by Robert McKee
When an Inciting Incident occurs it must be a dynamic, fully developed event, not something static or vague. This, for example, is not an Inciting Incident: A college dropout lives off-campus near New York University. She wakes one morning and says: “I’m bored with my life. I think I’ll move to Los Angeles.” She packs her VW and motors west, but her change of address changes nothing of value in her life. She’s merely exporting her apathy from New York to California.
If, on the other hand, we notice that she’s created an ingenious kitchen wallpaper from hundreds of parking tickets, then a sudden POUNDING on the door brings the police, brandishing a felony warrant for ten thousand dollars in unpaid citations, and she flees down the fire escape, heading West—this could be an Inciting Incident. It has done what an Inciting Incident must do.
The INCITING INCIDENT radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life.
As a story begins, the protagonist is living a life that’s more or less in balance. He has successes and failures, ups and downs. Who doesn’t? But life is in relative control. Then, perhaps suddenly but in any case decisively, an event occurs that radically upsets its balance, swinging the value-charge of the protagonist’s reality either to the negative or to the positive.
Negative: Our dropout reaches L.A., but she balks at taking a normal job when she’s asked for her social security number. Fearful that in a computerized world the Manhattan police will track her down through the Internal Revenue Service, what does she do? Go underground? Sell drugs? Turn to prostitution?
Positive: Perhaps the knock at the door is an heir hunter with news of a million-dollar fortune left by an anonymous relative. Suddenly rich, she’s under terrible pressure. With no more excuses for failure, she has a heart-thumping fear of screwing up this dream come true.
In most cases, the Inciting Incident is a single event that either happens directly to the protagonist or is caused by the protagonist. Consequently, he’s immediately aware that life is out of balance for better or worse. When lovers first meet, this face-to-face event turns life, for the moment, to the positive. When Jeffrey abandons the security of his Davenport family for Hollywood, he knowingly puts himself at risk.
Occasionally, an Inciting Incident needs two events: a setup and a payoff. JAWS: Setup, a shark eats a swimmer and her body washes onto the beach. Payoff, the sheriff (Roy Scheider) discovers the corpse. If the logic of an Inciting Incident requires a setup, the writer cannot delay the payoff—at least not for very long—and keep the protagonist ignorant of the fact that his life is out of balance. Imagine JAWS with this design: Shark eats girl, followed by sheriff goes bowling, gives out parking tickets, makes love to his wife, goes to PTA meeting, visits his sick mother… while the corpse rots on the beach. A story is not a sandwich of episodic slices of life between two halves of an Inciting Incident.
Consider the unfortunate design of THE RIVER: The film opens with the first half of an Inciting Incident: a businessman, Joe Wade (Scott Glenn) decides to build a dam across a river, knowing he’ll flood five farms in the process. One of these belongs to Tom and Mae Garvey (Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek). No one, however, tells Tom or Mae. So for the next hundred minutes we watch: Tom plays baseball. Tom and Mae struggle to make the farm turn a profit, Tom goes to work in a factory caught up in a labor dispute, Mae breaks her arm in a tractor accident, Joe makes romantic passes at Mae, Mae goes to the factory to visit her husband who’s now a scab locked in the factory, a stressed-out Tom fails to get it up, Mae whispers a gentle word. Tom gets it up, and so on.
Ten minutes from its end, the film delivers the second half of the Inciting Incident: Tom stumbles into Joe’s office, sees a model of the dam, and says, in effect: “If you build that dam, Joe, you’ll flood my farm.” Joe shrugs. Then, deus ex machina, it starts to rain and the river rises. Tom and his buddies get their bulldozers to shore up the levee; Joe gets his bulldozer and goons to tear down the levee. Tom and Joe have a bulldozer-to-bulldozer Mexican standoff. At this point, Joe steps back and declares that he didn’t want to build the dam in the first place. FADE OUT.
The protagonist must react to the Inciting Incident.
