The Calling Card Script

by Paul Ashton

  there is a life and story beyond the ending – whether or not Tony Soprano

  is whacked in the blackout, and whether or not Dale Cooper is really

  possessed by Bob.

  THE END 185

  AMBIGUITY

  Both these final scenes seem to have a sense of ambiguity about them as

  we ask ourselves what really happened and what the ending really is. How -

  ever, ‘ambiguity’ is a much overused and misused term, in particular by

  inexperienced writers trying hard to justify a lack of clarity in their story.

  Ambiguity is not a lack of clarity – on the contrary, it is the possibility

  of more than one clear meaning. Take the sentence: ‘They are cooking apples.’

  This can mean either a reference to the kind of apples used for cooking, or

  a reference to some people in the act of cooking some apples. Both meanings

  are perfectly clear – they just happen to be equally possible given the way

  that particular sentence is phrased. Without more information and context

  for the sentence, both meanings stand.

  The problem with ‘ambiguity’ is that it is too often inaccurately used

  to explain away vagueness of meaning, extreme obscurity – and, in the end,

  a lack of meaning. If you want your ending to express ambiguity, then you

  need to think very clearly and carefully about what the alternate but clear

  possible meanings are. This is a lot harder than it sounds and than you

  would think. There aren’t many stories that truly manage to do this. You

  might say that in the blackout ending of The Sopranos, there are two basic

  possibilities – either Tony dies or he lives. We don’t know. Both are possible

  and both follow through from everything we have seen over six seasons.

  A brilliant ambiguous ending is that in Memento. Having been told

  that his apparent mission to avenge his wife’s murder is a fallacy and that

  he is in effect being utilised as a hit man, the hero wakes up in a new scene

  and appears to continue as before. We do not know whether or not it is

  indeed a fallacy. Both possibilities are clear and, in the story, logical. But by

  the time he reaches the next (final) scene, the hero who cannot form new

  memories appears to have forgotten this bombshell. He does not know the

  truth. He will never know the truth. The ending is a true ambiguity, and in

  that ambi guity is contained the brilliant poignancy of the story. Which is

  better or worse: the unbearably painful vengeance that spurs him on or the

  unbearable truth that his vengeance has been devised to give meaning to

  an otherwise meaningless life? And in a final, brilliant dramatic irony, the

  char acter carries on having forgotten the question, while we are left with

  the bombshell of ambiguity, fully conscious of its meaning and fully aware

  of how painful both possibilities are.

  186 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT

  Ambiguity is not for the faint-hearted or muddy-minded. It is for those

  who are absolutely clear about what they are trying to say and show.

  TWISTS

  Concluding twists are a regular feature of the thriller, detective and horror

  genres. The audience for these genres expects the story to try to hoodwink

  them and surprise them at the end. When twists are done well, they are

  about the revelation of important information that we just haven’t quite

  worked out for ourselves. Done badly, they are tricks thrown in that don’t

  follow through or make any sense of what has gone before.

  Some kinds of twists are about the moment of anagnorisis – realis -

  ation – for the character about who (and what) they really are. They are

  often supernatural, as in The Sixth Sense, Angel Heart, The Others, or for Annie in the pilot of Being Human. Or they can be psychological, as in The

  Machinist.

  Other kinds of twists are about the moment of realisation by the hero

  about the truth of who (or what) another character really is, as in State of

  Play, My Summer of Love, Chinatown, Unbreakable or any number of who -

  dunit, mystery and detective stories.

  Once in a blue moon they are revelations by the hero of something

  fundamental they have kept secret from the audience, as in No Way Out,

  where the naval officer in pursuit of a Russian spy turns out to be precisely

  the double agent he is meant to be pursuing. This one is a dangerous game

  to play with your audience – you risk alienating them at the end by saying

  that the character is not the person they have been rooting for.

  The late revelation of information comes in all kinds of stories, in

  particular comedies where a character’s attempt to hide or cover up some -

  thing fails to comic effect – from Basil Fawlty pretending Sybil is ill or

  hiding the rat from the hotel inspector, to the revelatory resolutions of

  Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, Much Ado, Twelfth Night et al. But these aren’t twists. Usually we can see the secret or truth being suppressed and

  our comic delight is in seeing how badly the characters do so and in the

  irony of knowing it will come out in the end. Real twists are where the

  audience is as surprised as the characters by the revelation.

  Audiences for genre-driven stories take a delight in trying to guess the

  reveal before it comes. And the reveal only works the first time they see the

  THE END 187

  story, so if you are going to make one then it needs to be impactful,

  fundamental, coherent and the true completion of the story. If it’s a cheap

  trick then it’s a cheap story. If it’s a meaningful revelation, you can satisfy

  both story and audience alike.

