by Ben Brady
Have a good time with this one!
Notes
1. John Huston, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (unpublished manuscript, January 1947), p. 1.
2. Gelbart, Tootsie, pp. 1–5.
3. Benton, Kramer vs. Kramer, pp. 1–9.
7. Developing Character and Conflict to Crisis
The Nature of the Dramatic Obstacle
We suspect you wrote your character and conflict with a great deal more specificity in your last assignment. You probably got to the problem, and to more of a problem, more swiftly and with better definition: if you didn’t, you were likely a good deal more aware of that. Good writing doesn’t waste time bringing the story into troubled waters.
But several problems are likely to have occurred. You may have had a good idea for your scene, but somehow failed to see the extent of the opportunity your idea offered for drama or comedy, so you came away feeling you had missed the boat. Or you may have hurried your development to the point of crisis too quickly with the result that your characters and conflict seemed sketchy.
You may have asked yourself once your protagonist had his problem: Where do I go from here? How do I maintain that development, create suspense, reveal motivation, and bring a character to the crisis where he makes a final, self-defining effort to triumph, regardless of whether he triumphs or fails?
We said to define your conflict, just as you must define your character, yet how do you keep that conflict in clear view when the form the protagonist’s immediate problem or obstacle takes seems to change moment by moment as he encounters opposition? Even as simple a scene as that from Rocky turns out to be deceptive when looked at more closely. We said the immediate problem was overcoming Adrian’s resistance, yet nowhere do you encounter resistance in general. What you do encounter is a series of related changes. First, she wants to talk to her brother. Then, she doesn’t think she should stay. Next, she gets to the door. She doesn’t want to take her glasses off or her hat. She starts to weep. When kissed, she doesn’t immediately respond. These are the actual obstacles.
It’s also too easy to say that the fun as well as your insight and inventiveness is in how your characters try to solve their problems, when you now realize, reviewing the scenes quoted so far in the text, that there are layers of problems confronting characters. There is the basic dilemma for the protagonist set out in the premise. There is a series of forms that the immediate problem or obstacle takes in a given scene. There is a relationship between what is immediately at stake and what is ultimately at stake with regard to the main issue of conflict. Then there are obvious complications that befall characters, like Rocky’s falling in love, Les’s proposing to Michael-Dorothy, or Joanna’s coming back for Billy, some of which may seem directly related to the main thrust of your story, some less so.
In fact, two problems have emerged: one is how to master the actual technique for developing character and conflict moment to moment; the other is how to relate that development to the various turns the story structure of your material takes, to the turns in the plot. There are two concepts you need to understand in order to solve these problems.
First, your protagonist is subjected, moment by moment, to a series of minor reverses because each effort your protagonist makes to overcome his obstacle fails, partially, as we have pointed out, because of the opposition he or she encounters from the antagonist, be that a person or force or division within the protagonist himself. Each reverse leads to a new effort on the part of the protagonist to get his way and a new effort on the part of the antagonist to block him. The obstacle takes on new shades and shapes necessarily as a consequence. When we speak of an action-reaction pattern in drama, this is exactly what we mean, this constant metamorphosis of the conflict as it is generated by the first attempt and relative failure of the protagonist to solve his problem. The development of a scene is made up of several reverses leading to the crisis that, climactically, your protagonist must resolve.
The second key to developing character and conflict is how you invent and use complications in the action. Rocky’s falling in love is a complication; Joanna’s returning for Billy is a complication. Complications are crucial turns in the story, in the plot: reverses make up the texture of action within individual scenes. If speaking of reverses helps us understand the growth of the action within a scene, speaking of complications gives us an additional way to think about the larger problems from which specific scenes flow. The two can overlap, especially when a complication is introduced, as in the scene from Kramer vs. Kramer when Joanna demands Billy: normally they are quite different.
Let’s look at reverse and complication more closely.
Reverse
Some screenwriters and directors talk about plot structure in a jargon you should avoid. For instance, you hear terms like plot point bandied around, a term that can be used to justify any moment in a story a writer is in love with. Reverse is an older and more acute term and gives a real handle on the endlessly changeable nature of the obstacle your protagonist encounters. Its roots go back to the Greeks. They called a reverse a peripeteia, and by it meant the crucial, climactic moment in which the tragic hero recognized his irreversible failure to solve his problem as he would have wanted. The most famous peripeteia in dramatic literature is in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex when Oedipus, who thought he had avoided the fate pronounced for him—that he would kill his father and marry his mother—discovers he has inadvertently done both. At the moment he discovers this, he cries out:
OEDIPUS
O, O, O, they will all come,
all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let me
look upon you no more after today!
I who first saw the light bred of a match
accursed, and accursed in my living
with them I lived, cursed in my killing.1
In a moment he falls from a king to a man all others but his daughter Antigone, who is also his sister, despise. He rushes off to find that his wife-mother, Jocasta, has hung herself. He blinds himself and is led off by Antigone, no more than a beggar.
