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

“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.

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.

The Incredible Hulk, or rather, Bruce Banner and not the Hulk himself, is one of the greatest characters ever created. I can already hear the groans of undead snobs rolling over in their graves and preparing to claw their way up through the dirt and grass (and maybe concrete) just so they can sink their decaying teeth into me and eat my brains for daring to say something so sacrilegious, but bear with me. In his very conception, the Hulk has every bit as much to say about humanity as The Lord of the Flies or any other treasure of literature, because he’s a metaphor for the constant struggle we all face to reconcile our animal natures with the demands of civilization. Everyone has a raging beast of some sort within, whether it has humungous fists and a hard right jab or maybe just a really acid tongue, and everyone has to struggle to restrain that beast in order to get along with other people and fit into society. To borrow a term from Ursula K. Le Guin, the Hulk is just a literalization of the metaphor of that beast, and as such, you can do virtually anything with him. He’s a fantastic tool for writing stories that are not only exciting and larger than life, but also deep, emotional, philosophical, and universal.

The latest attempt at bringing the Hulk to a wide audience, though, The Incredible Hulk (starring the great Edward Norton as Bruce Banner and an unfortunate CGI creation as the Hulk) fails to realize most of that potential, because the creative team behind the film turned the struggle within Bruce Banner from a war between his two natures — and by extension, all our two natures — into a detached clinical problem involving pulse rates and some multicolored goop that can be viewed under a microscope. I’m not saying science fiction (or the trappings thereof) shouldn’t be involved in a Hulk story; that would be silly. But instead of Banner struggling with his own impulses towards anger, his own desire to smash, and his own very obvious need to civilize himself and maintain the restraint of civilization at all times, we just see him watching a heart rate monitor and trying to keep the number from getting too high when he runs. In other words, the writers turned the Hulk from a tragic flaw that arises from Banner’s very nature into an arbitrary problem that could have happened to anyone, and in so doing they stripped the universal, relatable metaphor out of the story and thus deprived the audience of an absolutely essential point of emotional identification — the very thing that makes a story work in the first place.

I imagine they did this to try to make Banner more “likeable”, since that’s one of the big watchwords in the studio system nowadays, and a guy with an anger management problem doesn’t necessarily seem “likeable” on the surface, but that’s what good writing is all about: making a flawed and very human person likeable anyway so that we all care about his struggle.

The movie is actually both more successful and somewhat more sadly flawed than I’ve let on, though, because in other areas, the writers did take some advantage of the metaphor. With the exception of true, dyed-in-the-wool, no-exceptions pacifists, most people probably agree that anger and even violence have their place and are sometimes appropriate. Killing someone in self-defense when he’s trying to cut your heart out with a chainsaw, for example, or defending a child from a marauding priest with a raging hard-on, would probably seem appropriate to most people. The key is deciding where and when violence and anger are appropriate, and using them only in those times and places — and then only in appropriate measures. With Emil Blonsky, the villain of the film (played wonderfully by Tim Roth) we get the perfect foil for the twin characters of Banner and Hulk: someone who wants to be all id all the time and has no use whatsoever for restraint. In fact, in turning himself into the Abomination, he completely and utterly repudiates civilization and thus creates the ultimate justification — indeed demand — for Banner to let the Hulk loose: to defend ordinary civilized people from monsters like Blonsky.

As far as it goes, this is absolutely terrific writing.  Banner and the audience both get to see the consequences of embracing anger (e.g. the Hulk) without any kind of limit, and Banner is also forced to learn that sometimes the Hulk (i.e. anger) is actually a necessary and good thing.  The problem is that Banner’s decision to willingly become the Hulk and fight the Abomination hasn’t been set up as the culmination of a struggle within himself between his desire to be peaceful and his very human urge to lash out. It’s not the resolution of a character arc in which he finally realizes he’s been trying to make a false choice and he suddenly has to look at everything he thinks he knows in a whole new light. It’s not even a particularly meaningful character arc point at all, because Banner has been so sanitized and stripped of depth that the choice doesn’t actually mean very much at all.

Instead, Banner just sits around sulking about how bad it sucks to be him and how he can’t be with the woman he loves and everyone’s chasing him and it’s just not fair, and then some shit happens, the end. There’s some good, fun stuff in the movie, but overall, it’s a big missed opportunity, and the money folks could’ve made a heckuva lot more money off their investment if they’d just paid more attention to the script.  It’s understandable that they didn’t, because they’re money people after all, not script people, and script people need money people just as much as money people need script people, but the problems in communication between the two are a subject for another day.

Last night I watched an interesting little Italian thriller called The Backwoods.  (Well, actually, it’s called Bosque de Sombras, but it stars Gary Oldman and Paddy Considine along with actors of various other nationalities, so I’m going to stick with the English title.)  Anyway, it’s not bad, though it also has some pretty serious flaws, but one scene in the latter half of the story got me thinking about a common problem in movies: Mexican standoffs in which one character just arbitrarily gives up.

Without spoiling anything significant about the movie (which isn’t good enough to recommend, but also isn’t bad enough to recommend against) there’s a scene in which a character, we’ll call him Arygay Oldmanay, has a gun drawn on another character.  He’s got the other guy dead to rights, no question about it, but then a third guy sneaks up behind Arygay and points a gun at him.  Now, in the broader sense of the term, this is a Mexican standoff, because neither side has an advantage, so the situation is deadlocked.  Yes, the third guy can shoot Arygay, but only if he doesn’t mind Arygagy shooting and killing his friend.  (OK, screw this “Arygagy” stuff; he’s just Gary from now on.)  So you’d figure that Gary would realize that the gun in his hand, which he has pointed right at the third guy’s friend, is his only piece of leverage, the one thing keeping him alive, right?