  DEUS EX MACHINA

  I have already talked about this – the turn of events that comes from no -

  where and hijacks the story. The chariot descending from the heavens for

  Medea resonated in the themes and the world of the play. But without that

  true resonance, agants from outside the world of your story thus far step -

  ping in and changing events fundamentally or irrevocably are a problem.

  What it really means is a failure of story – a desperate attempt to

  salvage a story that has no ending. The ending must follow on. If at the end

  you reinvent the rules of the universe you created at beginning, then what

  was the point of watching everything that came between the two?

  The difference between a twist and a deus ex machina is that one is

  the character-driven revelation of meaningful information at a crucial point

  in the story, while the other is a conveniently thrown-in change of direction

  that reveals nothing meaningful and does not conclude the story.

  ANAGNORISIS

  The point about great twists is that they are not really ‘twists’ at all – they

  are a revelation or realisation of something we didn’t yet know or hadn’t yet

  worked out. In all the examples above, with the exception of No Way Out,

  the twist is the anagnorisis – the realisation and revelation of a crucial

  truth in the story and for the characters. Dr Malcolm Crowe and Grace

  Stewart and Annie realise they are ghosts in The Sixth Sense, The Others

  and Being Human. Harry Angel realises he is the killer and has sold his

  soul to the devil in Angel Heart. Trevor Reznick realises he isn’t being

  haunted or stalked by
anything other than his own sense of guilt in The

  Machinist. Cal McCaffrey realises his old friend is at the heart of the

  conspiracy in State of Play. Jake Gittes realises the truth of Evelyn’s

  relationship with her daughter and father in Chinatown. Mona realises that

  her relationship with Tamsin was founded on lies in My Summer of Love.

  They are all realisations and most are (unless we’ve already guessed them)

  188 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT

  also revelations. They are the anagnorisis – a crucial part of the end of the

  journey.

  Anagnorisis is not about sudden clarity that comes from nowhere. It

  is earned, fought for, pursued – even if the character does not realise until

  the final moment that is what they have been doing. It may be a surprise

  to them – but it shouldn’t be a non-consequential, random shock because

  this means the muddle in the middle has simply been a meaningless mess,

  rather than a mess with a purpose and a point. Utter villains need not make

  this journey – but the heroes simply must. And so will the other characters

  to greater or lesser degrees.

  Realisations and revelations are not necessarily sudden twists. With

  most characters, it is a more slowly dawning realisation or understanding

  or appreciation of the journey they have been on and who they really are

  after travelling down that road. For Oedipus it is a sudden tragic under -

  standing that his hubris and arrogance have taken him down a very wrong

  road indeed. But for Sam Tyler in Life on Mars, the end of episode one is a

  dawning realisation that solving the Raimes case won’t get him home,

  while the end of series two is an eventual realisation that he is ultimately

  more himself and at home in the 1970s than he ever could have thought.

  For Mia in Fish Tank it is the realisation that her dancing dream turns out

  to be a grubby sordid reality, but that she has the pride and strength of

  personality and intelligence to walk away and readjust her desires. For

  Schmidt in About Schmidt, it is the realisation that he has the choice of

  whether or not to speak the truth at his daughter’s wedding, and that if he

  does do so then it will have consequences.

  For Hamlet it is any number of things – one of which is that having

  set in motion a chain of events at the beginning, the end is inevitable and

  he must simply accept that what will be will be (even though all he has done

  and not done throughout makes the ending come about, so ‘what will be’ is

  of his own actions). It is a realisation that he must take responsibility for

  all the tragic, messy, unwanted consequences of those events – the deaths

  of Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, Laertes. It’s

  also a realisation that he has come to some kind of terms with the grief and

  anger and angst and confusion of the beginning – so that the ‘rest is peace’.

  Not every anagnorisis is clear-sighted or even fully conscious. For

  Stanley, a dumbstruck silence the morning after is a kind of anagnorisis in

  The Birthday Party. For Babak Beiruty in The Incomplete Recorded Works

  THE END 189

  the realisation is a very weird, warped understanding that he must cut out

  the cancer from his body – and by extension, his obsession with a girl he

  will never see again – and that this must surely kill him. For Leonard

  Shelby in Memento, the moment of realisation comes and goes, and it is our

  job to carry the poignant ambiguity of his life with us as he fails to remem -

  ber the possible truth that has just been revealed to him.

