Story

by Robert McKee

  Mystery, Suspense, Dramatic Irony

  Curiosity and Concern create three possible ways to connect the audience to the story: Mystery, Suspense, and Dramatic Irony. These terms are not to be mistaken for genres; they name story/audience relationships that vary according to how we hold interest.

  In Mystery the audience knows less than the characters.

  Mystery means gaining interest through curiosity alone. We create but then conceal expositional facts, particularly facts in the Backstory. We arouse the audience’s curiosity about these past events, tease it with hints of the truth, then deliberately keep it in the dark by misleading it with “red herrings,” so that it believes or suspects false facts while we hide the real facts.

  “Red herrings” has an amusing etymology: As peasant poachers of deer and grouse made off with their booty through medieval forests, they would drag a fish, a red herring, across the trail to confuse the lord of the manor’s bloodhounds.

  This technique of compelling interest by devising a guessing game of red herrings and suspects, of confusion and curiosity, pleases the audience of one and only one genre, the Murder Mystery, which has two subgenres, the Closed Mystery and the Open Mystery.

  The Closed Mystery is the Agatha Christie form in which a murder is committed unseen in the Backstory. The primary convention of the “Who done it?” is multiple suspects. The writer must develop at least three possible killers to constantly mislead the audience to suspect the wrong person, the red herring, while withholding the identity of the real killer to Climax.

  The Open Mystery is the Columbo form in which the audience sees the murder committed and therefore knows who did it. The story becomes a “How will he catch him?” as the writer substitutes multiple clues for multiple suspects. The murder must be an elaborate and seemingly perfect crime, a complex scheme involving a number of steps and technical elements. But the audience knows by convention that one of these elements is a fatal flaw of logic. When the detective arrives on the scene he instinctively knows who did it, sifts through the many clues searching for the telltale flaw, discovers it, and confronts the arrogant perfect-crime-committer, who then spontaneously confesses.

  In the Mystery form the killer and detective know the facts long before Climax but keep it to themselves. The audience runs from behind trying to figure out what the key characters already know. Of course, if we could win the race, we’d feel like losers. We try hard to guess the who or how, but we want the writer’s master detective to be just that.

  These two pure designs may be mixed or satirized. CHINA-TOWN starts Closed but then turns Open at the Act Two Climax. THE USUAL SUSPECTS parodies the Closed Mystery. It starts as a “Who done it?” but becomes a “Nobody done it”… whatever “it” may be.

  In Suspense the audience and characters know the same information.

  Suspense combines both Curiosity and Concern. Ninety percent of all films, comedy and drama, compel interest in this mode. In Suspense, however, curiosity is not about fact but outcome. The outcome of a Murder Mystery is always certain. Although we don’t know who or how, the detective will catch the killer and the story will end “up.” But the Suspense story could end “up” or “down” or in irony.

  Characters and audience move shoulder to shoulder through the telling, sharing the same knowledge. As the characters discover expositional fact, the audience discovers it. But what no one knows is “How will this turn out?” In this relationship we feel empathy and identify with the protagonist, whereas in pure Mystery our involvement is limited to sympathy. Master detectives are charming and likable, but we never identify with them because they’re too perfect and never in real jeopardy. Murder Mysteries are like board games, cool entertainments for the mind.

  In Dramatic Irony the audience knows more than the characters.

  Dramatic Irony creates interest primarily through concern alone, eliminating curiosity about fact and consequence. Such stories often open with the ending, deliberately giving away the outcome. When the audience is given the godlike superiority of knowing events before they happen, its emotional experience switches. What in Suspense would be anxiety about outcome and fear for the protagonist’s well-being, in Dramatic Irony becomes dread of the moment the character discovers what we already know and compassion for someone we see heading for disaster.

