Remembering a Story's Details

In the July 2014 issue of Discovery Magazine (Hold That Thought, p 30-33), scientist Elizabeth Phelps, a past president of the Association for Psychological Science and a psychologist at New York University, is interviewed about memory. She speaks in the article that recalling memories shows activation in two parts of the brain. Recalling details about ‘physical locations and layouts’ activates the posterior parahipocampus. When we recall the feelings associated with memories, ‘we see more amygdala involvement.’

In tests, Phelps found that ‘we’re set up to capture time and place.’ That makes it easier to recall such details, an evolutionary advantage.

When I work with struggling authors, I often find a focus on those details and much less a focus on the feelings of characters. I believe the way our brain functions makes it easier for new writers to come up with those details. Such a focus risks becoming tedious, however, reducing a story to a series of descriptions of events. I call this writing style ‘watch the movie and write down the details.’

A bigger problem with this style of writing is that readers often access a story’s characters through the feelings events generate. To leave out those feelings denies readers a prime entry point into a character’s inner life and goals. This is especially true when a main character becomes a kind of automaton, recording visual details.

To help such writers, I have them write out beside each paragraph the feelings of the main character in the scene and how the events of the scene impact and change that character’s feelings. If those feelings don’t change, nothing has happened in the scene to impact the character and, generally, not the reader, either.

The subtle trap here is that those situations and places might evoke feelings in the author, which makes them symbolic to the author and meaningless to the reader, evoking nothing (except perhaps irritation).

All hugely successful stories are journeys of feeling for readers, supported by details of time and place. If you’re telling a story, take care to convey those feelings in a way your readers can share the story journey.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

When a Middle Fails a Beginning and End

Maleficent, a new film starring Angelina Jolie, has a wonderful opening and a wonderful close, but the middle seriously sags. Why that happens speaks to a problem with story structure.

The film opens with Jolie as a mythical creature and a young girl who watches over and protects the Moor, where other creatures like pixies roam. Humans occupy a nearby kingdom. Each mostly keep to their realm until a young man enters the Moor to steal a jewel and is caught by Jolie. They become friends, grow up together, and she falls in love with him.

When the nearby king fails in an attack on the Moor, the young man uses Jolie's love for him to take her wings and get himself appointed king. This sets up a central question, will she get revenge? She curses the new king's daughter so that when she reaches 16, she will fall into a deep sleep that can only be woken from a kiss of true love.

In this middle section, Maleficent watches over the girl, whom she clearly and deeply loves. As the girl gets to know Maleficent, she comes to love her like a mother. But this section of the movie mostly keeps the king scheming to destroy Maleficent off-stage, and there's no real drama around seeing Maleficent care for the girl. Beautifully acted by Jolie, yes; the narrative tension necessary to sustain the movie, no.

Narrative tension is generated when a character has a clear goal accessible to a story's audience, and is blocked from achieving that goal. When an audience has internalized a character achieving that, the narrative tension is transferred to the audience. This is what makes a story compelling.

Maleficent has no narrative tension in its middle section, so the drama of the story sags.

Jolie's wonderful performance can't make up for that.

Jolie as an actress had the same problem in the movie Changeling. Great performance, no narrative tension.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

When a Mystery is a Mystery

My starting point for exploring story structure was a class taught by a literary agent at the time, David Morgan, who had studied with Lajos Egri (The Art of Dramatic Writing!). Egri taught that a story has a premise, character+conflict=resolution. But my background in science fiction had shown me that some stories don't have human characters, or characters at all. In science fiction, some characters embody ideas, not human emotions in conflict. And in literary fiction, some stories also have characters who embody ideas (Camus' The Plague, how middle-class people deal with impending death).

I decided a premise would be a dramatic issue, movement, and the movement of that issue to fulfillment.

Later I found it easier for students to think of a story's core dramatic issue as its promise, and that a storyteller could begin a story with the introduction of its promise and moving it toward its fulfillment.

The science fiction film Under the Skin demonstrates how a story can revolve around ideas more than characters. The main character is an alien that takes on the body of a young female. She/it then goes out seducing young men into a liquid that dissolves their bodies into a slurry fed into a mostly hidden chamber. The alien has only a basic understanding of human communication.

