Story Page 13

  Looking at your ending, ask: As a result of this climatic action, what value, positively or negatively charged, is brought into the world of my protagonist? Next, tracing backward from this climax, digging to the bedrock, ask: What is the chief cause, force, or means by which this value is brought into his world? The sentence you compose from the answers to those two questions becomes your Controlling Idea.

  In other words, the story tells you its meaning; you do not dictate meaning to the story. You do not draw action from idea, rather idea from action. For no matter your inspiration, ultimately the story embeds its Controlling Idea within the final climax, and when this event speaks its meaning, you will experience one of the most powerful moments in the writing life—Self-Recognition: The Story Climax mirrors your inner self, and if your story is from the very best sources within you, more often than not you’ll be shocked by what you see reflected in it.

  You may think you’re a warm, loving human being until you find yourself writing tales of dark, cynical consequence. Or you may think you’re a street-wise guy who’s been around the block a few times until you find yourself writing warm, compassionate endings. You think you know who you are, but often you’re amazed by what’s skulking inside in need of expression. In other words, if a plot works out exactly as you first planned, you’re not working loosely enough to give room to your imagination and instincts. Your story should surprise you again and again. Beautiful story design is a combination of the subject found, the imagination at work, and the mind loosely but wisely executing the craft.

  Idea Versus Counter-Idea

  Paddy Chayefsky once told me that when he finally discovered his story’s meaning, he’d scratch it out on a scrap of paper and tape it to his typewriter, so that nothing going through the machine wouldn’t in one way or another express his central theme. With a clear statement of Value plus Cause staring him in the eye, he could resist intriguing irrelevancies and concentrate on unifying the telling around the story’s core meaning. By “one way or another,” Chayefsky meant he’d forge the story dynamically, moving it back and forth across the opposing charges of its primary values. His improvisations would be so shaped that sequence after sequence alternately expressed the positive, then negative dimension of his Controlling Idea. In other words, he fashioned his stories by playing Idea against Counter-Idea.

  PROGRESSIONS build by moving dynamically between the positive and negative charges of the values at stake in the story.

  From the moment of inspiration you reach into your fictional world in search of a design. You have to build a bridge of story from the opening to the ending, a progression of events that spans from Premise to Controlling Idea. These events echo the contradictory voices of one theme. Sequence by sequence, often scene by scene, the positive Idea and its negative Counter-Idea argue, so to speak, back and forth, creating a dramatized dialectical debate. At climax one of these two voices wins and becomes the story’s Controlling Idea.

  To illustrate with the familiar cadences of the Crime Story: A typical opening sequence expresses the negative Counter-Idea, “Crime pays because the criminals are brilliant and/or ruthless” as it dramatizes a crime so enigmatic (VERTIGO) or committed by such diabolical criminals (DIE HARD) that the audience is stunned: “They’re going to get away with it!” But as a veteran detective discovers a clue left by the fleeing killer (THE BIG SLEEP), the next sequence contradicts this fear with the positive Idea, “Crime doesn’t pay because the protagonist is even more brilliant and/or ruthless.” Then perhaps the cop is misled into suspecting the wrong person (FAREWELL, MY LOVELY): “Crime pays.” But soon the protagonist uncovers the real identity of the villain (THE FUGITIVE): “Crime doesn’t pay.” Next the criminal captures, may even seem to kill, the protagonist (ROBOCOP): “Crime pays.” But the cop virtually resurrects from the dead (SUDDEN IMPACT) and goes back on the hunt: “Crime doesn’t pay.”

  The positive and negative assertions of the same idea contest back and forth through the film, building in intensity, until at Crisis they collide head-on in a last impasse. Out of this rises the Story Climax, in which one or the other idea succeeds. This may be the positive Idea: “Justice triumphs because the protagonist is tenaciously resourceful and courageous” (BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, SPEED, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS), or the negative Counter-Idea: “Injustice prevails because the antagonist is overwhelmingly ruthless and powerful” (SEVEN, Q & A, CHINATOWN). Whichever of the two is dramatized in the final climatic action becomes the Controlling Idea of Value plus Cause, the purest statement of the story’s conclusive and decisive meaning.

