A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

“This violence contains a movie, but only intermittently.” -Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Well-shot and well-edited violence porn.” -Mike Thomas of the Chicago Sun-Tribune.

“This time, it’s impersonal.” -Kyle Smith of the New York Post.

Can you guess which one was the negative review? No clicking allowed, especially since Mike Thomas’s review isn’t available online anymore!

Never mind. The point is that Rambo didn’t do so well with critics. But hey, apparently it’s violence porn. Expecting Rambo to be a critical success would be like betting on Hostel (33% fresh on the Cream of the Crop section of Rotten Tomatoes) or Saw III (6% fresh on Cream of the Crop, all of 27% fresh overall) to win the Oscar for Best Picture, right? Movies like Rambo aren’t made for a handful of ivory-tower eggheads who spend their lives mentally masturbating onto the pages of some obscure academic journal that only twelve other people in the whole world even bother to pretend to read; they’re audience movies.

Except Rambo wasn’t exactly a hit at the box office, either. Oh, it got off to a pretty good start despite the reviews — it did more than $18M on its opening weekend here in the US — but then, once people had gotten a look at it, it dropped off a cliff. It cost $50M to make and it didn’t even gross $43M domestic. Ouch!

That’s too bad, because there’s the seed of a really good movie in there.

It starts off with a burnt-out Rambo living in Thailand, making a living capturing snakes for a local tourist attraction and basically avoiding all engagement with other people. Then a group of violence-hating Christian missionaries show up and force Rambo out of his shell. They want to hire him to ferry them upriver into Burma, where they plan to minister to the Karen people, an ethnic minority group which is being brutally oppressed by the military junta ruling the country. Rambo isn’t interested — he tells them that unless they’re bringing the Karen rebels guns, they won’t change a thing — but the group’s lone woman, Sarah (played by Julie Benz) manages to form some kind of tentative connection with him, and he reluctantly agrees. (The actual persuasion scene is by far the worst part of the movie. It wants to convey Rambo’s bitter philosophy and the emotional scar tissue he’s built up over the years, but the dialogue is wincingly awful, and utterly superficial to boot.) Naturally, the missionaries get into trouble soon after he drops them off, and Rambo winds up having to go on a rescue mission with a bunch of mercenaries hired by the church which sponsored the mission.

This setup has the potential to explore the conflict between pacifism and violent reality, the near-impossibility of maintaining any kind of idealism and engagement with the world when nothing you do ever seems to make a damn bit of difference, the necessity of compromise… all of which are deep philosophical issues, and yet deep as they are, these philosophical issues could all be dramatized and made meaningful to millions upon millions of people through the medium of an action movie. That doesn’t sound so much like “violence porn” after all, does it?

The problem is that Stallone left most of those conflicts in the seed stage instead of growing them into complete character arcs and a fully developed story. And this is where the movie would have benefited from a little more ivory-tower eggheadedness, both from a critical perspective and at the box office.

My friend Bill Martell (whose screenwriting blog, Sex in a Submarine, I highly recommend) defines a story as the time when the protagonist has to solve his inner problem in order to solve his outer problem. (Or her inner and outer problems, but since we’re talking about Rambo here, I’ll stick with male pronouns for the rest of this post.) That’s a great definition, because it makes it clear that for a story to work, something in the outer world, some kind of outer problem, forces the protagonist to change in order to successfully deal with it.

For me, this approach to storytelling has always called to mind the Hegelian dialectic, a branch of philosophy designed to make sense of change by breaking it down into three stages: the thesis, or the initial or preexisting state of affairs; the antithesis, an idea or force which contradicts or opposes the thesis; and the synthesis, the resolution of the tension between the thesis and antithesis via mutual negation and transformation^*. In screenwriting terms, it’s useful to look at the protagonist at the beginning of the story, or rather at his attitudes and psychological makeup, as the thesis. The antithesis, then, is whatever contradicts or opposes either the protagonist’s approach to life or what he stands for, and the conflict between them forms both the narrative arc of the story and the character arcs of the protagonist and whichever characters embody the antithesis.

Most people would probably assume that the antagonist is the antithesis, but that’s often not the case. In Rambo, the villain is the head of the local Burmese military detachment, the guy responsible for all the torturing, raping and killing we see, and also the guy who abducts Sarah and her fellow missionaries and feeds one of them to a bunch of hungry pigs. (And no, it’s not a pretty sight.) But he’s not the antithesis. In the beginning of the movie, Rambo’s approach to dealing with the horrors of the world is to disengage and avoid, and up to this point, it’s been effective as far as it goes. The antithesis to disengagement from horror, though, isn’t more horror, it’s engagement with horror, fighting against horror and trying to do something about it. In other words, Sarah is Rambo’s antithesis, and not just because she wants to go to Burma and help the Karen people while he thinks she’s wasting her time, but also because she’s resolutely non-violent while he’s, well, Rambo.