When the alien picks up a young man who has a horribly disfigured face, the alien clearly can't tell the difference, but it does come to take pity on the young man, who is not killed and dissolved. This act of mercy separates the alien from its human male-appearing handlers. It goes off with a man it meets at a bus stop. When the man attempts to initiate sex, the alien has no idea how a male penis and female vagina interact. She runs off, is found in some woods by a rapist, who, when he pulls off some of the alien's human covering, comes back with a can of gas and sets the alien on fire. The alien appears to die, or at least the body it's in dies.

The film seems to be a story about how the alien developing feelings of human compassion doom it.

I'm sure others who watched the film could come to other, equally valid conclusions. This is a film where things happen with no explanation.

For this kind of film to work, a film maker needs to have something to say. The director has something to say, but he's not saying it in the traditional, Hollywood style film that typically offers an accessible main character with a clearly defined issue of human need who transports the story's audience to the fulfillment of its promise. Here, the viewer must interpret what happens and what it means.

Under the Skin does, in its own way, explore the ideas it generates, about how an alien might interact with humans, unlike a film like Prometheus that generates ideas (Jesus was an alien) but doesn't explore them.

Under the Skin is beautiful shot, directed, composed, acted, and edited, so it is a pleasure to experience while it unfolds on the screen. People who like challenging films should give this a view.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

Love in the Movies

When you watch a film like Sleepless in Seattle, you know Ryan and Hanks will find and love each other. Just as easily, in six months they could go through the world's ugliest divorce. There's nothing in the film that really conveys they have intimate feelings for each other. Other Hollywood films might get the main characters into bed but they end up in the same place, two actors pretending to be in love because that's what they are being paid to do.

Then along comes Only Lovers Left Alive, a new film by Jim Jarmusch. To get this out of the way, I love his films, and the way they ask me to think and experience what I see on the screen. What Lovers also conveys through its two main characters is what an intimate relationship between two loving, sexual adults looks like. Watching the film I believed these two characters love each other.

I don't often see this in films, partly I suspect because there aren't many actresses of the caliber of Tilda Swinton. The last time I recall seeing kind of intimacy was in the Jason Bourne films with Matt Damon and Franka Potente. As the two characters became close and fell in love, I could see why he would go through hell to avenge her death.

It does take time to create this kind of relationship, and good acting, and Jarmusch takes the time with two wonderful actors.

As a story, Only Lovers Left Alive is about managing the mundane in an immortal life.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

When a Movie Makes Odd Choices

Notes on Godzilla

Godzilla opens with something huge escaping from an underground cavern in the Philippines, then a nuclear reactor disaster in Japan that takes the life of an American working at the plant, the wife of an engineer played by Bryan Cranston.

Jump ahead 15 years. He's become crazed trying to prove something caused the disaster, that it wasn't a problem with the reactors failing. His now adult son, in the military, doesn't believe him but is willing to join him in a trip into the closed off disaster zone, where they find zero radioactivity. They are quickly captured by the people guarding the secret of what happened, and soon Cranston is dead and a monster that eats radioactive material is unleashed.

So, we've lost what seemed to be the main character, and the monster unleashed is NOT Godzilla, and the son isn't clearly defined as a character. He helps a child find its parents, he's involved in the military mission to try and kill the now TWO monsters that are not Godzilla, and kill Godzilla, too. But he doesn't feel connected to any deeper purpose (other than reconciling briefly with his father); he's just a guy doing his job.

Along the way, many minor characters are given the kind of screen time that would have an impact if the story were more clearly defined. They are simply people responding to a crisis. I never thought I'd see a film where Juliette Binoche made zero impression.

I didn't understand why Bryan Cranston wasn't the main character who is seeking to avenge his wife's death and the humiliation of his warning about what was coming being ignored. I also didn't understand why Godzilla was reduced to the role of a minor character.

In a sense, the movie is trying to be realistic, but it's not realistic that a creature like Godzilla could exist without being noticed or registering on some kind of scientific instruments. In the recent film Battleship it was preposterous that a bunch of old sailors could quickly get an aged Battleship back to sea in fighting condition. But the movie wasn't trying to be realistic, so I just enjoyed the second run, low cost matinee show. They did it with a wink, and I was happy to slyly wink back and think 'bravo!' when the old coots saved the day.

