Starbuck and The Bachelor

Recently, I experienced one of those moments of serendipity where the contrast of two cultural events leads to some surprising insights. Within a few days of each other, I saw the final episode of The Bachelor, followed by the French Canadian film Starbuck. The Bachelor tracked, in its most recent season, a man choosing from 25 women to be his bride, or as he liked to put it as many times as possible, “the woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.” Starbuck is a fiction film about a 42-year-old man who discovers that he has fathered over 500 children through a sperm bank.
The obvious similarity between Starbuck and The Bachelor is that both stories focus on the male role in the mating dance. But what we should study as writers is how each works through a particular genre to make its case. Starbuck uses one of the eight sub-genres of comedy, the traveling angel story (for the story beats of Traveling Angel and the other 7 major forms, see the Comedy Class). The Bachelor relies on the love story and one of the major forms of television, the reality show. 
Starbuck appears to be just another example of the low comedy, also known as gross out comedy, that has taken over Hollywood for at least a decade.

After all, the entire movie is based on the comic contrast of a vast number of human beings resulting from one man’s seed. But that would be a serious misreading of the film. The high concept premise is just the setup for the overall comic story structure – the traveling angel form – that is the real secret to the film’s success. 
Of the eight major comic sub-genres, the traveling angel comedy is the only form I have never seen fail at the box office. I recently did a structure breakdown of Intouchables, a very successful traveling angel film from France. Other examples include Amelie, Chocolat, and Mary Poppins. 
Starbuck twists the traveling angel form in that the hero doesn’t enter a community in trouble. The writers establish him up front as a total screwup who has gotten his girlfriend pregnant and clearly is in no position to be a true father. He then discovers he has biologically fathered over 500 children, and 142 of them are suing to find out his identity. 
Now the traveling angel element kicks in. The hero clandestinely meets a number of his offspring, all of whom have problems. And this man who is incapable of being a father in his own life tries to help, and care for, the children he created in a test tube twenty years before. 
Notice this is comedy of contrast and structure, not comedy of dialogue. Comedy based primarily on funny dialogue doesn’t travel well, because it’s based on language and cultural references unique to a particular country or region. Comedy based on big structural contrasts is the only type of comedy that works for a worldwide audience, because the laughs come from character and action. (Sure enough, remake rights to the film have been sold in France and India, and a Hollywood version, called “The Delivery Man,” starring Vince Vaughn, is coming out in October.) 
By hanging the jokes on the traveling angel story structure, Starbuck can move from the low base of animal humor to the heights of community and true fatherhood. Instead of packing as many petty jokes and gags as the writers can fit into 109 minutes, the script has a foundation of heart and character change that makes the humor icing on a very tasty cake. 
Starbuck uses comedy to strip the man’s role in the mating game down to its lowest biological denominator, then builds to love. The Bachelor uses the love story to dress up the man’s role with romance, but the reality show competition makes it really about the biological survival of the fittest. 
Again, to understand how The Bachelor story actually works, you have to look at how the genre plays through the medium, in this case the love story through reality television. Of course, reality shows are not “real,” they are written, in that producers create conflict situations for the contestants to resolve. Which is why they should be called “surreality” shows, because they take real people and put them in a highly constructed and dramatic world. 
The Bachelor, like many reality shows, is designed to produce as much conflict and humiliation as possible. This is one reason why The Bachelor is a more dramatic – and sadistic – show than The Bachelorette, because when the women are sent home they almost invariably cry. Rejection and humiliation in love in front of a national audience, what could be better than that? 
There is another medium besides television The Bachelor love story plays through, and that is the game. The Bachelor is a tournament of love. When love is turned into a game, emotions are forced into bite-sized slots. The participants know it’s a game played for an audience, but they can’t help feeling the emotion. Of course, this is fast food emotion, freeze dried emotion. When the game is over and the cameras shut down, the two winners find out that love in the every day is a very different animal. 
Part of the severe contrast of love and game comes from the compressed time of the love story. The couple on a date never gets a chance to experience one another, because they are so conscious they are on a filmed date, and they are dating on deadline. So they are always meta-dating, talking about how well the date is going, about how right they are for each other, even though they’ve barely said word one. 
Probably the central problem contestants have on the show is reconciling these dual and conflicting requirements of love and game. They want true love but they are also competing to win the game. Indeed, the worst thing one player can say about another is “she’s here for the wrong reasons” – ie, to win this game, or win the larger game of becoming a reality TV star, which means she doesn’t really care about love. 
But this conflict between love and game is ultimately false. Far from being a highly unrealistic love story played out in compressed time in front of cameras and a national audience, The Bachelor, and even more so The Bachelorette, mimic what is really happening in the mating game. In real life men compete to see whose seed gets to impregnate the highly prized egg. Women compete to see whose egg gets to benefit from the male with the best resources. Love is the feeling human parents create to try to extend a single moment of mating to the years it takes to successfully raise a child. 
Like any reality show, especially one based on competition, The Bachelor has certain story beats that the producers (read writers) create. You know they’re coming, but the women fall for them anyway. I love to count the story tricks the producers come up with while they are actually happening. 
And the women’s responses to these story beats are totally predictable, at every stage of the plot, all the way down to repeating the same lines of dialogue. The show appears to be about romance, and the game is all about choosing a life partner, about free will of the heart. But these real people, who are not reading from a script, are mouthing the same lines and experiencing the same jealousy and heartache. They are programmed to do and say this stuff. 
The producers don’t have to write the lines down in a script. All they have to do is create the competitive, survival-of-the-fittest situation, with at least one death each week, and the women are guaranteed to say the lines anyway. 
This pre-programmed, mating game quality is even more apparent on The Bachelor than on The Bachelorette. On The Bachelor I can often tell who the guy is going to pick by how he looks at a woman when she gets out of the limo the first night. It’s remarkably obvious, at least for the final 2 or 3. That’s men. And while it gives The Bachelor a slight detective quality - as I try to figure out if I’m right about who killed the bachelor with a lightning bolt – it also makes the entire season one long stall. When a woman is choosing from 25 men, it’s not so easy. A woman needs to hear what the guy has to say, even if he’s only saying a pre- programmed line just a little bit better than the next guy.