  This rhythm of Idea versus Counter-Idea is fundamental and essential to our art. It pulses at the heart of all fine stories, no matter how internalized the action. What’s more, this simple dynamic can become very complex, subtle, and ironic.

  In SEA OF LOVE detective Keller (Al Pacino) falls in love with his chief suspect (Ellen Barkin). As a result, each scene that points toward her guilt turns with irony: positive on the value of justice, negative on the value of love. In the maturation plot SHINE, David’s (Noah Taylor) musical victories (positive) provoke his father’s (Armin Mueller-Stahl) envy and brutal repression (negative), driving the pianist into a pathological immaturity (doubly negative), which makes his final success a triumph of maturity in both art and spirit (doubly positive).

  DIDACTICISM

  A note of caution: In creating the dimensions of your story’s “argument,” take great care to build the power of both sides. Compose the scenes and sequences that contradict your final statement with as much truth and energy as those that reinforce it. If your film ends on the Counter-Idea, such as “Crime pays because…,” then amplify the sequences that lead the audience to feel justice will win out. If your film ends on the Idea, such as “Justice triumphs because…,” then enhance the sequences expressing “Crime pays and pays big.” In other words, do not slant your “argument.”

  If, in a morality tale, you were to write your antagonist as an ignorant fool who more or less destroys himself, are we persuaded that good will prevail? But if, like an ancient myth-maker, you were to create an antagonist of virtual omnipotence who reaches the brink of success, you would force yourself to create a protagonist who will rise to the occasion and become even more powerful, more brilliant. In this balanced telling your victory of good over evil now rings with validity.

  The danger is this: When your Premise is an idea you feel you must prove to the world, and you design your story as an undeniable certification of that idea, you set yourself on the road to didacticism. In your zeal to persuade, you will stifle the voice of the other side. Misusing and abusing art to preach, your screenplay will become a thesis film, a thinly disguised sermon as you strive in a single stroke to convert the world. Didacticism results from the naive enthusiasm that fiction can be used like a scalpel to cut out the cancers of society.

  More often than not, such stories take the form of Social Drama, a lead-handed genre with two defining conventions: Identify a social ill; dramatize its remedy. The writer, for example, may decide that war is the scourge of humanity, and pacifism is the cure. In his zeal to convince us all his good people are very, very good people, and all his bad people are very, very bad people. All the dialogue is “on the nose” laments about the futility and insanity of war, heartfelt declarations that the cause of war is the “establishment.” From outline to last draft, he fills the screen with stomach-turning images, making certain that each and every scene says loud and clear: “War is a scourge, but it can be cured by pacifism… war is a scourge cured by pacifism… war is a scourge cured by pacifism…” until you want to pick up a gun.

  But the pacifist pleas of antiwar films (OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR, APOCALYPSE NOW, GALLIPOLI, HAMBURGER HILL) rarely sensitize us to war. We’re unconvinced because in the rush to prove he has the answer, the writer is blind to a truth we know too well—men love war.

  This does not mean that starting with an idea is certain to produce didacti
c work… but that’s the risk. As a story develops, you must willingly entertain opposite, even repugnant ideas. The finest writers have dialectical, flexible minds that easily shift points of view. They see the positive, the negative, and all shades of irony, seeking the truth of these views honestly and convincingly. This omniscience forces them to become even more creative, more imaginative, and more insightful. Ultimately, they express what they deeply believe, but not until they have allowed themselves to weigh each living issue and experience all its possibilities.

  Make no mistake, no one can achieve excellence as a writer without being something of a philosopher and holding strong convictions. The trick is not to be a slave to your ideas, but to immerse yourself in life. For the proof of your vision is not how well you can assert your Controlling Idea, but its victory over the enormously powerful forces that you array against it.

  Consider the superb balance of three antiwar films directed by Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick and his screenwriters researched and explored the Counter-Idea to look deep within the human psyche itself. Their stories reveal war to be the logical extension of an intrinsic dimension of human nature that loves to fight and kill, chilling us with the realization that what humanity loves to do, it will do—as it has for aeons, through the now and into all foreseeable futures.