Not so with Godzilla. Visually, the soldiers sky diving into San Francisco was cool. That was about it for me being thrilled watching the film. Monsters destroying stuff is just CGI to me now.

Odd choices all around.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

Acting as a Lens into Character

I recently saw the French film Bicycling With Moliere. It's about a successful actor on a popular drama; he's recognized and pretty much adored wherever he goes. He's decided to prove his chops as an actor by performing Moliere's The Misanthrope with an actor leading a reclusive life on an island. That actor agrees to consider doing the play, but only if they switch doing the lead role during the performance, and if the successful actor will rehearse the play with him for a week.

What I found intriguing in the movie is how, as the actors switch roles in the play, the choices they make for delivering lines speaks to something deeper that animates each man. By the time the popular actor appears in the play and loses his way, it's clear from his rehearsals that he lost his way years before. The busyness of his successful life allowed him to maintain a cheerful, in control facade.

The realization for the reclusive actor is that he can't go back to living among the feral wolves, which is how he sees the people who revolve around the successful actor.

The acting in the movie is subtle and playful, but the story does take each actor to a deeper place.

Actors like Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson became successful, in part, because they choose roles (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard) that took their characters to a place where a facade was replaced by a deeper state of human feeling. When you come across a hugely successful film or story, you'll generally find that transformation of character. It's a journey audiences love to experience.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

Why Transcendence Fails to Transcend

Big budget Hollywood films that fail to find an audience often offer lessons in storytelling. Transcendence is an example.

In most successful films, a main character embodies a story's promise (what the story is about) and that character experiences narrative tension around the course and outcome of the story. Transcendence violates this by starting with the aftermath of what's happened in the film with a major, but secondary character. This sets up a plot question, what happened to create the world we see in the opening scene? We then meet Johnny Depp in the present. He's a scientist working to create a singularity, an artificial, highly intelligent computer system that has the potential to evolve rapidly. But Depp is soon shot and dies, and his consciousness is uploaded into a computer. This takes 25 minutes. The action is slow and the settings mostly dark.

Main character #3 is kidnapped to force him to help shut down the new version of Depp, and he experiences narrative tension about this, but he's not the main character. These scenes run about twenty five minutes.

Eventually he's reunited with Depp's wife, who builds a massive underground compound at Depp's direction and guidance, using new technologies he's creating. A scientist friend gets into the facility and suggests to her the possibility that the A.I. is using Depp's personality to mislead her, and its real plan is to wipe out humanity and take over the world under the guise of using nano-technology to heal the crippled and end pollution. Now she experiences narrative tension. But she's not quite the main character in the film, either.

This builds to a major confrontation and some significant action (the trailer suggests this is an action film; that's not true at all). With the action, there's more tension generated about the plot about how the battle to shut down this facility/Depp will play out. To save his human wife, a newly minted Depp in a physical body allows himself to be infected with a virus she carries.

Depp and the wife he loves die together; her love has pulled on what was left of Depp to do the right thing. He dies, and since everything about his nano technology has already infected the world, everything in the world (anything connected to the internet or run from the internet) shuts down.

The film ends with main character #3 in a garden created by the human Depp that shields some of the nano technology that could rebuild the world. Will he allow the technology to rebuild the world?

The film develops a number of ideas about technology, but none are ever developed. It's also a muddle about who the main character is in the film. Depp and his A.I. version? The wife? The other scientist? It's not clear. They all have prominent roles in the story.

A film can be developed with multiple main characters. L.A. Confidential is a great example, but it's also a great example of story mechanics. Several main characters, but one story (about illusion, reality, and identity) and one plot (who's going to replace Mickey C, and what happened at the Night Owl Cafe?)

You don't find that kind of clarity in Transcendence. Big budget Hollywood films that fail to find and satisfy an audience often have flawed story mechanics, and not having a clearly defined central character is deadly. A film can be told with an ensemble that acts out the promise, it's just hard to do well and easy to do badly.

Helping an audience to transcend mundane reality is a basic goal of a good film. Having a main character the audience relates to or invests in and begins to share that character's narrative tension is a major part of how a good film helps its audience become absorbed in and share the story's journey to the fulflllment of its promise.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

Dale E Basye on Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go (+playlist)

RoboCop Vs RoboCop: An Issue of Tone

RoboCop Vs RoboCop: An Issue of Tone

In screenwriting, a difficult issue for new writers to deal with is tone. A problem in many first scripts is a shift in tone that undercuts the impact of a story. A script with a comedic tone turns to slap stick humor at the climax. A dramatic story (realistic) becomes melodramatic (unrealistic).

