Roman Polanski’s Release

Published on July 13, 2010

These last two days, I have been watching the media clamor on Roman Polanski’s release with the same anguish I felt when I learned of his arrest last September. In fact, it was that event that prompted me to begin this blog. If you click on the “Roman Polanski” category to your right, you will find the awkward attempt at a heartfelt statement that poured out of me in those first couple of days.

After posting that declaration, I still didn’t feel I had fully succeeded in unraveling all my complicated feelings. So I started working on a longer, more in-depth piece, mining further and further into my subconscious. It took me about a week of writing, and writing and writing, to find the various sources of my distress, bring them to light and make the connections between them.

Once I felt satisfied with the piece, I wanted more than a few people to read it. So, rather than put it on my nascent blog, I decided to try to get it published in a major outlet. But my soul searching process had taken too long and by the time I sent it out, the story was losing its legs. Knowing that it was bound to resurface at some point, I put the piece away, waiting for the next chapter to break.

So here we are. And to hell with those major outlets who ignored me the first time around. This time it’s going on my blog, where hopefully I have at least a few more readers than I had nine months ago.

I debated briefly whether to update it to the present. But it was written to reflect the internal process of discovery I was having as that initial media firestorm was playing out. So I have left it intact.

I hope it you get something out of it.

The Light Blue Ribbon
by Jennine Lanouette
October 6, 2009

Ever since the arrest of Roman Polanski, I have been trying to sort out my feelings about it. I am surprised at how pained I am. It almost feels personal.

I am reminded of the words of Evelyn Mulwray in Polanski’s film Chinatown. “It’s very personal, Mr. Gittes. It couldn’t be more personal.” Evelyn’s impulsive reaction to Jake’s questioning is our first hint of what, much later, we will be brutally confronted with. As a teenager, Evelyn was sexually molested by her father.

Jake is questioning Evelyn on the whereabouts of her husband Hollis, head of the L.A. Water Department, because Jake’s photos of Hollis with a young girl have shown up in the newspaper, in an obvious attempt to discredit a city official. Jake is simply trying to find out who set him up. What we later learn is that the young girl is the product of Evelyn’s past trauma and Hollis was hiding her to protect her from becoming another victim of her father/grandfather’s grasp.

I have been studying and lecturing on this film for about 15 years now. If I had to pick a greatest film ever made, this may well be it. Certainly in the top five. The insight it has given me on the transcendent capabilities of film drama has had a profound effect on my work. It was released in 1974, three years before Mr. Polanski’s encounter with the young Samantha Geimer.

I was, also, once in a relationship with a man who had been sexually molested as a child. He and I had a deep connection, like soul mates, but his past proved an insurmountable obstacle to our intimacy. I know well the destructive effects of sexual abuse.

I am reminded of another scene in which Evelyn is trying to head Jake off the trail that leads to her daughter. She tells him that her husband’s “infidelities” didn’t bother her because she was having affairs of her own. When pressed for details, she responds, “I don’t see anyone for very long. It’s difficult for me.”

When I was in graduate school in the early 80’s, we lionized Robert Towne for his screenplay of this film. A school chum of mine learned one day I hadn’t yet seen Polanski’s other films, so he dragged me off to see The Tenant. But it was too dark and weird for me. Not that I was a stranger to dark, weird films. Lynch, Herzog and Kubrick were among my favorites. But I also knew that Polanski was the guy who had gotten in trouble for having sex with that young girl. Being not much more than a young girl myself at the time, that uncomfortable knowledge biased me against his particular dark, weird films. Still, Chinatown was an undeniable masterwork. I dealt with this contradiction by choosing to believe that the genius of Chinatown was in Robert Towne’s script and Polanski was simply the faithful executer.

There is an image in the film that I have not been able to get out of my mind since the arrest story broke. In the climactic scene, when Evelyn finally confesses to Jake the truth about her daughter who is also her sister, there can be seen in the background a young girl’s straw hat with a light blue ribbon around it. A picture of pristine girlhood innocence, bringing into the scene not only the presence of the daughter being hidden upstairs but also the violated innocence of Evelyn.

In the mid-90s, I began teaching Script Analysis and, in deference to the great Robert Towne, I chose Chinatown as one of the first films to cover. I was eager to discover Towne’s trade secrets in this Neo-noir detective story that is so often described as “enigmatic” and “labyrinthine”. As I gamely dug into it’s notoriously inscrutable plot, I was soon surprised by what I found.

Explaining to Evelyn why he got out of Chinatown and quit the police force, Jake says, “I thought I was keeping someone from being hurt and actually I ended up making sure she was hurt.” They have become intimate because they are drawn to each other’s wounds. She is literally drawn to his when she tends to the cut on his nose. He, in turn, is drawn to the “flaw” in her eye, an indelible mark of her vulnerability.

But when Evelyn gets a call and suddenly leaves him without telling why or where to, Jake lapses back into a distrust that only continues to build until he finally makes a mistake that leads to her death. Thus, not only has he repeated the trauma of his own past, but he has also opened the way for Evelyn’s past trauma to be repeated since her death leaves her daughter in the control of her sexually abusing father.

In a way, this was inevitable when Evelyn (and her daughter) lost the protection of her husband, Hollis. He was murdered by her father due to his refusal to build a damn, from which her father plans to profit. “I will not make the same mistake twice,” Hollis says, referring to a previous damn break he was partially responsible for that killed 500 people. This makes him the one character in the film who consciously decides not to repeat his traumatic past. And he is murdered for it.

When I started studying this film, I had already been reading books about sexual abuse trauma and reenactment to better understand the effects of my partner’s abuse history on our relationship. I didn’t realize there would be a secondary benefit to this research when, innocently preparing my Chinatown lecture for class, I suddenly became aware of how truthfully both Evelyn and Jake’s traumas were represented in this film. The resonance of these characters to my own experience broke a loneliness I felt in my struggles not to abandon this person whose challenges couldn’t easily be talked about in polite company. Someone involved in the creation of this film had also been around trauma and knew its downward spiraling effect.

Of course, I at first assumed that the “someone” I imagined was Robert Towne. I excitedly looked up some interviews to learn about his motivations for writing the story. I thought I would find a fellow traveler in matters beyond screenplay structure. But my search soon proved frustrating. When asked about the origins of his idea, Towne soliloquizes on the lost beauty of his childhood Los Angeles and the pervasive get-yours-and-get-out ethic that has been its ruin. But he skims over the incest as if it is simply a convenient and effective plot twist. I thought, “Are we talking about the same film here?” He seemed to have no understanding of the underlying trauma themes he had woven in. I was dumbfounded and disappointed.

I had no choice. I had to look to Polanski. I still knew little about him, except what my prejudices would allow. But I didn’t have to go far in my research to be confronted with his Holocaust childhood. And there was no need to go further than that. Polanski had experienced unfathomable trauma. I had to accept that my fellow traveler behind the human truth of Chinatown was not Robert Towne. It was Roman Polanski.

Another scene comes to mind. Having arranged for Evelyn’s escape, Jake confronts Evelyn’s father, Noah Cross, with the bifocals that prove he killed Hollis. But Cross is unphased by the charge. He brags about having grabbed up the valley that will be worth millions when the water is piped in, and getting the citizenry to pass a bond issue paying for the damn that will collect the water, and then arranging for the valley to be incorporated into the city so technically the water does not leave Los Angeles. Gittes asks why he’s doing it. “How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?” “The future, Mr. Gittes!” he says. “The future!”  But neither is Cross satisfied with simply owning L.A.’s future. He still wants “the girl.” Evelyn was lost to him long ago. Jake asks who he blames for that. “I don’t blame myself,” says Cross. “See, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place they’re capable of anything!”

Invasion, appropriation of resources, annexation, eugenics. A chilling description not of the romanticized Los Angeles that Towne grew up in, but of the decimated Poland that had such a formative influence on Polanski. Towne created the congruent metaphors of the rape of the land and the rape of a daughter, which no doubt was what attracted Polanski to the script. But Towne’s treatment of the incest was limited to its metaphoric and dramatic significance, in essence exploiting the issue to serve the story’s other elements. It was Polanski who knew how to bring in and intensify the painful human reality of such a traumatizing event.

My empirical observations were confirmed in December, 1999, with the appearance of an article by Robert Benedetto* in which he closely examines Towne’s third draft to compare it with the shooting script that Towne and Polanski produced in a famously tumultuous eight-week collaboration. Benedetto’s unequivocal conclusion is that it was Polanski who made Towne’s intriguingly good screenplay rise to the level of greatness.

I no longer regard Polanski’s other films as simply dark and weird. In most of them, I see him thrashing about to make sense of where he came from. In Rosemary’s Baby, I see his anger and disdain towards the German people for the devil’s bargain they made with Hitler – We’ll give you our Jewish neighbors if you give us a comfy, secure middle class life. In The Pianist, I see him for the first time, at age 70, telling a story that shows real compassion for himself.

Ever since Mr. Polanski’s arrest, I have been struggling to articulate why when I first read the news I burst into tears. What I now know is that, encompassed in this event, I feel a magnitude of tragedy that overwhelms me. I can’t separate out the component parts. Learning about Polanski’s past after my close study of his film was a humbling experience. How, having portrayed sexual abuse trauma so truthfully, he could then go on to unthinkingly exploit a young girl is one of the mysteries of human nature that I can’t begin to try to explain, even to myself. All I know is I wish he hadn’t done it. But the knowledge I have gained from studying his greatest work leads me to suspect that, in addition to being the heartrending exploitation of another, it was also a profoundly self-destructive act of immense emotional and spiritual proportion. Thus, it was tragic on all sides.

When first confronted with the larger picture of Polanski’s life, I was forced to ask a question of myself: Who am I to judge this man? I can judge what he did. That’s a no-brainer. Everyone knows it was wrong. Given that acknowledgement, it is the judicial system’s responsibility to make reparation to the victim and assess if the perpetrator is a further threat to others. And these two questions were closed in this matter a long time ago. Any further judgment I might have the impulse to make of him is hubris on my part.

Of course, there is the separate issue that he thwarted the judicial process by leaving the country. This, too, I wish he hadn’t done. Even if he had been double-crossed by the judge on the plea bargain and thrown back in the slammer, I doubt it would have been a life sentence. He would have done some time and been released. Neither he nor, more importantly, Ms. Geimer would ever have had to hear of it again. However, it doesn’t entirely surprise me that he did take flight considering that he spent a portion of his childhood incarcerated in the Krakow Ghetto. I am willing to accept that impulse as his own traumatic response.

My fervent hope is that the powers that are now coming to bear on this matter can collectively arrive at a fair and just reparation that will calm down the media and allow this artist to travel freely again in the country where the victim has forgiven him and the devotees of his work await him.

* * *

Now, nine months later, that does not appear likely to happen.

I am glad for Mr. Polanski that, with his release from house arrest, he has been given some relief. But, at the same time, I am sorry that neither he nor his admirers and colleagues who have found their way to a personal forgiveness of him will have the opportunity for the closure that a collective forgiveness would afford.
__________________________

*Footnote: “The Two Chinatowns: Towne’s Screenplay vs. Polanski’s Film,” Robert Benedetto, Creative Screenwriting, Vol. 6, No. 6, November/December, 1999, page 49.

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What Went Wrong With The Last Airbender?

Published on July 12, 2010

One of my students e-mailed me this week to make a request. “I’ve been secretly hoping,” he said, “that you will cover a movie you might not have a reason to see:  The Last Airbender. After my wife and I saw it, she said she liked the story, but thought it was poorly written and directed.  Which made me realize that different people have different ideas of what “story” is.  To me, story is the complete package. Others might see a story as the overall premise, and the movie as the execution itself.  I’d be interested to know how you view that.” He then further commented that he was curious to see where I think the film falls short and where it succeeds.

That I might not have a reason to see this particular film is right, considering it bombed among critics and is in free fall at the box office. But I can’t help being intrigued by such a request from a student. So I wrote him back and said, Sure. I hadn’t yet put together what I later realized while watching the closing credits – the source of his interest in the film was from being part of the special effects team on it.

I don’t know much about what it’s like to work on the special effects of a movie. But I would guess that CGI technicians are just as capable of pouring their heart and soul into their work as the creative principles on a project. Everyone wants to feel proud of what they’ve done. So when the resulting film bombs, as this one seems to be doing, it is just as disappointing for them and prompts a need to find out how and where things could have gone so terribly wrong.

So I’ll start my comments by saying – Thank you! – to the special effects team since the film’s rich visual spectacle was definitely its redeeming feature. And I’m not just saying that. I was struck from the outset at the seamless integration of the live-action “realism” and the animated fantasy. In fact, I breathed a sigh of relief in the first scene that this film wasn’t going to strain my ability to enter its world in the same way that a film like, say, Where the Wild Things Are did.

Sadly, though, that wonderful work was not enough to save the film from being impaled on a post by critics and quickly abandoned by audiences.

Let me first address my student’s question about the definition of story. Certainly, story can be considered separately from the writing of a film. This is why “Story” and “Screenplay” are often credited separately. Someone came up with a great idea but their execution didn’t fully do it justice, so another writer was brought in to finesse the screenplay. In fact, this is what keeps me in business as a story consultant. I see countless drafts from clients that are very good or great story ideas but the characters aren’t quite there, the dialogue is over burdened and the dramatic momentum is only lurching along. So my job is to help them bring the writing of the screenplay up to the quality of that great idea they walked in with.

And, boy, do I wish I could have gotten my hands on this draft of The Last Airbender. I, too, liked the story, to the degree that I could discern it through all the distracting mess it was surrounded with. But I’m going to skip over talking about bad dialogue and chaotic plot threads and instead focus on the larger picture.

My initial comment to this writer/director would have been that his screenplay suffers from a confusion of main characters. Is it Katara’s story or Aang’s story? Not to mention what about ole Prince Zuko, who’s supposed to be the bad guy. For all three, we are given plenty of reason to become sympathetically attached. Katara has an unusual gift that she doesn’t know how to use effectively while her tribe has a desperate need for her to have mastery of it due to their dire circumstance. Aang pops out of an iceberg after 100 years and so is considerably behind the times, struggling to catch up, and, we eventually learn, has some unresolved conflicts to work out that got him stuck there in the first place. And poor old Zuko is utterly unloved and unappreciated by his father, having been given the near impossible task of hunting down, capturing and bringing home “the Avatar” in order to regain his father’s esteem. But more on Zuko later.

First the confusion between Aang, who is, actually, the last airbender of the title, and Katara, who is, actually, put front and center at the beginning. Katara has the misunderstood gifts, she is the motherless child with the absent father, she, along with her brother, has been left with the responsibility of protecting her tribe, which has been reduced by war to a few children and old people. While her character is a stark embodiment of vulnerability, uncertainty and undue burden, Aang, on the other hand, is a manchild stuck in an iceberg who appears to emerge with confidence, sureness and a certain amount of power.

Yet, it turns out that, of the two, Aang has the far more serious underlying problem. The way he got stuck in that iceberg in the first place is that when, some hundred years ago, he learned he was the Avatar, he rebelled and ran away. In effect, he rejected his destiny. And, as we all know, your destiny is your destiny, especially in drama. He’s gonna have to pony up to it at some point. And, indeed, he does, somehow, I’m not sure how, come around in the end, at least as it is reported to us, to have resolved his inner conflict and accepted his role. But we see very little of that happening actively in front of us as the story transpires.

Do you see how we have started with one story here and ended with another? Here’s my glib summary of what I saw: This is the story of a young water tribe girl, left alone by her parents but having the gift of a water-bender, who must master her water bending abilities to adequately protect and defend her tiny water tribe against the evil fire nation. She finds a mystical seeming boy in an iceberg and they launch a journey together to find a teacher of water bending. Meanwhile, the fire nation is after him because they know he is The Avatar, which means he has the capability to master bending in all four elements. He has many near scrapes with the fire nation until he reaches the large powerful water tribe. There, he starts to learn water bending until the fire nation arrives and attacks the water fortress. Somehow, in the course of the battle, the boy gets over his problems with being the Avatar just in the knick of time to make his show of force that has the power to scare away the fire nation.

Katara’s problem is presented at the beginning as the need to master her water bending skills to protect her village. But by the end, this goal has been almost completely sidelined. At first, it was simply matched by Aang’s need to learn water bending along with her so that he can become the Avatar, and help her defend her village. But, ultimately, it is completely overshadowed by waiting for Aang to get his act together, which means deciding that he’s willing to be the Avatar, which then means accepting his grief and anger and then learning how to show force without hurting others. Only problem is that most of this is simply reported to us through dialogue. I don’t recall ever seeing any signs of undue grief or anger in him and, come to think of it, not even a whole lot of ambivalence about his lot in life.