At the end of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Dobbs, with a line of burros carrying a fortune in gold dust, runs into three bandits. He tries to pretend he is unconcerned, but they, making sure he is alone, become threatening. Dobbs pulls a gun and tries to shoot, but it refuses to work. The bandits crush his skull with a stone and knife him with a machete. They don’t recognize the value of Dobbs’s bags of gold dust and slice them, letting the gold pour out and blow away in the wind. Dobbs had slaved for this gold and thought he had killed his best friend to have all of it. Meeting with bandits is a complication: what happens to him as a consequence is a reverse.
These are examples of major reverses—literally, complete reversals of fortune. Ted encounters one in Kramer vs. Kramer when he comes home after a superlative day, only to have Joanna abandon him. Every scene can’t have a major reverse in it: they appear only at strategic turning points in the story. But every scene is made up of the texture of the minor reverses a character encounters trying to get his or her way. Michael undertakes one tryout after another in hope—why else would he be at one?—only to find they turn out badly for one unexpected reason after another. He undergoes, swiftly, multiple reverses. Or he meets with Les, and moment to moment is stopped from letting Les down gently until the proposal he came to prevent is made: he meets another series of reverses. Even something as simple as Dobbs’s hesitating to pick up the cigarette and having it stolen from him is a reverse.
Think of the simple reverses in the first scene we quoted in this text, when Bonasera is methodically rebuked by Don Corleone in The Godfather for not coming for help before, for demanding too severe a punishment for his daughter’s attackers, and for offering to buy help. These are all reverses. Each reverse is a moment of dramatic action containing an action and a reaction within the flow of the scene. Each of these moments also marks a particular shading or change in the immediate obstacle the character is trying
to overcome. That obstacle will appear in a slightly new form because of each reverse. A new effort, a new ploy, a new inspiration, a new offer—a new response is called for, reverse by reverse, from the protagonist because he fails to get his way and from the antagonist’s efforts to keep things that way!
Complication
A complication is a development in the process of events that affects the overall objective of the protagonist. It is an event that has an ongoing impact, providing the basis for a scene or a number of scenes or an entire screenplay. A reverse is a given moment of action-reaction within a scene that works out contrary to what the protagonist wants. A reverse is never good, while a complication in itself can be neutral: it is how your protagonist handles a complication that is important. There is nothing bad about Rocky’s falling in love or Dobbs’s winning the lottery that lets him go prospecting. Everything depends on how these characters handle the consequences of each complication. Rocky builds a relationship; Dobbs goes mad with greed from the gold he finds. Similarly, Michael’s decision to imitate a woman and become Tootsie represents a real complication in his life, but it becomes impossible only because of the complications that follow from that action on his part: he falls in love with a woman who believes he is a woman, and her father falls in love with him.
Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider plays a providential drifter who helps a group of poor miners against a single wealthy, greedy miner trying to corner all claims. He persuades the man to buy out the poorer miners at a reasonable price instead of calling in hired guns, but the miners decide to stick it out from motives of dignity. They desire gold only as a means to build a decent community. This is a complication that now makes their resistance look not foolhardy but heroic, and the antagonist’s seemingly generous offer becomes merely an example of mindless greed.
A complication can also be bad. Luke in Star Wars becomes involved with Darth Vader and his minions as he tries to help Princess Leia, the first consequence of which being that he sees his adoptive family destroyed. There is nothing positive immediately for Ted in Joanna’s leaving. Your premise will contain both your primary idea for your story and the primary complication, with the shading the action gives that for better or worse.
A story can have a few complications or many. There is a delicate line to walk here. Too many complications and we begin to chuckle and wonder, What next? One of the techniques of comedy depends on this multiplication of complications. Used right, even apparently serious material can be given a comedic nature not at odds with a writer’s intentions. Complications abound in Prizzi’s Honor, starring Jack Nicholson as Charlie Partani, a Mafia man Friday who investigates, kills, and organizes with equal dexterity. First complication—he falls in love with a non-Mafia woman. Second complication—she turns out to have stolen “family” money. Third complication—she is an expert hit man in her own right. Fourth complication—instead of killing her, he marries her. Fifth complication—the daughter of one of the sons of the ruling Prizzi godfather tells her father Charlie raped her and sets him off in a quest for vengeance. Sixth complication—the father hires Charlie’s wife to hit Charlie.
When Charlie overcomes all problems and the Prizzi godfather asks him to run the family’s business, a moment of great triumph for Charlie, he is ordered to kill his wife. Why? Charlie’s wife had shot a woman, a witness to a kidnap (another complication), to prevent her from identifying the Mafia members involved. That woman turned out to be a policeman’s wife. The police are consequently on a rampage against the Mafia (a complication caused by a complication), even though their salaries are cut in half by the withdrawal of Mafia bribes. Now Charlie must run the family, and straightening out this mess is his first assignment. He is horrified and refuses, but is driven to a moment of insight. If he doesn’t kill his wife, he must leave the family, and he realizes he can’t imagine a life outside the family. He encounters a major reverse because of this complication. He kills his wife.