It’s the tension between these two very different approaches to life which forms the story, and we expect both characters to grow and change by the time the end credits roll. Obviously, Rambo is moved to action by Sarah’s plight, and in the end he should realize that he really can make a difference by helping the Karen rebels defeat the Burmese military. And Sarah, presumably, should rethink her absolute, categorical no-exceptions-ever-no-matter-what opposition to violence once she realizes that some people truly are nothing more than monsters and that she and her fellow missionaries (not to mention a whole bunch of innocent Karen people) would have died if not for the violent measures Rambo took to save them.

Unfortunately, Stallone didn’t properly dramatize either character arc, and he gave Sarah’s particularly short shrift. There’s a moment in the climactic battle against the military when Michael, one of the other missionaries (played by Paul Schulze) grabs a rock and bashes in an enemy soldier’s head, but it feels cheap, because the movie didn’t lay much of a foundation for his change of heart, and more importantly, it makes the problem with Sarah even more glaringly obvious, because after her initial platitudes, we never get much of a sense of what her attitude towards violence (or towards its personification, Rambo) has become. She should have changed over the course of the story, and her evolution should have formed her character arc and helped mold both Rambo’s arc and the steps of the plot, but instead she played very little part in the story beyond being a damsel in distress.

Here’s one example. There’s a great scene early on when Rambo and the missionaries are in his boat heading upriver towards Burma. They run into some pirates, and just before the pirates draw their weapons and start shooting (and kidnapping and raping and torturing and god knows what else) Rambo pulls a gun and kills them all. The missionaries, of course, are horrified, and Rambo naturally wants to turn around and go home… but then the scene shoots itself in the foot. Michael is outraged, but Sarah tells the other missionaries that if they go back, the killing will have been in vain, and she puts her hand on Rambo’s arm and gently persuades him to finish the trip. The problem is that this doesn’t create conflict between Rambo and Sarah, and it doesn’t advance the theme of the story or generate movement in their character arcs, either. Nor does it make a whole lot of sense. Michael already regards Rambo as a disgusting and irredeemable sinner; he should have been the one to coldly insist that Rambo discharge his mission and bring them to Burma so that the deaths of the pirates won’t be completely pointless. Sarah, by contrast, who’s felt some kind of connection to Rambo, who’s had some degree of belief that there’s something worthwhile buried within him, and yet whose pacifism truly comes from the heart, should have been horrified and repulsed. Instead of calmly touching his arm, a gesture of attraction, she should be at the far end of the boat, pressed up as far away from Rambo as she can get, and deep down, Rambo should be hurt by her rejection.

In the end, however, she should be the one to accept the necessity of violence, at least in some circumstances, not Michael. (Though maybe not through actually bashing in someone’s head, since that runs the risk of feeling cliched and obvious.) By the same token, though, Rambo should realize that violence isn’t the whole answer. Yes, it’s necessary sometimes, but he should finally acknowledge that the sort of work that the missionaries want to do — bringing medicine and education to the villagers, for example — is just as important. The simplest way to establish this would be for Rambo to see how much the missionaries’ work means to the Karen villagers; he could form a bond with some of them and decide to stay in Burma and continue helping them after defeating the evil Burmese military guy. (After all, they didn’t wipe out the whole Burmese army, just a relative handful of soldiers and one psychotic leader among many, so the troubles of the Karen people are hardly over.) Instead, we get a complete non sequitur in the form of a coda in which he walks up to his father’s house, having abandoned the rebels and returned home to the US, bang, the end. What does that have to do with reengaging with the world and taking a not-always-violent stand against evil? Absolutely nothing.

A large part of the problem is that nobody involved with the film seemed quite sure what they wanted to do with the relationship between Sarah and Rambo. At times it seems like there’s a potential romantic attachment forming between them, but it never goes anywhere, and at other times it actually looks like she might already be involved with Michael, who’s the head of the missionary group. Perhaps people were nervous about the age difference between Stallone and Julie Benz, but if that was the case, they should have just cast someone a little older in the role of Sarah, because a genuine romantic connection between them would have made the Hegelian dialectic formed by their conflicting worldviews much more personal and deeply felt. Their attraction to each other would have symbolized the fact that his tendency to violence as a first resort and her naive but idealistic pacifism needed to mate with each other, figuratively speaking, and create something new and improved. Separately, they were incomplete and flawed human beings, but together, they would have been freed of each of their individual weaknesses, and as a result they would have been far more capable of dealing with both the threat of the Burmese military and the needs of the Karen people than either of them were alone. They needed each other, in other words.

