Specific Genre Structures: The Archive
24May
01Apr
Genre Structures, Addendum: Charting the Big Dilemmas
Coming-of-age stories tend to be about making bad decisions until the very end:
An Education:
- W: Accept the come-on? Yes.
- W: Lie to her parents and go to Oxford with him? Yes.
- W: Agree to ignore his crimes? Yes.
- W: Have sex with him? Yes.
- W: Accept the marriage proposal? Yes.
- R: Humiliate herself to get back into school? Yes.
The Bourne Identity:
- R: Speak to the lady at the Embassy? No.
- R: Climb down the wall? Yes.
- R: Trust Marie? Yes.
- R: Continue investigating his past after they discover bad things? No.
- R: Leave Marie and return to Paris? Yes.
- R: Kill Conklin? No.
Alien:
- W: Answer the distress signal? Yes.
- W: Break quarantine? Yes.
- W: Remove the face-hugger or not? No. (To be fair, they can’t figure out how)
- R: Kill the alien or try to preserve it for the company? Kill it.
- R: Blow up the whole ship to kill it? Yes.
- R: Go back for the cat? Yes.
- R: Come home to help with the store? Yes.
- U: Pick up the ear? Yes.
- U: Investigate it outside the law? Yes.
- W: What to do when Dorothy finds him there? Have sex with her.
- W: Hit her when she asks him to? Yes.
- R: Finally tell Sandy everything when Dorothy shows up? Yes.
- U: Go confront Frank? Yes.
- R: Agree to build the weapons for the terrorists or let himself be shot? He pretends to agree under false pretense.
- U: Let Shinzen sacrifice himself so he can escape? Yes.
- R: Get back into the arms business? No.
- W: Trust his partner? Yes.
- U: Take the next step with Pepper she makes herself vulnerable at the fundraiser? Not yet.
- U: Lie to the press about Iron Man? No.
07Nov
Rulebook Casefile: Psychological Arcs in Groundhog Day
- Denial: Phil thinks it’s all a dream
- Anger: Punches out Ned Ryerson, blows off his broadcast.
- Bargaining: Tries to take advantage of situation.
- Depression: Attempts suicide many times
- Acceptance: Tries to make use of this gift.
- We admitted we were powerless over alcohol -- that our lives had become unmanageable: In this case, it’s not alcohol, it’s just selfishness. He hits rock bottom when he ends eight days in a row by getting slapped by Rita, then commits suicide for several days in a row, saying, “I’ve come to the end of me, Rita. There’s no way out now. I just want you to remember that we had a beautiful day together once.”
- Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity: Finally, he decides to just be honest with Rita and tells her that he suspects he might be a god, “Well, not the god, I don’t think, but a god.” After proving that he’s now almost omniscient, she agrees to spend the day with him. At the end of the day, she falls asleep on his bed as he reads poetry, and the only line we hear is “Only god can make a tree.” He realizes that he’s not god after all, because god is a greater power than him.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him: He pauses after reading that line and thinks.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, and...
- Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs: He says to her. “The worst part is that tomorrow you’ll have forgotten all about this. And you’ll treat me like a jerk again. It’s alright. I am a jerk.”
- Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character, and...
- Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings, and...
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all: The next morning, he brings Rita and Larry coffee and muffins and does a much better job with his broadcast..
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others, and...
- Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it: He tries to save the homeless man who he refused to give money to before, but he finds that the man will die no matter what.
- Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out: When the homeless person dies again, he gives up on saving him and looks up to the sky with a questioning look.
- Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs: He helps as many people as he can in the town, doing good all day long, until the whole town is moved by his example, which finally allows him to break out of his spiral.
Of course, it could well be that neither of these arcs was conscious on the part of the screenwriters, and that’s the beauty of it. These thinkers were describing the nature of problem solving, and any well-written story about solving a similar problem will make the same discoveries on its own. Ultimately, self-help gurus and writers are doing the same job: identifying the universal human nature underlying our problems.
24May
Specific Genre Structures, Part 4: Drama and Tragedy
Nevertheless, this does give us a clue as to the nature of Drama: it tends to pick up where comedy leaves off. Comedy ends with the removal of a mask and the beginnings of humility, but that’s where drama tends to begin. Dramas are, more than anything, about growth. The hero’s flaw and the hero’s problem tend to be one and the same: they know that they’re their own worst problem and they’re determined to fix it.