  SUNSET BOULEVARD: In the first sequence the body of Joe Gillis (William Holden) floats facedown in Norma Desmond’s (Gloria Swanson) swimming pool. The camera goes to the bottom of the pool, looks up at the corpse, and in voice-over Gillis muses that we’re probably wondering how he ended up dead in a swimming pool, so he’ll tell us. The film becomes a feature-length flashback, dramatizing a screenwriter’s struggle for success. We’re moved to compassion and dread as we watch this poor man heading toward a fate we already know. We realize that all of Gillis’s efforts to escape the clutches of a wealthy harridan and write an honest screenplay will come to nothing and he’ll end up a corpse in her swimming pool.

  BETRAYAL: The Antiplot device of telling a story in reverse order from end to beginning was invented in 1934 by Phillip Kaufman and Moss Hart for their play Merrily We Roll Along. Forty years later Harold Pinter used this idea to exploit the ultimate use of Dramatic Irony. BETRAYAL is a Love Story that opens with former lovers, Jerry and Emma (Jeremy Irons and Patricia Hodge) meeting privately for the first time in the years since their breakup. In a tense moment she confesses that her husband “knows,” her husband being Jerry’s best friend. As the film proceeds it flashes back to scenes of the breakup, then follows with the events that brought about the breakup, back farther to cover the golden days of the romance, then ends on boy-meets-girl. As the eyes of the young lovers glitter with anticipation, we’re filled with mixed emotions: We want them to have their affair, for it was sweet, but we also know all the bitterness and pain they’ll suffer.

  Placing the audience in the position of Dramatic Irony does not eliminate all curiosity. The result of showing the audience what will happen is to cause them to ask, “How and why did these characters do what I already know they did? Dramatic Irony encourages the audience to look more deeply into the motivations and causal forces at work in the characters’ lives. This is why we often enjoy a fine film more, or at least differently, on second viewing. We not only flex the often underused emotions of compassion and dread, but freed from curiosity about facts and outcome, we now concentrate on inner lives, unconscious energies, and the subtle workings of society.

  However, the majority of genres do not lend themselves to either pure Mystery or pure Dramatic Irony. Instead, within the Suspense relationship writers enrich the telling by mixing the other two. In an overall Suspense design, some sequences may employ Mystery to increase curiosity about certain facts, others may switch to Dramatic Irony to touch the audience’s heart.

  CASABLANCA: At the end of Act One we learn that Rick and Ilsa had an affair in Paris that ended in breakup. Act Two opens with a flashback to Paris. From the vantage of Dramatic Irony, we watch the young lovers head for tragedy and feel a special tenderness for their romantic innocence. We look deeply into their moments together, wondering why their love ended in heartbreak and how they’ll react when they discover what we already know.

  Later, at the climax of Act Two, Ilsa is back in Rick’s arms, ready to leave her husband for him. Act Three switches to Mystery by showing Rick make his Crisis decision but not letting us in on what he’s chosen to do. Because Rick knows more than we, curiosity is piqued: Will he run off with Ilsa? When the answer arrives, it hits us with a jolt.

  Suppose you were working on a Thriller about a psychopathic axe murderer and a female detective, and you’re ready to write the Story Climax. You’ve set it in the dimly lit corridor of an old mansion. She knows the killer is near and clicks the safety off her gun as she moves slowly past doors left and right extending into the dark distance. Which of the three strategies to use?

  Mystery: Hide a fact known to the antagonist from th
e audience.

  Close all the doors so that as she moves down the hall the audience’s eyes search the screen, wondering, Where is he? Behind the first door? The next door? The next? Then he attacks by crashing through… the ceiling!

  Suspense: Give the audience and characters the same information.

  At the end of the hall a door is ajar with a light behind it casting a shadow on the wall of a man holding an axe. She sees the shadow and stops. The shadow retreats from the wall. CUT TO: Behind the door a man, axe in hand, waits: He knows that she’s there and he knows that she knows that he’s there because he heard her footsteps stop. CUT TO: The hallway where she hesitates: She knows that he’s there and she knows that he knows that she knows that he’s there because she saw his shadow move. We know that she knows that he knows, but what no one knows is how will this turn out? Will she kill him? Or will he kill her?