Success as a popular storyteller in the worldwide markets of film and television comes down to how you play out your genre in your medium. Doing something unique is never easy. But if you know your forms well enough to twit them, you can come up with something that will stand out from the crowd.

The Hunger Games

Spoiler alert: this breakdown contains crucial information about the plot of the movie.

In spite of The Hunger Games’ massive success at the box office, many viewers have complained that the movie is not as detailed as the original novel. I always find this comment ridiculous. While novels and films share hundreds of techniques that make for a good story, they also have at least one major difference: novels are a narrative medium while film is a dramatic one. When people dismiss the movie for not being as “good” as the book, they fail to see the key story elements, found in book and film, that make this a worldwide story phenomena.

The Hunger Games is the latest example of a huge blockbuster hit constructed by combining the myth genre with video game story elements. In my Genre classes, I have long pointed out that Myth is the basis for more blockbuster hits than any other genre by far. Book author and screenplay co-author Suzanne Collins understood this powerful technique right from the premise. In one of the most important of all Greek myths, Theseus and the Minotaur, every year King Aegeus must send seven young men and seven young women to be eaten by the Minotaur in ritual payment for a crime.

Like J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter stories, Collins has woven myth elements throughout her story. Main character Katniss is based on one of the major Greek goddesses, Diana, the huntress. When she and her fellow tributes show up in the arena, they are driving chariots. Like Romans watching gladiators kill gladiators and animals slaughtering Christians for sport, the rich dandies of the Capitol watch on live television as children butcher children. When Katniss shoots an apple with her arrow she repeats the act of legendary freedom fighter William Tell.

All of these mythical and ancient historical references give the story an appeal that can transcend age, gender and cultural boundaries. But that’s not enough for a hit. While myth is the foundation of more blockbusters than any other genre, it is almost always combined with one or two other genres to unify and update the myth form. In the case of The Hunger Games, Collins has combined myth with science fiction. This mashup of ancient past with distant future gives the audience the sense that this story isn’t specific to a particular time and place; it is universal. It is the essence of human beings.

Collins also uses science fiction to take the capitalist foundation of America society to its logical extreme, where competition for show and money has taken on life and death stakes. Like Rollerball and Westworld, the players in this competition are pawns to the big corporate money, and if you lose you die.

One of the biggest mistakes that science fiction writers make is that they create a futuristic world that is so bizarre, so unlike anything we know today, that the audience is alienated from the story almost before it begins. They may continue to watch but they will have a clinical attitude to the story throughout. And this is the kiss of death, in fact the single biggest reason that many science fiction films fail.