The current reboot of RoboCop shows how two movies can have the same basic story and plot (man who becomes mostly robot struggles to retain his humanity) and, because of different tones, turn out to be very different movies.

The original RoboCop, directed by Paul Verhoeven, was both an action film and a satire about the media and corporate greed. We were asked to care about the main character and his struggle to hold on to his humanity but also to enjoy the visceral thrill as his actions to solve his own murder led him to take on both hard core criminals and his corporate masters.

The current RoboCop starts on a satiric note about American, robotic peace-keeping in Tehran, but then shifts to a realistic account (for a movie) of how a near-dead detective is rebuilt in a mostly robotic body, and the complications involved from both a standpoint of science, morality, and corporation machinations. It felt like this took about half the running time of the movie, and the drama was low-key.

The main character, deep into the movie, does sets about to solve his own murder, which makes the plot finally feel like it's getting into gear.

Unfortunately for the movie, since it's taken on a realistic tone, and it takes so long for the plot to hit a higher gear, the movie invites a realistic assessment on what's happening. The problem is, it's tough to sell the idea that Americans would be against robots enforcing laws, when so much has already been set up via computers (cameras scanning crowds and using facial recognition software, scanners automatically recording the license plate of every car that enters a community). Also, a central issue in the movie about congress refusing to allow robots in law enforcement comes across as artificial, because it feels like the issue has already been resolved.

Another problem for realism, when it comes out that a .50 caliber machine gun will take RoboCop apart, no one shoots him with that (or if they do, he survives); and none of the several thousand bullets expended in his direction hit him in the mouth.

The original RoboCop was fresh and bracing and true to itself as a story, the current RoboCop comes across as struggling to be realistic and failing to be true to itself.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

Narration and The Book Thief

by Bill Johnson

The movie The Book Thief opens with narration by death, who adds some comments through the movie. In the film, a young girl is given up by her mother (who is possibly a communist or Jewish) to a German couple just before WWII. The girl is illiterate, but learns to read and then 'borrows' books from a local, well-off woman who lost a son in WWI.

I haven't read the book, but the movie has a golden-hued look that seems out of place with what is happening. The deeper problem is that, until the end of the film, it's not clear why it's narrated by death and what, ultimately, all the golden-hued action is meant to convey.

In the last line of the film, death admits to being haunted by the girl's death. To be a dramatic question for the story, the question of what about the death of her brother haunted the girl, and whether she could survive this haunting, would have given the film and death's narration a dramatic purpose. It's a question that would relate to other families in the film dealing with the deaths of loved ones in the war. But since this line comes at the end of the film, it's only then that the narration serves some dramatic purpose.

The reason people who write screenplays are told to NEVER use narration is that as a device, it lends itself to simply commenting on or explaining the action of a film, but not being dramatic unto itself. Narration as explanation, by its nature, tends to be dramatically flat; it's often the authors using characters to convey information the authors feel the audience needs.

An example of a dramatic use of narration is the film Days of Heaven, narrated by a young girl who doesn't understand what she's seeing, so her narration is dramatically interesting. What the audience sees happening is different that what she relates.

Another example of failed narration was in a horror film that was a remake of a Japanese horror film. In the movie, a new frequency is opened for cell phones, and via that frequency, the dead start returning to this world. The actors in the film all react to this event, but what the story is about is only revealed with the last line of narration, 'The dead had a stronger live to live than the living.' If that had been framed as a question at the beginning of the film, all the action would have had a purpose.

In films like this, actors are left to pose, because they aren't given characters to play. All the actors in The Book thief do a good job of posing, but they aren't given fully-realized characters to play.

Something else that's interesting about narration, even though screen writers are taught to avoid the technique, it's often used in popular films, Memento being a great example.

If you're going to use narration in a script, make sure it serves a dramatic purpose unto itself.

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To read some of my longer reviews of popular movies, check out my writing workbook, A Story is a Promise, available on Amazon Kindle, and Smashwords.