by Salva Rubio
Keep in mind that our plot is usually concerned with “turning over the cards,” that is, showing us the clues as the detectives unveil them, and you will find that in many instances, the sleuth will start investigating one mystery to find another one that encompasses the first. We call this a case within a case that lets us – and the detective — discover what has been the story (and often the theme) all along.
Finally, a piece of advice from Blake if you’re writing a Whydunit: figure out who, what, when, where and why your bad guy did it... and make your gumshoe follow those steps in reverse.
WHY DID THEY DUNIT?
Do you have what it takes to solve the mystery, both in your script and in your case? You’ll need:
A “detective,” an amateur or a pro who thinks he has seen it all but is “unprepared for what he’ll find.”
A “secret” to uncover, one that our sleuth is so obsessed with that when “turning over the cards” he cannot help but go on... and we cannot help but watch.
A “dark turn” in which he will break his own rules, his group’s or society’s, showing that his drive is an obsessive one and thus making him “part of the crime.”
Beware of who you find in that last dark chamber! What if you find… yourself?
MICHAEL CLAYTON (2007)
It is always good news when an experienced screenwriter takes the director’s seat, even if it’s his first feature, as in the case of Tony Gilroy and Michael Clayton. Add to the mix Sydney Pollack, Anthony Minghella and Steven Soderbergh as producers and a cast that includes George Clooney, Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson... and its success was not a surprise.
The resulting film was nominated for seven Academy Awards ®
(including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay). And there’s no doubt about it, it’s a wonderful movie whose narrative, universe and visual style made it an instant classic.
It’s also a great example of our “Political Whydunit” subgenre, taking place in the realm of “governmental or corporate power,” in this case, law firms, organizations, multinationals — you get it! So we’re talking about “thriller” in its most traditional sense.
Of course, Michael Clayton includes all our elements: a “detective” in the form of a lawyer who has seen it all, because his work deals with complex schemes, who finds himself making a “dark turn” to solve a “case within a case,” that is, to reveal a “secret” that very powerful and wealthy people want to keep hidden. But Michael, just like us, needs to know the secret. Will he be changed by the revelation?
W Type: Political Whydunit
W Cousins: Z, Good Night and Good Luck, T he Quiet American, The Constant Gardener, The Name of the Rose
MICHAEL CLAYTON
Written and Directed by Tony Gilroy
Opening Image: The “reborn lawyer” monologue of Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), a very disturbed man, opens the film, quite the opposite of what we will see at the end. We also find an anxious woman, Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), hiding in a bathroom. And finally, in the middle of the night, we see the busy offices of a law firm knee-deep in a crisis, full of nervous people who have sold their souls to their jobs. In this world, can you remain sane... let alone be decent?
Theme Stated: “Who else could be trusted?” says Arthur, referring to Michael Clayton (George Clooney). Trust is the theme of this film, but would you rely on the words of such a distressed man as Arthur? To do so would surely take the kind of loyalty and faith one can only put in friends and family. Yet can your own work disturb you so much that you become the opposite — untrustworthy?
Set-Up: Enter lawyer and “fixer” Michael Clayton, a man who deals with the dirty work at the law firm. Soon we realize that Michael, drinking and playing high-stakes poker, must ironically have personal things that need fixing: he has gambling debts and he invested in his recovering, drug-addict brother Timmy’s restaurant, but Timmy relapsed, the restaurant closed, and Michael owes Timmy’s loan sharks $ 75,000. So why does everybody trust Michael? Soon, we understand as we witness his charm, seeming serenity, fast decision-making skills and clarity of mind when dealing with a difficult client. Yet he still seems to be in a Stasis=Death situation when he says he only considers himself a “janitor.” Meet our cynical “detective” who thinks he has seen it all, and get ready to discover how unprepared he is for what is about to happen.
Catalyst: While driving at dawn, Michael stops and leaves his car, impressed by the magnificent view of some horses in a field. Suddenly, his car explodes! And Michael has to run.