Now, about Zuko. The film’s mistake here, and an easily fixable one, was in revealing to the audience too early his problems with his father. Remember, in How to Train Your Dragon, how the dragons were very scary, formidable adversaries until almost at the end when we learned they were functioning under the extreme duress of having to feed a much, much bigger, scarier monster? A nice clean dramatic tension was maintained throughout that then had a satisfying pay off when we were shown their underlying predicament. In contrast, The Last Airbender’s dramatic tension was seriously undermined by revealing Zuko’s burdens while we were still supposed to be fearing him.

In fact, I found myself at moments caught between, on the one hand, wanting Aang and Katara to escape Zuko’s pursuits and, on the other, wanting Zuko to succeed at capturing Aang so that he could be loved again by his father. The dissonance of that latter impulse with the overall narrative drive kept causing me to pop out of my immersion in the story, having to stop and think, “Wait! I don’t want that to happen! I’m rooting for Aang. I’m supposed to be fearing Zuko.” In a different sort of drama, this popping-out-of-the-story-to-think could be considered a Brechtian alienation effect. But I don’t think this film’s intention was to make a radical socialist statement. On the contrary, my popping-out-to-think in this film was actually undermining the writer/director’s intentions to build a tension-filled, action/adventure story.

Here’s my idea for how to fix this story: Since Aang’s problem seems to be one of identity – Do I have to be an Avatar? Or can I just be a regular boy like all the other boys? – I would give him a “Bourne Identity” opening. He pops out of the iceberg with no idea who he is. Kind of a cosmic comeuppance. You want to be a nobody rather than fulfilling your Avatar destiny? Well, we’ll make you a real  nobody, no identity at all, and you can see how that feels. This puts him in an even more disempowered position than the gifted, motherless, fatherless Katari left with only her brother to defend her beleaguered village. The disempowerment of having no identity will definitely take the trump card in the game of creating sympathetic character, getting us firmly on board with him from the beginning.

Whereas Bourne has a chip buried under his skin to give him his first clue, Aang has a barely decipherable tattoo on his forehead. Perfect. The grandmother can make out just enough to get him started on his quest. But nobody has any clue that he might be the Avatar. Then, like Bourne, he gradually discovers skills and knowledge in himself that he has no idea how he got. He sees that his powers have the potential to help Katari reach the larger water tribe to learn water bending. So they set out for that purpose.

Meanwhile, one of his newly discovered skills involves sending a light beam into the sky, which gets the attention of the Fire Nation and starts their hunting and harassing of him. Now, not only does he not know who he is, but he sees that someone else does know and it is threatening enough to them to want to do him harm.

So we meet Zuko appearing to be working in collaboration with his father to capture Aang (the Avatar), willingly doing his father’s bidding, being the good warrior. The two together creates much greater dramatic tension (because its scarier) than having them working at odds with one another.

At a certain point, probably around the middle, Aang has some kind of revelation (a memory, an oracle, a message on a scroll) about having been a novice monk and being given the test in which he picked out the four objects, proving he is the reincarnation of the Avatar. So, whereas he spent the first half of the story trying to find out who he is, he spends the second half not wanting to believe its true, or somehow resisting. Yet the Fire Nation is bearing down on him (and everyone else).

This is when we begin to see what has been at stake for Zuko all along – it’s not that Zuko shares his father’s values of waging war and killing spirits. It’s that Zuko knows that his father has little faith in his warrior abilities and desperately needs to prove him wrong in order to gain his love. This could pay off either with a high-tension moment when it appears Zuko has succeeded but then must be confronted with the fact that he still doesn’t have his father’s love (because his father is incapable of love), or with Zuko failing and having to punish himself in anticipation of his father’s punishment, which would speak volumes about Zuko’s internal state in relation to his father.

Then the whole thing culminates with Aang being backed up against a wall (metaphorically speaking) to the point that he has no choice. That’s when he has to accept his destiny in order to call upon the forces necessary to propel back the assaulting fire people and begin to restore balance in the world.

The point here being that even a main character who is a half-god needs to have some human challenge, problem, quirk, quandary or other such underlying issue in order to be interesting and have somewhere to go in the course of the story. Aang is introduced to us as being very assured and god-like, as if he has no real problems to overcome. Then we are told that he had a very un-god-like reaction when he learned he was destined for great things. So there is an interesting human problem (that’s what I like about the story), but it’s not presented to us through human behavior and, therefore, gets kind of lost in all the dazzling spectacle.

If I were to sum up in a few words what I think is wrong with the film overall, I would say: Way too much information, way too early in the story, and all coming out at us through reportage in dialogue rather than being communicated through the action.

But I will say this for The Last Airbender: It was better than The Happening.

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Robin Hood Revisited

Published on July 1, 2010

Sorry I’ve been away for a while. I’ve been having fun. Doing exactly what, I’ll get to in a moment. But first a little background.

While working on my last post about Robin Hood, I did some prowling around the internet and found this interesting story about “the other two writers.” You know, the two guys who aren’t Brian Helgeland. Names are Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Vorhis and the story goes that they wrote a screenplay called  “Nottingham” which made the rounds in Hollywood and had tons of buzz on it as this great screenplay. It was eventually bought (by someone, maybe Brian Grazer, maybe the studio, I forget who) and then Russell Crowe signed on and he wanted Ridley Scott brought in to direct. So then it’s pretty much a go. But when Scott got hold of this hot property he immediately started changing it, and changing it, and changing it, and Brian Helgeland was brought in (I don’t know by who). But the long and short of it is that by the time the film reached the screen it had virtually no resemblance to the initial screenplay that had originated the project. And what a travesty! How typical Hollywood! To take a great screenplay and utterly destroy it! (Just trying to represent here the tone of the reports I was reading.)

All of this, of course, made me curious. A great screenplay? Really? Ruined by Ridley Scott? Are you sure? Hmm. Think I’d like to get a look at that screenplay and see for myself. Prowling a little further, I found the original easily accessible and downloadable, and so did just that, then printed it out (I like to scribble in margins) and settled in on my couch for a good read.

. . .

So, now having read it, I can attest to the fact that there is indeed just about zero resemblance, other than a few legendary characters, between the screenplay titled “Nottingham” by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Vorhis and the film titled “Robin Hood” that also bears their names. As for all the buzz it got, I would not call this a “great” screenplay. I would call it an intriguing idea that needed more work. For those of you who have more important things to do with your time than download, print out and read unproduced screenplays that are about to fade into obscurity, I have decided, as a sort of public service, to summarize the main points of the story here.

Nottingham
By Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Vorhis

Sir Robert Tornham, Sheriff of Cyprus, gets word that he is being reposted to England to become Sheriff of Nottingham. He arrives in Nottingham to learn of the notorious Robin Hood, a lesser nobleman of Saxon descent, who has been robbing, pillaging and murdering nobles of Norman birth, heralded as a hero by the common folk because of his largesse with them.

Tornham examines the scene of a recent double murder learning they were guests at a party held by Lord Fitzwater for his daughter Marian. He interviews Marian who tells him she was about to be married to Robin Hood when he was unjustly outlawed for coming to the defense of a miller who had killed one of the king’s deer to feed his starving family.

While Prince John is out hunting deer, he is suddenly pursued by a wild boar until Lady Marian shoots it dead. Marian takes off on horseback, Tornham goes after her and is ambushed and taken hostage by Robin Hood and his men. Robin tells Tornham he is not the murderer he seeks.

Freed by the Merry Men, Tornham goes to see Marian. An alarm is sounded and Tornham learns of another murder. He inspects the scene of the murder and tells his squire it wasn’t Robin Hood who killed the man because he was with Robin Hood when the murder happened. Tornham is told in confidence by Queen Eleanor that King Richard has been taken hostage by the Austrians and they are holding him for ransom. Taxes will go up and it will be Tornham’s job to collect them. But Prince John will try to keep the money from being delivered to the Austrians. She makes him pledge his loyalty to King Richard.

Prince John announces that the King is reported to be near death so all ransom money will be delivered to him. Tornham surreptitiously delivers gold to the Archbishop of Canterbury to be used to free the king. He then tells Lady Marian he plans to catch Robin Hood by ambushing him at the abbey of Friar Tuck the following Sunday.

Marian sneaks out in the night to warn Robin Hood, and Tornham follows her. He tells Robin Hood he doesn’t believe he’s responsible for the murders but needs his help in finding who is. He shows him the arrowheads he’s been collecting from the corpses with the initials S.P. chiseled into them. Hood tells him it stands for Sagitarii Pedestri, which means “Foot Archer” and indicates that the arrowheads came from Prince John’s infantry archers.

The camp is suddenly surrounded by the soldiers of Prince John led by Guy of Gisborne, who was tipped off by Tornham’s squire. Robin Hood is captured and Tornham is given credit for it. At a celebration, Prince John tells Tornham Robin Hood will be executed. When Tornham insists on a trial, Prince John agrees to a test of combat against Guy of Gisborne. Tornham then asks Gisborne to defeat Robin Hood but not kill him to give him a jury trial so he doesn’t become a martyr. Gisborne refuses.

Tornham sneaks into Gisborne’s chamber, finds a secret passageway and makes his way through underground tunnels. Above, the fight between Robin Hood and Gisborne begins as King Richard approaches the castle. Below, Tornham finds a chamber with arrows matching the arrowheads from the dead bodies and a list of names of the murder victims. Above, the fight proceeds until King Richard’s horsemen gallop up to the castle gate. Tornham leads the king’s men through the tunnels into Gisborne’s chamber for a surprise attack from within. A great battle ensues. Gisborne grabs Lady Marian and gallops off with her. Tornham races after them. He finds Marian and battles it out with Gisborne, finally getting the better of him.

Tornham, recovering from his wounds, is told by Queen Eleanor that the people are saying that Gisborne’s murder, Prince John’s overthrow and King Richard’s return are all to Robin Hood’s credit. “People need heroes,” she says. Then she tells him the king is auctioning off his key positions to raise money for his next French campaign. But she assures him they have a post for him in the king’s army. Robin Hood, now Lord of Locksley, offers to buy him the position  of Sheriff of Nottingham but Tornham refuses. Robin leaves for his wedding to Lady Marian.

Clearly, the idea here was to invert the well-known legend to tell it from the “bad guy’s” point of view while adding the ironic twist at the end that Robin Hood gets all the credit for the Sheriff’s accomplishments. Ain’t that just the way things go. There’s always a more complicated truth behind the popular account. But I can’t help feeling there’s a bit of a “So what?” factor here. What have we gained by learning this? Some poor schlump got shafted again. So what? In my observation, the significance of the more-complicated-truth-behind-the-popular-account story usually has to do with an underdog who’s not being properly credited due to his (or her) disempowered status. For me, that’s when stories of underlying truth get interesting, even if only liberally imagined.

But before I get carried away on my disempowered underdog soapbox, let me back up for a minute to consider some practical matters of structure. What we have here is a detective story within a political power struggle. These are the two most common structures for a plot-based story – the solving of a mystery and the triumph over an enemy. Most plot stories are either one or the other, but these writers have managed to pack the two into one. Maybe that’s why this screenplay was deemed to be so great among Hollywood script readers. And I certainly grant it that as well – the external tension is definitely increased by the interweaving of these two different narrative forms.

I just have one small problem with this approach. What we’re doing here is taking a plot idea and simply adding more plot to it, which keeps everything happening on a superficial level of external conflict rather than going deeper into character and theme. Robert Tornham has about as much depth and complexity as Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code. And as for Robin Hood, he’s just a big blank spot running through the middle of the story. We are given very little sense of who he is and why he does what he does. In fact, Robert Tornham’s predicament – needing to solve a mystery in order to topple a corrupt king – could have easily been told without the context of the Robin Hood legend. This is made clear by the fact that Robin Hood’s primary purpose in the legend – that of stealing from the rich to give to the poor – is significantly sidelined. It is only mentioned at the beginning to provide a reason for Robin Hood to be persecuted and framed for murder. The unfortunate result of this deprioritizing is to strip the story of its thematic potential, leading to the “So what?” factor. In short, the plot aspects of murder mystery and power struggle have been used to drive the story at the expense of developing the character and thematic elements.

So there I was, lying on my couch, contemplating “Nottingham” and planning what to say about it on my blog. One thing I’ve discovered in these months of blogging is that, while I love to pull apart and analyze great stories (because you can just keep going deeper and deeper into them), when it comes to lesser works, my usual process is not nearly as much fun. In fact, it can be quite dull and discouraging. And since no one is paying me to write this blog (yet), the fun factor is paramount. I soon discovered that a much more fun approach to problematic works is what I have come to call the here’s-how-I’d-rewrite-that-screenplay technique. If you’ve been following my scribblings for a while now, you’ll know that I have done theses revisionings with It’s Complicated, Avatar, Father of the Bride, and, to some degree, Robin Hood.

So, I figured I would use that technique to illuminate the shortcomings of Nottingham. I soon discovered, however, that I wasn’t getting any creative juices going on it. I opened the portals to my imagination but nothing came out. Dry as a bone. No movement whatsoever. In fact, it just gave me a weary feeling to think about it. Then I had a radical thought: Maybe I should write my own action film. Just for fun. My own action-packed retelling of a historical story. But mine, of course, would be from a woman’s point of view. So whose story would I tell? Joan of Arc? (Too well traveled.) Florence Nightingale? (Too respectable.) Hildegard von Bingen? (Already coming to a theater near you this October. Margarethe von Trotta, writer/director.) Then it hit me – Maid Marian! What could be more obvious than that? The floodgates opened and the creative juices began to flow.

So this is the fun I’ve been having the last few weeks (in my spare time), sitting in my bean bag chair contemplating my magnetic whiteboard propped up against my office wall. At first, I stared at a bunch of marker scribbles on a time line. Then I started making top to bottom rows of little slips of paper, scenes of Marian written in red, Robin Hood in blue, King John in black, held up by magnets, adding more and more each day, until the marker scribbles had to be erased to make room for all the paper slips. Eventually the paper slips took over the entire board, with rejects spilling onto the carpet, along with scissors, blank paper, more magnets and markers of many colors. I can’t think of a more heavenly place on earth to be than this, except, of course, for those moments when it becomes torture. But, if you hang in, those moments pass and then it becomes heaven again, or at least more fun than you’ve had in a long, long time.

(BTW, there was an article in the New York Times the other day reporting discoveries on the part of brain researchers that daydreaming has measurable benefits to the creative process. Duh!)

Then came the point when I realized I was tinkering with it too much. Trying to make it just right, trying to get it perfect. That’s when I knew it was ready for posting. The point of this exercise was not to write a perfect story. It was to have some fun taking a wild shot at something way out of my normal scope and, hopefully, illustrate some points of character and theme in the process.

So, if I were to retell the Robin Hood story, here’s how I would do it:

Marian
a treatment
c. Jennine Lanouette 2010

Lady Marian kneels in a chapel, praying. Friar Tuck asks what troubles her and learns she is praying for God’s help in winning the archery tournament in the upcoming May Day games, which her father, the Norman noble Sir Hugh Longchamps, promised her she could compete in if she taught her little brother, Thomas. The next day, however, when it is announced that King John will be in attendance, Sir Hugh goes back on his promise, telling Marian he can’t risk having her win over her little brother, which she surely will, and, besides, it is unseemly for a woman to compete. In a fit of anger, she runs away from the festivities.

Sir Robert Locksley, a brutish brawling Saxon noble who controls the local flour mill, meets Sir Hugh at the fair and accuses him of trying to encroach on his corner of the market by building a new mill. When Sir Hugh tries to have Sir Robert thrown out of the festival, Sir Robert decks the first guard who approaches, setting off a wild fracas among the crowd. A trumpet heralds the arrival of King John and the fighting immediately stops. Everyone runs around, getting ready, as the king’s cortege is seen approaching from the distance.

Meanwhile, deep in the woods, Marian, in her state of pique, has become lost. She comes upon a shack and is taken in and fed by a peasant family who have little to spare. She is shocked to see how they suffer, even more than she, from her father’s tyrannical nature.

As the games are about to begin, King John announces, amidst much fanfare, that he is launching a campaign to recapture his lost territories in France. The assembled crowd cheers as the young nobles prance around on their steeds. The games proceed with a greater fervor as everyone is eager to demonstrate their battle prowess.

Finding her way back to the castle with the help of the peasant family, Marian sees more destitute families. This is eye-opening to her since, before this, she has only been outside the castle walls to go on the hunt with her father. One of the families has a little boy who is very sick. She looks him over and promises them some medicinal herbs from the castle garden.

Marian comes in to the castle yard to find the jousting tournament underway. She tells her peasant escorts to wait at the castle’s back entrance where she will bring them the herbs. On her way to the garden, she cuts through the stables and encounters Sir Robert suiting up for his match. He has not laid eyes on the daughter of Sir Hugh since she became a young woman and is immediately smitten. As he postures on his steed to impress her, she tries to take her leave to tend to her more important errand. Once her errand is complete, she prepares herself for a scolding from her father. But he is too elated with Thomas’ triumph in the archery competition. He didn’t even notice she was gone.