Now let’s turn to three scenes from three very successful screenplays widely separated in time and place to illustrate and develop these points: The Graduate, On the Waterfront, and Fanny and Alexander.
A Seduction Scene from The Graduate
The Graduate is a film that caught the disillusionment of the 1960s when it first appeared with its mingled portrayal of innocence and hope corrupted by the beaten in spirit. Ben returns home from college only to discover nothing of great meaning or value awaits him. He is adrift and enticed, teased, and seduced by a woman old enough to be his mother, Mrs. Robinson, a close friend of his parents. Her husband is his father’s partner. Her daughter, Elaine, is Benjamin’s age. Later Ben and Elaine will fall in love and end up together despite her mother’s affair with Ben.
What follows is the scene in which Mrs. Robinson seduces Ben. He has just been maneuvered by her into taking a hotel room, where he is waiting for her as the action begins. Jot down what you think are the BEGINNING, MIDDLE, and END. List the complication that has brought Ben here, which we have indicated for you, and then list what you think the reverses are in this scene.
FADE IN:
INT. HOTEL ROOM (EST) NIGHT
Ben steps in, moves to the window. We SEE the pool area through the window. Ben closes the blinds.
There is a KNOCK on the door. Ben crosses to the door and opens it.
MRS. ROBINSON
Hello, Benjamin.
BEN
Hello, Mrs. Robinson.
Mrs. Robinson moves to the bureau and puts her purse and gloves on it. She looks at herself in the mirror for a moment, then turns slowly, looking at the room, finally ending on Ben’s face. She steps towards him.
[TWO SHOT: BEN & MRS. ROBINSON]
MRS. ROBINSON
Well?
He clears his throat and kisses her.
BEN
Well.
MRS. ROBINSON
Benjamin.
BEN
Yes?
MRS. ROBINSON
I’ll get undressed now. Is that all right?
BEN
Sure. Shall I—I mean shall I just stand here? I mean—I don’t know what you want me to do.
MRS. ROBINSON
Why don’t you watch?
BEN
Oh—sure. Thank you.
She takes off her jacket.
MRS. ROBINSON
Will you bring me a hanger?
BEN
What?
MRS. ROBINSON
A hanger.
Ben opens the closet door.
BEN
Oh—yes. Wood?
MRS. ROBINSON
What?
BEN
Wood or wire? They have both.
MRS. ROBINSON
Either one will be fine.
BEN
Okay.
He brings her a hanger. She puts her jacket on it.
MRS. ROBINSON
Will you help me with this, please?
She turns her back.
BEN
Certainly.
He undoes the zipper at her neck.
MRS. ROBINSON
Thank you.
BEN
You’re welcome.
She turns and looks at him. He backs away.
MRS. ROBINSON
Would this be easier for you in the dark?
BEN
Mrs. Robinson—I can’t do this.
MRS. ROBINSON
You what?
BEN
This is all terribly wrong.
MRS. ROBINSON
Benjamin—do you find me undesirable?
BEN
Oh no, Mrs. Robinson. I think—I think you’re the most attractive of all my parents’ friends. I mean that. I find you desirable. But I—for God’s sake, can you imagine my parents? Can you imagine what they would say if they just saw us here in this room right now?
MRS. ROBINSON
What would they say?
BEN
I have no idea, Mrs. Robinso
n. But for God’s sake. They brought me up. They’ve made a good life for me. And I think they deserve better than this. I think they deserve a little better than jumping into bed with the partner’s wife.
MRS. ROBINSON
Are you afraid of me?
BEN
No—but look—maybe we could do something else together. Mrs. Robinson—would you like to go to a movie?
MRS. ROBINSON
Can I ask you a personal question?
BEN
Ask me anything you want.
MRS. ROBINSON
Is this your first time?
BEN
Is this—what?
MRS. ROBINSON
It is, isn’t it? It is your first time.
BEN
That’s a laugh, Mrs. Robinson. That’s really a laugh. Ha ha.
MRS. ROBINSON
You can admit that, can’t you?
BEN
Are you kidding?
MRS. ROBINSON
It’s nothing to be ashamed of—
BEN
Wait a minute!
MRS. ROBINSON
On your first time—
BEN
Who said it was my first time.
MRS. ROBINSON
That you’re afraid—
BEN
Wait a minute.
MRS. ROBINSON
—of being—inadequate—I mean just because you happen to be inadequate in one way—
BEN
INADEQUATE!
LONG pause.
MRS. ROBINSON
(starting to dress)
Well—I guess I’d better—
BEN
Don’t move.
He slams the bathroom door shut. The light in the room disappears.
FADE OUT2
This is at once amusing and sad, full of effective, simple detail, like Ben’s asking Mrs. Robinson whether she prefers a metal or wooden hanger and the exaggerated politeness of his using “Mrs. Robinson” to address her. It is similar to the earlier scene from Rocky, except now it is the man who is inhibited. How do your notes on structure compare with ours?