  There are only a small number of ‘successful’ stories I can think of

  that really challenge this. In Mike Leigh’s Naked it isn’t clear at the end,

  when Johnny limps away down the road refusing to accept any form of

  closure, pause or empathy, whether he clearly understands his alienation

  from everyone around him and decides to embrace it or whether he does not

  reach that realisation and so is stubbornly continuing as he always has.

  This ambiguity, for me, casts an unsatisfying cloud across the story. He is a

  brilliant character and creation, but I’m not sure whether the random qua -

  lity of his encounters through the main body of the story lead him to a point

  of change, a point where he sees himself and/or the world differently enough

  to make the story we have seen truly meaningful.

  Anagnorisis can come in many shapes and forms, but if it doesn’t come

  in some way, at some point, to some degree, no matter how momentarily,

  then there can be no real and true satisfaction – no ending to the journey

  your characters have gone through to try to satisfy their wants and needs

  at the start and throughout the story. This is the difference between dram -

  atic stories and pure comedies. In pure comedies, the characters never quite

  self-consciously realise who or what they are and therefore are never quite

  capable of change. In drama, characters can realise and can change;

  whether or not they do so, or do so successfully, or do so in time, is the

  subject of your story.

  IMPACT

  Dramatic satisfaction isn’t about the temporarily bloated ‘fast food’ feeling

  of fullness in your stomach. It is about the immediate impact and then the

  lasting completeness of an experience.

  Rather than a bloated fullness, I think the best and most satisfying

  endings do deliver a kind of sucker punch. They hit you. They have an

  impact. They affect you – whether that’s an immediate, winding blow or a

  delayed response that gets you later. If you feel nothing, then what was it

  190 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT

  all for? Don’t make it just a chuckle – make it an infectious belly laugh that

  gives you a stitch. Don’t make it just a bit sad – make it heartbreaking.

  Don’t make it just diverting – make it overwhelming. Don’t make it quite

  clever – make it fiercely intelligent. Don’t make it melodramatic – make it

  dramatic. Don’t make it just OK – make it great. Make it satisfy.

  STRUCTURE AND THE ENDING

  If the beginning means setting characters out on a journey, and the middle

  means driving them through the peaks and troughs of the difficult road

  ahead, then the end is ultimately the arrival. It is the distant point that the

  characters wanted, needed, necessitated, whether or not they knew it – and

  that in some cases they have always been gazing towards longingly. Struc -

  turally, it is the point that all roads either do or pointedly do not lead to.

  Picturing this as a physical journey – roads, routes, terrains, destin -

  ations – is useful but don’t let it confuse you or what you are doing. If your

  story is of characters in one room, or a character trapped inside their own

  head, then the structure will still be a journey – but it won’t look or feel like

  a physical one. Rather, the physical journey is a metaphor. The road from

  doubt to faith, or faith to doubt, is a journey. The road from psychological

  confusion to clarity or vice versa: from social acceptance to alienation or

  vice versa; from feeling nothing to feeling something; political or philo

  -

  sophical disenchantment to c
onviction; professional failure to success.

  The road from any state of being to another, just as much as from one

  physical place to another, is a journey.

  CLIMAX AND CRISIS

  Key structural elements in this journey at the end are the climax and the

  crisis. The climax is the big peak, the final culmination of waves of increas -

  ing intensity that must then ultimately break in some form of resolution or

  conclusion. It is the metaphorical wall of water that only stops when it hits

  the shoreline.

  The shoreline is the crisis – the make-or-break point where events can

  no longer be deferred or avoided. It is the point beyond which things will

  THE END 191

  have changed, for better or worse. It is the final big battle or confrontation

  for the characters. It is the critical dilemma and choice and decision for the

  characters. It is their moment of truth, the deciding factor about what

  happens next in this world. It is the point at which they either will or will

  not get what they want, or need, or deserve. It will be life-changing for the

  characters whose story this is, whether that is in the quiet measured world

  of personal stories in The Station Agent or is about the future of humankind

  in Children of Men.

  In The Station Agent, the climax is the awkward falling apart of the

  two relationships that Fin has cautiously developed with Olivia and Joe,

  culminating in his angry drunkenness in front of half of the small town in

  the bar. The crisis is his subsequent decision over whether to withdraw

  completely and revert to the isolated shell in which he started out, or not

  to let go and persist with Olivia despite her apparent rejection of his friend -

  ship. He decides to persist because too much has already changed and it

  means too much to him.

  In Children of Men, the climax is Theo trapped inside the horrendous

  prison of Portsmouth with the pregnant woman he is trying to protect en

  route to her escape. To complicate matters, she now gives birth to the first

  baby born in the world for eighteen years. The crisis is finding a way of

  leading her and her baby to safety in the middle of a pitched battle. There