  Dramatic Irony: Employ Hitchcock’s favorite device and hide from the protagonist a fact known to the audience.

  She slowly edges toward a closed door at the end of the hall.

  CUT TO: Behind the door a man waits, axe in hand. CUT TO: The hallway as she moves closer and closer to the closed door. The audience, knowing what she doesn’t know, switches its emotions from anxiety to dread: “Don’t go near that door! For God’s sake, don’t open that door! He’s behind the door! Look out!”

  She opens the door and… mayhem.

  On the other hand, if she were to open the door and embrace the man….

  MAN WITH AXE

  (rubbing sore

  muscles)

  Honey, I’ve been chopping

  wood all afternoon.

  Is dinner ready?

  … this would not be Dramatic Irony, but False Mystery and its dim-witted cousin, Cheap Surprise.

  A certain amount of audience curiosity is essential. Without it, Narrative Drive grinds to a halt. The craft gives you the power to conceal fact or outcome in order to keep the audience looking ahead and asking questions. It gives you the power to mystify the audience, if that’s appropriate. But you must not abuse this power. If so, the audience, in frustration, will tune out. Instead, reward the filmgoer for his concentration with honest, insightful answers to his questions. No dirty tricks, no Cheap Surprise, no False Mystery.

  False Mystery is a counterfeit curiosity caused by the artificial concealment of fact. Exposition that could and should have been given to the audience is withheld in hope of holding interest over long, undramatized passages.

  FADE IN: The pilot of a crowded airliner battles an electrical storm. Lightning strikes the wing and the plane plunges toward a mountainside. CUT TO: Six months earlier, and a thirty-minute flashback that tediously details the lives of the passengers and crew leading up to the fatal flight. This tease or cliff-hanger is a lame promise made by the writer: “Don’t worry, folks, if you stick with me through this boring stretch, I’ll eventually get back to the exciting stuff.”

  THE PROBLEM OF SURPRISE

  We go to the storyteller with a prayer: “Please, let it be good. Let it give me an experience I’ve never had, insights into a fresh truth. Let me laugh at something I’ve never thought funny. Let me be moved by something that’s never touched me before. Let me see the world in a new way. Amen.” In other words, the audience prays for surprise, the reversal of expectation.

  As characters arrive onscreen, the audience surrounds them with expectations, feeling “this” will happen, “that” will change, Miss A will get the money, Mr. B will get the girl, Mrs. C will suffer. If what the audience expects to happen happens, or worse, if it happens the way the audience expects it to happen, this will be a very unhappy audience. We must surprise them.

  There are two kinds of surprise: cheap and true. True surprise springs from the sudden revelation of the Gap between expectation and result. This surprise is “true” because it’s followed by a rush of insight, the revelation of a truth hidden beneath the surface of the fictional world.

  Cheap Surprise takes advantage of the audience’s vulnerability. As it sits in the dark, the audience places its emotions in the storyteller’s hands. We can always shock filmgoers by smash cutting to something it doesn’t expect to see or away from something it expects to continue. By suddenly and inexplicably breaking the narrative flow we can always jolt people. But as Aristoltle complained, “To be about to act and not to act is the worst. It is shocking without being tragic.”

  In certain genres—Horror, Fantasy, Thriller—cheap surprise is a convention and part of the fun: The hero walks down a dark alley. A hand shoots in from the edge of the screen and grabs his shoulder, the hero spins around—and it’s his best friend. Outside these genres, however, cheap surprise is a shoddy device.

  MY FAVORITE SEASON: A woman (Catherine Deneuve) is married but not happily. Her possessive brother agitates his sister’s marriage, until finally convinced she cannot be happy with her husband, she leaves and moves in with her brother. Brother and sister share a top-floor apartment. He comes home one day feeling uncertain qualms. As he enters, he sees a window open, curtains billowing. He rushes to look down. In his POV we see his sister smashed on the cobbles far below, dead, surrounded by a pool of blood. CUT TO: The bedroom and his sister waking up from a nap.