If so, you’d be wrong.  As in a really startling number of other movies, Gary lays down his weapon and gives up.  Why?  I can only guess that he’d seen too many movies, and he just thought that this was what he was supposed to do in situations like this, because it sure doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to me.  Now, if I were in Gary’s position and some kind of expert marksman had a high-powered sniper rifle with a laser sight trained right on my skull and the marksman assured me that he could turn out my lights the instant he saw me even think about pulling the trigger and long before I actually did it, meaning that the deterrence value of my weapon was genuinely neutralized, then maybe I would lay down my gun.  Otherwise, not on your life.  I’d threaten, I’d bluster, I’d bluff, I’d bargain — I’d do whatever I could to stay alive, but the one thing I wouldn’t ever do is conclude that surrender is the only option.  So when Gary gave up, it yanked me right out of the movie, which up to that point had at least created a pretty effectively creepy atmosphere.

I realize it’s hard to come up with a creative solution to a problem that’s already been put up on screen a million and a half times, but at least don’t just punk out on the problem — do something that makes sense, both narratively speaking and for the characters in the situation you’ve created.  Otherwise poor saps like me will continue to waste valuable rental dollars on disappointing movies, and then we won’t watch anything else you do in the future!

Every now and then the success of a movie surprises me a little, and May 2008 is one of those times.  Why is Iron Man doing so well?

The villain’s plan is the most important part of an action movie or a thriller, but the plan in Iron Man isn’t just generic, it’s not even sketched out very clearly in the first place.  And to make matters worse, whatever exactly it is, it has something to do with selling arms to bad guys in other parts of the world who want to use them on their own people, or maybe on their own immediate neighbors, meaning it has no direct effect on any of the characters in the film, on any of the people they care about, or even on most people in the audience in most parts of the globe.  So the stakes suck.

(Oh, and note to manufacturers illegally selling arms: don’t leave your company’s name prominently stenciled on the boxes.  I mean, duh!)

Just as importantly, the resolution of the protagonist’s character arc (his growth, or the lesson he learns) has to be intimately bound up with the defeat of the villain’s plan — it’s literally the way the protagonist changes and improves as a person that enables him to finally defeat the villain — but in Iron Man, the creative team actually made Tony Stark’s character development part of the problem!  He starts out as a stereotypical weapons dealer who’s unmoved by the harm wreaked by his work, but when he’s kidnapped by terrorists and he sees the toll his weapons take up close and personal, he vows he won’t sell any more weapons until he figures out some way to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands and being used against innocent people.  Sounds like a neat idea, both in terms of weapons and character design, right?  But while his solution is the Iron Man suit, something that can’t be used against innocent people because he’s the one piloting it, the suit immediately complicates matters enormously when the Dread and Terrifying Mr. Generic, I mean, Obadiah Skid-Marks, or whatever the heck the villain’s name is, copies the suit and not only makes a much bigger, stronger version of it but plans to sell boatloads of them to bad guys all over the world!  Kind of makes the whole Iron Man suit concept look like a really bad idea, huh?  Sort of makes you wish Tony Stark had just stuck to being a heartless weapons dealer and left well enough alone, right?

Well, imagine instead if the Dread and Terrifying Mr. Generic actually had a really cool villain’s plan: sell (or even give!) a whole bunch of weapons to terrorists so they can stage a huge attack on the United States… which would force the US to buy lots and lots and lots of weapons from the Dread and Terrifying Mr. Generic in order to fight back, making him super-rich and mega-powerful!  Then maybe he wouldn’t be so generic, and people in the audience would really care about (and understand) his plan and the efforts of the hero to stop him.  Even people in other countries would care a lot, because nobody without a vested interest in the proceedings wants the US to go to war.  Let’s face it, war pretty much sucks infected corpses for everyone.

If this were Stane’s plan, then Tony Stark’s character growth would be perfectly and completely bound up with the conflict of the story: his earlier uncaring self would have enabled his co-executive Mr. Generic’s devious villainy, and his new, better self (and the Iron Man suit his new, better self created) would be required to defeat Generic and his terrorist army — and better yet, he could defeat them without even starting a war at all.  That would be awesome.  That would be an incredibly satisfying ending.  And since we’re at war now in the real world, and because it often seems like there are no good solutions, just more problems, it would give the audience a huge cathartic release of all the tension and fear they’re carrying around because of real-world events — tension and fear which can’t, at the moment, be released in the real world.  That’s called taking advantage of the zeitgeist.

Some of you may be figuring I’m completely full of ass because Iron Man is making tons and tons of bank and looks to be a monster success, but after some thought, I came to the conclusion that there are two basic reasons for that.  One, the economy sucks and the war sucks and everything sucks and there seems to be no way out, so just like a really full balloon can wind up being popped by a lot of things, even a brush with a sticker magnet on the fridge, not just by a really well-sharpened needle, people were primed for release and Iron Man provided it.  And two, which is kind of a variation on one, it was the first movie of the summer, and whatever its flaws, it provided some definite summer pleasures, including Robert Downey Jr.’s awesome lead performance, nice acting all around, some really fun effects, a few good suit sequences, and the first appearance of a popular superhero character in his own movie.  But I’ll make you a bet that unfortunately nobody will ever be able to collect on either way: if the script had been structured and written better, the movie would’ve made even more money.  A lot more money.  And it would’ve built even more interest in the inevitable sequel.  Unless someone has a time machine or a scope that can look into alternate universes, there’s no way to prove I’m right, but I’m sure I am.