works of novelistic or cinematic imagination and originality need considerably more than this, especially in relation to experientiality or the question of what it is like to be in the particular story. This is something that many films which, in their screenplays, slavishly follow the supposed generative rules of narrative structure then fail to communicate. So all the right moves are there but there is very little depth to the experientiality (though spectacular effects-driven action can often be used to cover this absence, at least superficially).

  In order to grasp what a transformation rule is we can look more closely at the narrative of The Navigator, as its compliance with the supposed generative rules of classical cinematic narrative structure (as mapped on the previous pages) is in fact quite a superficial aspect of this film's narrative effectiveness.

  Paul Joseph Gulino, who is much less guilty than most of implying that his narrative analyses identify generative rules, makes the very informative point that even a typical eight-sequence feature film structure, or any variation upon it, derives from the old days of film “reels” on single projector theater setups. When projectionists had to change reels of approximately fifteen-minute lengths, structuring filmic narratives into these segments made a lot of sense. Though we have now largely forgotten why, and the sequences have drifted away from the strict fifteen-minute durations, this structure has tended to persist to a remarkable degree. This is a salutary reminder, if one were needed, that many of the seemingly generative rules of “classical” narrative may be describing how things have tended to be rather than how they have to be.

  For example, instead of only the linear end-to-end approach (from inciting incident through to resolution), we can think of a narrative structure in terms of parallel “runs” (top left) and then the embedding of these runs inside each other. Three such runs make up the narrative of The Navigator: Griffin's, Connor's and one that brings the medieval villagers and modern workers together as one collective protagonist (called “The People” here for conv
enience).

  “Embedding” operations can be thought of as being rather like relative clauses in sentences. We could re-write each of the “run” statements opposite with the other two statements as relative clauses, except that the resulting sentence would be an impossibly clumsy one. So the act of faith in Connor's “run” contains and is contained by the story of the journey, so too The People's belief, and so on.

  What the particulars of this specific film establish as the film works through its material is that the act of faith is ultimately an act of faith in seeing (the city, the great church). At the very end, this is underscored when Griffin adds a coda to his own narration by telling Ulf that he (Ulf as a character in the story) finally tunneled under the terrifying road and, on a hill overlooking the city, showed the church to the little wooden Virgin (left). One of the most powerful and affecting moments in the film, this is not explained by any of the generative rules of narrative structure, other than the rather mundane one of tying up loose ends at the resolution. But there is a transformation rule running through this particular film that does explain the moment's deep impact, and that informs the embedding operations interlinking the three main narrative runs.

  This transformation rule can be expressed in the following way. When seeing reaches a point of sublime intensity it risks “seeing too much” and becomes traumatic.

  All statements of transformation rules tend to be specific to the film (or novel) that has been elaborated around them (and there may be several transformation rules operating in concert). They do not become “rules” for generating other stories (i.e. generative rules), except perhaps in the filmmaker's own body of work. Some advocates of the various generative rule systems of narrative structure tend to view such aspects of a film as “subtext” – the place where the writer and director can put all their clever stuff if they want to, so long as the main “text” is obeying the “classical” generative rules. The implication is a take it or leave it attitude to “subtext,” as if it does not really matter too much whether these aspects are there at all. But we are not talking about disposable “subtext” here. This transformation rule is what turns The Navigator into such an unforgettable piece of instinctively post-classical cinema. And it does so by indissolubly wedding the narrative to the image-making, which is of course something that cannot happen at the level of a screenplay alone.

  Where does a unique transformation rule come from? From a writer or director putting it on a post-it note to themselves when they sit down to make a film? Undoubtedly not. All the evidence available from close scrutiny of the creative process suggests that the vital transformation rules, which transform narratives from the inside, develop deep inside the creative process in ways that are frequently not expressible by the creators.

  We can identify its principal transformation rule in operation at several key points in The Navigator (left). Connor, having returned to the village from the outside world, describes in vivid detail what he has seen there – growing chaos and scenes of human despair caused by the plague. When the group arrives at the city it looks first like an entrancing spectacle, glowing with lights, but crossing the highway turns into a visual assault on their unaccustomed senses. When the great menacing shape of the nuclear submarine rises out of the harbor in the darkness, something of the immensity of forces at work in the modern world comes literally into sight for a moment. Then the city's further assault on the senses culminates in the vast wall of TV screens encountered by Griffin, their disjointed imagery both compelling attention and warning of dangers loose in the modern world (nuclear proliferation, AIDS). Ascending to the top of the spire at dawn gives Griffin a climactic view as the strange world he has entered begins to fill with color.