  In Kubrick’s PATHS OF GLORY the fate of France hangs on winning the war against the Germans at any cost. So when the French army retreats from battle, an outraged general devises an innovative motivational strategy: He orders his artillery to bombard his own troops. In DR. STRANGELOVE the United States and Russia both realize that in nuclear war, not losing is more important than winning, so each concocts a scheme for not losing so effective it incinerates all life on Earth. In FULL METAL JACKET, the Marine Corps faces a tough task: how to persuade human beings to ignore the genetic prohibition against killing their own kind. The simple solution is to brainwash recruits into believing that the enemy is not human; killing a man then becomes easy, even if he’s your drill instructor. Kubrick knew that if he gave the humanity enough ammunition, it would shoot itself.

  A great work is a living metaphor that says, “Life is like this.” The classics, down through the ages, give us not solutions but lucidity, not answers but poetic candor; they make inescapably clear the problems all generations must solve to be human.

  IDEALIST, PESSIMIST, IRONIST

  Writers and the stories they tell can be usefully divided into three grand categories, according to the emotional charge of their Controlling Idea.

  Idealistic Controlling Ideas

  “Up-ending” stories expressing the optimism, hopes, and dreams of mankind, a positively charged vision of the human spirit; life as we wish it to be. Examples:

  “Love fills our lives when we conquer intellectual illusions and follow our instincts”: HANNAH AND HER SISTERS. In this Multiplot story, a collection of New Yorkers are seeking love, but they’re unable to find it because they keep thinking, analyzing, trying to decipher the meaning of things: sexual politics, careers, morality or immortality. One by one, however, they cast off their intellectual illusions and listen to their hearts. The moment they do, they all find love. This is one of the most optimistic films Woody Allen has ever made.

  “Goodness triumphs when we outwit evil”: THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK. The witches ingeniously turn the devil’s own dirty tricks against him and find goodness and happiness in the form of three chubby-cheeked babies.

  “The courage and genius of humanity will prevail over the hostility of Nature.” Survival Films, a subgenre of Action/Adventure, are “up-ending” stories of life-and-death conflict with forces of the environment. At the brink of extinction, the protagonists, through dint of will and resourcefulness, battle the often cruel personality of Mother Nature and endure: THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, JAWS, QUEST FOR FIRE, ARACHNOPHOBIA, FITZCAR-RALDO, FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX, ALIVE.

  Pessimistic Controlling Ideas

  “Down-ending” stories expressing our cynicism, our sense of loss and misfortune, a negatively charged vision of civilization’s decline, of humanity’s dark dimensions; life as we dread it to be but know it so often is. Examples:

  “Passion turns to violence and destroys our lives when we use people as objects of pleasure”: DANCE WITH A STRANGER. The lovers in this British work think their problem is a difference of class, but class has been overcome by countless couples. The deep conflict is that their affair is poisoned by desires to possess each other as objects for neurotic gratification, until one seizes the ultimate possession—the life of her lover.

  “Evil triumphs because it’s part of human nature”: CHINATOWN. On a superficial level, CHINATOWN suggests that the rich get away with murder. They do indeed. But more profoundly the film expresses the ubiquity of evil. In reality, because good and evil are equal parts of human nature, evil vanquishes good as often as good conquers evil. We’re both angel and devil. If our natures leaned just slightly toward one or the other, all social dilemmas would have been solved centuries ago. But we’re so divided, we never know from day to day which we’ll be. One day we build the Cathedral of Notre Dame; the next, Auschwitz.

  “The power of nature will have the final say over mankind’s futile efforts.” When the Counter-Idea of survival films becomes the Controlling Idea, we have that rare “down-ending” movie in which again human beings battle a manifestation of nature, but now nature prevails: SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC, THE ELEPHANT MAN, EARTHQUAKE, and THE BIRDS, in which nature lets us off with a warning. These films are rare because the pessimistic vision is a hard truth that some people wish to avoid.

  Ironic Controlling Ideas

  “Up/down-ending” stories expressing our sense of the complex, dual nature of existence, a simultaneously charged positive and negative vision; life at its most complete and realistic.