Discontent or Disaster / Humbled Growth / Back-Sliding / Self-Actualization:
- Kramer vs. Kramer
- Ordinary People
- Salvador
- The Wrestler (self-actualization through death)
- The Fighter
- The King’s Speech
Discontent / Rising / Strained to Breaking Point / Death of Body, Career, or Soul:
- Citizen Kane
- The Godfather
- Downhill Racer
- Serpico
- Dog Day Afternoon
- Donnie Brasco (Surprisingly)
- The Talented Mr. Ripley
- American Beauty
- Titanic
- The Black Swan
- There Will Be Blood
Next week, we’ll have one more post before we start go through the structure list, on different psychological arcs that exist alongside these.
23May
Specific Genre Structures, Part 3: Horror
In action and conspiracy movies, we identify with the hero the whole time. Even when the heroes are kicking themselves in the third quarter for being overconfident in the second quarter, we fully identify, since we shared their adrenaline rush, and we, too, failed to see the disaster coming.
Thrillers are trickier. We share the thrill of transgression in the second quarter, but we do see the disaster coming, and we withhold some of our sympathy even then. In the third quarter, when the sinning hero suffers consequences, we switch to a judgmental attitude and look down on the same transgressions that we just vicariously enjoyed.
In horror, we always empathize with the heroes, in that we share their fear, but we rarely sympathize, because their suffering is usually somehow their fault. The transgression usually happens much earlier, in the first quarter or before the movie starts, and we take no joy from it. Instead, our joy comes from a mix of sharing the heroes’ fear and sharing the evil force’s desire to punish them. As the advantage keeps shifting between the two sides, we win either way.
Transgression / Denial and Dread of Unseen Consequences / Horror at Visible Consequences / Triumph or Succumb:
- Frankenstein (transgression = creating life)
- King Kong (transgression = fetishization of the exotic)
- Rosemary’s Baby (punished for the ambition of her husband)
- Halloween (Laurie is punished for the sexual transgressions of her friends)
- Alien (transgression = defending company)
- The Shining (transgression = drinking and abusing child, happened before movie)
- Scream (transgression = lack of desensitization to horror combined with old-fashioned teen horniness)
- The Birds (Critics have twisted themselves into knots trying to figure out why the opening scenes justify the attack. I think Hitch’s true point is that people will always blame themselves for nature’s fury, even when they shouldn’t.)
- Night of the Living Dead (“What did humanity do to deserve this?” is the implied question, which is ironically answered by the final scene)
- The Exorcist (The priests keep asking why the devil would choose this girl)
- Saw (Victims try to figure out what they did wrong)
- 28 Days Later (Again, “What did we do to deserve this?” is asked many times)
Tomorrow: Drama and Tragedy
22May
Specific Genre Structure, Part 2: Thriller, Conspiracy and Action
The first surprise is that thrillers have almost the same underlying structure as comedies. As with Comedy, classical thrillers tend to focus on a hero who creates his own problem by transgressing society’s norms, creating this very similar quartet: Discontent / Transgression / Consequences / Victory or Defeat
- Double Indemnity
- Rear Window
- Strangers on a Train (punished for a transgression he only considered)
- Bonnie and Clyde (surprisingly)
- Body Heat
- Blood Simple
- Blue Velvet
- Fatal Attraction
- Silence of the Lambs (Sort of: transgression = sharing with Lecter / consequences = Lecter’s escape. Actually, this movie proves to be surprisingly slippery, and could be squeezed into any of these three categories)
- Maltese Falcon
- Manchurian Candidate
- Chinatown
- All the President’s Men
- L. A. Confidential
- Crimson Tide (surprisingly, since it feels more like thriller or action)
- Goldfinger
- The Great Escape
- The French Connection
- Star Wars
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Die Hard
- Speed
- Batman Begins
- Thor feels like straight-up action and not at all like a thriller, but it’s structured like the latter than the former: It’s focused not on the external threat but on the hero’s folly and culpability in all that follows. The movie is more critical of Thor than Loki.
- Donnie Brasco feels like a thriller, but doesn’t fit into any of these categories. Instead, it charts like a tragedy, which is a structure we’ll look at later in this series.
- The Fugitive (compressed from a four-year TV epic) crams an entire action arc into its first 40 minutes, then fits a mystery arc into the remaining 80 minutes.