Late that night, Marian and her two trusted servants, Will and Little John, sneak into the grain stores to steal her father’s precious barley seed. She instructs them to make sure to steal enough so he will notice that. They take the sacks into the woods and leave them on the peasant family’s door step. Sir Hugh is livid when he discovers his loss and immediately has the Sheriff of Nottingham scour the countryside for the culprit. The family is terrified to be caught with the goods, so they return the seed to the castle in the middle of the night. Sir Hugh takes it as a threatening message from Sir Robert.

Holding court in Sir Hugh’s Great Hall, King John boasts to the local nobles about the fleet of ships he will build to defeat France and then agrees to hear grievances from his subjects. Much the miller’s son is brought in, who was arrested for poaching deer against the edict of the king. Sir Robert comes to Much’s defense since he is in his employ. Sir Hugh, in turn, portrays Sir Robert’s action as the subversive defense of poaching from a Saxon. Other nobles chime in. Sir Robert protests that the Saxon peasants are being made to endure undue burdens. Marian listens intently to Sir Robert. But the King is not interested in the petty squabbles of local nobles. He dismissively sentences Much to “punishment” and leaves the hall. As the door closes behind him, Sir Robert loses his temper at Sir Hugh and starts another brawl.

Sir Hugh tells the Sheriff of Nottingham he wants to prove to the king that Sir Robert is the one who stole his seed and appoints him to investigate. Marian asks Nottingham if she can come along when he goes to interview the peasants. In the peasant village, Marian sees the daughter, Mathilda, about her age, from the peasant family who helped her. She takes Mathilda aside to ask why they returned the seed and is told that if they had been caught with it they would have been tortured. Marian is incredulous. Nobles steal from nobles all the time. King John is about to go to France to steal land from King Phillip. Why should peasants be treated so harshly? Mathilda says it’s not the same for peasants. They are left to starve, and when they try to feed themselves, they’re tortured.

The King leads a hunting party in the Sherwood Forest, including Sir Hugh, Thomas, Marian and other local nobles. Marian shoots a deer. King John congratulates her on her beginner’s luck. He tells her it is hers and then asks what she will do with it. “I think I’ll send it to the peasant village,” she says. Amidst a collective gasp, Sir Hugh intervenes. “My daughter is a joker, Your Highness. Of course, we give it to you as a symbol of our gratitude.” King John accepts the gift. As the hunting party proceeds, Marian lags behind. She sees another deer and shoots it, too. Thomas comes after her, asks if she got it. She tells him no, she missed and it got away. As she follows her brother back to the hunting party, she leaves a scarlet kerchief on a tree branch.

When Sir Hugh confines Marian to her chamber as punishment for offending the king, she asks to see her confessor. Friar Tuck arrives and Marian tells him where to find the second slain deer to give to the peasants. Tuck is grateful but says if she wants to help the peasants, get her father to build them a hospital. Marian tells Sir Hugh that she will give up archery if he builds a hospital for the peasants and lets her run it. He agrees it is a much more suitable pursuit for a young woman, but he is not sure he can afford it. Hosting the king is expensive. He is running out of flour and other food stores. Marian suggests he ask Sir Robert to contribute some flour, to share the burden of taking care of the king. She thinks he’d be willing. But when Sir Hugh follows Marian’s suggestion, Sir Robert refuses, insisting he pay full price. Sir Hugh vents his anger at Marian for making him humiliate himself with Sir Robert.

King John announces he will need Sherwood Forest lumber for ship building. Sir Hugh must give up the lumber for building his new mill. He tells Marian there can be no hospital either. She resolves to make a mobile hospital in wagons instead. Sir Hugh agrees as long as she brings along her servants Will and Little John to guard against bandits. Marian and Friar Tuck make their rounds in the mobile hospital with Will and Little John. As they tend to the sick in peasant villages, they also distribute small packages of food from their second wagon. They are summoned to a shack on Sir Robert’s land where they find Much the miller’s son gravely wounded from torture.

Sir Robert sees unfamiliar wagons on his lands and follows them. He confronts Little John on a foot bridge and takes him on in a cudgel fight until Marian breaks them up. Surprised that the wagons belong to her and learning of her mission, Sir Robert wants to know why the daughter of a Norman would be interested in the welfare of Saxon peasants. She is only interested in alleviating suffering. He then offers to escort her on his land. The Sheriff of Nottingham, meanwhile, has been spying on Sir Robert as part of his investigation. Seeing Sir Robert with Marian, he turns and rides away on his horse. Arriving back at the castle, Nottingham reports to Sir Hugh that Sir Robert is courting Marian, effectively conspiring to steal her, too.

Marian’s mobile hospital is ambushed by bandits. While Sir Robert, Will and Little John fight them, hand to hand, Marian climbs a hill to a high perch and shoots each bandit in the arm to disable them. She hides the bow and sneaks away as Sir Robert dashes up the hill in pursuit of the shooter. All he finds is Marian. Back at the wagons, Marian whispers to Will where he can find his bow and quiver. Marian tells the bandits she will tend to their wounds if they agree not to ambush her hospital again. Anytime they need food or medicine, they can just ask for it. They agree and Friar Tuck starts cleaning and binding their wounds with medicinal herbs as they proceed on their way. They arrive at Sir Robert’s castle to discover that his mill has been invaded and his flour is stolen. Sir Robert confronts the bandits about it, but Marian points out that the timing doesn’t add up. One of Sir Robert’s servants tells him it was Sir Hugh’s men. Marian tells him it serves him right for not sharing the burden of hosting the king with Sir Hugh.

Nottingham announces new taxes on the peasants to support the campaign against King Phillip. The peasants speak to Marian of fighting back. Marian urges them not to and gives them what little money she has. But it is not enough. Marian asks her father to ask the king to ease up on the peasants. He refuses.

Sir Hugh hosts a banquet for the King, inviting all the local nobles, including Sir Robert. But he is mortified when Marian makes a plea to the king on the peasants’ behalf. The King lectures her on the natural order of things and then announces to the gathered nobles that he will need more help from them for the French campaign to be a success. They pledge their support but express outrage behind his back. The king orders the music to start and Sir Robert asks Marian to dance. Marian glances at her father who is watching her from across the room and rejects him flatly. Sir Hugh observes with satisfaction. Just then, the peasants march in to the castle yard demanding repeal of the taxes. The King’s men take on the peasants with relish, clearly enjoying the brawl. The nobles, including Sir Robert and Marian, come out to the castle steps to watch the peasants fight the king’s men, laughing at the fray. Nottingham makes a slur against Saxons and Sir Robert reacts. A macho melee begins among the nobles above while the peasants fight for their lives below. Marian takes her leave.

Marian watches the fight from her chamber window. It is starting to get ugly. Blood flows as wounded and unconscious are dragged out. Arrows come in from above as Marian looks for their source. She gets her bow and quiver, proceeds down a long hall to another chamber window and shoots the shooter in the arm. She shoots another shooter, and another and another, disabling them one by one. She stows away her weapon and returns to her chamber, needlework in her lap. Guards burst in, then apologize for disturbing her.

The next day, Marian and Tuck tend to the wounds of the rebel peasants. Sir Robert brings bread to Marian to distribute on her rounds. She won’t speak to him. She saw him brawling. So primitive. So unrefined. Sir Robert asks how is he supposed to get his message across without brawling? Marian says she would like to meet the man who was shooting people in the arm to disable them. Back at his castle, Sir Robert practices his archery.

Nottingham announces tax collection will be done two weeks hence. Failure to pay will mean imprisonment. Marian, Will and Little John go to the bandits and ask them to help steal seed from her father. They creep into his castle in the middle of the night and successfully pull off the heist. Marian then meets with a French monk, a contact of Friar Tuck’s, to sell the seed. She asks him if he can get her arrowheads. Sir Hugh, meanwhile, discovers seed missing from his storehouse, assumes it was Sir Robert and invades his castle to steal back the goods. Sir Robert comes to Marian for help in getting her father to believe he is not the one stealing. Marian suggests he and Sir Hugh get together and pay the peasants’ taxes. Sir Robert exclaims he cannot even pay his own taxes. He will have to sell land.

Tax collectors arrive to collect from the peasants. Nottingham oversees the operation. The peasants pay and order is restored. Marian, Will, Little John and Friar Tuck, wearing hoods, then ambush the tax men. Marian shoots them in the arm. Will and Little John tie them up and take their money. Friar Tuck cleans and binds their wounds with medicinal herbs. Later, at the local inn, the tax men tell tales of the formidable bandits that overtook them. They make them sound bigger and scarier than they are, while noting that the leader was silent the whole time.

Sir Hugh tells King John that he suspects Sir Robert of being behind the tax theft since he wasn’t able to pay his own taxes without selling land. King John sends his men out to take over Sir Robert’s flour mill and give it to Sir Hugh. When Sir Robert finds out he has been falsely blamed again, he threatens to kill whoever is stealing. For Marian’s part, she learns of Sir Robert’s mill being taken and feels bad. She tells Sir Hugh it couldn’t have been Sir Robert because everyone knows the thief is an expert archer and Sir Robert, being a Saxon, has to be a terrible archer. She suggests to her father that he challenge Sir Robert to a match to find out. When Sir Robert finds out about the match, he practices even more rigorously so he can win to impress Marian. Sir Hugh boasts that he will beat Sir Robert handily, but Sir Robert wins. Sir Hugh is again furious at Marian for humiliating him, and his suspicions of Sir Robert are re-inflamed. Marian, on the other hand, has a change of heart about Sir Robert.

Friar Tuck tells Sir Robert that he knows who is stealing and smearing his name. Sir Robert demands to meet this man for a duel. The meeting is arranged and Sir Robert arrives at the appointed place and time ready for a big confrontation. He demands his foe show himself. Out from behind a thicket of bushes, steps Marian, completely unarmed, an angelic apparition if ever there was one. Sir Robert thinks they are playing a joke on him. She could not possibly be the mysterious archer and thief. Marian pulls out her bow and quiver and quickly demonstrates her ability. He is shocked, but suddenly it all makes sense. He then is in the position of having to reason with her to convince her to stop stealing. He tells her stealing is cheating. “You have to win your reward,” he says. “That’s the honorable thing to do. Fight and win.” But she responds,  “Fighting to win is just stealing by killing, which is a sin against God. I steal without killing.” He tries every argument he can think of to get her to agree to stop stealing with no success. Finally, he proposes to her. “Be my wife and stop stealing for my sake.” She is caught by surprise, unwittingly revealing her feelings for him. He leaps in at the revelation. “Tell me I have not won your heart!” he exclaims. “Yes, you have won my heart,” Marian admits, “but not my body and soul.” “Then let’s have a shooting contest,” he proposes, “so I can win all of you – body and soul.” “You think you can win a shooting contest against me?” she asks with a laugh. “Yes,” he says, “I do.” “Then let’s find out,” she says.

They shoot at various targets around the forest – a tree trunk,  a tuft of grass, a bird’s nest – the targets getting smaller and farther away. Finally, Robert says, “How bout the little tiny bird on that distant tree branch?” “Are you planning to eat that little tiny bird?” asks Marian. “No,” says Robert. “Then it is not a fit target,” she insists. “So, then, that knot, about the size of a little tiny bird, on the trunk of that distant tree,” suggests Robert. “As you wish,” says Marian. Sir Robert then draws back his arrow, studies his target carefully, and finally lets go. The arrow hits firmly in the middle of the knot. “Ha!” he says. “Tell me I have not won you now!” A flash of anger crosses Marian’s face. In one fluid movement, she pulls up an arrow from her quiver, draws it back in her bow, lowers her sites to her target and releases. The arrow sails through the forest and hits in the exact same spot, splitting his arrow in two. She turns to him. “This is not a game, my friend,” she says. “As long as there are people starving, I cannot promise to stop stealing. Come, Tuck. We will leave now.” Marian turns and strides away. Tuck follows. Sir Robert watches helplessly as she goes. He looks to Will, who gives a “that’s Marian” sympathetic shrug.

Marian goes to her father Sir Hugh to say that she has decided to join a nunnery – the Order of the Virgin Mary in France. He is relieved that she will no longer be around to embarrass him. She begins her preparations for leaving. As she is packing her trunks, there is a commotion in the castle yard. Nottingham is reading a proclamation that all men and boys over the age of 14 will be conscripted into military service. An arrow comes in from nowhere to shoot the proclamation out of Nottingham’s hand and onto the wooden door behind him. Everyone looks around for the shooter. They only see women looking out of nearby windows, Marian among them. A few days later a procession of wagons, accompanied by Will and Little John, leaves from the castle to transport Marian to her nunnery in France. Sir Hugh waves ruefully as they disappear over a hill.

The King’s men come to conscript the young men for war. They are put in shackles and marched off. But the King’s men are ambushed and the conscripted peasants are freed by hooded bandits. Marian reveals herself to the freed conscripts and they pledge their loyalty to her. They are Mary’s Men. Tuck doesn’t want to tend the wounds of the King’s men. They are too dangerous. Marian tells him to think of what it will do to their mean disposition to feel someone being kind to them. Tuck approaches them as if they are lions ready to bite and claw. To his surprise, they are grateful for his help and pledge their loyalty to Marian.

Sir Robert gets word that he is being blamed for freeing the conscripts and the King’s army is marching on his castle. “Damn that Marian!” he says. Meanwhile, Marian and her Mary’s Men are hiding out in the forest, building an encampment. When she learns that Sir Robert is under siege once again for her transgressions, she rounds up all her men to go help him. As word spreads far and wide, men come from all directions – bandits, peasants and freed conscripts alike. Sir Robert sees a mighty, rag tag force coming his way with Marian at the lead, like Joan of Arc. They enter his castle and begin preparing and fortifying. “I cannot leave you to suffer for my actions,” Marian tells Sir Robert. They have a passionate embrace. Just then the king’s army is seen approaching. They all take their places on the parapet and Sir Robert tells Marian this is the real thing now. This isn’t just picking at bandits from tree tops. This is for keeps. He asks if she’s ready for it. She says, Of course!

However, as the battle gets underway, Marian discovers that when she shoots the oncoming invaders in the arm or the leg, it doesn’t stop them. They just keep coming. So she goes for the shoulder and that slows them down a bit. But nonetheless they continue to advance. Sir Robert sees her hesitating before she shoots. He yells to her above the fracas. “You must shoot them in the heart, Marian! It’s the only way to stop them!” Shing! Shing! Shing! The sound of arrows flying by their heads. Marian takes aim again, then stops. “I can’t do it!” she exclaims. “Yes, you can!” says Sir Robert. “You have to!” Shing! Shing! “I do NOT have to!” she says. “We need you, Marian!” he calls out. Shing! “I know you can do it!” Shing! Shing! “No! I WON’T do it! I won’t shoot to kill! I won’t!” Kablam! A battering ram hits the castle gate. “Marian!” he pleads desperately. “They’re gaining on us! Stop this nonsense!” But Marian walks away from the fray. With arrows whizzing by, he runs after her. She turns back to him. “I don’t know how you can do it,” she says, “and still live with yourself! They can have the castle if they want it so badly! I’ll go live in the woods. I’ll live on the deer and the fruits of my labor. But I will not kill another man!” Sir Robert tries to stop her. “How will you get arrowheads and ploughshare blades?” he asks.  She breaks away from his grasp. “I’ll steal them!” she says and stomps out. Her men see her leaving and begin to go with her. More and more follow, abandoning their posts as Sir Robert exhorts them not to. The king’s men begin storming over the parapet. Sir Robert sits heavily, head in hands, despairing. Finally, he resignedly grabs his bow and quiver and leaves the castle, as well.

Marian looks on with pride as Will, Little John, Much the miller’s son and the rest of the Mary’s Men put the finishing touches on a woodland hospital. They organize a stealth operation to raid the Sir Hugh’s castle for medicinal herbs and other supplies. Arriving incognito in the bustling castle yard, they hear the announcement that King John has put a bounty on the head of Sir Robert. As Nottingham holds up the proclamation to nail it to the castle door, an arrow comes in from nowhere to fix it on the door for him. He looks around in alarm but doesn’t see Marian receding into the background. “Women do all the work. Men get all the credit,” she says to Little John with a sigh. Just then another arrow comes in and splits her arrow in two. She looks around and sees that it is Sir Robert’s.

Lady Marian and Sir Robert are married by Friar Tuck in a forest glen. A French monk arrives with a shipment of arrowheads. Marian stops everything to make a deal with him. The monk then joins in the festivities.

