Dialogue

by Robert McKee

  BEAT 7

  TONY

  Then, what is it, okay? What is it?

  (pause, quieter)

  Just… help me understand it, okay?

  MELFI

  You know, Anthony, during our work I never judged you, or your behavior. It’s not the place of a therapist to do so.

  TONY

  All right, I get all this. Go, go.

  MELFI

  In a personal relationship, I don’t think I could sit silent.

  ACTION: Tony asking for trouble.

  REACTION: Melfi crossing the line.

  SUBTEXT: Tony begs for the truth, but Dr. Melfi knows the furious effect truth can have on him, so she stalls. Still, he insists, so after sidestepping for six beats, she finally crosses the line from professional to personal, and by doing so, she puts herself in grave danger.

  BEAT 8

  TONY

  About what?

  MELFI

  Our values are… just very different.

  ACTION: Tony cornering her.

  REACTION: Melfi belittling him.

  SUBTEXT: When he pressures her for an answer, she insults him and hints for the second time that she knows his hidden weakness.

  Tony can read subtext with the best. When she says that the values separating them are “just very different,” he knows that that’s PC for “My values are clearly better than yours, but let’s not fight about it.”

  The word “values” startles Tony, and its insinuations anger him, but he manages to hold his rage in check.

  BEAT 9

  TONY

  You don’t like my values?

  MELFI

  Honestly?

  TONY

  Yeah.

  A tense pause.

  MELFI

  No.

  ACTION: Tony daring her to cross him.

  REACTION: Melfi denying his worth.

  SUBTEXT: We measure a person’s worth in the quality of his values and the actions they motivate. By rejecting Tony’s personal values, she rejects his value as a person.

  When Tony confronts Dr. Melfi, she does not flinch. Instead, she states her disdain for him with such sudden, unexpected power that he drops his bullying tone.

  BEAT 10

  TONY

  Okay.

  (pause)

  Like what?

  MELFI

  (glancing at her watch)

  It’s getting late.

  ACTION: Tony asking nice.

  REACTION: Melfi giving him a last way out.

  SUBTEXT: Feeling vulnerable and dreading the worst, Tony softens his tone. Dr. Melfi, knowing that her insights will wound Tony and perhaps enrage him, offers him an excuse not to know.

  BEAT 11

  TONY

  No, no, no, no. Come on. It’s okay. It’s okay.

  MELFI

  Well… you’re not a truthful person. You’re not respectful of women. You’re not really respectful of people.

  ACTION: Tony inviting the worst.

  REACTION: Melfi pulling her punch.

  SUBTEXT: At some level, Tony realizes that the answer to “What is wrong with me?” will scald his sense of self, but he pursues it to the blistered end.

  Notice that when Dr. Melfi hits Tony with the bitter facts, her language softens the blow. She could have called him a liar, abuser, or worse. Instead, she keeps her cool control—“not a truthful person,” “not really respectful.”

  BEAT 12

  TONY

  I don’t love people?

  MELFI

  Maybe you love them, I don’t know. You take what you want from them by force, or the threat of force.

  ACTION: Tony doubting himself.

  REACTION: Melfi firing the first barrel.

  SUBTEXT: Tony has never for a moment doubted his love for his family, friends, and lovers. But the instant Dr. Melfi shows him his essential tyrannical nature, he cannot argue back. Instead, he phrases his denial as a question, a question he seems to ask himself as much as her.

  Line by line, fact by fact, Dr. Melfi has destroyed Tony’s self-worth. She knows full well that, humiliated and emasculated, he might lash out in violence. She faces a dilemma between speaking the final full truth and the violence it might bring versus keeping silent and staying secure. She makes her choice of action and dares to launch the final beat.

  BEAT 13

  MELFI

  (continuing)

  I couldn’t live like that. I couldn’t bear witness to violence or—

  TONY

  —Fuck you…

  Tony runs out, slams the door, and shouts from the lobby:

  TONY

  … you fucking cunt.

  ACTION: Melfi firing the second barrel.

  REACTION: Tony killing her with words.

  SUBTEXT: In Beat 12 she impugns Tony’s morals, but in Beat 13 she denigrates the whole gangster life and, with that, everyone close to him.

  He could kill her for those insults; he has killed others for as much. But he runs out instead because of the way the writers staged the opening. As Tony entered Dr. Melfi’s office, a dozen members of a group session filed out past him. She saw Tony standing in the crowd and called out to him. In other words, there were witnesses. If he were to attack her now, those people could put him at the scene by name. Tony’s too savvy to make that mistake, so he fires off the most lethal words he knows.

  This final beat turns with a sharp irony. Dr. Melfi tells Tony that she cannot witness violence, but we suspect that subconsciously she relishes face-to-face brushes with violence and the adrenaline rush they bring.

  So even though Tony starts every beat but the last, it’s Dr. Melfi’s passive aggression that carries the scene to its climax. At first, she deflects his sexual moves, then in Beat 4 she provokes his desire to know why, and finally, she leads him to the self-discovery he dreads. On balance, Dr. Melfi owns the more powerful personality; she controls the conflict from open to close.