Debate: What a way to start our Debate section! What has happened? Why has someone tried to kill Michael? The film cuts to a flashback four days earlier, helping us to consider possible answers. More characters are introduced, like his young son, who is obsessed with an adventure novel in which no one can be trusted. “Sounds familiar,” Michael tells him. At work, he expertly fixes other people’s problems, though he seems weary of it. There is much stress and pressure involved, which in the past drove him to a gambling addiction. At the same time, we meet Karen, General Counselor for U-North (an agricultural products conglomerate), a woman not unlike Michael, also under a lot of pressure.
Break into Two: Arthur, legendary senior litigating partner of the firm, and the man of the distressed opening monologue, has apparently stripped naked while giving a deposition. Michael “gets the case” and has to go to Milwaukee to “fix” it. The “case within a case” has begun, and there is “no turning back,” as Arthur holds the “secret” Michael will have to uncover.
B Story: The B Story pertains to both men and the trust they have in each other. Michael finds Arthur, who claims that he has been working about 12 % of his life on a case defending the reputation of U-North, who he believes to be responsible for the death of hundreds of farmers... at the same time while crazily proclaiming he is “Shiva, the God of Death.” Can Michael trust a man like him?
Fun and Games: The exploration of how work, pressure and stress can affect people and even turn them crazy is the promise of the premise that this beat delivers — not only because we see a video of Arthur getting naked, but also because this section deals with the defense of the U-North case he was working on. Karen, who must “fix” it, meets Michael and decides that neither he nor Arthur are trustworthy. Karen’s suspicions are confirmed when she illegally gets Arthur’s briefcase and finds a memo about a product made by U-North that turns out to be carcinogenic — this is the “secret” she will have to hide. Michael soon learns that Arthur has escaped his careful watch, and Karen seeks Mr. Verne, a kind of “fixer” like Michael, but with seemingly less scruples. Verne starts monitoring Arthur’s house and calls, and their suspicions become very real: Arthur is building a case against U-North.
Midpoint: Michael suffers a false defeat when he can only get $ 12,000 to pay off his brother’s debt and is given a ticking clock warning: he has seven days to get the rest of the money. He goes public when he tells his boss Marty that he is “ 45 years old and broke” and fears losing his job in a soon-to-happen merger. Michael asks for a loan, but all he gets is a week to find Arthur to secure his own job. Talk about raising the stakes !
Bad Guys Close In: Michael has to find his mentor Arthur no matter what, but when he finally does, the latter uses his vast legal knowledge to keep Michael at a distance: their friendship is “disintegrating.” Michael tells Arthur, “I’m not the enemy.” And Arthur’s response, “Then who are you?” strikes at the core of Michael’s internal struggle.
The Bad Guys Close In when Arthur leaves a message at the firm’s answering machine telling about the carcinogen, prompting Karen to nervously ask Mr. Verne to kill him in order to cleap-up the mess once and for all. Soon, Arthur is dead, and of course, it has been staged to look like suicide. Michael blames himself for the death of his friend and visits a key witness against U-North, noting that it made no sense for Arthur to commit suicide at that stage in the case. So our “detective” performs
his “dark turn” against both his personal and his family’s beliefs when he asks his policeman brother to give him a seal to trespass into Arthur’s apartment. There, he discovers a seemingly unrelated clue inside a copy of the same book his son was reading: a receipt from a copy shop... and something we may find familiar (remember our Catalyst) — an illustration of horses on a hill. Just as Michael is taking this in, a voice yells, “Freeze!”
All Is Lost: Michael is arrested, so he will not be able to carry on with his investigation of Arthur’s documents. The whiff of death surrounds the case as he realizes he may never find answers to the “secret.”
Dark Night of the Soul: Michael contemplates the extent of his options when his angry brother bails him out, disappointed for having trusted him, recalling the theme.