- Spider-Man (covering the first ten years of the comic) zips through a thriller arc, in which the power goes to Peter’s head and he suffers the consequences, then it wraps that up and devotes the rest of the movie to an action arc, as he deals with the external threat of the Green Goblin
- Iron Man (covering 20 years of the comic) does the opposite: first we have an action arc, dealing with the external threat of the warlord, then a thriller arc, as Tony comes home and lets his powers get to his head, and deals with the consequences at the end.
21May
Specific Genre Structures, Part 1: Comedy
- First quarter: Longstanding problem becomes acute through a humiliation and a new opportunity to solve that problem is identified.
- ¼ point: Hero commits to the opportunity.
- Second quarter: Hero tries to solve the problem the easy way.
- Midpoint: Disaster and loss of safe space
- Third quarter: Hero tries to solve the problem the hard way.
- ¾ point: Spiritual crisis
- Final quarter: Wiser hero solves or succumbs to problem.
Surprisingly, although there are many profoundly different subgenres of comedy, I was able to identify on more-specific quartet that applied to almost all of them:
Discontent / Transgression with Mask / Deal with Consequences / Growth Without Mask:
- Easy Living (mask = false identity that is thrust upon her)
- The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday (mask = pretend to no longer to be in love)
- Sullivan’s Travels (mask = phony poverty)
- Some Like It Hot (mask = drag)
- The Apartment (transgression has already begun, then escalates, mask is unwanted but adopted to get ahead at work and explain strange goings on to his neighbor)
- The Producers (mask = scam)
- Breaking Away (mask = Italian accent)
- Risky Business (mask = sunglasses)
- Tootsie (mask = drag)
- Raising Arizona (literally with and without masks)
- Swingers (mask = phony pick-up persona)
- Rushmore (he’s been wearing the mask for years, but now it escalates)
- Wedding Crashers (mask = fake identities)
- The 40 Year Old Virgin (mask = fake confidence)
- Juno (first transgression has already happened, second transgression happens late)
- Superbad (mask = fake ID)
- Mean Girls (mask = fake personality)
- The Hangover (transgressions not seen, revealed as part of lengthened consequences section)
- In Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant has no mask but it doesn’t matter because Hepburn insists on treating him as something he isn’t, so he gets the same benefit, in that he gets to flee his responsibilities for a time.
- I was surprised that Bridesmaids, which feels like a very classical comedy, is the most atypical of the comedies I looked at, since our hero engages in almost no transgression, but merely attempts to be dutiful. She does wear a mask, however, to the extent that she pretends not to be broke and not to be horribly depressed about friend’s wedding and life in general.
- Dr. Strangelove didn’t fit at all, but I think that that’s because it’s a conspiracy movie that’s played as a comedy and thus fits the “mystery” arc that we’ll look at tomorrow. (It was adapted from a dead serious novel)
- Annie Hall, likewise, doesn’t fit, because it’s really a drama arc played for laughs.
19May
How to Structure a Story Around a Big Problem, Introduction
- First I spent most of The Hero Project rethinking the conventional wisdom on structure.
- Then I conducted The Great Guru Showdown, where I pitted previous structure gurus against each other.
- Then I did a quick rundown of How to Structure a Movie, but I didn’t go into much detail about each step.
- Then I did a week on the idea that “inciting incident” wasn’t a very useful concept, so it should be replaced by three ideas: Problem-Opportunity-Conflict.
I don’t want to imply that beloved movies like Weekend or Slackeror Pulp Fiction are doing anything wrong simply because they’re notabout the solving of a large problem. This structure doesn’t describe some sort of “inherent nature of celluloid”, it merely describes the natural progress that most humans go through when we try to solve a large problem, which is why, if you’re writing that kind of story, in whatever media, you should probably hit most of these steps in roughly this order.
In this series, we’re going to walk through the steps of the most common structure, but that will actually start nextweek. First we’re going to spend a week expanding my previous thoughts about specific genre structures. Over the course of the Checklist Road Tests, it seemed that the concept of “the promise of the premise” was unclear, partially because I borrowed it from Blake Snyder.
It emerged that this could mean very different things depending on the genre. In some genres, such as comedy and thrillers the audience and the hero are having fun together, but we also saw that in horror movies such as Alien, the audience is having fun because the heroes are suffering. So this week we’ll tackle…
- Mon: Comedy
- Tues: Thriller, Action, Mystery
- Wed: Horror
- Thurs: Drama, Tragedy