by Robert McKee
He grabs her wrist and they fall to floor wrestling for the gun, rolling over each other, until suddenly an emotion they haven’t felt for over a year ignites and they start to make love on the floor next to the smashed lamp and shattered door. A little voice in his head says, “This could work,” but then a gap opens between him… and his body. That, she thinks, smiling, is his real problem. Moved to pity and affection, she decides to take him back into her life. The scene ends on the positive: He has her help to survive, their love is restored.
If the audience empathizes with these characters, the movement from the negative to the positive will create a positive emotion. But which? There are many.
Suppose the writer calls for a summer’s day, brightly colored flowers in window boxes, blossoms on the trees. The producer casts Jim Carrey and Mira Sorvino. The director composes them in head-to-foot shots. Together they’ve created a comic mood. Comedy likes bright light and color. Comics need full shots because they act with their whole bodies. Carrey and Sorvino are brilliant zanies. The audience will feel tingling fear spiced with laughter as Carrey bangs through the door, as Sorvino pulls a gun, as these two try to make love. Then a burst of joy when she takes him back.
But suppose the scene were set in the dead of night, the house spackled with shadows of trees blowing in the wind, moonlight, street light. The director shoots tight, canted angles and orders the lab to mute the colors. The producer casts Michael Madsen and Linda Fiorentino. Without changing a beat, the scene is now drenched in a Thriller mood. Our hearts will be in our throats as we fear that one of these two isn’t getting out of this alive. Imagine Madsen bulling his way in, Fiorentino grabbing a gun, those two fighting for it. When they’re finally in each other’s arms, we’ll breathe a sigh of relief.
The arc of the scene, sequence, or act determines the basic emotion. Mood makes it specific. But mood will not substitute for emotion. When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller. It does the writer no good to write an exposition-filled scene in which nothing changes, then set it in a garden at sundown, thinking that a golden mood will carry the day. All the writer has done is dump weak writing on the shoulders of the director and cast. Undramatized exposition is boring in any light. Film is not about decorative photography.
THE NATURE OF CHOICE
A Turning Point is centered in the choice a character makes under pressure to take one action or another in the pursuit of desire. Human nature dictates that each of us will always choose the “good” or the “right” as we perceive the “good” or the “right.” It is impossible to do otherwise. Therefore, if a character is put into a situation where he must choose between a clear good versus a clear evil, or right versus wrong, the audience, understanding the character’s point of view, will know in advance how the character will choose.
The choice between good and evil or between right and wrong is no choice at all.
Imagine Attila, King of the Huns poised on the borders of fifth-century Europe, surveying his hordes and asking himself: “Should I invade, murder, rape, plunder, burn, and lay waste… or should I go home?” For Attila this is no choice at all. He must invade, slay, plunder, and lay waste. He didn’t lead tens of thousands of warriors across two continents to turn around when he finally came within sight of the prize. In the eyes of his victims, however, his is an evil decision. But that’s their point of view. For Attila his choice is not only the right thing to do, but probably the moral thing to do. No doubt, like many of history’s great tyrants, he felt he was on a holy mission.
Or, closer to home: A thief bludgeons a victim on the street for the five dollars in her purse. He may know this isn’t the moral thing to do, but moral/immoral, right/wrong, legal/illegal often have little to do with one another. He may instantly regret what he’s done. But at the moment of murder, from the thief’s point of view, his arm won’t move until he’s convinced himself that this is the right choice.
If we do not understand that much about human nature—that a human being is only capable of acting toward the right or the good as he has come to believe it or rationalize it—then we understand very little. Good/evil, right/wrong choices are dramatically obvious and trivial.
True choice is dilemma. It occurs in two situations. First, a choice between irreconcilable goods: From the character’s view two things are desirable, he wants both, but circumstances are forcing him to choose only one. Second, a choice between the lesser of two evils: From the character’s view two things are undesirable, he wants neither, but circumstances are forcing him to choose one. How a character chooses in a true dilemma is a powerful expression of his humanity and of the world in which he lives.
Writers since Homer have understood the principle of dilemma, and realized that the story of a two-sided relationship cannot be sustained, that the simple conflict between Character A and Character B cannot be told to satisfaction.
A two-sided conflict is not dilemma but vacillation between the positive and the negative. “She loves me/she loves me not, she loves me/she loves not,” for example, swings back and forth between good and bad, and presents insoluble story problems. It isn’t only tediously repetitious, but it has no ending.
If we try to climax this pattern on the positive with the protagonist believing “She loves me,” the audience leaves thinking, “Wait till tomorrow when she’ll love you not again.” Or if on the negative “She loves me not,” the audience exits thinking, “She’ll come back. She always did.” Even if we kill the loved one, it’s not a true ending because the protagonist is left wondering, “She loved me? She loved me not?” and the audience exits groping for a point that was never made.