Break into Three: Michael presses on and follows his last clue: the copy shop receipt. And A and B stories cross when he discovers Arthur’s legacy: a memo explaining U-North’s plans to keep the carcinogen secret. This sounds like Break into Three material because now Michael has a way to prove that his mentor was not (totally) crazy! But at the office, Marty offers Michael the $ 80,000 he requested earlier, which comes with a three-year contract. Michael decides not to give Marty the memo, knowing he would lose everything. Meanwhile, Karen has gotten the memo, too.
Finale:
Gathering the Team: Michael has a plan: he gathers the money and pays the loan shark, afterwards going to the poker room we saw at the beginning. The Bad Guys have gathered too, to kill Michael.
Executing the Plan: Michael leaves the game early, demonstrating that maybe he won’t relapse after all. He gets a call from work, thus executing his plan of continuing to work for the company. Meanwhile, Mr. Verne sets a bomb in his car.
High Tower Surprise: Back in the present at our “horses on the hill” location, the car explodes. The baddies think that he has been killed, and Michael supports this notion by throwing his belongings into the burning car.
Dig, Deep Down: Michael “digs, deep down” when he trusts his drug-addicted brother (the one most likely to fail him) to help him at the most dangerous time. But after having paid the loan sharks, it is his brother who thanks him.
The Execution of the New Plan: Michael’s new plan involves confronting Karen and making her believe that it’s easier to buy him than to kill him. When she complies and trusts him, attempting to buy him off, he reveals that he was recording the conversation and his policeman brother arrests her. Michael has shown what kind of a person he’s chosen to be.
Final Image: Michael gets in a taxi and tells the driver to give him $ 50 worth of a drive. We began with a very distressed man, and we are ending with an apparently calm one. As in most “Whydunits,” our “detective” has not changed, but rather we have — thanks to the revelation. Is he more cynical than before? We must wonder, as in the unforgettable last shot, for only a second... Michael Clayton smiles.
Pi (1998)
Darren Aronofsky is, no doubt, one of the most interesting filmmakers and auteurs that emerged in the late ’90 s. He’s the living example of how you can start in the independent realm with a self-financed first film, and with a budget of about $ 68,000, produce a film that is multi-awarded and launches a mainstream career.
This film is also a good example of our “Fantasy Whydunit” subgenre, one in which the “secret” is investigated in a magical, supernatural or hallucinated world, like the surrealistic Chinatown that our main character inhabits along with his constant feelings of paranoia, social anxiety disorder and hallucinations.
Maximillian Cohen is our “detective,” one who thinks he has “seen it all” about the real world and is only interested in mathematics. Well, he is truly unprepared for what he will find, which goes beyond math. And while you can tick the “cynical” box too, in this case he will change at the end — if only at a great loss.
With a “secret” that must be uncovered — apparently a long string of random numbers — and a classic“case within a case” scenario, what Max is looking for turns out to be much more than he expects. And to discover it, of course, he will have to make that dreaded “dark turn” that causes him to become part of the darkness that falls... when you stare too hard at the sun.
W Type: Fantasy Whydunit
W Cousins: The Naked Lunch, Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos), Mulholland Drive, eXistenZ, Alphaville
Pi
Story by Darren Aronofsky and Sean Gullette and Eric Watson
Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky
Opening Image: Our “detective” to be, Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is waking up, nose bleeding, an image that we will see repeatedly. But has he really woken up? Max suffers massive headaches that make him pass out, but he is also paranoid and hallucinates — this makes up the Fantasy of the Whydunit. At the end of the film, we will see if he has really “woken up”... to life.
Theme Stated: “When I was a little kid, my mother told me not to stare into the sun,” Max narrates. Looking into the sun almost blinded him, but he doesn’t realize that learning about certain “secrets” is similar to staring at a star — we can end up blind or worse. Max will have to learn this lesson, and this time, for real.