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Why Robin Hood Is Not Gladiator

Published on May 25, 2010

Here’s Ed and I walking out of the movie theater after seeing Robin Hood.

Ed: Well . . . I have one good thing to say about it.
Me (brightly): Oh, yeah? What’s that?
Ed: It employed 855 people.

Lately, Ed has been making a habit of counting the names in the credits at the end of movies. Maybe because I make him sit through them all. So it’s his way of entertaining himself. If I remember right, Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was 700, Alice was around 800 and Avatar was a whopping 1400 and something. So that’s where Robin Hood stands on that score.

I guess Ed didn’t like the movie much. I wouldn’t say my feelings were quite so extreme. I had a good time. It had some great actors. Most notably, Cate Blanchett, Eileen Atkins, Max Von Sydow, William Hurt (nice to see him on the screen again) and a personal heart throb of mine – Matthew Macfadyen (although under-utilized in this film). Russell Crowe, at this point, is a given in Ridley Scott films so not too many surprises there.

I also enjoyed seeing yet another interpretation of life during the medieval era. All earthy and ragged with the barest touches of color and class. These characters had less greasy hair, I noticed, than some medieval envisionings, but more body odor. A particularly nice touch, I thought, was the way the “epic” battle scenes were at the same time kinda small. The castles were very compact. The armies were a manageable horde. The roads through the dark woods were rather narrow. Kind of adds to the primitive feel, reminding us that we took up a lot less space on this planet, once upon a time.

I certainly acknowledge, however, that the script fell short of its mark, so to speak. Despite efforts on the part of the producers to spin it so, this film is not Gladiator In Tights. I had already gleaned as much from the lackluster reviews, much to my disappointment. So, by the time I got to see it, my intent was not so much to have a surpassing experience as it was to discern what it’s mistakes might have been.

One of Ridley Scott’s hallmarks as a director is the thinking person’s action film, Thelma & Louise and Black Hawk Down being two good examples. But those were both explicitly topical, meaning that the action was there to serve the intellectual query. Are women justified in responding to male aggression with aggression of their own? Should America intervene in internecine foreign conflicts for humanitarian goals?

The greater challenge is to make a thinking person’s action film that is conceived as pure entertainment. How do you make a film that is high-octane spectacle while also working in some aesthetic layering, human resonance and greater meaning than all the slash and burn? This is the apotheosis that Scott was able to reach with Gladiator. However, in doing so, he set the bar very high for himself. Sadly, he did not meet his own standard with Robin Hood. I think this is at the core of all the collective moaning about this film.

[The following discussion assumes you have seen the film. If you haven’t you can skip down to the Gladiator part of the discussion, assuming you’ve seen that film.]

So to restate the question I’m exploring here – What exactly is it that makes Gladiator a thinking person’s action film whereas Robin Hood is not?

The answer, in a word, is theme, an essential ingredient in any thinking person’s film and the level on which Robin Hood misfired badly. This is particularly unfortunate since the Robin Hood legend is nothing if not thematic, operating, as it does, from the premise that it is justifiable to steal from the over-fed rich if you are doing so to serve the starving poor.

But, in my observation, theme is not something you want to have just statically sitting on top of your story. You don’t want to just take it as a given that Robin Hood is the guy who stole from the rich to give to the poor. This is, in fact, a limitation of the Robin Hood story, as it has always been told. It becomes monotonous. How many times can you watch the Merry Men carry out their escapades before it just becomes the same old story over and over again. Redistributing wealth is indeed a noble pursuit, but seen it once, seen it a dozen times, and then it’s just a bad 1950s perpetually-happy-ending TV show. (Fine for little boys reading Hardy Boys novels, but not the makings of a thinking person’s action film.)

Theme is best utilized when it is made active, which is to say when it has a progression from beginning to end. So Ridley Scott’s instincts were correct to explore the events in Robin’s life that lead him to become Robin Hood. Then you have someplace to go thematically, not to mention characterologically, because, presumably, he hasn’t decided yet that this is what he’s going to do. The overriding question becomes, How did he get there? How did he get to this particular moral stance?

Most of us will stand up for what’s right if directly exposed to an injustice suffered by one who matters to us, and we are the only one who can help and we have the means with which to make a difference. But taking a stand when we don’t have to? When no one’s looking? For a complete stranger? Just for the hell of it? No thanks. Think I’ll just stay here in my comfy little life. So why does this Robin Hood guy do all that running around taking a stand against injustice and helping people in need just for the hell of it?

There’s a question to explore! And what are we given in this film as an answer for it? First, we see Robin Longstride being asked by King Richard if God would have approved of the Crusades. Robin says no, and describes a moment when an old Muslim woman, about to be slaughtered, looked on him with pity because she knew they had become godless. The King responds by calling him honest, brave and naïve.

Oops, now we have a problem. The man is highly principled at the outset. And aware of his principles and willing to take a stand against the King for them. Where are we going to go from here? It’s that self-awareness thing again. Too much, too soon. I would have rather he started out all wrapped up in his comfy little self-protective values, just like me. Then I might have been genuinely surprised to see him gradually metamorphose into someone who goes out on a limb for others. And I might have even been inspired by it.

This is the other problem with Scott’s Robin Hood: In a word, character. We don’t see any character progression in the course of the story. One measure of this is, as already noted, he is as earnest and principled in the beginning as he is at the end. Another measure is that all of the gains he does achieve are external – bringing the barons and king together to defeat the French, saving the village from the plunderers, winning the affection of Marian and creating his outlaw do-good community. So we have accomplished much in the area of plot and action. But we haven’t gone anywhere with either theme or character.

Remember back in college English class reading Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth, Parts One and Two? . . . No? . . . Me neither. I read them much later. Anyhow, perhaps you’ve heard of the scallywag Prince Hal and his sidekick Falstaff who spend almost the entire first play getting into trouble in brothels and taverns while Hal’s earnest, kingly father is out tending to the very serious business of defending his crown. At the end of the first play, young Hal finally proves himself in battle and is reconciled with his father. Then, in the second play, Hal distances himself from the profligate Falstaff and begins assuming the responsibilities of being a king. And in the third play (Henry V), he proves to be a very effective king, something few would have predicted in his youth.

Part of what makes Robin Hood so irresistible in the legend is the mischievous and delighted way in which he goes about his redistribution program. What if his pre-enlightened self was only mischievous and self-satisfied without the noble purpose? And what if under all that fun-loving roguery, he was actually a very angry young man? Then we would have a distance to travel with him. What if, to take this even further – and I’m going to make a huge leap here – part of why he’s so angry is because he is the illegitimate son of Richard the Lionheart? And what if everyone knows it because the resemblance is so stark. (Of course, then the film would have to be cast with Charlie and Martin Sheen or Keifer and Donald Sutherland or the like. Hmm. Might have to rethink that one.)

I could see creating a Robin Hood who is merely irresponsible and roguish to start. Then, when external circumstances bear down upon him, such as being wronged by Prince John and such, he becomes outwardly angry and dour. This is compounded when he begins to get weighed down by the injustices in the world. He feels powerless, and becomes bitter and resentful. Then he has his first opportunity to steal from the rich (such as reclaiming the seed corn from the church) and he has fun for the first time in months (or years). This is the beginning of his new career path. And we have a merrier Robin than Russell Crowe was able to give us.

This is the big advantage of working off the Robin Hood legend –  no one knows who he really was or where he came from. So why not pose a “what if?” that gives him plenty of reason to have a chip on his shoulder? Some people are born to be leaders, most people are not. So in Robin we have a born leader who, if born legitimately, would have been a perfect heir to the throne. Meanwhile, Richard has no legitimate heir, so the fate of the people falls into the hands of that miscreant Prince John. See how this makes the conflict with Prince John personal? That lends considerable help to the external conflict, as well as being grounded in Robin’s internal life.

But I’m just playing around here. Monday morning quarter backing, as it were. I don’t presume to know what actually would have saved this film. What I do know, however, is exactly how and why it is not Gladiator.

It so happens just a couple of weeks ago, I analyzed Gladiator in my class. This was not entirely of my choosing. I was asked to cover it. Actually, that’s not true. I was asked to cover an action film. And from a short list I was given, I chose this one on an instinct that there was more going on in it than the average actioner. By now, having lectured on it three times in the last year, I have developed a great fondness for it, despite all the blood spurting and body slicing.

Here’s the first thing that sets Gladiator apart from Robin Hood: The conflict of the plot is grounded in a conflict in political philosophy. Marcus Aurelius wants to transition Rome from an empire to a republic. He has chosen Maximus as the person to entrust with that task. His son Commodus, meanwhile, wants to keep Rome as an empire to secure his place in power. Maximus is caught between the two.  No shortage of tension in this situation.

The plot conflict in Robin Hood, on the other hand, is just the warring interests of three self-serving kings. No philosophy or other sort of larger ideas behind it. No wonder Robin Hood washes his hands of the whole thing when he leaves London for Nottingham. And, indeed, he is free to do so. Not a lot of tension there.

Here’s the second thing: Maximus’ internal conflict is that he wants to go home to rejoin his wife and son. But his emperor/mentor/father figure has asked him to do one more thing for him. One more tiny favor. Just go to Rome and steward this humongous, creaky, groaning ship of state as it makes a slow delicate left turn away from the volatility of monarchic empire to come to rest in the security of democratic republic. Can you do that one thing? Please?

Remember, Maximus has made it clear from the start that as soon as this damn war is done, he’s out of here. He says repeatedly that he plans to go home. Now, if Marcus Aurelius had not asked him for this one last favor, in the process expressing his will for Rome to become a republic, Maximus would have been free to go home, regardless of Commodus’ power plays. Whether Rome remained an empire or became a republic would not have been his problem. He’s going home to Spain, far removed from all the political machinations. So his internal conflict of whether to go home to his wife and son or to serve Rome in one more capacity is created by his bond with Marcus Aurelius. That makes the empire vs. republic debate personal to him. This is quite an internal bind.

As for Robin Hood’s internal bind? I’ve only seen the film once, but I can’t think of anything quite so compelling as what Maximus is faced with. Can you?

So it’s also Marcus Aurelius’ request, drawing as it does upon Maximus’ bond with him,  that drives Maximus to reject Commodus’ demand for allegiance and lands him in front of the execution squad. He wriggles out of that one and races home, but it is too late. His wife and son have been killed.  Now his desire to go home has turned metaphoric. Now he wants to go (((Home))), as in heaven, to join his wife and son.

There’s just one itty bitty problem with going (((Home))). In ancient Roman culture, dying is not a simple matter. There are Good Deaths and Bad Deaths. The best kind of death is in the glory of battle, as we learn from Maximus when he addresses the cavalry. Later, we learn what makes a bad death from Juba, the African slave. “Don’t die,” he says to the caged, delirious Maximus. “They will feed you to the lions.”

So what’s at stake in this story? Maximus is not negotiating the usual action hero tension between life and death. He has lost everything – wife, son, home, position, community – such that he wants to die. What’s at stake for him, instead, is if he will still manage to achieve a Good Death, despite having given up on life. This is a problem that is highly individual to Maximus. Thus, we have a nicely complex character.

Don’t recall any such complexity in Robin Hood. Do you?

Now, here’s the third thing that sets Gladiator apart: the thematic conflict between satisfying personal wishes and serving the common good. Let me lay out the thematic progression for you:

Your emperor/mentor/father figure asks you to defer your personal desire in favor of serving the greater good. You say no at first, but you know you will have to say yes. This is your mentor and he is speaking on behalf of the greater good. Then, you are all ready to defend your mentor’s wishes when you are told your family is about to be killed. Well, that trumps the greater good, for sure. Now you have to go save your family. This is an unquestionably justifiable reason for putting your personal needs first.

But you fail. Your family is dead, your home burned. Further, you’ve lost your exalted position in society and have been taken into slavery. Okay, no call to serve the greater good now. Surely, such unimaginable loss justifies living in service to personal desires. The Fates have been cruel to you. How much can one be expected to suffer and still prioritize the greater good? You are sure now that life is just every man for himself and you are completely in the right to simply serve your own impulses. “I’m going to get my revenge,” you decide. “To hell with Rome, the Republic, democracy, the people. To hell with Marcus Aurelius!” You resolve to kill your adversary.

And you are justified in killing Commodus. He deserves to die. It’s the right thing to do. But the Fates have another idea. Doing the right thing is important. But by itself, it’s not enough to get you a Good Death. You have to do the right thing for the right reason. And vengeance is the wrong reason.

What we have here is Maximus being pulled in two directions by the secondary characters surrounding him. On the one hand, Commodus pulls him towards base-impulse reptilian revenge. On the other, the memory of Marcus Aurelius, and his current advocate in Lucilla, pulls Maximus towards saving Rome. That’s where his soul hangs in the balance. Will he succeed in moving beyond his lower impulses so he can do the right thing for the higher purpose of saving Rome? Ultimately, that’s what he does. And that’s when he can, finally, go Home.

On the plot level, Maximus has gone from seeing Rome lost to a self-serving emperor, to being the one who ensures Rome’s future as a republic. On the character level, he has gone from wanting to die at any cost, to having the Good Death that will free his soul. And on the theme level, he has gone from wanting to only satisfy his personal desires to joining Lucilla in serving the common good.

Do I have to bring this discussion back to Robin Hood? Or can I just leave it here.

Think I’ll just leave it here.

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Pratfalls and Promises

Published on May 18, 2010

The last couple of weeks I’ve been a bit preoccupied with a wedding in the family. My partner Ed’s daughter got married. Happily, there were no big dramas for me to dissect in that story. All was beauty, elegance, joy and abundant love.

But a couple of days after, Ed and I were cleaning out some clutter in our garage and came across an old VHS of the 1991 Father of the Bride with Steve Martin. “Oh, fun!” I said. “Let’s watch this!” I’d never seen it, but he wasn’t interested. (Too close to home, I guess.) So, that evening, I settled in with it while he went off to his photography class.

By about 15 minutes in, I was already bored. So I started fast forwarding, scanning through the sappy montages and dorky slapstick routines and slowing down to Play whenever it looked like there might be some interesting dynamics between characters emerging. But I didn’t find enough to lift the film out of its tedium.

Slapstick has never been one of my preferred genres of comedy. Try as I might, I can’t see the humor in watching people do things that are just plain stupid. I get more enjoyment out of watching someone compromise his better self and undermine his higher purpose in a way that I could imagine myself having an impulse to do in a similar anxiety-producing circumstance. It’s the difference between making fun of the (less than intelligent) “other” and laughing at a reflection of your own flawed self.

See, in order for all that self-sabotage to have meaning, you have to know something about the self that is being sabotaged. You have to have an individualized main character. This is the even greater problem in the film – the main character is completely generic. Steve Martin’s George Banks is presented as an “Everyman” Dad having generic feelings and responses to his daughter’s sudden news. There is no individuality. Plus, he is incredibly sentimental about it, so there is also no edge. And, consequently, the attempts at humor are not all that funny.

But, rather than try to dissect a bad movie to show how to make it good, I’m going to give you an example from my own real life circumstances that I hope will illustrate what I wished I could have seen more of in that film.

There was a point at the reception of my step-daughter-equivalent’s wedding when I ended up flat on my ass on the floor in a state of deep humiliation. I was trying to scoot from one rented wedding banquet folding chair to another to allow two guests to sit next to each other who I thought would enjoy meeting. But I put my hand on the wrong part of the chair I was heading for, causing the seat to snap up and the chair to collapse in a great clatter on the floor with me landing next to it. Fortunately, my lower self’s impulse to crawl under the table was overruled by my higher self’s internal counsel, “Just take it like a man, Jennine. Get up onto your patent leather pumps, dust off your satin dress, check that your hair’s still in place and reposition yourself in this chair with as much dignity as you can muster.”

The next morning, dishing the wedding over breakfast with our house guests, I expressed my relief at immediately seeing Ed’s compassionate hand extended to pull me up and smooth my ruffled ego. If he hadn’t been nearby, I joked, I would have had no choice but to disappear under the table before anyone saw me, then poke my head out the other side and, if the coast was clear, dart across to take cover behind the table skirt of the dais, then crawl the entire length to the other end of the hall where I could make my escape through an exit door into the night. We had a good laugh imagining me doing that.

In life, we usually manage to resist these lower self impulses, but the opportunity to witness someone else giving in to them, especially in exaggerated form,  makes us feel better about our fear that a part of us, if not kept in check, is fully capable of doing the same. That’s why the scene I described for our house guests is such a familiar one. We’ve all seen it in some film or other. And we’ve all laughed at it as a way of accepting not only the character’s but also our own human frailty. Anyone landing on the floor at a formal affair would experience a general sort of embarrassment, and anyone witnessing it (preferably in a movie theater) could be provoked to laughter because of that circumstance’s generic familiarity.

