Story

by Robert McKee

  Maturity:

  At the Inciting Incident of BIG the adolescent Josh Baskin (David Moscow) is transformed into what appears to be a thirty-two-year-old man (Tom Hanks). The film jumps immediately to the Negation of the Negation, then explores the grays and blacks of negativity. When Josh and his boss (Robert Loggia) tap dance on a toy piano at F.A.O. Schwartz, this is childish, but more positive than negative. When Josh and his coworker (John Heard) play “keep away” on the handball court, this is perfectly childish. In fact, we come to realize that the whole adult world is a playground full of children playing corporate “keep away.”

  At the Crisis Josh faces irreconcilable goods: an adult life with a fulfilling career and the woman he loves versus a return to adolescence. He makes the mature choice to have his childhood, expressing with a fine irony that he has at last become “big.” For he and we sense that the key to maturity is to have had a complete childhood. But because life has short-changed so many of us in youth, we live, to one degree or another, at the Negation of the Negation of maturity. BIG is a very wise film.

  Lastly, consider a story in which the positive value is sanctioned natural sex. Sanctioned meaning condoned by society; natural meaning sex for procreation, attendant pleasure, and an expression of love.

  Under the Contrary falls acts of extramarital and premarital sex that, although natural, are frowned on. Society often does more than frown on prostitution, but it’s arguably natural. Bigamy, polygamy, polyandry, and interracial and common-law marriage are condoned in some societies, unsanctioned in others. Chastity is arguably unnatural, but no one’s going to stop you from being celibate, while sex with someone who has taken a vow of celibacy, such as a priest or a nun, is frowned on by the Church.

  Under the Contradictory, humanity seems to know no limit of invention: voyeurism, pornography, satyriasis, nymphomania, fetishism, exhibitionism, frottage, transvestism, incest, rape, pedophilia, and sadomasochism, to name only a few acts that are unsanctioned and unnatural.

  Homosexuality and bisexuality are difficult to place. In some societies they’re thought natural, in others, unnatural. In many Western countries homosexuality is sanctioned; in some Third World countries it’s still a hanging offense. Many of these designations may seem arbitrary, for sex is relative to social and personal perception.

  But common perversions are not the end of the line. They’re singular and committed, even with violence, with another human being. When, however, the sexual object is from another species—bestiality—or dead—necrophilia—or when compounds of perversities pile up, the mind revolts.

  CHINATOWN: The end of the line of sanctioned natural sex is not incest. It’s only a Contradictory. In this film the Negation of the Negation is incest with the offspring of your own incest. This is why Evelyn Mulwray risks her life to keep her child from her father. She knows he’s mad and will do it again. This is the motivation for the murder. Cross killed his son-in-law because Mulwray wouldn’t tell him where his daughter by his daughter was hiding. This is what will happen after the Climax as Cross covers the terrified child’s eyes and pulls her away from her mother’s horrific death.

  The principle of the Negation of the Negation applies not only to the tragic but to the comic. The comic world is a chaotic, wild place where actions must go to the limit. If not, the laughs falls flat. Even the light entertainment of Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers films touched the end of the line. They turned on the value of truth as Fred Astaire traditionally played a character suffering from self-deception, telling himself he was in love with the glitzy girl when we knew that his heart really belonged to Ginger.

  Fine writers have always understood that opposite values are not the limit of human experience. If a story stops at the Contradictory value, or worse, the Contrary, it echoes the hundreds of mediocrities we suffer every year. For a story that is simply about love/hate, truth/lie, freedom/slavery, courage/cowardice, and the like is almost certain to be trivial. If a story does not reach the Negation of the Negation, it may strike the audience as satisfying—but never brilliant, never sublime.

  All other factors of talent, craft, and knowledge being equal, greatness is found in the writer’s treatment of the negative side.