  Here optimism/idealism and pessimism/cynicism merge. Rather than voicing one extreme or the other, the story says both. The Idealistic “Love triumphs when we sacrifice our needs for others,” as in KRAMER VS. KRAMER, melds with the Pessimistic “Love destroys when self-interest rules,” as in THE WAR OF THE ROSES, and results in an ironic Controlling Idea: “Love is both pleasure and pain, a poignant anguish, a tender cruelty we pursue because without it life has no meaning,” as in ANNIE HALL, MANHATTAN, ADDICTED TO LOVE.

  What follows are two examples of Controlling Ideas whose ironies have helped define the ethics and attitudes of contemporary American society. First, the positive irony:

  The compulsive pursuit of contemporary values—success, fortune, fame, sex, power—will destroy you, but if you see this truth in time and throw away your obsession, you can redeem yourself.

  Until the 1970s an “up-ending” could be loosely defined as “The protagonist gets what he wants.” At climax the protagonist’s object of desire became a trophy of sorts, depending on the value at stake—the lover of one’s dreams (love), the dead body of the villain (justice), a badge of achievement (fortune, victory), public recognition (power, fame)—and he won it.

  In the 1970s, however, Hollywood evolved a highly ironic version of the success story. Redemption Plots, in which protagonists pursue values that were once esteemed—money, reknown, career, love, winning, success—but with a compulsiveness, a blindness that carries them to the brink of self-destruction. They stand to lose, if not their lives, their humanity. They manage, however, to glimpse the ruinous nature of their obsession, stop before they go over the edge, then throw away what they once cherished. This pattern gives rise to an ending rich in irony: At climax the protagonist sacrifices his dream (positive), a value that has become a soul-corrupting fixation (negative), to gain an honest, sane, balanced life (positive).

  THE PAPER CHASE, THE DEER HUNTER, KRAMER VS. KRAMER, AN UNMARRIED WOMAN, 10, AND JUSTICE FOR ALL, TERMS OF ENDEARMENT, THE ELECTRIC HORSEMAN, GOING IN STYLE, QUIZ SHOW, BULLETS OVER BROADWAY, THE FISHER KING, GRAND CANYON, RAIN MAN, HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN, TOOTSIE, REGARDING HENRY
, ORDINARY PEOPLE, CLEAN AND SOBER, NORTH DALLAS FORTY, OUT OF AFRICA, BABY BOOM, THE DOCTOR, SCHINDLER’S LIST, and JERRY MAGUIRE all pivot around this irony, each expressing it in a unique and powerful way. As these titles indicate, this idea has been a magnet for Oscars.

  In terms of technique, the execution of the climactic action in these films is fascinating. Historically, a positive ending is a scene in which the protagonist takes an action that gets him what he wants. Yet in all the works cited above, the protagonist either refuses to act on his obsession or throws away what he once desired. He or she wins by “losing.” Like solving the Zen riddle of the sound of one hand clapping, the writer’s problem in each case was how to make a nonaction or negative action feel positive.

  At the climax of NORTH DALLAS FORTY All-Star wide receiver Phillip Elliot (Nick Nolte) opens his arms and lets the football bounce off his chest, announcing in his gesture that he won’t play this childish game anymore.

  THE ELECTRIC HORSEMAN ends as the former rodeo star Sonny Steele (Robert Redford), now reduced to peddling breakfast cereal, releases his sponsor’s prize stallion into the wild, symbolically freeing himself from his need for fame.

  OUT OF AFRICA is the story of a woman living the 1980s ethic of “I am what I own.” Karen’s (Meryl Streep) first words are: “I had a farm in Africa.” She drags her furniture from Denmark to Kenya to build a home and plantation. She so defines herself by her possessions that she calls the laborers “her people” until her lover points out that she doesn’t actually own these people. When her husband infects her with syphilis, she doesn’t divorce him because her identity is “wife,” defined by her possession of a husband. In time, however, she comes to realize you are not what you own; you are your values, talents, what you can do. When her lover is killed, she grieves but is not lost because she is not he. With a shrug, she lets husband, home, everything go, surrendering all she had, but gaining herself.