However, what would make that scene even funnier and, paradoxically, even more possible for us, as viewers, to identify with, is if we were clued in to a surrounding circumstance that is highly personal to the individual character being portrayed. And, indeed, in my real life circumstance, there were, in fact, some additional factors that added a specific tension to my predicament. Being less than three years into this relationship, I am still a relatively new step-mother-equivalent in this family. I knew that at least a few of the guests would be wanting to get a look at Ed’s new girlfriend. So I wanted to make a good impression on his behalf. More than anything, I didn’t want to embarrass him, or my new step-daughter (equivalent). And there I go, falling on my ass just as everyone’s entering the banquet room. See how my individual circumstance makes it even funnier? See how it creates an even greater need to crawl under the dais and out the nearest door?

Okay, I lied a little. The wedding was all beauty and elegance save for one new, nervous, step-mother-equivalent falling on her ass. But, I must say, I feel better now that I have written about it here. In fact, on reflection, all that humiliation was worth it. I have managed to extract a good comedy writing lesson from it and, hopefully, someone out there has learned something.

So, getting back to Father of the Bride, it’s that kind of individualized circumstance, be it external or internal, that I didn’t get from Steve Martin’s character. The fate I suffered was a direct expression of what I feared most – making a bad impression and embarrassing Ed. The things Steve Martin did that got him into trouble leading up to his daughter’s wedding had no particular meaning to us in terms of his character because we didn’t know enough about him to tell what inner fears or maladapted desires were being expressed.

I wondered how this film could have gone so wrong, especially knowing it was a remake of the 1950 favorite with Spencer Tracey and a young Elizabeth Taylor, which I felt sure couldn’t have been this dull and schmaltzy. Curious to see what the earlier one could tell me about where the later one veered off track, I went and got it at my local video store.

By ten minutes in, a key difference was clear. Tracey’s Stanley Banks is a curmudgeon, which makes him infinitely more interesting (and individual) than the sentimental George of four decades later. But, it was when I got to the end that I saw the most important difference between the two films. George Banks (Steve Martin) knows from minute one that he is in pain about losing his daughter to marriage whereas Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracey) doesn’t know he is in pain until his epiphany when he leaves her at the alter and takes his seat among the guests. George Banks, having that knowledge from the start, appears to just be whining about it all through the rest of the film. Get over it already! But Stanley can’t consciously feel his pain yet so, consequently, he spends the entire lead up to the wedding acting it out on everyone around him in tension-filled, and, therefore, humorous, ways.

Self-awareness is a wonderful thing in life. But in drama, it is death, at least at the outset. If you begin your story with your main character in a self-aware state, you have given yourself nowhere to go with him (or her). It is that self-awareness that robs George Banks of an individualized problem. With Stanly Banks, we may be as in the dark as he is about what his problem is, but its abundantly clear that he has a problem and we are waiting to see how it is going to play out. Self-awareness is what we are striving to accomplish by the end of the story. You don’t want  to hand it to your viewer on a platter just after the opening credits.

I don’t understand how come so often contemporary writers and directors take on a remake of an old favorite only to make it worse. They should be making it better. Has our understanding of drama not evolved over time? Why do we so often seem to be going backwards?

See, even as good as the 1950 version is, there is plenty of room for improvement to meet today’s standards. For one thing, we know even more now about the inter-relational cost of being driven by our unconscious impulses. For another, we have all kinds of CGI capability to make that dream sequence (the high point of the 1950 film) even more out of this world. If I were remaking that film today, here’s how I would do it:

Make the monologue at the beginning more of a rumination. The wedding is over, George/Stanley is sitting among the party wreckage, wondering how he could have gone so wrong and if his daughter will ever speak to him again. Then he begins to tell the story, jumping back several months to the day he first learned of her intention to marry. Faced with her looming independence, he immediately reverts to over-controlling Dad and starts bossing her around. He has begun acting out his unconscious fear of losing her. As the various wedding tasks and rituals are undertaken, it only continues. He becomes even more controlling, more curmudgeonly, more self-indulgent, more reactive, getting himself into some terrible jams and driving everyone around him crazy.

For those who know both films intimately, this may seem only a shade off from what already exists. The critical difference is that his rumination at the beginning is more specifically troubled and his acting out throughout is more directly connected to unconscious loss. In short, the lows are lower and the highs are higher. And it’s all more individual.

Finally, on the day of the wedding, just before the ceremony, he does one more unconsciously self-pitying thing and his wife gives him a verbal smack upside the head. “Knock it off! What the hell’s wrong with you?!!” She tells him, even if he can’t muster up the joy this day calls for, he can at least fake it for his daughter’s sake. He takes her advice to heart and decides to rise to the occasion.

But it’s not until he is in front of the alter with his daughter on his arm that reality starts to set in. He hands her over to the presiding minister and mentally rehearses his next cue – when the minister says, “Who gives this woman?” he is to respond, “I do,” and then step backwards to take his seat. “Step back?” he thinks in voice over. “Step away? You want me to back away from her? I have always gone towards her – chasing after her when she was two, running alongside her bike at five, leaning over her homework at 12, calling out the door after her at 16. Now I’m supposed to step away? Not as easy as it looks, buddy.” He imagines himself doing a big backwards prat fall. Then sees his wife glaring at him and realizes it’s time to say his line. “I do,” he says and then, with great effort, he takes his three steps back and lands with a dull thud in his seat.

That’s when it hits him. All the pain and anguish at losing his daughter to another man. He describes, in his voice over, a swirl of feelings inside, but only allows a single tear to escape. His wife squeezes his hand. Then, through a watery veil, he sees for the first time his daughter’s radiance as she stands facing her new husband. Tears of sorrow turn to tears of joy.

But the joy is short-lived when he suddenly realizes what an ass he has been all these months. He replays all those embarrassing scenes in his head, wincing at each mortifying one. Now he’s sure he’s lost his daughter not only to marriage, but to his own obnoxious behavior.

All through the reception he tries to get her attention to make his amends. But every time he comes close, she is pulled away. This is only because that’s what happens to brides at their wedding. But he becomes convinced she is avoiding him. He works himself into a tizzy that she won’t speak to him ever again. During the father/daughter dance, she’s too concerned with getting the steps right. Before he can say his piece, she is whisked off by another dance partner. At the end of the evening she takes off with her husband without saying good-bye and he is despondent.

Now we are back to where we were for the monologue at the beginning. But now the post-wedding wreckage he is sitting amongst means something. It is an externalization for how he feels inside. His wife has gone to bed, happily satisfied that she did her job well, as mother of the bride. The wedding was a great success. He is left alone with his desolate feelings.

Then his phone rings. It is his daughter. She is crying her apology to him for not saying good-bye. She doesn’t know what happened. It’s all a blur. They cry together. “You must think I’m the most terrible, ungrateful daughter on earth!” she exclaims. And then he says to her, “It’s okay. It’s okay. You know, no matter what you do, I’ll never abandon you. You’ll always be able to count on me to be there when you need me.”

[Sniff.]

As you can see, I’ve been in wedding immersion for the last couple of weeks. I think I’ll be able to move beyond it now.

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The African Queen, Revisited

Published on April 25, 2010

This week, I covered The African Queen in my Analyzing the Script on Screen class. I love that film. It is such a paragon of great screenwriting.

But, lately, whenever I use it in class, I always feel compelled to precede it with a disclaimer. It is a sad fact that these days, almost 60 years after its release, despite being among the great cinematic masterpieces, the film comes across as woefully dated. So I have to at least acknowledge this. “I know, I know,” I say to my students, “it’s full of regrettable racial stereotypes. Yes, and the special effects are out of the stone age. And, okay, it’s also infused with 1950s sexual repression, giving it the unfortunate distinction of having perhaps the most unsexy onscreen kiss in the history of cinema. But try to look past all that to benefit from what the film has to teach us.” I’m never too sure if this appeal is having the desired effect. (Another dubious distinction of this film, only recently earned, is being the last of the films on the AFI top 100 films list to have an official release on DVD. While I’m ecstatic this has finally happened, I can’t help feeling the insult to the film that it took so long.)

This morning, musing over my coffee, reflecting on last week’s class, I was brought back to a thought I’ve often had about The African Queen:  I wish someone would do a remake of it. But not a liberally reimagined, in-the-spirit-of type remake. I wish someone would do a scene-for-scene, word-for-word exact remake of the film’s screenplay while incorporating all the advantages of current day filmmaking. You see, the screenplay is perfect. But the execution, while being at the top of the craft for its time, has become a major impediment to a broad appreciation of it’s mastery.

I can already hear the collective gasp. Mon Dieu! Is she really suggesting that a mere mortal director and two everyday film stars try to match the work of gods like John Huston, Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn?! Sacrilege!! Arrest that woman!! Ban her blog!!

Yes, I’m suggesting that – in the interests of promoting and upholding greatness in the art and craft of screenwriting. Of course, it would have to be done in the most capable hands and with the highest respect and affection. And the motivation for doing it would have to be not only for its own sake, but also as a sort of (admittedly elaborate) academic exercise. It would be the first time (that I know of) that a screenplay is reproduced as its own work of art in the same way that plays are. The current day director and stars would simply be re-interpreters of a masterwork of dramatic literature, as if they were doing Death of a Salesman on Broadway.

I’m seeing Martin Scorsese directing, right? With his interest in film history and preservation, not to mention his command of the medium, he is the director I would most trust with this treasure. And for Charlie Allnut, I keep getting Robert Downey, Jr. popping up in my head. Can you see it, too? He’s plenty rough around the edges to be at first repulsive to Rose, but has all the charm necessary to slowly grow on her affections. And for Rose Sayer? I can see either Kate Winslet or Cate Blanchett having the necessary British imperiousness that melts into essential humanity, with the added advantage of keeping the Kate tradition going.

To further promote my cause, I’m going to do something I haven’t done yet in this blog. I’m going to post the introductory chapter from the book I’m working on –  Beyond Thrills and Chills: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Character and Theme in Screenplay Structure – which covers the major points from my lecture last week. Maybe this will help convince someone that this screenplay needs to be preserved in an updated form that doesn’t take an erudite film sensibility to enjoy. (It’s long, being that it’s a book chapter — remember those? — so if you’re more of a sound bite person than a substance person, you can stop here.)

Here it is.

Introduction:
The African Queen
by Jennine Lanouette

Do not skip this chapter! I sympathize with the impulse to pass over an introductory chapter and I certainly wouldn’t blame the reader for feeling impatient to get to such undisputed masterpieces as Chinatown and Raging Bull. But before you dismiss The African Queen as so much bad rear screen projection, let’s not forget that it was written by James Agee and directed by John Huston, who are certainly co-equals in the pantheon of Polanski, Towne, Scorsese and Schrader. In fact, the latter four, no doubt, would bow in gratitude to these forebears. Polanski even put Huston in his film. “Ugly buildings, politicians and whores all get respectable in their old age,” Huston tells us in the guise of Noah Cross. Sadly, this does not seem to apply to chugging, coughing old boats. Sometimes they have to be rescued from obscurity.

The African Queen is the film that took to a new level my understanding of plot, character and theme and how they can function together in screen drama. It happened in the context of a lecture class I started teaching in the mid-1990s called Script Analysis, in which I would illustrate screenwriting principles by analyzing classic films.

One of the reasons I had selected The African Queen to analyze was remembering that, when I was in graduate school in the early 80s, it had the distinction of holding the record as the most-frequently-cited film on all-time best films lists of top critics. (Don’t ask me if this is actually true or not. It’s what I was told and at that time it was entirely believable.) In my study of its structure, I soon became convinced that it is the near equal balance of plot, character and theme story lines that gave this film the capacity to become so universally endeared to film aficionados. For those whose memory is hazy, here’s a recap:

At the outbreak of World War I, Rose Sayer, a British missionary in Africa, is stranded alone in the jungle after the Germans march in to conscript the natives and, in the process, burn the village and fatally assault her brother, the Reverend. She is found by Charlie Allnut, the local jack of all trades, who takes her onto his boat The African Queen to go into hiding until the war is over.

But Rose has another idea. She wants to go down the river to blow up the German battle ship The Louisa. Charlie humors her at first, hoping she’ll see the folly of her plan. But the further down the river they go, the more empowered she becomes. He is despairing at the dangers they will face until they successfully pass Shona, the German fort, and then survive several miles of deadly rapids. In their exhilaration, they fall in love.

However, their troubles aren’t over. Several more challenges await them — a sheer drop over a waterfall that requires significant repair to the boat, a swarm of insects that prevents them from anchoring on shore and, finally, the reeds and mud of the river delta that beaches the boat on a dirt bank. Just as they give up hope, a rainfall upstream swells the river to lift the boat off the mud.

As they drift out onto the lake, they see the Louisa doing its patrol. They go about executing their plan when a storm blows up. Their little boat is capsized and they are taken prisoner by the Germans, who sentence them to death. But before they proceed with the hanging, Charlie asks the Captain to marry them. He pronounces them man and wife just as the Louisa collides with the capsized African Queen, detonating Charlie’s makeshift torpedoes and blowing itself up. Rose and Charlie swim off to Kenya together.

Is this a story about two people stuck behind enemy lines who go down the river to blow up the Louisa? Yes, it is. Or is it a story about a man and woman who are stranded together in the jungle and through all the hardships they face, they fall in love? Yes, it’s about that, too. But which is the “real” story?

“Real” story? Why do we want to reduce an entire film down to one dominant story? Why do we want to prioritize one through line of a film drama over other equally compelling through lines? I have seen others analyze this screenplay by naming the adventure story as the main plot and then subjugating the romance to the status of subplot. What are we gaining by doing that? Other than succeeding at upholding our plot/subplot notion of what stories are made of. But what if the stories that are being told these days are becoming more complex than what can be contained in that model?

I maintain that this film actually has two distinct storylines – one, the adventure, functioning as the plot, and the other, the romance, operating in the arena of character. The two stories are equally balanced, inextricably intertwined and completely interdependent on each other. Thus, within a cohesive whole there can be individual plot and character stories and the overall impact of the work is the greater for it.

But let me back up for a minute and explain what I mean when I use the terms “plot,” “character” and “story.” Plot is the action of the story and is where we see the main character (classically referred to as the “protagonist”) play out his or her relationship with the immediate other (the “antagonist”). Character, on the other hand, is the infusion of individual human nature into the story and is about the main character’s relationship with him or herself (also known as “the inner journey”). Those two are pretty straightforward. “Story” bears a little more explanation.

The ultimate test, as I see it, of whether or not a given chronicle of events constitutes a story is if there is an A to B progression from its beginning to its end. In other words, in order for us, as an audience, to feel we have been told a story we need to have a sense that we’ve ended up somewhere different from where we started. That different place can take the form of the triumph over an enemy, the solving of a mystery, the inner transformation of the main character or any number of other such possibilities. But it is ending in a different place that gives us a sense of purpose in the story, whether it’s by achieving mastery in conflict, by bringing hidden information to light or by being emotionally and psychologically transformed. Just so long as by the end we have a feeling of having progressed somewhere, of having arrived at B.

But don’t get too stuck on this statement. It is not my opinion that all films must go from A to B. I am simply making the distinction that a film that goes from A to A is, in structure terms, simply describing A. If this is your intention, for example, if you want to present a rumination on the unchanging nature of human behavior or give an unvarnished exposure of a corrupt or tragic situation, that can be a valid purpose. And your audience can learn something important about the situation you have described. If, on the other hand, it is your intention to tell a story, then you have to get to B.

How do you know if you have gone from A to B? Here’s my diagnostic technique for measuring A to B progression, as applied to The African Queen: Where are Rose and Charlie at the beginning of the plot story? They are stuck behind enemy lines in the midst of a world war in a small boat with only a few weeks worth of provisions. Where are they at the end? They have made it down a wild and dangerous river and succeeded at blowing up a German battleship. This accomplishment definitely represents a significant distance from where they started. Thus, a clear A to B progression. How about the romance? At the beginning, Rose is a righteous, uptight, spinster missionary with a distinctly low opinion of Charlie Allnut. By the end, she is an adventurous, vulnerable, open-minded woman happily married to the man she formerly dismissed. Whoa! How’d that happen? A very definite A to B progression there as well.

Two distinct storylines with individual outcomes. But, at the same time, they are each benefiting from being told together. Imagine if The African Queen was just an adventure film with no romance – two guys stuck on a boat in the African jungle during World War I trying to get down the river to blow up a German battle ship. You’d have to add a lot of stunts and special effects to keep the audience in their seats for that one. On the other hand, imagine if it was just a romance with no adventure – a man and a woman stuck on a boat in the African jungle during World War I waiting out the war in a river backwater. You’d have to add a lot of sex to keep the audience in their seats for that one. In either case, it adds up to a lot of cheap thrills. This film goes beyond that.