Anyway, it was certainly fun seeing Rambo back on the big screen and kicking some evil ass, but imagine how much more satisfying this alternate version of the movie would have been. He would have finally, truly defeated his inner demons, he would have made a real and lasting difference in the world, and as a result, he would have finally gotten the girl and ended his long monk-like exile from everyday human society. I don’t know about you, but I’d have bought that movie on Blu-Ray instead of just renting it from Netflix, and I’m sure it would have made much more money at the box office too.

 

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^*(I’m simplifying, of course, and Hegel himself actually never espoused the model which bears his name; in fact, he opposed this sort of analysis entirely, though it is based in large part on his work, but that’s another subject entirely.)

Tags: Bill Martell, Box Office, Character Arc, Despair, Hegel, Hegelian dialectic, Hostel, Inner Conflict, Julie Benz, Paul Schulze, Rambo, Saw III, Sylvester Stallone, Theme

“I’ve seen now what I have to become to stop men like him.”

That one line from the trailer sums up what The Dark Knight wants to be about — Bruce Wayne’s internal battle over whether he really wants to turn into the kind of person he’d have to become to defeat the likes of the Joker, and by extension the larger question of just how much good has to compromise in order to defeat evil. It’s a question which really connects with the zeitgeist right about now, what with all the fear and scare-mongering over terrorism and the justifications being thrown around for torture, rendition, spying and so on, which is one reason the movie is doing so well at the box office.

Note, however, that I said that’s what the movie wants to be about. Unfortunately, it doesn’t entirely hit the mark.  No process of internal change or growth happens all at once; it inevitably involves a series of steps.  In fact, that’s pretty much the definition of a character arc — the steps the character takes in growing and changing over the course of the story. Good screenwriting involves (among many other things) dramatizing all the important components of the protagonist’s arc in a smooth, believable and interesting fashion. In The Dark Knight, though, one of the biggest and most important steps happens entirely offscreen!

A little background. The Joker has announced that he’s going to kill someone new every day until Batman comes forward and unmasks himself, and he’s begun to deliver on his threat. Bruce decides he can’t take the guilt anymore, so he tells Harvey Dent, Gotham City’s crusading District Attorney, to call a press conference at which he’ll announce that he’s Batman and turn himself in to the police.  Batman hanging up his cowl and going to jail — pretty dramatic, huh?  Of course, we know it can’t happen because then there’d be no sequels and probably no movie either, but it’s a great idea because it creates a ton of tension: we’re dying to see what happens to change his mind and how much the decision to keep being Batman and risk the lives of more innocents costs him.

At the press conference, though, Dent is the one who announces that he’s Batman and turns himself in, and Bruce Wayne just stands around on the sidelines looking rich and lounge-y. WTF? Seriously, OMGWTFBBQ? Well, later we find out that Dent persuaded Batman to use him as bait to trap the Joker instead of just turning himself in and trusting the Joker to stop killing people. (Like that was ever a good plan anyway.) This makes for a decent moment of surprise at the press conference when the wrong Batman steps forward, but it comes at the expense of the most important turning point in Bruce Wayne’s entire character arc — when he decides not to give up and to keep fighting no matter the cost.

Look at it this way: for Bruce Wayne to decide to give in to the Joker’s demands, he should have reached the point of ultimate despair. He should have put everything he had into the fight against the Joker, and yet the Joker should have utterly defeated him. Giving up should have seemed like the only viable option remaining, because it should’ve been absolutely clear that there was just no conceivable way he could ever win without either killing a whole boatload of innocent bystanders in the process or turning into a monster even worse than the Joker — or more likely, both. Then surrendering would almost make sense, and we’d share Batman’s despair.

The problem is that at this point in the movie, we haven’t yet seen him give his all against the Joker. In fact, we haven’t even seen him come close. They’ve really only just begun to scuffle, and their biggest encounters are yet to come. So what does that make Batman, a quitter? A wimp? A loser?

Now think about what it should take to change his mind at this point. Remember, the Joker should have beaten him at every turn and left him with nothing but the nuclear option, becoming even worse than the Joker in order to defeat him, which would be the ultimate Pyrrhic victory. Given the theme of the movie, there are really only two basic options. First, something or someone could restore Bruce’s faith in himself, his confidence that he can win and his certainty that he’s inherently good enough that he could never become truly evil like the Joker. Or second, it could become clear to him that however horrible the collateral damage caused by his battle against the Joker might be, the damage done by a Joker unrestrained by the Batman would be far, far worse.