  Integral to, and immediately preceding, each of these moments, the film offers images of sublime beauty or strangeness: the figures from the village dwarfed by the snow-covered “Cumbrian” landscape; the night-time cityscape blazing with light like a vision of something self-evidently “celestial”; a white horse on a rowing boat in the moonlight; a hawk in flight and lunging onto a bolting rabbit on the TV screens; the morning sky reddening over the city. Griffin's visions themselves, interspersed through the film, belong to this catalogue of especially intense imagery. And each time, as the visual intensity approaches its sublime apotheosis, the film effects an immediate transformation into the traumatically overwhelming, Griffin's eventual blindfolding in order to help him “see” the way more clearly becoming an explicit recognition of these transformations within the narrative itself. And Griffin's eventual death from plague is the final traumatic resolution of the series of visions that have informed the film as a whole.

  Now, there is a sense in which asking what this means is to ask the wrong question. Structurally, within the narrative of The Navigator, its own unique transformation rule is what melds the narrative so powerfully and affectingly to the image. So identifying a further extractable “meaning” is unnecessary for this effect to have been achieved. It is always possible, of course, to think about a further level of meaning anyway. So it becomes possible, for instance, to wonder if a critique is being offered here of that “society of the spectacle” that the modern world has become. Or if a parable of the storytelling act and of creativity in general is being offered – one in which the especially creative vision becomes unbearable for the society and has to be excised, driven out in the end. But here we are in the realm of our own responses, our own speculations, our own “readings,” rather than the realm of the film's own narrative organization as such.

  The principal transformation rule we have identified at work in The Navigator (when seeing reaches a point of sublime intensity it risks “seeing too much” and becomes traumatic) becomes especially clear in the following examples.

  Connor returns to the awe-inspiring landscape of his mining community having been shocked by what he has seen in the outside world. He has clearly been a young man eager to get away but the plague has brought social chaos to the wider world and, at first, the village he returns to looks reassuringly safe and familiar. But when he talks of what he has seen out there – the people dying by the roadside, children becoming beggars, monks on “pilgrimages” that are their means of getting away – it becomes clear that these things are coming nearer. The sublime images of the natural environment are immediately followed by these intrusive verbal evocations of what Connor has seen. And then it becomes very real in the form of a boatload of refugees from the east, out on the lake. Repelled and then set alight by men from a neighboring village, while Connor and his companions watch from the shore, this boat full of the ill and the terrified brings home the traumatic nature of what is happening. Connor says he is sick of all that he has seen out there. But community pressure and Griffin's visions convince him to lead an expedition to find the great church being built in the west and make an offering there.

  For people who believe the earth is flat, arriving at what appears to be a “celestial” city after a night of tunneling in their deepest mine makes sense: they have broken through on the other side of the world. The city's lights make an enchanting spectacle from a distance. Even the lights of the vehicles on a busy night-time highway are, at first, full of beauty. Ulf stands enchanted in the middle of the road.

  But suddenly the reality of where he is breaks through his moment of reverie. As car horns blare and vehicles streak past him at perilously close quarters, Ulf becomes trapped and terror-struck amidst what seconds earlier had seemed like a dreamscape. The force of the sudden reversal is palpable, as sounds and images blur menacingly and Ulf does not know which way to turn, until his companions drag him back to the side of the road. For the group as a whole, the road suddenly makes it all too apparent that more trauma lies ahead than they might have imagined.

  While Connor goes on ahead to look for the church, the others find a foundry to cast the copper cross they intend to place on its spire, having carried chunks of ore with them from their mine. Then Martin stays wi
th the foundry workers waiting for the new cross to cool, while Searle, Griffin and Arno steal a horse (for working the pulley that will hoist the cross) and begin rowing it across the harbor to the other part of the city where the church is.

  The surreally beautiful visual spectacle of a white horse in a rowing boat in the blue moonlight is interrupted when, gazing out into the darkness, they sense a presence in the water around them. Suddenly a massive submarine partially surfaces near them, then disappears again, only to resurface on the other side of their boat, terrifying the horse, almost capsizing them, and expressing by its very presence a feeling of how immense and incomprehensible the forces are that characterize the modern world in which they have found themselves.