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

Last night, I watched the first couple episodes of Island at War, a BBC miniseries from a couple years ago. (Yes, apparently it’s British Week in the Screenplay Science laboratory.) Overall, it’s proving to be a nicely executed but not particularly exceptional show about the invasion of the British Channel Islands by Nazi Germany in WWII, but one scene in the first episode really popped. Cassie Mahy (played by Saskia Reeves) has just lost her husband, an amiable civilian, to enemy fire, and rather than exhibit the standard, obvious signs of grief — tears, weeping, proclamations that she can’t go on without him, etc. — she gets angry. The fact that this is entirely in character (partly for reasons that aren’t revealed until the second episode) is a bonus, but the real point is that her bitter, furious tirade at her dead husband for going out on the pier and getting shot make us feel her grief far more viscerally and immediately than any mere crying jag ever could. As executed, the scene is tremendously powerful. If it were written “on the nose” (in industry term for dialogue in which characters say exactly what they’re feeling, e.g. “I miss my husband terribly”) it would’ve been mediocre at best.

OTN writing is a deadly mistake that’s unfortunately very commonly made by new screenwriters… and by a surprising number of more experienced ones, too. Part of the problem, I think, is that while teachers and screenwriting books almost all warn against the practice, they never seem to give a very good explanation of why it’s so bad. Oh, they’ll say things like “it has no subtext,” but that’s not really helpful to someone trying to acquire an emotional understanding of what works and what doesn’t work.

The real reason OTN writing is a disaster is actually very simple: it provides no conflict, so it just lies there dead on the page or the screen. Think about it. In Island at War, Cassie Mahy is trying to fight the anguish and desolation which threaten to overwhelm her. We already know she’s grief-stricken, because we saw that she loved her husband. A scene in which she merely expressed her grief wouldn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, and it wouldn’t contain any conflict, either. Conflict, though, both internal and external, is literally what stories are made of. And conflict provides tension, because we want to see how it resolves and whether the characters get what they want or not. Without conflict, you don’t even really have a story at all. Subtext is important not only because it adds layers of meaning to your story, but because it adds conflict — between what a character is saying and what he or she really means, between characters who may not fully understand each other, inside a character who is trying to fight some sort of feeling or drive, and so on.

And yes, the infamous rat (which has now shown up in FX’s otherwise somewhat promising new show Damages!) is quintessential on-the-nose writing.

Well, it’s been a very long day, so I’m off to watch disc one of the Fanny Trilogy. Maybe it’ll spawn a new blog entry, but even if it doesn’t, I’m finally going to get out of the office and see some new releases this weekend, so come hell or high water, I’ll start talking about current movies again within the next few days. Hope you all have a great night.

It’s a cliche by now to observe that once you notice or remark upon something, suddenly you see it everywhere and it practically seems to be stalking you, but in this case, I think it actually may be true.

OK, not really, but it is pretty strange to blog about the awful and heavy-handed symbolism of the rat in The Departed and then to see the same damn thing just a few weeks later in an otherwise stupendously good BBC production from seventeen years ago. And when I say “the same damn thing”, I mean that literally. In The Departed, Scorcese put up a huge neon sign saying “CORRUPTION HERE!” with a big blinking arrow pointing right at the government by having a rat run up and across a railing with the Massachusetts State House in the background, and in House of Cards, Paul Seed did the same thing about a dozen times over by repeatedly cutting to rats cavorting through London, generally against the backdrop of one august and historic government structure or another. In fact, I have a very strong suspicion that Scorcese got the idea from House of Cards; he’s certainly very literate in film, and I’m sure he’s seen plenty of TV too.

(On a side note, isn’t it interesting (and depressing) that we have a variety of expressions for people who are conversant with literature — “well-read” and “literate” being just two of many — but none for people who have a great deal of knowledge about film? I was tempted to roll my own and call Scorcese “well-viewed”, but I thought people might think I was saying his films have been seen by a lot of people. We movie people need more respect!)

For those of you who don’t know what the heck House of Cards is, it’s a fantastic miniseries about a consummate back-room politician who decides one day that he wants to become Prime Minister of England (the ultimate front-room position) and goes after the job with every last bit of guile and venom he can muster. He regularly confides in us, the audience, but he keeps his hand carefully hidden from all the other characters in the story, and as his schemes unfold, we can only marvel at their ever-greater audacity — and, at least for awhile, at their continuing success.