For example, here are two stories: one that wavers back and forth between inward states of pleasure and pain and one of inner dilemma. Compare BETTY BLUE with THE RED DESERT. In the former, Betty (Beatrice Dalle) slides from obsession to madness to catatonia. She has impulses but never makes a true decision. In the later Giuliana (Monica Vitti) faces profound dilemmas: retreat into comforting fantasies versus making meaning out of a harsh reality, madness versus pain. BETTY BLUE’S “mock-minimalism” is an over two-hour long snapshot of a helpless victim of schizophrenia that mistakes suffering for drama. IL DESERTO ROSSO is a minimalist masterpiece that delineates a human being grappling with the terrifying contradictions within her nature.
To construct and create genuine choice, we must frame a three-sided situation. As in life, meaningful decisions are triangular.
The moment we add C we generate ample material to avoid repetition. First, to the three possible relationships between A and B: positive/negative/neutral, love/hate/indifference, for example, we add the same three between A and C and between B and C. This gives us nine possibilities. Then we may join A and B against C; A and C against B; B and C against A. Or put them all in love or all in hate or all indifferent. By adding a third corner, the triangle breeds over twenty variations, more than enough material to progress without repetition. A fourth element would produce compound interlocking triangles, a virtual infinitude of changing relationships.
What’s more, triangular design brings closure. If a telling is two-sided so that A vacillates between B and no-B, the ending is open. But if choice is three-sided so that A is caught between B and C, A’s choice of one or the other closes the ending with satisfaction. Whether B and C represent the lesser of two evils or irreconcilable goods, the protagonist can’t have both. A price must be paid. One must be risked or lost to gain the other. If, for example, A relinquishes C to have B, the audience feels a true choice has been taken. C has been sacrificed, and this irreversible change ends the story.
The most compelling dilemmas often combine the choice of irreconcilable goods with the lesser of two evils. In the Supernatural Romance DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS, for example, Dona (Sonia Braga) faces a choice between a new husband who’s warm, secure, faithful, but dull versus an ex-husband who’s
sexy, exciting, but dead, yet his ghost appears to her in private as flesh and blood and sexually insatiable as ever. Is she hallucinating or not? What’s the widow to do? She’s caught in the dilemma between a boringly pleasant life of normality versus a bizarre, perhaps mad, life of emotional fulfillment. She makes the wise decision: She takes both.
An original work poses choices between unique but irreconcilable desires: It may be between two persons, a person and a lifestyle, two lifestyles, two ideals, two aspects of the innermost self—between any conflicting desires at any level of conflict, real or imagined, the writer may devise. But the principle is universal: Choice must not be doubt but dilemma, not between right/wrong or good/evil, but between either positive desires or negative desires of equal weight and value.
11
SCENE ANALYSIS
TEXT AND SUBTEXT
Just as a personality structure can be disclosed through psychoanalysis, the shape of a scene’s inner life can be uncovered through a similar inquiry. If we ask the right questions, a scene that speeds past in the reading and hides its flaws brakes into ultra-slow motion, opens up, and reveals its secrets.
If you feel a scene plays, don’t fix what works. But often a first draft falls flat or seems forced. Our tendency then is to rewrite dialogue over and over, hoping that by paraphrasing speeches we can bring it to life… until we hit a dead end. For the problem won’t be in the scene’s activity but in its action; not in how characters are talking or behaving on the surface, but in what they’re doing behind their masks. Beats build scenes, and the flaws of an ill-designed scene are in these exchanges of behavior. To find out why a scene fails, the whole must be broken into its parts. An analysis begins, therefore, by separating the scene’s text from its subtext.
Text means the sensory surface of a work of art. In film it’s the images onscreen and the soundtrack of dialogue, music, and sound effects. What we see. What we hear. What people say. What people do. Subtext is the life under that surface—thoughts and feelings both known and unknown, hidden by behavior.
Nothing is what it seems. This principle calls for the screen-writer’s constant awareness of the duplicity of life, his recognition that everything exists on at least two levels, and that, therefore, he must write a simultaneous duality: First, he must create a verbal description of the sensory surface of life, sight and sound, activity and talk. Second, he must create the inner world of conscious and unconscious desire, action and reaction, impulse and id, genetic and experiential imperatives. As in reality, so in fiction: He must veil the truth with a living mask, the actual thoughts and feelings of characters behind their saying and doing.
An old Hollywood expression goes: “If the scene is about what the scene is about, you’re in deep shit.” It means writing “on the nose,” writing dialogue and activity in which a character’s deepest thoughts and feelings are expressed by what the character says and does—writing the subtext directly into the text.
Writing this, for example: Two attractive people sit opposite each other at a candlelit table, the light glinting off the crystal wine-glasses and the dewy eyes of the lovers. Soft breezes billow the curtains. A Chopin nocturne plays in the background. The lovers reach across the table, touch hands, look longingly in each others’ eyes, say, “I love you, I love you”… and actually mean it. This is an unactable scene and will die like a rat in the road.
Actors are not marionettes to mime gestures and mouth words. They’re artists who create with material from the subtext, not the text. An actor brings a character to life from the inside out, from unspoken, even unconscious thoughts and feelings out to a surface of behavior. The actors will say and do whatever the scene requires, but they find their sources for creation in the inner life. The scene above is unactable because it has no inner life, no subtext. It’s unactable because there’s nothing to act.