  If your story seems unsatisfying and lacking in some way, tools are needed to penetrate its confusions and perceive its flaws. When a story is weak, the inevitable cause is that forces of antagonism are weak. Rather than spending your creativity trying to invent likable, attractive aspects of protagonist and world, build the negative side to create a chain reaction that pays off naturally and honestly on the positive dimensions.

  The first step is to question the values at stake and their progression. What are the positive values? Which is preeminent and turns the Story Climax? Do the forces of antagonism explore all shades of negativity? Do they reach the power of the Negation of the Negation at some point?

  Generally, progressions run from the Positive to the Contrary in Act One, to the Contradictory in later acts, and finally to the Negation of the Negation in the last act, either ending tragically or going back to the Positive with a profound difference. BIG, on the other hand, leaps to the Negation of the Negation, then illuminates all degrees of immaturity. CASABLANCA is even more radical. It opens at the Negation of the Negation with Rick living in fascist tyranny, suffering self-hatred and self-deception, then works to a positive climax for all three values. Anything is possible, but the end of the line must be reached.

  15

  EXPOSITION

  SHOW, DON’T TELL

  Exposition means facts—the information about setting, biography, and characterization that the audience needs to know to follow and comprehend the events of the story.

  Within the first pages of a screenplay a reader can judge the relative skill of the writer simply by noting how he handles exposition. Well-done exposition doesn’t guarantee a superb story, but it does tell us that the writer knows the craft. Skill in exposition means making it invisible. As the story progresses, the audience absorbs all it needs to know effortlessly, even unconsciously.

  The famous axiom “Show, don’t tell” is the key. Never force words into a character’s mouth to tell the audience about world, history, or person. Rather, show us honest, natural scenes in which human beings talk and behave in honest, natural ways… yet at the same time indirectly pass along the necessary facts. In other words, dramatize exposition.

  Dramatized exposition serves two ends: Its primary purpose is to further the immediate conflict. Its secondary purpose is to convey information. The anxious novice reverses that order, putting expositional duty ahead of dramatic necessity.

  For example: Jack says, “Harry, how the hell long have we known one another? What? About twenty years, huh? Ever since we were at college together. That’s a long time, isn’t it, Harry? Well, how the hell are ya this morning?” Those lines have no purpose except to tell the eavesdropping audience that Jack and Harry are friends, went to school together twenty years ago, and they haven’t had lunch yet—a deadly beat of unnatural behavior. No one ever tells someone something they both already know unless saying the obvious fills another and compelling need. Therefore, if this information is needed, the writer must create a motivation for the dialogue that’s greater than the facts.

  To dramatize exposition apply this mnemonic principle: Convert exposition to ammunition. Your characters know their world, their history, each other, and themselves. Let them use what they know as ammunition in their struggle to get what they want. Converting the above to ammunition: Jack, reacting to Harry’s stifled yawn and bloodshot eyes, says, “Harry, look at you. The same hippie haircut, still stoned by noon, the same juvenile stunts that got you kicked out of school twenty years ago. Are you ever gonna wake up and smell the coffee?” The audience’s eye jumps across the screen to see Harry’s reaction and indirectly hears “twenty years” and “school.”

  “Show, don’t tell,” by the way, doesn’t mean that it’s all right to pan the
camera down a mantelpiece on a series of photographs that take Harry and Jack from their university days to boot camp to the double wedding to opening their dry cleaning business. That’s telling, not showing. Asking the camera to do it turns a feature film into a home movie. “Show, don’t tell” means that characters and camera behave truthfully.

  Dealing with the knotty problems of exposition so intimidates some writers that they try to get it all out of the way as soon as possible, so the studio script analyst can concentrate on their stories. But when forced to wade through an Act One stuffed with exposition, the reader realizes that this is an amateur who can’t handle the basic craft, and skims to the last scenes.

  Confident writers parse out exposition, bit by bit, through the entire story, often revealing exposition well into the Climax of the last act. They follow these two principles: Never include anything the audience can reasonably and easily assume has happened. Never pass on exposition unless the missing fact would cause confusion. You do not keep the audience’s interest by giving it information, but by withholding information, except that which is absolutely necessary for comprehension.