Given the infinitely variable nature of protagonists, however, any reaction is possible. For example, how many Westerns began like this? Bad guys shoot up the town and kill the old marshal. Townspeople gather and go down to the livery stable, run by Matt, a retired gunslinger who’s sworn a sacred oath never to kill again. The mayor pleads: “Matt, you’ve got to pin on the badge and come to our aid. You’re the only one that can do it.” Matt replies: “No, no, I hung up my guns long ago.” “But, Matt,” begs the schoolmarm, “they killed your mother.” Matt toes the dirt and says: “Well… she was old and I guess her time had come.” He refuses to act, but that is a reaction.
The protagonist responds to the sudden negative or positive change in the balance of life in whatever way is appropriate to character and world. A refusal to act, however, cannot last for very long, even in the most passive protagonists of minimalist Nonplots. For we all wish some reasonable sovereignty over our existence, and if an event radically upsets our sense of equilibrium and control, what would we want? What does anyone, including our protagonist, want? To restore balance.
Therefore, the Inciting Incident first throws the protagonist’s life out of balance, then arouses in him the desire to restore that balance. Out of this need—often quickly, occasionally with deliberation—the protagonist next conceives of an Object of Desire: something physical or situational or attitudinal that he feels he lacks or needs to put the ship of life on an even keel. Lastly, the Inciting Incident propels the protagonist into an active pursuit of this object or goal. And for many stories or genres this is sufficient: An event pitches the protagonist’s life out of kilter, arousing a conscious desire for something he feels will set things right, and he goes after it.
But for those protagonists we tend to admire the most, the Inciting Incident arouses not only a conscious desire, but an unconscious one as well. These complex characters suffer intense inner battles because these two desires are in direct conflict with each other. No matter what the character consciously thinks he wants, the audience senses or realizes that deep inside he unconsciously wants the very opposite.
CARNAL KNOWLEDGE: If we were to pull the protagonist Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) aside and ask him “What do you want?” his conscious answer would be: “I’m a good-looking guy, lot of fun to be with, make a terrific living as a CPA. My life would be paradise if I could find the perfect woman to share it.” The film takes Jonathan from his college years to middle age, a thirty-year search for his dream woman. Again and again he meets a beautiful, intelligent woman, but soon their candlelit romance turns to dark emotions, acts of physical violence, then breakup. Over and over he plays the great romantic until he has a woman head over heels in love with him, then he turns on her, humiliates her, and hurls her out of his life.
At Climax, he invites Sandy (Art Garfunkel), an old college buddy, for dinner. For amusement he screens 35mm slides of all the women from his life; a show he entitles “Ballbusters on Parade.” As each woman appears, he trashes her to Sandy for “what was wrong with her.” In the Resolution scene, he’s with a prostitute (Rita Moreno) who has to read him an ode he’s written in praise of his penis so he can get it up. He thinks he’s hunting for the perfect woman, but we know that unconsciously he wants to degrade and destroy women and has done that throughout his life. Jules Feiffer’s screenplay is a chilling delineation of a man that too many women know only too well.
MRS. SOFFEL: In 1901 a thief (Mel Gibson) who’s committed murder awaits execution. The wife of the prison warden (Diane Keaton) decides to save his soul for God. She reads Bible quotations to him, hoping that when he’s hanged he’ll go to heaven and not hell. They are attracted. She engineers his jailbreak, then joins him. On the run they make love, but only once. As the authorities close in, she realizes he’s about to die and decides to die wit
h him: “Shoot me,” she begs him, “I don’t want to live a day beyond you.” He pulls the trigger but only wounds her. In the Resolution, she’s imprisoned for life, but goes into her cell proudly, virtually spitting in the eye of her jailer.
Mrs. Soffel seems to flit from choice to choice, but we sense that underneath her changes of mind is the powerful unconscious desire for a transcendent, absolute, romantic experience of such intensity that if nothing ever happened to her again it wouldn’t matter… because for one sublime moment she will have lived. Mrs. Soffel is the ultimate romantic.