Obviously, House has some clear similarities to Shakespeare’s Richard III, and also to the stellar but unfortunately short-lived TV show Profit, both of which I highly recommend. The beauty of Profit and Richard III — and of the vast majority of House of Cards, for that matter — is that they’re stuffed with magnificently-executed subtext, and understanding all the layers of meaning that unspool before us is tremendously rewarding, because we feel like we’ve accomplished something by figuring them out and putting them together. Furthermore, because we’ve drawn our conclusions ourselves, we take a sort of emotional ownership of them, accepting them as our own. That’s why preaching and overt messages rarely work; they’re finished conclusions people are trying to force on us, not deductions we’re allowed to partake in.

The rats, unfortunately, are the worst sort of preaching, completely free of subtext, and as such they stand in stark and unfortunate contrast to the rest of The Departed and House of Cards, both of which are otherwise written with great subtlety and skill.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled rodent-free browsing.

…The Departed! Everyone give a big round of applause to William Monahan and Martin Scorcese!

OK, OK, calm down. It may seem foolish (and probably hella-arrogant) to criticize a movie that won four Oscars, including Best Adapted Screenplay, not to mention one that made almost $300M at the worldwide box office and was 93% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, but just as most awful movies have some good qualities hiding somewhere, at least if you look hard enough, most great ones have something wrong with them that we can learn from. It’s difficult enough for a single person to create something that’s truly perfect (and when I say “difficult enough” I really mean “so close to totally impossible that mere mortals need not apply, and that means you… and to be fair, me too, and also pretty much everyone else in the known universe”) but when creating that something requires dozens or even hundreds of people to work together despite disagreements, miscommunications, clashes of ego, and sheer outbursts of wrongheadedness, and when you also factor in time and budgetary constraints, the sales and marketing people who have to sign off on every significant choice anyone makes, and everything else that can go wrong in the complex and insanely rushed bubble universe of a film production, perfection is even more impossible to attain. (Work with me here; just like there are bigger and smaller infinities†, there are more- and less-impossible impossibles.) So it’s no insult to say that The Departed left a little room for improvement. It’s a great movie and I was rooting for it on Oscar night, but something bothered me when I saw it on opening weekend, and it bothered me even more when I watched it again on DVD last night.

By now, some of you have surely figured out what I’m talking about. Yes, ladies and germs, children of all ages, Future Oscar-Winners Yourselves, I’m talking about the rat. Watching that stupid bleeping rat scurry along the railing in the final scene was like having Scorcese walk up to my seat and personally bludgeon me to death with a giant fifty-pound wheel of stinky cheese while screaming at the top of his lungs, “Did you get it? Did you get it? Come on, did you get it? Corruption is everywhere! Corruption is EVERYWHERE! GET IT!!?!??” Gee, like the message hadn’t come through already.

Don’t get me wrong; the rest of the movie was great. The dialogue was fantastic, the acting was mostly†† stupendous, scene after scene unspooled to electric effect, and Monahan took a very difficult-to-structure story and structured it magnificently. Besides, the rat wasn’t what I call a “central” flaw, which is to say an element which significant other parts of the story depend on and are therefore undermined by, so in the larger scheme of things, it wasn’t all that important. But symbols shouldn’t be jackhammers (getting hit by a jackhammer hurts) and I wish a misstep of this magnitude had come earlier in the film instead of right at the end.

(Well, actually, I wish there hadn’t been any missteps, of this magnitude or any other, but that kind of goes without staying.)

Anyway, some people I’ve talked to about this have insisted that I’m missing the point, that the rat was funny. Maybe it would have been funny in another movie, but The Departed isn’t a comedy. It wasn’t supposed to be funny — or at least not funny in that broad, almost slapsticky way. Everything else in the movie, including its comic moments, grew organically out of the fantastic characters William Monahan created (based in part on the work of Siu Fai Mak and Felix Chong on Infernal Affairs) but the rat was pure editorial commentary. It wasn’t just a jarring tonal shift, it was Scorcese interrupting the story with a Very Important Announcement™, and as such it sucked us out of our state of investment in the characters and story and therefore reduced our emotional involvement in the film.

Since emotional involvement is the single most important thing a film or screenplay can hope to offer, I’m going to make double-damn sure that I don’t ever make that mistake now that I’ve seen The Departed a couple times and had the rat shoved down my throat so memorably and unpleasantly, and I suggest you do the same.

And with that, I’m off. I promise I’ll talk about some more recent movies — brand spanking new theatrical releases, in fact — very soon.

†Seriously, I’m not making this up, and if you look into it, you’ll find out it actually makes perfect sense.

††I felt that Mark Wahlberg was a slightly weak link. It’s not that he was bad; in fact, he did very solid work, and in any other movie, he’d have shone. It’s just that he paled by comparison next to the likes of Leonardo di Caprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga, and Alec Baldwin. The Departed had an extraordinary cast, maybe one of the deepest benches ever assembled for a movie like this.