  Pace the exposition. Like all else, exposition must have a progressive pattern: Therefore, the least important facts come in early, the next most important later, the critical facts last. And what are the critical pieces of exposition? Secrets. The painful truths characters do not want known.

  In other words, don’t write “California scenes.” “California scenes” are scenes in which two characters who hardly know each other sit down over coffee and immediately begin an intimate discussion of the deep, dark secrets of their lives: “Oh, I had a rotten childhood. To punish me my mother used to flush my head in the toilet.” “Huh! You think you had a bad childhood. To punish me my father put dog shit in my shoes and made me to go to school like that.”

  Unguardedly honest and painful confessions between people who have just met are forced and false. When this is pointed out to writers, they will argue that it actually happens, that people share very personal things with total strangers. And I agree. But only in California. Not in Arizona, New York, London, Paris, or anywhere else in the world.

  A certain breed of West Coaster carries around prepared deep dark secrets to share with one another at cocktail parties to validate themselves one to the other as authentic Californians—“centered” and “in touch with their inner beings.” When I’m standing over the tortilla dip at such parties and somebody tells me about dog shit in his Keds as a child, my thought is: “Wow! If that’s the prepared deep dark secret he tells people over the guacamole, what’s the real stuff?” For there’s always something else. Whatever is said hides what cannot be said.

  Evelyn Mulwray’s confession, “She’s my sister and my daughter” is nothing she would share over cocktails. She tells Gittes this to keep her child out of her father’s hands. “You can’t kill me, Luke, I’m your father” is a truth Darth Vader never wanted to tell his son, but if he doesn’t, he’ll have to kill or be killed by his child.

  These are honest and powerful moments because the pressure of life is squeezing these characters between the lesser of two evils. And where in a well-crafted story is pressure the greatest? At the end of the line. The wise writer, therefore, obeys the first principle of temporal art: Save the best for last. For if we reveal too much too soon, the audience will see the climaxes coming long before they arrive.

  Reveal only that exposition the audience absolutely needs and wants to know and no more.

  On the other hand, since the writer controls the telling, he controls the need and desire to know. If at a certain point in the telling, a piece of exposition must be known or the audience wouldn’t be able to follow, create the desire to know by arousing curiosity. Put the question “Why?” in the filmgoer’s mind. “Why is this character behaving this way? Why doesn’t this or that happen? Why?” With a hunger for information, even the most complicated set of dramatized facts will pass smoothly into understanding.

  One way to cope with biographical exposition is to start the telling in the protagonist’s childhood and then work through all the decades of his life. THE LAST EMPEROR, for example, covers over sixty years in the life of Pu Yi (John Lone). The story strings together scenes from his infancy when he’s made Emperor of China, his teenage years and youthful marriage, his Western education, his fall into decadence, his years as a Japanese stooge, life under the Communists, and his last days as a laborer in Peking’s Botanical Gardens. LITTLE BIG MAN spans a century. CARNAL KNOWLEDGE, FAREWELL, MY CONCUBINE, and SHINE all start in youth and leapfrog through the key events of the protagonists’ lives into middle age or beyond.

  However, as convenient as that design may be in terms of exposition, the vast majority of protagonists cannot be followed from birth to death for this reason: Their story would have no Spine. To tell a story that spans a lifetime a Spine of enormous power and persistence must be created. But for most characters, what single, deep desire, aroused out of an Inciting Incident in childhood, would go unquenched for decades? This is why nearly all tellings pursue the protagonist’s Spine over months, weeks, even hours.

  If, however, an elastic, endurable Spine can be created, then a story can be told over decades without being episodic. Episodic does not mean “covering long stretches of time” but rather “sporadic, irregular intervals.” A story told over twenty-four hours could well be episodic if everything that happens in that day is unconnected to everything else that happens. On the other hand, LITTLE BIG MAN is unified around a man’s quest to prevent the genocide of Native Americans by the whites—an atrocity that spanned generations, therefore a century of storytelling. CARNAL KNOWLEDGE is driven by a man’s blind need to humiliate and destroy women, a soul-poisoning desire he never fathoms.