THE CRYING GAME: Fergus (Stephen Rea), a member of the Irish Republican Army, is put in charge of a British corporal (Forest Whitaker) held prisoner by his IRA unit. He finds himself in sympathy with the man’s plight. When the corporal is killed, Fergus goes AWOL to England, hiding out from both the British and the IRA. He looks up the corporal’s lover, Dil (Jaye Davidson). He falls in love, only to discover that Dil’s a transvestite. The IRA then tracks him down. Fergus volunteered for the IRA knowing it isn’t a college fraternity, so when they order him to assassinate an English judge, he must finally come to terms with his politics. Is he or is he not an Irish patriot?
Beneath Fergus’s conscious political struggle, the audience senses from his first moments with the prisoner to his last tender scenes with Dil that this film isn’t about his commitment to the cause. Hidden behind his zigzag politics Fergus harbors the most human of needs: to love and be loved.
THE SPINE OF THE STORY
The energy of a protagonist’s desire forms the critical element of design known as the Spine of the story (AKA Through-line or Super-objective). The Spine is the deep desire in and effort by the protagonist to restore the balance of life. It’s the primary unifying force that holds all other story elements together. For no matter what happens on the surface of the story, each scene, image, and word is ultimately an aspect of the Spine, relating, causally or thematically, to this core of desire and action.
If the protagonist has no unconscious desire, then his conscious objective becomes the Spine. The Spine of any Bond film, for example, can be phrased as: To defeat the arch-villain. James has no unconscious desires; he wants and only wants to save the world. As the story’s unifying force, Bond’s pursuit of his conscious goal cannot change. If he were to declare, “To hell with Dr. No. I’m bored with the spy business. I’m going south to work on my back-swing and lower my handicap,” the film falls apart.
If, on the other hand, the protagonist has an unconscious desire, this becomes the Spine of the story. An unconscious desire is always more powerful and durable, with roots reaching to the protagonist’s innermost self. When an unconscious desire drives the story, it allows the writer to create a far more complex character who may repeatedly change his conscious desire.
MOBY DICK: If Melville had made Ahab sole protagonist, his novel would be a simple but exciting work of High Adventure, driven by the captain’s monomania to destroy the white whale. But by adding Ishmael as dual protagonist, Melville enriched his story into a complex classic of the Education Plot. For the telling is in fact driven by Ishmael’s unconscious desire to battle inner demons, seeking in himself the destructive obsessions he sees in Ahab—a desire that not only contradicts his conscious hope to survive Ahab’s mad voyage, but may destroy him as it does Ahab.
In THE CRYING GAME Fergus agonizes over politics while his unconscious need to love and be loved drives the telling. Jonathan searches for the “perfect woman” in CARNAL KNOWLEDGE, flitting from relationship to relationship, while his unconscious desire to humiliate and destroy women never varies. The leaps of desire in Mrs. Soffel’s mind are enormous—from salvation to damnation—while unconsciously she seeks to experience the transcendent romance. The audience senses that the shifting urges of the complex protagonist are merely reflections of the one thing that never changes: the unconscious desire.
THE QUEST
From the point of view of the writer looking from the Inciting Incident “down the Spine” to the last act’s Climax, in spite of all we’ve said about genres and the various shapes from Archplot to Antiplot, in truth there’s only one story. In essence we have told one another the same tale, one way or another, since the dawn of humanity, and that story could be usefully called the Quest. All stories take the form of a Quest.
For better or worse, an event throws a character’s life out of balance, arousing in him the conscious and/or unconscious desire for that which he feels will restore balance, launching him on a Quest for his Object of Desire against forces of antagonism (inner, personal, extra-personal). He may or may not achieve it. This is story in a nutshell.
The essential form of story is simple. But that’s like saying that the essential form of music is simple. It is. It’s twelve notes. But these twelve notes conspire into everything and anything we have ever called music. The essential elements of the Quest are the twelve notes of our music, the melody we’ve listened to all our lives. However, like the composer sitting down at the piano, when a writer takes up this seemingly simple form, he discovers how incredibly complex it is, how inordinately difficult to do.