So, to look at how this interplay between the external action of the plot and the internal progression of the character is carried out in The African Queen, we’ll take it through the major structural markers.

The point of attack (a.k.a., the inciting incident) is when the Germans march in, burn the church and the village and fatally assault the Brother/Reverend. In the plot, this begins the story because it’s the moment when Rose becomes stranded behind enemy lines. She is in dire straits and has to do something to address her external circumstances.

Simultaneously, this begins the character story because, during the ten years she’s been living the missionary life, her brother has been a stand in for a husband. She follows him and defers to him in all things. So long as he’s around, she will never be open to another man. Once he is removed, the opportunity exists for her to discover there is more for her in life than spinsterhood.

The end of the first act is when Rose leaves on the boat with Charlie and then hatches a plan to go down the river and blow up the Louisa. In the plot story, she has set out on a course of action for overcoming her circumstances. In the character story, not only is Rose stuck on a boat with a man, as if its going to take that kind of Petri dish isolation to get her to open up, but she has also launched a partnership with him – she needs his cooperation to succeed in her plan. This close working relationship is only furthering the potential for you-know-what to happen.

Throughout the first half of the second act, they go through a series of power struggles: Charlie takes Rose down her first set of rapids to cure her of her crazy idea, but, instead, it has the opposite effect. She is exhilarated by it. Charlie then goes on “strike” by getting drunk, calling her a “psalm-singing skinny old maid,” in response to which Rose pours out the rest of his gin. Charlie then flatly refuses to go down the river, so Rose uses the cold shoulder treatment to coerce him into it. And it works. Charlie can no longer stand the isolation. He relents and agrees to go down the river.

These obstacles to reaching their goal are not big, scary external events, as one would expect in a pure action story. Rather, they are inter-relational conflicts that must be gotten past in order to start focusing on the goal. In all this back-and-forth power grabbing, they are simply working out who’s boss. It turns out, of course, that Rose is boss.

Along the way, though, we gain further insight into Rose: the sheltered naiveté revealed in her physical exhilaration going down the rapids; her genuinely hurt feelings at being called an old maid; and her unrestrained ability to retaliate. Indeed, her cold-shoulder piety turns out to be far more unbearable than Charlie’s drunken insult. These deeper revelations into her character are giving us a greater understanding of the internal challenges she will have to get past in order to transform to the degree that she does in the end.

The mid-point is when they have the dual successes of passing the German fort without being blown up and navigating the rapids without crashing on the rocks. In their exhilaration, they come together in an embrace and kiss. Plot story: They’ve mastered a major obstacle in their journey. Two obstacles, in fact. Character story: This first collaborative success has caused Rose’s righteous defenses to come down and she’s fallen in love.

One of the things I enjoy about this film as a relationship story is that its not the same old saw in which a man and woman go through a series of adventures leading them to fall in love and then we’re supposed to take it on faith that, somehow, they will live happily ever after. On the contrary, in this story, Rose and Charlie fall in love halfway through and then spend a good part of the rest of the film working through a few relationship issues, to put it in contemporary terms. In dramatic terms, they encounter a series of challenges that each serves as a test to their intimate connection.

First, while they are still in their honeymoon phase, with Charlie imitating hippos and baboons as Rose laughs hysterically, they suddenly hear the sound of a waterfall looming up in front of them. Before they have time to steer the boat to the shore, they are caught in the current and pulled over a sheer drop. The boat lands afloat but there is damage to the propeller and drive shaft.

Charlie is initially discouraged at the magnitude of the problem, but Rose counters his disempowerment by mentioning once having seen a Masai native do blacksmithing with just a set of bellows on a rock. Charlie concurs and then improves upon the idea, describing how he would do it instead. Before long, he has forgotten his discouragement and fully embraced the necessary task. While, in action terms, we then see them applying the requisite elbow grease to complete the repairs, more important is the character significance of Rose’s gentle nudging that enables Charlie to discover his own inner resources. Thus, in mastering the challenge, they have also begun to develop their partnership.

The second challenge comes when, after an evening of gliding along a placid stretch of river lovingly extolling each other’s virtues in their adventure, they steer to shore to anchor for the night and are overcome by a swarm of insects. Rose immediately loses it, becoming completely nonfunctional in a state of hysteria. Charlie runs for a tarp and throws it over her, then pulls up the anchor and uses a long poll to push the boat back out into deep water. This is only a momentary obstacle and doesn’t require a stunt-laden special effects sequence to be bested. But it does provide our first opportunity to see Rose showing vulnerability, in great contrast to her former stoic rigidity. Charlie, on the other hand, compensates for her display of essential humanity with quick thinking and endurance.

Finally, they come to the river delta and are soon navigating through shallow water surrounded by reeds. Charlie has no choice but to get in the water and pull the boat by a rope from the bow. When he climbs back on deck for a rest, Rose screams at the sight of leeches on him. Now its his turn to lose control, stuttering and shaking in fear. He hates leeches more than anything. Rose gets the salt to poison them off his skin. When all have been removed, they try pushing the boat with polls from the deck but get nowhere, so Charlie climbs overboard again to resume pulling it from the water. The partnership seesaw of vulnerability and strength has shifted its balance again, with Charlie on the low end this time, showing his vulnerability as Rose compensates with strength. But, most notably, we also see an unmistakable compassion in Rose as he goes back in the water, another contrast to her former impenetrable righteousness.

Then we come to the end of the second act, with the boat immovably stuck on a mud bank in the delta, Charlie in a malarial sweat and Rose anticipating their imminent death in her prayer to God to let them into heaven. Plot story: they have failed at their mission, their cause is lost. This is the structural low point that counterbalances the triumphal high point the story will end on. Character story: In her prayer, she says, “Judge us not for our weakness, but for our love.” She has accepted her feminine sexuality and essential womanhood to such a degree that she is not afraid to ask for God’s acceptance as well.

The climax is when they are about to be hanged, Charlie asks the Captain to marry them and then the Louisa collides with the African Queen and is blown up by its torpedoes. Plot story: They have succeeded at blowing up the Louisa. Character story: Rose is now a married woman who has experienced the benefits of intimate partnership in the accomplishment of a seemingly impossible task.

The resolution is when they swim off to Kenya. Plot story: They will, individually, survive and thrive. Character story: Now begins their life together.

For years, I presented this film in my classes simply in terms of its simultaneous plot and character stories. I would tell students, “Look how great this is! Two stories going on at the same time! And look at how elegantly intertwined they are!” I would also discuss the construction of individual scenes, comment on the character quirks of both Rose and Charlie and, of course, revel in my favorite bits of dialogue: “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we’re put on this earth to rise above.” (Be sure to read these in your most high-toned Eleanor Roosevelt inflection.) “I never dreamed any mere physical experience could be so stimulating!” And, “I don’t wonder you love boating!” Then, at the end of class, as a sort of icing on the cake, I would try to remember to point out all the religious motifs that appear throughout the story.

There are actually quite a few of them. Not only is Rose reading a bible all the time and performing rituals like singing in church, saying grace, burying her brother and pouring out gin bottles, but there are also all these not-so-thinly-veiled biblical references. Going down the river, they encounter the rapids, the swarms, the reeds, the leeches, the pestilence – like the ten plagues of Egypt. In the delta, the image of Charlie pulling the boat through the reeds has a distinct resemblance to Jesus bearing the cross. Then come the floods with the animals fleeing two by two, and the clouds parting and the light beaming down. It’s all straight out of a Sunday school textbook. Then the swollen river lifts the boat off the mud, floating it through the reeds with the passed out Rose and Charlie on board, and you can’t help thinking of the baby Moses in the bulrushes. So I would talk about all these religious motifs, like aren’t they all just so cute.

Then came that fateful day when I was yet again preparing my African Queen lecture for class. I had recently been contemplating in the abstract the fact that drama is actually made up of three fundamental elements – plot, character and theme – and exploring how these three operate together in drama. I had begun to consider the possibility that, if plot and character can function as individual A to B story lines within a dramatic structure, maybe theme can as well. Maybe an A to B theme storyline can be found that would start with a mundane, everyday truth and progress to a higher, more universal Truth. How would that work? Well, if plot is about relationship with the immediate “other” and character is about relationship with “self”, then theme would have to be about the main character’s relationship with the larger world. Therefore, to find that progression within the story, we would have to ask the question: How has the world changed? Or, how has our understanding of the world changed?

I decided to take another look at my outline and structure chart for The African Queen to see if I could find an identifiable theme storyline. I stared at my notes and ruminated  . . . “If it’s true that films can function on all three levels, what would be the theme level of African Queen? What would it be? . . . What would it be? . . . ” And then, it just jumped out at me. “Merciful Mary, Mother of God! There it is! Those aren’t just cute little randomly placed religious motifs. Those are carefully planted beacons signaling the way to a Universal Truth!”

To look at this story through the lens of a religious theme: Where are we at the beginning of the story? Rose lives in a missionary’s world of church-going, hymn-singing, bible-quoting and “right” living. In the opening scene, she is mightily endeavoring to hold together a Sunday morning service, but the music is a nightmare, the parishioners are barely engaged, and all it takes is one discarded cigar butt from Charlie to scatter the congregation. Where are we at the end of the story? Rose has co-habitated with a man in the wild and feels no guilt about it due to the depth of her love. Anticipating her imminent death, she appeals to God to let them into heaven even though they have had pre-marital sex.

The God Rose believed in back at the beginning of the story would have thrown her straight into Hell for this. No question. But her concept of God has expanded to allow for the possibility that love can take precedence over orthodox notions of morality. Her understanding of the world has shifted from an old-school perspective of constraining, by-the-book religiousness to a more progressive free spirituality, a sort of Emersonian self-reliance in which the individual cultivates their own personal relationship with God. The theme story of The African Queen, then, is a journey from institutional religiousness to a pure spirituality.

Looking more closely at the structural markers, as we did with the plot and character stories, some interesting patterns emerge. Throughout the first half of the story, the religious references are limited to the rituals of sermonizing, hymn-singing, prayer mumbling, bible-reading, and the like. It’s not until after the mid-point that the biblical images start to appear – plagues, floods, bulrushes. Hmm, let’s look more closely and see what other mystical references we can find.

Now, wait a minute, how exactly do they get past the German fort Shona anyhow? The native conscripts are firing at them, but apparently they’re not highly experienced at using these guns. So the German commander grabs a rifle and takes aim. But just as he gets Charlie in his crosshairs, the waning sun beams into his scope and he is momentarily blinded. Well, that could be a coincidence.

Okay, what about what happens later when the boat is stuck on the mud and Rose prays to be let into heaven? As she finishes her prayer and slumps over, surrendering to her fate, the camera pans up from a high angle to reveal that they are actually only a few hundred feet from the open lake. Then we cut back upstream to where the rain begins to fall, which floods the river and brings them their salvation. So, that’s just an act of nature, right?

But there’s one more that really can’t be ignored. There they are on the deck of The Louisa, sentenced to death and about to be hanged by the German captain, when, out of nowhere, the capsized African Queen bobs up from the depths right in its path, torpedoes aimed straight for it. That makes three so-called coincidences that just happened to save their butts when all appeared to be lost. Is something going on here?

Of course, divine intervention, while popular among the Greeks, has not been considered a legitimate dramatic device for some time now. But they get away with it in this film because it lends crucial support to the theme. In order to arrive at a personal relationship with God, it helps to know that there is a God. Hence, God makes His entrance on page 55 of the script in the sights of a German officer.

The origin of this theme is easily found in the life of screenwriter James Agee. When he was six years old, his father died and his mother sent him off to a boarding school run by Episcopal monks for religious training. There he met and began a lifelong friendship with Father James Flye. His mother, meanwhile, remarried another Episcopal priest, Father Erskind Wright, whom he didn’t particularly get along with. He then underwent a spiritual crisis while at boarding school that he later described in his novel The Morning Watch. Published in 1951, he would have been writing this novel about the same time that he was working on the script for The African Queen. While his novel afforded him the opportunity to express his inner conflicts through lyrical prose, the movie script gave him another avenue of communication, through images and allegory.

Indeed, in the novel, The African Queen, by C.S. Forester, on which the film is based, Rose and Charlie do not get married by the German captain and do not blow up the Louisa. The captain hands them over to the British, who then sink the Louisa. Charlie is sent to enlist and Rose is sent back to England. The triumphs at the end of the film version were, apparently, purely of Agee’s invention. Thus, for Agee, The African Queen is one big metaphor through which to express, and find a resolution for, his own personal spiritual dilemma.

Recent research suggests that the ability to communicate through metaphor is critical to human existence. Cognitive scientists are discovering that without it we would not be able to take in new information and process it with all the other information we’re already holding in our puny little heads. We utilize metaphors hundreds of times a day just to be understood by our fellow humans. When we have a new idea to communicate, we will search for just the right concrete image to get it across. “It’s like . . . It’s like . . .  It’s like I’m in a cage in this job and my boss only let’s me out once a day to feed me!”

Sadly, in recent times metaphor in storytelling has often seemed like a lost and forgotten art. I get so weary of hearing people say, “That was completely unrealistic! It would never actually happen that way!” Who cares! Did you get the point that was being made? That’s what matters. Did you hear what the writer or director or artist was wanting to tell you? I mean, honestly, how likely is it that the plot of The African Queen could happen in real life? Not very, when you think about it. But what a tragedy if “realism” had been the standard by which Agee and Huston made all their creative decisions. Rose Sayer preaches that nature is what we’re put on this earth to rise above. I’m here to say that it is through the use of metaphor to communicate a theme that we achieve that transcendence.

Pure plot can tell a story all by itself that has little meaning greater than the immediate sensations caused by the exciting events unfolding on the screen. Add a character story to the mix and you get some insights into human nature along with your superficial thrills and chills. Put the two together to create a thematic metaphor and you have the potential for the concrete embodiment of larger ideas.

Finding the structure of a plot story is comparatively easy – you simply track the external conflict. For the structure of the character story, you look for how the internal transformation of the character has incrementally evolved over time.

I’m sorry to report, however, that there is no one system for finding a theme structure. Or none that I have yet found. The good news is that, therefore, there is much flexibility in how it can be achieved. In my experience, each theme structure shows up as its own unique system peculiar to that particular story. The African Queen happens to be one that is very balanced and symmetrical, a little like the fastidious nature of its main character. I have not yet seen another structure that is quite so tidy as this. But it is this programmatic quality that makes it a convenient example for introducing the idea that separate character and theme structures can exist.

So how do these individual theme structures get created in the first place? How do they get so deeply embedded under the surface of the plot and character stories? That’s a question for the ages. I don’t know the entire answer. But I do know a few things. I know, for example, that, generally speaking, artist’s don’t go about planning out their metaphors and assigning thematic meanings to them. It would be difficult to “think up” a thematically rich metaphor. More often, it simply bubbles up from the unconscious in an image or a situation, as does most creative raw material. Sometimes a writer is aware of the metaphor and theme that are suggested by the plot and character elements they are creating, sometimes not. Indeed, a writer is not even always intentionally weaving a theme into their work. Sometimes, they are just driven by a need to make a statement, and they may not even be aware of that.

This is the beauty, and the mystery, of the creative process. The artist is gripped with an inspired idea, endeavors laboriously to manifest it in a coherent form and then stands back to look at what they’ve just created. What happens next likely falls somewhere on a spectrum in which, at one end, the artist is surprised to find whole other layers of meaning that they didn’t consciously include or, at the other, the artist is no longer able to find their original inspired idea in the confused mess they have brought into being. Where the work falls on this spectrum is completely dependent on the artist’s ability to equally manifest both art and craft through an even balance of conscious and unconscious processes. It is my firm belief that the best way to cultivate such skill is through deep analytical study of the successful work of others. The goal is to consciously assimilate into one’s unconscious the guiding principles of art and craft that govern those works.  This is the intention of this book.

Coming soon to a bookstore near you (with any luck).

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Truly, Madly, Deeply

Published on April 19, 2010

I haven’t been to the movies much lately cause I’ve been busy watching the third season of Mad Men now that its out on DVD. Last night, Ed and I holed up with disc number four and finished off the season. And today, like Don Draper showing up at the apartment of his latest sexual conquest in the middle of the night to tell her that he can’t stop thinking about her, so I am showing up here to tell my readers I can’t stop thinking about the show.

Not that I have been completely immune to romantic obsession with TV dramas before this. I was ever-faithful to Deadwood for its short but brilliant life. With The Sopranos it was an on-again-off-again sort of thing, but I did finally make a commitment in its last couple of seasons. And I had an early affair with The Wire, but then broke things off for reasons I can’t explain (maybe cause it asked for too much commitment). But now, I’m madly in love with Mad Men.

This could turn into a problem. I’m hoping if I draw upon my objective, analytic capabilities to write something about it, I can get enough distance to assuage my longing for season four (which started production only last week) and once again focus on my other work.