  In THE LAST EMPEROR a man spends his life trying to answer the question: Who am I? At age three Pu Yi is made Emperor but has no idea what that means. To him a palace is a playground. He clings to his childhood identity until as a teenager he’s still nursing from the breast. The Imperial officials insist he act like an emperor, but he then discovers there is no empire. Burdened with a false identity, he tries on one personality after another but none fit: first English scholar and gentleman; then sex athlete and hedonist; later international bon vivant doing Sinatra imitations at posh parties; next a statesman, only to end up a puppet to the Japanese. Finally, the Communists give him his last identity—gardener.

  FAREWELL, MY CONCUBINE tells of Dieyi’s (Leslie Cheung) fifty-year quest to live in the truth. When he is a child, the masters of the Peking Opera ruthlessly beat, brainwash, and force him to confess that he has a female nature—when he does not. If he did, torture wouldn’t be necessary. He’s effeminate, but like many effeminate men he is at heart male. So, forced to live a lie, he hates all lies, personal and political. From that point on all the conflicts in the story stem from his desire to speak the truth. But in China only liars survive. Finally realizing that truth is an impossibility, he takes his own life.

  Because lifelong Spines are rare, we take Aristotle’s advice to begin stories in medias res, “in the midst of things.” After locating the date of the climactic event of the protagonist’s life, we begin as close in time to it as possible. This design compresses the telling’s duration, and lengthens the character’s biography before the Inciting Incident. For example, if the Climax occurs on the day a character turns thirty-five, instead of starting the film when he’s a teenager, we open the film perhaps a month before his birthday. This gives the protagonist thirty-five years of living to build the maximum value into his existence. As a result, when his life goes out of balance, he is now at risk and the story is filled with conflict.

  Consider, for example, the difficulties of writing a story about a homeless alcoholic. What has he to lose? Virtually nothing. To a soul enduring the unspeakable stress of the streets, death may be a mercy, and a change in the weather might give him that. Lives with little or no value beyond their e
xistence are pathetic to witness, but with so little at stake, the writer is reduced to painting a static portrait of suffering.

  Rather, we tell stories about people who have something to lose—family, careers, ideals, opportunities, reputations, realistic hopes and dreams. When such lives go out of balance, the characters are placed at jeopardy. They stand to lose what they have in their struggle to achieve a rebalancing of existence. Their battle, risking hard-won values against the forces of antagonism, generates conflict. And when story is thick with conflict, the characters need all the ammunition they can get. As a result, the writer has little trouble dramatizing exposition and facts flow naturally and invisibly into the action. But when stories lack conflict, the writer is forced into “table dusting.”

  Here, for example, is how many playwrights of the nineteenth century handled exposition: The curtain comes up on a living room set. Enter two domestics: One who’s worked there for the last thirty years, the other the young maid just hired that morning. The older maid turns to the newcomer and says, “Oh, you don’t know about Dr. Johnson and his family, do you? Well, let me tell you…” And as they dust the furniture the older maid lays out the entire life history, world, and characterizations of the Johnson family. That’s “table dusting,” unmotivated exposition.

  And we still see it today.

  OUTBREAK: In the opening sequence, Colonel Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) flies to West Africa to halt an outbreak of the Ebola virus. On board is a young medical assistant. Daniels turns to him and says, in effect, “You don’t know about Ebola, do you?” and lays out the pathology of the virus. If the young assistant is untrained to fight a disease that threatens all human life on the planet, what’s he doing on this mission? Any time you find yourself writing a line of dialogue in which one character is telling another something that they both already know or should know, ask yourself, is it dramatized? Is it exposition as ammunition? If not, cut it.