To understand the Quest form of your story you need only identify your protagonist’s Object of Desire. Penetrate his psychology and find an honest answer to the question: “What does he want?” It may be the desire for something he can take into his arms: someone to love in MOONSTRUCK. It may be the need for inner growth: maturity in BIG. But whether a profound change in the real world—security from a marauding shark in JAWS—or a profound change in the spiritual realm—a meaningful life in TENDER MERCIES—by looking into the heart of the protagonist and discovering his desire, you begin to see the arc of your story, the Quest on which the Inciting Incident sends him.
DESIGN OF THE INCITING INCIDENT
An Inciting Incident happens in only one of two ways: randomly or causally, either by coincidence or by decision. If by decision, it can be made by the protagonist—Ben’s decision to drink himself to death in LEAVING LAS VEGAS, or, as in KRAMER vs. KRAMER, by someone with the power to upset the protagonist’s life—Mrs. Kramer’s decision to leave Mr. Kramer and their child. If by coincidence, it may be tragic—the accident that kills Alice’s husband in ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE, or serendipitous—a sports promoter meets beautiful and gifted athlete in PAT AND MIKE. By choice or accident; there are no other means.
The Inciting Incident of the Central Plot must happen onscreen—not in the Backstory, not between scenes offscreen. Each subplot has its own Inciting Incident, which may or may not be onscreen, but the presence of the audience at the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident is crucial to story design for two reasons.
First, when the audience experiences an Inciting Incident, the film’s Major Dramatic Question, a variation on “How will this turn out?” is provoked to mind. JAWS: Will the sheriff kill the shark, or the shark the sheriff? LA NOTTE: After Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) tells her husband (Marcello Mastroianni) that he disgusts her and she’s leaving, will she go or stay? JALSAGHER (THE MUSIC ROOM): Biswas (Huzur Roy), an aristocrat with a life-consuming love of music, decides to sell his wife’s jewels, then his palace to finance his passion for beauty. Will extravagance destroy or redeem this connoisseur?
In Hollywood jargon, the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident is the “big hook.” It must occur onscreen because this is the event that incites and captures the audience’s curiosity. Hunger for the answer to the Major Dramatic Question grips the audience’s interest, holding it to the last act’s climax.
Second, witnessing the Inciting Incident projects an image of the Obligatory Scene into the audience’s imagination. The Obligatory Scene (AKA Crisis) is an event the audience knows it must see before the story can end. This scene will bring the protagonist into a confrontation with the most powerful forces of antagonism in his quest, forces stirred to life by the Inciting Incident that will gather focus and strength through the course of the story. The scene is called “obligat
ory” because having teased the audience into anticipating this moment, the writer is obligated to keep his promise and show it to them.
JAWS: When the shark attacks a vacationer and the sheriff discovers her remains, an vivid image comes to mind: The shark and the sheriff do battle face-to-face. We don’t know how we’ll get there, or how it’ll turn out. But we do know the film can’t be over until the shark has the sheriff virtually in its jaws. Screenwriter Peter Benchley could not have played this critical event from the point of view of townspeople peering out to sea with binoculars, wondering: “Is that the sheriff? Is that the shark?” BOOM! Then have sheriff and marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) swim ashore, shouting, “Oh, what a fight. Let us tell you about it.” Having projected the image in our mind, Benchley was obligated to put us with the sheriff when it happens.
Unlike action genres that bring the Obligatory Scene immediately and vividly to mind, other more interior genres hint at this scene in the Inciting Incident, then like a photo negative in acid solution, slowly bring it into focus. In TENDER MERCIES Mac Sledge is drowning in booze and an utterly meaningless life. His ascent from rock bottom begins when he meets a lonely woman with a son who needs a father. He’s inspired to write some new songs, then accepts baptism and tries to make peace with his estranged daughter. Gradually he pieces together a meaningful life.
The audience, however, senses that because the dragon of meaninglessness drove Sledge to rock bottom, it must once again rear its gruesome head, that the story can’t end until he is slapped in the face with the cruel absurdity of life—this time in all its soul-destroying force. The Obligatory Scene comes in the form of a hideous accident that kills his only child. If a drunk needed an excuse to pick up a bottle again, this would do. Indeed, his daughter’s death plunges his ex-wife into a drugged stupor, but Sledge finds strength to go on.