  Subtextual Progression

  Scan the list of subtextual actions below. Note how they progress the scene: Conflict builds through the first four beats, backs off for a moment in Beat 5, then progresses to the climax of Beat 13. Next note how this progression arcs the three values at stake in the scene: 1) Friendship/hatred in the doctor/patient relationship swings from positive to negative. 2) Tony’s comfortable self-deception (positive irony) turns to painful self-awareness (negative irony). 3) Peril/survival for Dr. Melfi pivots from negative to positive.

  BEAT 1: Turning on the charm/Gearing up for trouble.

  BEAT 2: Propositioning her/Calling him an idiot.

  BEAT 3: Claiming his innocence/Avoiding conflict.

  BEAT 4: Playing for pity/Blaming him.

  BEAT 5: Looking for a way out/Giving him a way out.

  BEAT 6: Laying it on the line/Buying time.

  BEAT 7: Asking for trouble/Crossing the line.

  BEAT 8: Cornering her/Belittling him.

  BEAT 9: Daring her to cross him/Denying his worth.

  BEAT 10: Asking nice/Giving him a last way out.

  BEAT 11: Inviting the worst/Pulling her punch.

  BEAT 12: Doubting himself/Firing her first barrel.

  BEAT 13: Firing her second barrel/Killing her with words.

  To see how inner actions manifest in outer speech, let’s compare the dialogue for these two characters on three points: content, length, and pace.

  CONTENT: Tony comes into the scene feeling unloved and empty, suffering from an existential crisis. The reasons he used to give himself for living his high-risk life no longer make sense. In such a state, people naturally ask questions, the two biggest being: “Who am I?” and “What’s the point?”

  Note that half of Tony’s lines are questions. The rest are either lies or pleas, told and asked in the hope that Dr. Melfi will give him the insight into himself he craves. The only line in which he does not beg for an answer is the last, and it may be his weakest, most desperate call for help.


  Dr. Melfi enters the scene at the height of her profession, sated with confident knowledge. Her therapeutic skill gives her what she wants: the power to lighten the darkness in her patients’ psyches. As a result, her lines make statements, the answers to Tony’s questions that she slowly, at times evasively, doles out.

  LENGTH: As noted in Chapter Seven, when people lose control of their emotions, their words, phrases, and sentences tend to shorten. Conversely, people in control often lengthen all three.

  Tony talks in monosyllables, and his longest sentence is ten words; Dr. Melfi frequently uses three-and four-syllable terms, and her sentences run as long as twenty-five words. Each of Dr. Melfi’s sentences includes a noun, verb, and object; Tony often abbreviates meaning into phrases such as “tickets,” “Bermuda,” “Go, go.”

  PACE: In an athletic event, the player who controls the pace of the game tends to win. Much the same is true in life. First note how Tony’s staccato cadence and Dr. Melfi’s languid rhythms mirror their contradictory emotional states. Then compare Tony’s frantic phrases (“Then, what is it, okay? What is it?) to Dr. Melfi’s long, slow sentences. Tony tries to bulldoze through the opening beats, but ultimately, her moral power controls the pace of the scene. She takes her time; he stumbles from moment to moment, lurching out in defeat.

  Lastly, Chapter Nine argued that repetitiousness is the enemy of fine writing, and generally that’s true, but, as always, the antithesis has its uses, too. Like waves pounding a shore, the writers use repetition to swell Tony’s rising tide of anger and frustration. He repeats, for example, the word “okay” five times, the last two as a promise not to hurt her—which, by climax, if he could, he would (“Fuck you, you fucking cunt”).

  If you haven’t already, watch the scene online to study how the dialogue’s contrasting qualities of content, length, and pace help channel the actors’ performances.

  In life, emotions seem to surge from the belly and then spread through the body. For this reason, acting coaches teach their students to think, not in their heads, but in their guts. Bad actors tend to be self-puppeteers who work from the head down to pull their own strings; fine actors let conflict hit below the waist as they surrender to their character.

  An instinct-driven performance is only possible if the writing, text and subtext, allows the actor to feel the meaning of the words in his guts, so that idea and emotion merge into immediate, vivid, seemingly spontaneous dialogue. Because the writing of THE SOPRANOS was the best of its day, James Gandolfini could create the from-the-guts tour de force that carried him to multiple Emmy, Screen Actors Guild, and Golden Globe Awards.

  14

  COMIC CONFLICT

  All characters pursue secondary desires per scene (scene intention) in pursuit of a primary, overall desire per story (super-intention). If, however, we were to place all stories ever told along a spectrum ranging from tragedy to farce, we would see that dramatic characters and comic characters go about these pursuits with distinctively different dialogue styles.

  The reason is simple: These two basic character types possess two fundamentally different mentalities. They do not think the same, and so they do not speak the same. Writing dialogue for one versus the other, therefore, demands two decidedly different techniques.

  The dramatic character pursues what life demands with some degree of awareness. He has a mental flexibility that lets him step back from the fray and think the thought, “Wow, this could get me killed.” This realization doesn’t necessarily stop his quest, but he’s aware of its irony and risk. Tony Soprano, for instance, in the midst of rage, has enough mindfulness not to commit murder in public.