When we reflect on our filmgoing, we realize we’ve witnessed the phenomenon of subtext all our lives. The screen isn’t opaque but transparent. When we look up at the screen, don’t we have the impression that we’re reading minds and feelings? We constantly say to ourselves, “I know what that character’s really thinking and feeling. I know what’s going on inside her better than she does, and I know it better than the guy she’s talking to because he’s busy with his own agenda.”
In life our eyes tend to stop at the surface. We’re so consumed by our own needs, conflicts, and daydreams that we rarely manage to take a step back and coolly observe what’s going on inside other human beings. Occasionally we put a frame around a couple in the corner of a coffee shop and create a movie moment as we look through their smiles to the boredom beneath or through the pain in their eyes to the hope they have for each other. But rarely and only for a moment. In the ritual of story, however, we continuously see through the faces and activities of characters to depths of the unspoken, the unaware.
This is why we go to the storyteller, the guide who takes us beyond what seems to what is… at all levels and not for a mere moment but to the end of the line. The storyteller gives us the pleasure that life denies, the pleasure of sitting in the dark ritual of story, looking through the face of life to the heart of what is felt and thought beneath what’s said and done.
How then might we write a love scene? Let two people change the tire on a car. Let the scene be a virtual textbook on how to fix a flat. Let all dialogue and action be about jack, wrench, hubcap, and lug nuts: “Hand me that, would ya?” “Watch out.” “Don’t get dirty.” “Let me… whoops.” The actors will interpret the real action of the scene, so leave room for them to bring romance to life wholly from the inside. As their eyes meet and sparks fly, we’ll know what’s happening because it’s in the unspoken thoughts and emotions of the actors. As we see through the surface, we’ll lean back with a knowing smile: “Look what happened. They’re not just changing the tire on a car. He thinks she’s hot and she knows it. Boy has met girl.”
In other words, write as these things happen in life. For if we give that candlelit scene to fine actors, they’ll smell the lie, refuse to act it, and walk off until the scene is cut or rewritten with an actable subtext. If the cast lacks the clout to demand a rewrite, then they’ll do this: They will put a subtext in the scene whether or not it has anything to do with the story. Good actors will not step in front of a camera without their subtext.
For example, an actor forced to do the candlelit scene might attack it like this: “Why have these people gone out of their way to create this movie scene? What’s with the candlelight, soft music, billowing curtains? Why don’t they just take their pasta to the TV set like normal people? What’s wrong with this relationship?” Because isn’t that life? When do the candles come out? When everything’s fine? No. When everything’s fine we take our pasta to the TV set like normal people. So from that insight the actor will create a subtext. Now as we watch, we think: “He says he loves her and maybe he does, but look, he’s scared he’s losing her. He’s desperate.” Or from another subtext: “He says he loves her, but look, he’s setting her up for bad news. He’s getting ready to walk out.”
The scene is not about what the scene seems to be about. It’s about something else. And it’s that something else—trying to regain her affection or softening her up for the breakup—that will make the scene work. There’s always a subtext, an inner life that contrasts with or contradicts the text. Given this, the actor will create a multilayered work that allows us to see through the text to the truth that vibrates behind the eyes, voice, and gestures of life.
This principle does not mean that people are insincere. It’s a commonsense recognition that we all wear a public mask. We say and do what we feel we should, while we think and feel something else altogether. As we must. We realize we can’t go around saying and doing what we’re actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that’s how you know you’re talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communicati
on and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that’s why they’re mad.
In truth, it’s virtually impossible for anyone, even the insane, to fully express what’s going on inside. No matter how much we wish to manifest our deepest feelings, they elude us. We never fully express the truth, for in fact we rarely know it. Consider the situation in which we are desperate to express our truest thoughts and feelings—psychoanalysis: A patient lies on a couch, pouring his heart out. Wanting to be understood. No holds barred. No intimacy too private to reveal. And as he rips terrible thoughts and desires to the surface, what does the analyst do? Quietly nods and takes notes. And what’s in those notes? What is not being said, the secret, unconscious truths that lie behind the patient’s gut-wrenching confession. Nothing is what is seems. No text without a subtext.
Nor does this mean that we can’t write powerful dialogue in which desperate people try to tell the truth. It simply means that the most passionate moments must conceal an even deeper level.
CHINATOWN: Evelyn Mulwray cries out: “She’s my sister and my daughter. My father and I…” But what she doesn’t say is: “Please help me.” Her anguished confession is in fact a plea for help. Subtext: “I didn’t kill my husband; my father did… to possess my child. If you arrest me, he’ll take her. Please help me.” In the next beat Gittes says, “We’ll have to get you out of town.” An illogical reply that makes perfect sense. Subtext: “I’ve understood everything you’ve told me. I now know your father did it. I love you and I’m going to risk my life to save you and your child. Then I’m going after the bastard.” All this is underneath the scene, giving us truthful behavior without phony “on the nose” dialogue, and what’s more, without robbing the audience of the pleasure of insight.