Set-Up: We get to know Max better and the many things that need fixing in his life. He lives alone, is reclusive, unemployed, dirty, and does not take care of himself; his entire room is filled with wires and circuits, a symbol of his ignoring all that is not mathematics in life. However, he has a “Save the Cat!” moment by playing math games with a little girl while awkwardly ignoring his sweet neighbor Devi’s (Samia Shohaib) kindness. Max tells us that he thinks “mathematics are the language of nature,” so he is determined to find a pattern behind everything, for example, the stock market. He does not want to get rich, but only wants to crack the code. He looks at the trees, but doesn’t seem to see beauty, only numbers. Max, who is Jewish, has a chance encounter with a Hasidic Jew, Lenny (Benk Shenkman), and after having another panic attack, notices he is being followed by a strange woman from Wall Street. But is it all real or just paranoia?
Catalyst: “Stop thinking. Just feel. Use your intuition.” This is what mentor Sol (“sun” in Spanish) tells Max when they meet to play the Japanese game go. But as we will see, ceasing to think and to just feel is precisely what Max finds difficult. Will he achieve this goal by the end?
B Story: Our B Story or “mentor love story” pertains to Sol. As we can deduce, he used to be a great mathematician who hastily worked to find patterns in the number Pi, but never found them. Retired after suffering a stroke, he seems to live a nice life among his books and tropical fish.
Debate: Can Max follow Sol’s healthy advice? Or is he really more interested in surpassing him? Who is the strange woman that Max avoids? He Debates with himself why Sol quit his research when “he was so close to seeing Pi for what it really is.” Why did Sol apparently stop believing when he almost had the answer? Further questions arise when Lenny tells Max that he works with numbers too; he is trying to crack a code that the Qabalah may contain.
Break into Two: Max has a revelation and decides to apply a new theory to his work, apparently basing it on the Golden Ratio. But before hitting the “enter” key on his computer to execute the calculations, he hesitates when he hears Devi making love in the next room. Those are the real-world feelings he is missing! Even so, he pushes the key and enters Act Two.
Fun and Games: His powerful computer, aptly named Euclid, melts down when trying to make the new calculations and spits out a printed paper with a seemingly random string of numbers. Max deems it an error and throws it away, noting a strange secretion on the computer. Meanwhile, Sol keeps advising him to relax to get perspective or he will become blocked, but Max realizes that part of Euclid’s results were true. Now the “secret” that he has to unveil is clear, as the “case within a case.” What was the string of numbers? Can he use it to predict the stock market’s patterns? He keeps having hallucinations and has to dodge the
woman again. To avoid her, he ends up going with Lenny to the synagogue, where he finds a new lead: the pattern they are looking for in the Torah is 216 digits long, just as the one Euclid found. However, Sol disapproves and thinks that Max can end up as a numerologist if he loses scientific rigor. The Wall Street woman, Marcy, tempts him with a new chip that could make his computer work again.
Midpoint: Agitated from this “Attention Attraction,” Max gets one of his attacks, this time in public. He tries to find out if a hallucination is real and ends up waking up near Coney Island. For a moment, he feels at peace, far from his seclusion and the city — at last connecting with nature. He seems to be getting the “knowledge that he has to change,” but before he can embrace the notion, a nautilus shell gives him a new idea. At home, he studies the strange secretion under the microscope and achieves a false victory; he finds spirals and the secretion seems to be organic! He may be onto something big.
Bad Guys Close In: Obsession further pushes the “disintegration of the world” for Max. He ignores Devi (he is “losing an ally”) and performs a double “dark turn”: first he calls Lenny to help with the Torah code (thus being anti-scientific), then he accepts Marcy’s chip in exchange for information. When Max is about to press “enter” again, he hesitates, as if knowing the consequences. The computer fails again, he hears Devi having sex again, and Max finds a strange bulging vein on the side of his head. Still, he gets the code again and learns it by heart.
All Is Lost: After memorizing the code, all goes white — he still does not know it, but getting the number into his head was dangerous. All Is further Lost when he wakes up and finds Devi in his apartment, but he kicks her out. No one will care about him now.
Dark Night of the Soul: Max contemplates himself in the mirror. He is “beaten and he knows it.” He has shaved his head and is studying an anatomy book, and even though we don’t understand why, we are sure it is bad news.