The great thing about dramatic series television these days is that its busting open our preconceptions of how stories should be structured. In all four of these shows, each episode is a walk through the wilds, seeming to follow no maps or charts, that nonetheless arrives, finally, at a sufficiently satisfying destination. Mad Men is especially so, with very slowly developing plot lines and frequent scenes that seem to have no point at all. Yet we are fully drawn in, hanging on every gesture and remark.

Why do we hang in for all this apparent meandering? I think one reason is that the show is heavily character-driven. We have been brought into such a thorough engagement with the characters, there is a degree to which we are happy to just be with them. But that can only go so far. We still have to have some sort of structure to each episode, some sort of guiding principle.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a short analysis of television structure in an e-mail to my students in answer to a question from one of them. For expediency’s sake, I’m going to repeat some of that here (apologies to my students reading this).

The original television sitcom model was a kind of cheesy moralistic character transformation in the Father Knows Best/Leave it to Beaver vein in which someone learns some kind of lesson that also reassuringly restores the balance of family and society. (For more on this, check out “Honey, I’m Home!” by Gerard Jones) This model was first challenged in the late 80s by Married . . . with Children and The Simpsons and then in 1989 Seinfeld came along and made a giant leap forward.

The radical departure of Seinfeld was in two inviolable rules the writers gave themselves (and the only two rules): No hugging. No learning. This meant no character transformation, whether cheesy and moralistic or authentic and meaningful, which opened the way to explore human nature in all its most self-serving impulses. The best of those episodes have three or four plot threads going simultaneously in which the characters dig themselves in deeper and deeper to a ridiculous but all too human predicament, and then, most of the time, despite all their efforts, lose anyhow. As we laugh at them, we are also laughing at our own selfish impulses and failures being acted out in exaggerated form.

In the same way that the sitcom was the arena of character transformation, the series drama was the realm of plot triumph. In the old Man from Uncle/Hawaii Five-O type shows, you could always be sure the good guys would win in the end, and the balance of society would be restored. Now, in shows like Deadwood and The Wire, maybe the good guys win, maybe not. In The Sopranos, it’s true that Tony Soprano always lands on his feet, but the moral underpinning of that show is so inverted to begin with, it’s hard to know if that’s a triumph. In a way, you could say the breakthrough that The Sopranos gave us was to put the “No hugging/No learning” rule on steroids. And we are similarly relieved to see our even more selfish impulses and even greater failures acknowledged. The bad guy is not a cardboard abstraction. He sees a therapist, struggles in his marriage and is disappointed in his teenage children, just like us.

So the question is — having removed character transformation and plot triumph as a basis for creating a structure, what do you then base your structure on? The short answer is you can base it on anything as long as that “anything” is a fully contained system in an of itself. Watching the season two DVDs of Mad Men a few months ago, I listened to the commentary track for episode four and was interested to hear the writers talk about how they structured the entire (television) hour around three consecutive Sundays leading up to Easter. The dramas that play out in that episode are just the same dramas the writers have been developing all season. But the three Sundays structure gives them an organizing principle from which to create a sense of pacing and keep the viewer oriented.

This illustrates my view that, at its most fundamental, the purpose of story structure — whatever form it takes — is simply to give us an organizing principle, both to guide the writer in the writing process and to help the viewer feel secure in a system that ultimately will make some kind of sense (even if only unconsciously).

I’m not going to go any deeper into a specific structural analysis of Mad Men right at this point. That’s too much work for a blog post I’m trying to toss off in a short time. But hopefully the points already made provide a guideline for anyone wanting to engage in such analysis on their own. In summary: let go of the old models you may have internalized and instead simply look for a self-contained system unique to that particular episode or season. The best way to do that is to simply look for a pattern, which can be external, like a series of Sundays, or can be more abstract and thematic, like the episode in Season Three which seemed to be all built around the different characters having to prostitute themselves in different ways.

There’s lots more that fascinates me about the innovations we’re seeing in series television drama these days, all of which I hope to eventually explore. But in the interests of keeping my posts to a manageable length (I know I got a little carried away in my Inglourious Basterds analysis), I’m going to leave it at this for now.

Besides, I think I have gotten my infatuated feet sufficiently back on the ground by now so that I can get to work on some other things.

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Jesus and the Great Dark Frog

Published on April 8, 2010

Last weekend, I went to church and got a lesson in storytelling. This is, of course, how it has been for centuries – go to church, hear a story and learn something. I happened to be visiting my parents and it was  Easter Sunday. So off we went.

Not long into the service, the minister gathered all the children at the front of the sanctuary and announced he had a ghost story for them.

“When I was a boy,” he began, “one day my parents and I went on a picnic. We played games and had lots of good food. It was a splendid day. Then it was time to go home. But on the way home, we got lost. So my parents pulled the car over and told me to stay there while they went to get directions. Then they gave me a stern warning not to leave the car because these were the woods of the Great Dark Frog.

“So I stayed there, all by myself. But, after a while, I got bored. So I went out to explore a bit. Soon it started to get dark and then suddenly before me was the Great Dark Frog. ‘Ooooh!,’ he said, ‘A child! I love to eat little children!’ And he jumped up and down in delight.

“Then he said, ‘But I have just eaten a whole bunch of little children! I am too full to eat you now! So I am going to jump rope 100 times so that I become hungry again and then I can eat you, too.’ Then the Great Dark Frog pulled a jump rope out of his pocket. He tied one end around a tree and gave the other end to me to turn it for him.

“When he got to 20 jumps, he said, ‘Yum! I’m feeling an appetite coming on!’ After 30 more jumps, he exclaimed, ‘Now I’m starting to feel hungry!’ And he kept jumping, jumping, jumping.

“Finally, when he was up to 90 jumps, he said he was very, very hungry. But I could see he had also gotten very, very tired. This gave me an idea. Still holding the rope, I ran around the tree as fast as I could, and then around and around and around again, until he was bound so tightly he couldn’t move. Then I tied a big knot and went off to find my parents. The end.”

All the children squealed and clapped, but the minister wasn’t finished. He looked down at them and asked, “Do you think this story is true?” And they all called out, “No!” Then he asked, “But did you enjoy it anyhow?” To which they chimed, “Yes!” Then he said, “Sometimes stories don’t have to be true to tell us something true, do they? So, is this story true? . . .  Or is it Truth?”

Not often do we get to see our formative influences laid out so starkly before us. See, this is the church I grew up in. And these lessons aren’t new to this church. So, apparently, I was taught at a very early age that stories exist in our lives not to be taken as literal truth, but rather to give us signposts guiding us to Larger Truth.

Then the children were sent off to their Sunday school classes while the minister stayed behind to take his annual shot at interpreting, for the benefit of the grownups, all the metaphoric meanings in the rolling away of the stone to reveal an empty tomb and the disciples’ subsequent sightings of Jesus walking  the earth again.

Glad I don’t have his job.

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The Way Things Ought To Have Been

Published on March 30, 2010

At the risk of my readers getting sick of hearing me squawk about how much I loved Inglourious Basterds, I thought I’d better post something a little more substantive explaining why I think it’s such a great film. Then – I promise! – I’ll shut up about it.

First, this film is a first, and of no small proportion, in my view, when it comes to pushing the limits of narrative convention. I don’t know of any other film that has had the “chutzpah” to so dramatically re-imagine such an indisputably documented historical event. (Okay, there’s Gladiator claiming that the Emperor Commodus was killed by a betrayed-general-turned-slave in a gladiator contest circa 180 A.D. when, in fact, he ruled for 12 more years and then was ignominiously assassinated by poison and strangling. But that was two millennia ago, so there is no shock value in the liberty taken because no one much cares anymore what really happened. Whereas, at only half a century’s distance, Hitler is still pretty hot-button.)

I need to spend a few more paragraphs here impressing upon the reader how big this is. All of drama history has been one long process of testing audiences to see what they will and will not accept. What they will and will not believe. What they will and will not comprehend. What they will and will not pay money to go see. And it has been a progressive process. Today, we will accept, comprehend and plunk down a ten spot for all kinds of narrative conventions that were unimaginable when drama was in its infancy, some of which were still considered off limits even a short time ago.

Let me give you a sense of the progress we’ve made. You know that dramatic convention we often see in stage plays where all the action happens in the same location and in a limited span of time, say, a single day? That didn’t come about simply as a way to save money on sets and costumes. It dates back to ancient Greece when playwrights thought it best to contain their drama in one location and limit it to one day (or slightly exceeding that) out of the belief that, otherwise, the audience wouldn’t be able to understand what the hell is going on. It was believed that the viewer literally didn’t have the mental capacity to follow too many jumps in location or time. Therefore, it was also believed the audience wouldn’t accept the drama any other way.

See, the art of storytelling was in the process of transitioning from the recited epic poem (The Iliad and The Odyssey) to performed drama (The Oresteia, Oedipus Rex, Medea) and no one was too sure yet how far they could take it. So, for a few more centuries, they kept having the “chorus” step in at various points as the drama unfolds to explain a few things and fill in some details. They still thought the story had to be explained, as it was in epic poem recitation. They didn’t know yet the degree to which their viewer would understand what they were trying to say simply by watching action unfold. And it’s entirely possible that viewers back then would not have understood because their brains had not yet evolved into that capacity.

Now, at the dawn of the third millennium, we have no doubt that viewers can comprehend a story simply by witnessing action. And if we didn’t yet fully know this a hundred years ago, the short history of the movies has demonstrated it to spectacular effect. Maybe the movies have helped us discover mental capacities that we always had, or maybe our brains have evolved to meet the challenges of a new technology. I don’t know. I’m just grateful to the dramatists and movie makers over the ages who have gradually pushed us forward into previously unknown perceptual abilities.

But the movies got caught up in its own trap. We were so enthralled at the beginning with our newly found ability to go out with a camera and capture “reality” on film, that we became over invested in using the technology to faithfully imitate reality. For decades, the golden standard of narrative filmmaking has been the ability to maintain the “suspension of disbelief,” the illusion that, as the viewer, you are getting a fly-on-the-wall perspective to something that is really, truly, actually happening. As the filmmaker, you just have to make sure that, whatever you do, you don’t break that illusion. Because your audience won’t accept it. Think of how often you have heard someone respond to a film, as if it’s the ultimate in damning criticism, by exclaiming, “That would never happen!”

It’s an odd paradox that, at the same time, we also love those movies in which a big hairy monster takes over the city, or a super hero saves the world from annihilation or a love smitten crooner belts his heart out while twirling on a lamp post. So we want fantasy, too. And movies can dish up the multi-sensory fantastic like no other art form yet invented.

How do we reconcile the need to imitate a plausible reality with the wish for wild fantasy? We set some prudent boundaries: Don’t put a song and dance number in an otherwise straight drama. Don’t mix abstract techniques with naturalistic drama. Don’t mix animation and live action. Don’t mix documentary and dramatic footage. Don’t mess around with linear time. Don’t do flashbacks. Don’t break the “fourth wall.” Not so long ago, these were all very strict rules. The belief was that viewers wouldn’t be able to maintain their suspension of disbelief while switching back and forth between one form and the other. So they wouldn’t accept it. By now, of course, each of these rules have been broken. And audiences have accepted it just fine.

However, just when we thought all the rules had been broken – by the likes of Paul Thomas Andersen, Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze, Ang Lee, Todd Haynes, Christopher Nolan and certainly not least among them Tarantino himself – we discover that there was one more rule that was so deeply ingrained that we were not even aware we were living by it. And that rule was – Don’t mess with history!!

(I suppose at this point I should insert – Spoiler alert! – even though it’s hard for me to imagine that any serious student of screenwriting has not yet seen this film.)

When David Franzoni wrote Gladiator he knew he was safe with his “dramatic license” because no one would know the difference unless they went home and looked it up on Wikipedia. Taratino, on the other hand, put his dramatic license right up in your face. And, in so doing, he knocked down the last remaining boundary in film (that I know of). He made it allowable to rewrite actual history with the pen of filmed fantasy for the benefit of collective emotional release. Get that son-of-a-bitch Hitler! Get him! Get him!!! GET HIM!!!!

Indeed, why shouldn’t we imagine that a random assortment of courageous and committed individuals could have planned and awkwardly executed a plan that nonetheless succeeded, against all odds, in bringing down a real live monster! Don’t we wish that’s what had happened? Why shouldn’t we envision what we wish had happened and get at least some feeling of satisfaction as if it really had? Think of the possibilities for rewriting the history of the past ten years!

To emphasize how radical this is in that larger context of drama history, I’m going to invoke the Greeks again. Aristotle is widely regarded in the story structure business as the ultimate authority, to such a degree that I sometimes feel The Poetics is a bit overrated. Drama theory may begin with Aristotle, but it certainly doesn’t end there. Nonetheless, as an early treatise cataloguing the various elements that successful dramas tend to have in common, it is an important text and there is one passage that I have found particularly useful as a description of drama’s possible purposes.

According to Aristotle, drama should achieve one of three objects (Chapter 25, Butcher translation): To portray things as they were or are (gritty realism), things as they are said or thought to be (for the Greeks, this meant speculations on what the gods are doing and thinking), or things as they ought to be (this includes both wishful fantasy and the morally instructive). Think about your favorite films and you will discover that they all fall into one of those three categories, except one. Now, Quentin Tarantino is here to tell us that drama can be utilized for a fourth objective: to portray things as they ought to have been (a sort of combo category of the gritty realistic and the wishful fantastic, in content as well as style). Not only did he rewrite history with this film, but he also improved on Aristotle.

I don’t know about you, but I was fortunate enough to see the film right when it came out, so I had little advanced knowledge of what was in it. I remember sitting in the movie theater and first thinking, “I don’t think that really happened.” Then, “Oh, look, he’s departing even further.” Then, “Wow, he’s taking this to some outlandish extremes.” Then, “Oh my God! Is he really gonna kill Hitler?! Whoa!!” And, finally, “Great! Yeah! Let’s do it! Why the hell not!!!”

There was a point at which I had to let go of my internalized narrative expectations in order to keep going with Tarantino on the ride he had planned for me. And it is a testament to his skill as a screenwriter (and director) that I was able to make that break and stay with him all the way through to his ending. So I wonder, What was it in the way the film was constructed that enabled me to do that? After some cursory study of the film’s structure, I have developed a couple of passable theories.

It turns out that Tarantino has, once again, despite appearances to the contrary, heavily drawn upon the old-reliable, time-tested narrative conventions while he is also energetically pushing beyond them. First among those is that he has made sure we have, in Shoshanna, a sympathetic character to attach to  emotionally at the outset. Shoshanna’s circumstance is unequivocally tragic and unjust. This not only positions her as the sympathetic character but it also grounds the film in actual history and provides the emotional motivation for what happens in the end. However, her story, by itself, it is not quite enough.

There is a risk that portraying Shoshanna’s homespun plan for revenge as successful could come across as trivializing the problem of the Nazis. We all know how ruthless and powerful they were. Considering the tremendous amount of damage they did to millions of lives, it is a bit offensive to suggest that getting rid of them might have been as easy as burning down a movie theater. This is the kind of reality vs. fantasy gap that could cause you to lose your audience, unless you’re okay with only appealing to the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider crowd. But I have a feeling Tarantino, much as I’m sure he respects Lara Croft, had something greater than that in mind.

To be a meaningful rewrite of history that brings authentic emotional release, the story’s dramatic weight must match  the historical circumstance. In actual fact, no one did succeed at assassinating Hitler, despite numerous attempts, because he was such a formidable foe. So the element we need, to give authenticity to our imagined alternative reality, is an equally formidable foe positioned in direct opposition to Hitler. Thus, we have Aldo the Apache.

Let’s now look, just for a moment, at the contrary possibility. Say we had Aldo’s story without Shoshanna’s. Well, we would have the necessary brute force to convincingly do the job but we wouldn’t have the human pathos to motivate it. Sure, Aldo has no lack of disdain for the Nazis for their “murder, torture, intimidation and terror” and for being the foot soldiers of a “Jew-hatin’, mass murderin’ maniac.” But, if not for our having seen Shoshanna suffering the consequences of such Nazi aggression, Aldo’s words would have remained, at least somewhat, abstract, making his triumph in the end more about conquering brute force with brute force and less about righting a terrible injustice. In fact, such a film could appear to be exploiting WWII and the Holocaust for an excuse to blow up a movie theater with a big hairy monster inside.