  What makes a comic character comic is mental rigidity. He pursues his all-absorbing desire as if myopic to any choice beyond it. In the scene I’ll analyze below, for example, two psychiatrists (e.g., professionals who ought to know better) are so consumed by sibling rivalry they regress to infanticide.

  In centuries past, the monomania of the comic character was known as his “humor.” In 1612, playwright Ben Jonson wrote a verse prologue to his comedy Every Man out of His Humour. In it, he drew upon theories from medieval physiology that allege that every person’s body has a unique balance of four humors (fluids)—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—and their one-of-a-kind concoction determines each person’s specific temperament. (Why the ancients didn’t add sexual fluids to their list of humors, I cannot say, but they sure seem influential to me.)

  Jonson seized upon this theory as a metaphor for the comic character. In his definition, a humor arises

  … when some one peculiar quality

  Doth so possesse a man, that it doth draw

  All his affects, his spirits, and his powers

  In their confluctions, all to runne one way.1

  In my comedy lectures, I call Jonson’s “one peculiar quality” the blind obsession. As noted in Chapter Eleven, desire intensifies in the comic character to the point of obsession. This fixation holds the character so tightly in its grip he cannot deviate from it. All aspects of his identity are bound to it; without it, he is no longer comic. What’s more, this obsession blinds him. He is driven to pursue it but cannot see the mania in himself. To us, he’s a crazed neurotic; to him, his obsession is normalcy.

  Consider, for example, Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers and others), the protagonist of no less than eleven Pink Panther films. Deaf, dumb, and blind to his incompetence, Clouseau obsesses on perfection. He devotes every compulsive waking hour to becoming the world’s ultimate detective.

  A few comic protagonists, such as Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer in ANNIE HALL and Larry David’s Larry David in CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, constantly dissect their obsession, phobically alert to any sign of neuroses. But what they do not grasp is that addictive self-analysis is itself a blind obsession. The more seriously and persistently these two guys self-psychoanalyze, the more hysterical they become—in both senses of the word.

  The comic protagonist’s blind obsession usually comes nested inside otherwise normal traits that anoint him with believability, dimensionalize his personality, and make him one of a kind. The art of comedy, however, imposes certain limitations on dimensionality, for this reason: Jokes require objectivity. Laughter explodes the moment two incongruous ideas suddenly clash in the mind. If their illogicality is not instantly recognized, the gag sputters in confusion. Therefore, the mind of the reader/audience must be kept sharply focused and uncluttered by compassion.

  In Chapter Eleven’s 30 ROCK case study, I defined a dimension as a consistent contradiction within a character’s nature: either a contradiction between an outer trait of characterization versus an inner quality of true character (e.g., Jack Foley’s romantic charm versus his bank robber’s ethics in Out of Sight), or a deep contradiction within the inner self (e.g., Macbeth’s blood-soaked ambition to be king versus his guilt-ridden conscience over the actions he takes to be king).

  A profound self-contradiction (such as those we saw previously within Dr. Melfi and Tony Soprano) draws a reader/audience into an empathic identification with a fellow human being and a compassionate concern for that character’s well-being. We welcome feelings in drama, but in comedy, empathy and compassion kill the laughs.

  For this reason, comic protagonists, almost without exception, have fewer dimensions than their dramatic counterparts and virtually none at the subconscious level of conflicted inner selves. Instead, comic dimensions pit appearance against reality, the man the character thinks he is versus the fool we know him in fact to be.

  Bit parts in comedy—geek, diva, jock, valley girl, fop, braggart, nag, nerd, etc.—chase their blind obsession with glaring clarity because monomania is their only trait. As you might imagine, writing fresh, innovative dialogue for these nondimensional roles can break your brain. Indeed, many comedies fail at this. Too often, when supporting characters speak, their blind obsession funnels what they say into trite lingo and clichéd reactions.

  FRASIER
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br />   Peter Casey, David Lee, and David Angell spun FRASIER off from the sitcom CHEERS and filled it with a cast of unique obsessives. The show ran on NBC from 1993 to 2004, winning a record thirty-seven Emmy Awards. It tells the story of radio talk show psychiatrist Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer), his brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce), and the people in their lives.

  Frasier and Niles share a number of blind obsessions. These become super-intentions that weave in and out of storylines, arcing through 264 episodes in eleven seasons, unifying the series: Both Frasier and Niles have a mortal fear of embarrassment; both crave social, intellectual, and cultural status—all leading to their supreme, often snobbish, pretentiousness; and, like all self-respecting comic characters, they obsess on sex.

  In a first season episode entitled “Author, Author,” Frasier and Niles have contracted with a publisher to write a book on the psychology of sibling rivalry. As fellow psychiatrists and siblings, this book, they feel, should be a snap. Unfortunately, they procrastinate the actual writing to the last day before the contract’s deadline.

  Desperate, they isolate themselves in a hotel room where they manage, after great difficulty, to compose a lead sentence. But then the fear of embarrassment grabs them by the throat: “What will people say if we fail as writers?” This fear paralyzes them with writer’s block, and they spend the rest of the day and the whole of the night eating and drinking their way through the minibar, writing nothing.