  Why, in a serious Domestic Drama, would a director resort to horrific shock images from the brother’s nervous imagination? Perhaps because the previous thirty minutes were so unbearably boring, he thought it was time to kick us in the shins with a trick he learned in film school.

  THE PROBLEM OF COINCIDENCE

  Story creates meaning. Coincidence, then, would seem our enemy, for it is the random, absurd collisions of things in the universe and is, by definition, meaningless. And yet coincidence is a part of life, often a powerful part, rocking existence, then vanishing as absurdly as it arrived. The solution, therefore, is not to avoid coincidence, but to dramatize how it may enter life meaninglessly, but in time gain meaning, how the antilogic of randomness becomes the logic of life-as-lived.

  First, bring coincidence in early to allow time to build meaning out of it.

  The Inciting Incident of JAWS: a shark, by random chance, eats a swimmer. But once in the story the shark doesn’t leave. It stays and gathers meaning as it continuously menaces the innocent until we get the feeling that the beast is doing it on purpose and, what’s more, enjoying it. Which is the definition of evil: Doing harm to others and taking pleasure in it. We all hurt people inadvertently but instantly regret it. But when someone purposely seeks to cause pain in others and takes pleasure from it, that’s evil. The shark then becomes a powerful icon for the dark side of nature that would love to swallow us whole and laugh while doing it.

  Coincidence, therefore, must not pop into a story, turn a scene, then pop out. Example: Eric desperately seeks his estranged lover, Laura, but she’s moved. After searching in vain, he stops for a beer. On the stool next to him sits the real estate agent who sold Laura her new house. He gives Eric her exact address. Eric leaves with thanks and never sees the salesman again. Not that this coincidence couldn’t happen, but it’s pointless.

  On the other hand, suppose that the salesman can’t remember the address, but does recall that Laura bought a red Italian sports car at the same time. The two men leave together and spot her Maserati on the street. Now they both go up to her door. Still angry with Eric, Laura invites them in and flirts with the salesman to annoy her ex-lover. What was meaningless good luck now becomes a force of antagonism to Eric’s desire. This triangle could build meaningfully through the rest of the story.

  As a rule of thumb do not use coincidence beyond the midpoint of the telling. Rather, put the story more and more into the hands of the characters.

  Second, never use coincidence to turn an ending. This is deus ex machina, the writer’s greatest sin.

  Deus ex machina is a Latin phrase taken from the classical theatres of Greece and Rome, meaning “god from machine.” From 500 B.C. to A.D. 500 theatre flouri
shed throughout the Mediterranean. Over those centuries hundreds of playwrights wrote for these stages but only seven have been remembered, the rest mercifully forgotten, due primarily to their propensity to use deus ex machina to get out of story problems. Aristotle complained about this practice, sounding much like a Hollywood producer: “Why can’t these writers come up with endings that work?”

  In these superb, acoustically perfect amphitheatres, some seating up to ten thousand people, at the far end of a horseshoeshaped stage was a high wall. At the bottom were doors or arches for entrances and exits. But actors who portrayed gods would be lowered down to the stage from the top of the wall standing on a platform attached to ropes and pulley. This “god from machine” device was the visual analogy of the deities coming down from Mount Olympus and going back up to Mount Olympus.

  Story climaxes were as difficult twenty-five hundred years ago as now. But ancient playwrights had a way out. They would cook a story, twist Turning Points until they had the audience on the edge of their marble seats, then if the playwright’s creativity dried up and he was lost for a true Climax, convention allowed him to dodge the problem by cranking a god to the stage and letting an Apollo or Athena settle everything. Who lives, who dies, who marries who, who is damned for eternity. And they did this over and over.

  Nothing has changed in twenty-five hundred years. Writers today still cook up stories they can’t end. But instead of dropping a god in to get an ending, they use “acts of god”—the hurricane that saves the lovers in HURRICANE, the elephant stampede that resolves the love triangle in ELEPHANT WALK, the traffic accidents that end THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE and THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, the T-Rex that hops in just in time to devour the velociraptors in JURASSIC PARK.