So here’s my two-fold theory: Not only do we, the audience, need an emotional grounding in reality at the beginning to make the revenge fantasy meaningful (as opposed to trivializing) but we also need, as the story progresses, a steady build up of narrative energy sufficient to break us through that dense boundary of acceptable narrative convention (the one that says you can’t recognizably alter history because the audience won’t accept it). We need a narrative energy so compelling that, as the story takes more and more left turns away from actual history, we are less and less inclined to nitpick about mere facts at the expense of staying with the story’s action-packed, fun-filled trajectory. In turn, this letting go of intellectual attachment to historical accuracy then enables us to discover how emotionally satisfying it is to watch Hitler getting mowed down with a machine gun and the rest of the Nazi party leaders being blown to smithereens. Thus, we have our revenge fantasy.

So how is that build up of narrative energy achieved?

As already pointed out, the shear brute force of Aldo and the Basterds is one source of energy in the story. Another, in a nice Taratino-esque touch, is that, while Shoshanna’s first function is to provide human pathos, she is by no means pathetic. No passive victim, damsel-in-distress here. She is acting as her own agent of empowerment and revenge, which also adds some energy.

But the third, and most important, source of energy is in the story’s structure itself. It took me a bit of time, studying my scribbled outlines and charts, to figure this one out. But, while searching for some sort of underlying system to all these disparate characters coming in at different times and from different places, eventually converging in one big culminating escapade, what finally jumped out at me is that, structurally, this film is simply a caper.

Takes me back to Screenwriting 1 in film school when one of our first assignments was to create an outline for a caper story. We were given these parameters: Something happens (the inciting incident) that motivates a small band of mischief makers to pull off a caper. So they come up with a plan (the end of the first act). They then make preparations and launch the plan (the beginning of the second act).  But their first attempt either fails or is only partially successful (first culmination of the second act, also called the mid-point). So they regroup and modify their plan, and adapt their preparations. Then they launch the second phase of the plan when they come very near to success (the second culmination, or end, of the second act). But there’s still a piece missing or something left to be done. This takes a final effort (the climax) that then brings them success. They divvy up the goods and go on their merry way (the resolution).

We’ve all seen the caper story a hundred times. Part of why we love it so much is because, along with its action and adventure, it also provides a high dose of audaciousness, cleverness and humor. No doubt Tarantino loves it for this, too. Hence, as usual, we see him drawing upon an old reliable form but doing it one better. Let’s go through the film chapter by chapter and see how it adheres to and departs from the form.

Chapter One (in which Colonel Hans Landa gets Farmer LaPadite to betray the Dreyfus family hiding in his basement, who are then executed by Landa’s men except for the teenage Shoshanna who escapes and runs away):

Here the emotional weight of the problem is established, that the Nazis are relentless and merciless in their persecution of the Jews. But there’s more. Landa’s viciousness goes beyond simply killing the Dreyfus family as we see the skill with which he manipulates LaPadite into abandoning his values and betraying his friends. Our initial sympathy for LaPadite is then transferred over to Shoshanna, whose circumstance is even more tragic. So the crushing power of the adversary is established and we are left with a mix of outrage and powerlessness at what we have just witnessed.

Chapter Two (in which Lt. Aldo Raine, having recruited “The Basterds” to kill Nazis, has managed to terrorize the German army and infuriate Hitler by sparing one soldier from each raid to go back into the ranks and report on the Basterds’ mercilessness):

Aldo is introduced as an Avenging Angel to answer Shoshanna’s plight. Once we see him state his intentions, we go directly to the results: Hitler is not pleased to learn there is someone out there beating him at his own game. As Hitler hears the details of Aldo’s extreme practices, we see them in action.

The only structural function of these first two chapters is simply to set things up. The story we have been brought in to see hasn’t even begun yet. But we have been given the backstory, we have met the main characters and are fully engaged with them and we know the magnitude of the problem and have a good idea of what’s at stake. We also see that there is a pecking order among the characters with Hitler in the highest power position and Shoshanna in the lowest and Landa and Aldo mid-spectrum in parallel positions (Landa is hunting Jews, Aldo is hunting Nazis), each displaying their unique methods for getting what they want.

Chapter Three (in which Shoshanna, well established four years later as a movie theater proprietress in Paris, is wooed by the German war hero/movie star Frederich Zoller, who then convinces Joseph Goebbels to move the premiere of his film to her theater, prompting her to decide that she and her projectionist Marcel will burn down the theater with all the Nazi leaders inside):

Here we have the inciting incident (the event that begins the story we’ve been brought in to see). The Nazis are premiering a war hero movie in Paris and Shoshanna has no choice but to let them do it in her theater. This is the “something happens” that then prompts a decision to pull off a caper. Indeed, Shoshanna wastes no time deciding to utilize the opportunity to rid the world of some of the most powerful Nazis.

Chapter Four (in which a British army operative/film critic, Archie Hicox, is briefed on Operation Kino in London, meets up with Aldo and The Basterds in Nadine, France, rendezvous with German film star Bridget von Hammersmark at the tavern La Louisiane, is killed, along with Basterds Wicki and Stieglitz, by partying German soldiers, leaving Aldo and Bridget to come up with an alternative plan for carrying out the operation):

This is where things start to get interesting, not just story-wise, but structurally as well. We learn that, as Shoshanna was hatching her plan, another plan was also being hatched. Operation Kino is Bridget von Hammersmark’s caper. Hicox has been drafted into it, as has Aldo and his Basterds. This caper has the same inciting incident as Shoshanna’s and a similarly motivated decision (both are women with unique access who plan to blow up the movie theater out of their hatred of the Nazis).

Critical to the caper structure is seeing the moment of decision to launch it and learning of the plan. This is what creates the tension as we then watch how well that stated plan is carried out in actuality. Note that, in this caper, we saw Shoshanna’s decision but skipped Bridget’s. That’s because there’s no need to fulfill that structural function twice. One decision will do. And since the decision is the direct result of the “something happens” that motivated it (a Nazi film premiere in Paris), which in this case we saw through Shoshanna’s perspective, it is Shoshanna’s decision that we are shown.

But there’s still the plan, which we only get brief mention of from Shoshanna (she’s going to burn down the cinema using 350 nitrate prints and make a special film just for the Nazis). So we jump to Bridget’s caper and are given a long extrapolation of her plan (with maps and pointers and the like). Again, as we only need one decision, we also only need one plan.

Then we have to follow Bridget’s plan to see how it plays out. Hicox meets up with the Basterds and we have a brief preparation looking out a second floor window at the entrance to a tavern, mostly in a tension-building lament about it being in a basement. The long, tension-filled set piece inside the tavern then fulfills the first phase of the caper (the first attempt). But the macho-posturing, egghead film critic botches the job and gets everyone killed (failure) except for Bridget who hooks up with Aldo (partial success).

Bridget and Aldo get a few things straightened out between them (regrouping). But she is doubtful that the mission can be accomplished. Aldo almost agrees, until he hears that Hitler will be in attendance (raising the stakes). “Getting a whack at planting ole Uncle Adolph makes this a horse of a different color,” he says. So they come up with a new plan.

Meanwhile, Landa inspects the site of the massacre and finds Bridget’s shoe and celebrity signature (more tension).

Chapter Five (in which Bridget, Aldo, Donowitz and Hirschberg attend the premiere, along with Landa, Zoller, Goebbels, Goerring, Boorman, Emil Jannings and Adolph Hitler. Shoshanna and Marcel review their plan. Landa greets Bridget and friends. Donowitz and Hirschberg take their seats and plant bombs. Landa takes Bridget aside and strangles her. Aldo is taken hostage and carted away with Utevitch. Landa tells Aldo he wants to make a deal. Zoller intrudes on Shoshanna and they shoot each other. Shoshanna appears on screen. Marcel ignites the nitrate. Donowitz and Hirschberg shoot Hitler and Goebbels. The theater explodes. Landa drives Aldo and Utevitch to the front and uncuffs them. Aldo cuffs Landa and carves a swastika in his forehead.):

In the caper structure, we not only need to be told the plan, we also need to be shown at least some of the preparation. This creates plot elongation for building tension, but it also lends plausibility and can show some potential cracks in the plan, which brings in even more tension. In this case, since we just heard the new plan from Bridget, we’re going to jump over to Shoshanna for preparation, continuing their trade off of structural functions. We are given a parallel action montage, alternating shots of Shoshanna dressing for the premiere with flashbacks of how she and Marcel made their special film for the Nazis, strong-arming a lab technician to develop it under threat of death. Once again, we don’t need two preparations, so we skip over how Bridget and Aldo managed to get all cleaned up in less than 24 hours, including how Bridget learned to walk wearing that high-heeled plaster cast. Tarantino could have chosen to show that preparation instead of the filmmaking bit. But to do both would have bogged things down and been unnecessary. And we need to bring Shoshanna back into the story.

With Shoshanna’s entrance to the party, we have completely broken through the boundary of narrative convention that demands adherence to historical accuracy. We have gotten a rag tag group of Allied conspirators and an impressive display of Nazi leaders in the same room together, with Hitler due at any moment. Thus, the energy and tension of the caper structure has done its job, so we no longer have to hold close to its parameters. All we have to do is unleash the characters on each other and let them fight it out. And that’s what Tarantino does.

Was Tarantino consciously creating a caper structure as he was writing this script? My guess is he was not. But neither would I say his decisions leading to this structure were not deliberate. Great film does not happen by accident. His decisions were simply instinctive rather than calculated. I’m sure he has been exposed to enough caper stories amongst the hundreds and thousands of films he’s seen to have absorbed the form into his unconscious. It is that unconscious knowledge that then guides him in his creative process, no doubt with some conscious tweaking on the details as he goes along.

Sadly, we can’t all be Quentin Tarantino, with his finely tuned instincts for creating stories that both draw from conventional structures while also breaking through them. But we can definitely learn a few things about the future of storytelling from some close study of the results he has managed to achieve.

Filed in Inglourious Basterds | No replies

Oscar Wrap-up

Published on March 9, 2010

Oh, those Academy Awards . . . I love ‘em, and I hate ‘em. Why do I always get so worked up about them?

On a philosophical level, I don’t really believe in picking bests. I’d rather come across as all generous and high-minded, magnanimously declaring, “Everyone’s a winner!” However (as you may have noticed from my last post), I also can’t resist getting swept up in the competitive spirit and boisterously cheering for my favorite underdog.

But, really, how can we possibly determine a best film of the year? There are so many good ones, all for different reasons. That’s what makes it seem like such a popularity contest, measuring something unmeasurable and, ultimately, of little value. Okay, there’s the publicity value and the status in the industry thing. But what is the artistic value of picking one single best film out of hundreds released in a given year?

So, at its worst, the Academy Awards is all just one big brash, gaudy, shameless effort at commercial promotion. That’s why sometimes I hate that I love it so much. But, the fact is, as base and self-serving to the industry as it may be, I do love it. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

And that’s because, at its best, it’s a big, brash, gaudy, shameless celebration of the movies, these goofy, imperfect diversions from daily life that range from our most trivial collective fantasies to truly inspiring and transporting works of art (with most falling somewhere in between). As Leo Tolstoy couldn’t help loving his selfish, imperfect Sophia, so I can’t help loving the movies. (Needless-to-say, I finally saw The Last Station yesterday. In a word, it was great.)

If I were the producer of the show, I would punch up the celebrating-the-movies stuff. Do more of what they did last night with the comic bit of Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin sharing a hotel room in the style of Paranormal Activity. That was good. The tribute to horror films was also fun to watch, with all those old favorites popping up on the screen (The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, Bride of Frankenstein). And the John Hughes tribute was quite moving. Made me want to go watch all his films I’d missed (as I got further and further away from his target age range).

But I’m sure there will be no dearth of mention in all the Oscar wrap-up today that the interpretive dance number seemed woefully out of place. If it were up to me, I’d fill that spot with something like the fantasy dance sequence from 500 Days of Summer, which was great simply for its movieness – a bit of Showboat, a bit of Snow White, a bit of Ferris Beuhler’s Day Off.

Instead of trying to squeeze more films into the BP category, why not feature the big budget, wide release and high cultural impact films in affectionate comedy skits and musical numbers while the smaller, more artistic ones are being honored with the awards? At home watching, we’ll all play “Name that Film” as each interlude goes by while we also tick off the wins and losses on our ballot.

Time problem, you say? Well, here’s a way to make time: Ditch some of those technical categories, especially the ones where they have to explain to the audience what it is, like sound editing and mixing, even picture editing. Not to mention the categories where they couldn’t come up with more than three nominees, like visual effects and makeup. (I know this is controversial – apologies to my friends in editing and visual effects.)

I certainly wouldn’t ditch the short and documentary film categories in the interests of time. That would undercut the goal of celebrating movies overall. Besides, those are the categories that produce some of the most entertaining acceptance speeches. (Come to think of it, they could make the show even more interactive if they made the docs and shorts available ahead of time on iTunes. That way, the viewer at home could make a more informed vote in those categories. And the filmmakers could make a little money. Doesn’t this seem like a bit of a no-brainer?)

But I’m not the producer of the show.

So – what about the winners? As I predicted, much of it was highly predictable. Probably the biggest upset was Precious winning over Up in the Air in the Adapted Screenplay category. I’m glad Precious got that recognition. Where I was way off was on the Costume category. But I got the impression that Sandy Powell, winning for The Young Victoria, agreed with me that perhaps someone else would have been a more appropriate awardee. She seemed to shrug it off as a ho-hum third Oscar, before generously championing costume designers who work on non-period films.

I am also glad, despite my Tarantino allegiance, that The Hurt Locker got its due. In fact, on reflection, I have to say there’s a lot of justice in it. First, of course, is the woman director thing. It was quite poignant and moving to hear Barbara Streisand say, “Ah, the time has come!” The movie industry is well known to be way behind other professional arenas, such as medicine and law, in its overall gender parity. At least in this one area, some catching up has been accomplished.

But did you also notice that it was the writer, Mark Boal, who gave the Best Picture acceptance speech? Tons of justice there! It was his vision from the beginning. His initial inspiration. And he was somehow able to keep his hand in as producer all the way through. That’s unusual. The position of the writer, generally speaking, is pretty far away from the position of the producer. Hence, the long history of lowly writer jokes, such as Alec Baldwin’s quip about Matt Damon getting an Oscar for screenplay and going on to become an action star, which is the most action a writer has ever seen in Hollywood. Love the layers of nuance there considering the many meanings of the word “action” – sex, profit sharing, popularity, excitement, fun, all of which writers are widely reputed to not get much of. Not to mention recognition. The woman director thing is pretty great. But the writer, the one who came up with the idea for the film in the first place, getting the Best Picture award? That is totally cool!

I also heard a little factoid yesterday that if [that other film] had won, it would be the highest grossing Best Picture winner of all time (little surprise there), and that if The Hurt Locker won, it would be the lowest grossing Best Picture winner of all time. Perhaps not everyone would be with me on this, but I see justice in that as well.

And here’s one more curious distinction: Of the roughly 31 wide release films nominated (in any category), 18 (almost two-thirds) were released in November or December and eight were released between July and October, which means only five were released in the first six months of the year. Two of those – Harry Potter (cinematography) and Star Trek (makeup) – were big budget, big release films, and two – Coraline and Up – were animated, these being characteristics that helped keep them from fading out of consciousness. So what was the fifth nominated film released way, way back in the first six months of the year? That had to remain in the industry consciousness long enough to be remembered for awards season? Standing, therefore, in a category of its own? Hmm. The Hurt Locker.

Also interesting to me is seeing to which film the runner-up longevity award goes (for its July release) – none other than my personal pet favorite . . . In the Loop!!! Yea! Way to go little under-the-radar scathing political satire! Yes! Yes! Yes! Now, I’m sure some enterprising social/cultural theorist could have a field day speculating on the implications of The Hurt Locker and In the Loop sharing this distinction, but I’m not going to go there.

I would, however, like to say something about Fox News’ embrace of The Hurt Locker as a “conservative values” film because of its portrayal of soldiers as “heroes.” The film opens with a quote from war correspondent Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” And by the end, the film leaves no doubt that its main character is hooked. Is he a hero for wanting to go back to Iraq and defuse bombs again? Maybe to some people. Or is he simply an addict, and therefore the victim of an unseen drug pusher for whom it is convenient that he is driven to need more and more life-and-death, risk-taking excitement?

I read this film not as a tribute to heroic sacrifice, but, rather, as laying bare a psychological trap endemic to the warrior life – the compulsion to seek more and more danger. My 82-year-old friend Martha, who I went to see the film with, pointed out to me that in past wars, soldiers didn’t re-up over and over again. They did one or two tours and were discharged. Or the war ended and they went home. This war shows little sign of ending.  It is well known that for an addiction to grab hold and flourish there must be a continuous supply of the drug of choice, which, at eight years plus, there certainly has been. Another link that can be made from this film is that, for those whose goal it is to prosecute endless war, its helpful to have addicted soldiers. We just have to get them to believe they are being heroes when they choose to go back and re-indulge their addiction.

That’s what I got from The Hurt Locker.

Filed in Oscars | No replies