What The Dark Knight offers us, though, is Harvey Dent coming up with a new plan. This suggests that Batman’s despair was pretty shallow and unnecessary — that all he actually needed to do was put a little more thought into the problem, but that he decided it would be easier to just give up. It makes Batman look even look more like a quitter. And it also makes him look kind of stupid.

Luckily, most of the rest of the movie is so crackerjack-super-fantastic-awesome-good that it’s possible to sort of gloss over this flaw while watching it, but there are some other problems I’ll talk about in future posts.

Tags: Aaron Eckhart, Batman, Box Office, Character Arc, Christian Bale, Christopher Nolan, Consequences, Cusp, Despair, Eat My Brains, Inner Conflict, Joker, Stakes, The Dark Knight, Theme, Villain's Plan, Zeitgeist

Here’s what Netflix says about The Asphalt Jungle.

Nominated for four Academy Awards and long considered a noir classic, John Huston’s heist film follows a band of criminal masterminds (Sam Jaffe, Sterling Hayden and Louis Calhern) as they carry out a million-dollar jewelry-store burglary that will have them set for life. Snatching the loot is easy, but their greed soon leads to double crosses and murder. The film features an early appearance by Marilyn Monroe as a sexy moll.

Sounds pretty awesome, huh? Gritty and intense and with some sex appeal, too, courtesy of Marilyn Monroe, right? Sadly, not so much. There’s really not a whole lot of double-crossing or back-stabbing, or chasing or law-breaking either, and in the end the movie winds up feeling more like a sluggish morality play in which everything that happens happens because the filmmakers or the studio thought they ought to be sending the correct social message rather than because of the dictates of the story and the characters.

I wonder if they realized that at the time, though. It’s all too easy to incorporate unexamined assumptions into your writing, because those assumptions just plain feel right and even inevitable. It’s something everyone should be careful of.

Tags: Arbitrary, John Huston, Louis Calhern, Marilyn Monroe, Oscars, Sam Jaffe, Sterling Hayden

Have you ever seen the corpse of someone who jumped or fell off a tall building?  If you haven’t, count yourself lucky.  I promise you, it’s not pretty.  But in the movies (and on TV) everything’s hunky-dory if someone just catches you before you hit the ground.  Take Hancock, which is merely the latest example out of, well, a few million metric buttloads.  In a widely-seen trailer moment, Hancock teaches an obnoxious kid a lesson by tossing him about seventy five miles straight up into the sky and then catching him just a fraction of a microsecond before he slams into the pavement and explodes into a giant mess full of blood and guts and partially digested Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups and miscellaneous other substances better left unnamed.  In reality, being caught like that would be pretty much just as bad as hitting the ground, because the real problem is the force of impact.  If you want to survive a fall like that unscathed, you need to slow down gradually, not instantly.  (Hence the use of parachutes as opposed to a bunch of people standing around in a field with their arms out.)  So what Hancock should’ve done was fly well up into the sky, more or less match downward velocities with the jerk he’d tossed up there, grab him, and then gradually decelerate to a nice, easy landing.

Now, I know this is kind of nitpicking, and it may seem like I’m the only one who cares about this particular issue, but it’s representative of a larger problem.  If you want readers and audience members to suspend disbelief, whatever you write has to be completely believable within the context of the story, and it has to be internally consistent.  If that context is a magical fantasy fairy-land where people wave wands made out of special dried mushrooms and conjure up giant fluffy bunnies, then great, conjure all the giant fluffy bunnies you want… as long as people always use those special dried mushroom wands to do it.  If the context of the story is the real world, though, and you’re creating a superhero within that real world that we all live in, then even if the superhero is impossible (or at least unlike anyone that we know of who’s existed to date) the world in which the superhero exists should be the exact same world we all wake up and eat cold Pop Tarts in every day.  In other words, Hancock can be super-tough and survive a fall from the moon; that’s totally fair.  The kid, however, has to be just like every other kid on earth.  He needs a parachute.

Audiences seem pretty used to the catching thing by now, so unless you care about these things like I do, I guess you don’t have to worry about it, but you definitely do need to avoid any obvious inconsistency or implausibility that people haven’t been conditioned to accept.  It’s what I call my “people have to get squished” rule — unless there’s a good and specific reason for someone not to get squished, and unless you’ve already established that reason in your script well before the potential squishing, the logical and expected squishing has to happen.  (And by “squishing”, of course I mean whatever consequence should be unfolding in your story.)  If it doesn’t, you’ve just killed the audience’s or your reader’s suspension of disbelief.  And I promise you, a once-healthy suspension of disbelief splattered all over the ground is an ugly and unfortunate thing.

Tags: Consequences, Peter Berg, Stakes, Suspension of Disbelief, Will Smith