Collins has avoided that problem by creating a recognizable future world. Again her technique has been to connect past to future. The rural mining town of Katniss’ District 12 reminds me of 1930’s America, with the film’s shooting style reminiscent of Margaret Bourke-White’s photos of the drought victims of the Dust Bowl. This familiarity gives the audience an emotional connection to the story world. Although there are many elements that tell them this is a futuristic abstraction, the multiple references to America’s past, and in some cases present, tell them this is a story about today.

Besides the myth genre, the other key to the huge success of The Hunger Games is its deft use of video game elements. Video games are a relatively new story medium, and their massive influence on novels and film is just starting to become clear. I’m not talking about transmedia here, where a specific video game is turned into a novel and/or a film. These are almost always failures because the creators/producers try to boil all the permutations of a video game into a single story that can be written or filmed.

The trick to combining video games with novels and movies is not to transfer a particular video game story but to apply the story elements that video games do especially well and that appeal to a large audience. For simplicity sake, let’s focus on two elements, story world and keeping score.

Because video games allow a player to take a number of different paths through the same world, there is an extreme emphasis placed on a story world with lots of details and surprises. The difficulty of translating this story element into a novel or film is that these media have a single story path, so you can’t allow too much exploration by the reader/viewer without losing narrative drive.

But, driven by the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter stories, allowing the audience to explore a detailed story world is probably the single biggest change in commercial storytelling in the last ten years. The exquisite detail of the Potter world was mind-boggling. And a big reason Rowling was able to create that kind of detail in novel, and then film, is that she had seven books to do so.

Collins has three books to detail her world and uses the full array of techniques. First she creates the overall arena, which is a totalitarian society within which this moral horror can believably occur. She then sets up fundamental contrasts within the arena, with the rich, powerful amoral Capitol set against the poor, starving rural District 12. Within this macro-arena of high contrasts, she then creates a second smaller arena, the field of battle. This arena must have a clearly defined wall surrounding it to create the pressure cooker effect, whereby you build the conflict under such extreme pressure that it finally blows sky high.

Keeping score is the most obvious story element that distinguishes video games from other forms of media. Video games are essentially the combination of sport and story, or quantified drama. The biggest drawback to this element is that it destroys ambiguity; you either win or you lose. This is the main reason many critics have not yet given video games the accolade of unique story medium (they’re wrong, by the way). But keeping score also has great value. Since in most video games you are the main character, keeping score tells you exactly what you, as both main character and viewer, have accomplished in the story.

In The Hunger Games, of course, the element of keeping score is so fundamental it is right in the premise. This is a tournament to the death, “Survivor” with life and death stakes. In Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, another book and film heavily influenced by video games, we get a life and death fight between the two titans of evolution, man and dinosaur. But The Hunger Games is even more horrific, because this is a fight among children, and 23 out of 24 must die. Each contestant has different psychology, skills and training. And as in any game, luck will have a big role to play as well.

The game is also fixed. The contestants from Districts 1 and 2 are the only ones trained for this event. Naturally they usually win. But ironically, Katniss’ greatest weakness, her home in the starving 12^th District, is also her greatest strength. She practices survival every day of her life, and she is a master of the bow and arrow.

Collins does something very interesting to turn the great weakness of keeping score into a story strength. What the player/main character accomplishes at the end of a video game has a very all-or-nothing quality. But in great storytelling what the character accomplishes, known as character change, is deeper and more subtle. Character change is not based on how many bad guys the hero has defeated, or on the sensual charge the player experiences in the process. Character change comes from how a character challenges his/her psychological and moral self.

In The Hunger Games Collins turns the tournament-to-the-death element of keeping score into the lever by which Katniss can have both a psychological and moral change. The tournament creates a Prisoner’s Dilemma on a massive scale, representing all of society. Prisoner’s Dilemma is one of the great insights in all of philosophy and game theory. In the classic setup, two prisoners are placed in separate interrogation rooms and given a choice of confessing to the crime or staying silent. But the authorities rig the choice so that each prisoner, without knowledge of what his partner is doing, must confess, because to trust his partner and stay silent risks death if the partner is the only one to confess.

Because only one player can survive the Hunger Games, the mini-society in which they live is one of total paranoia and distrust. Katniss’s distrust is heightened even more when she discovers that Peeta, her fellow tribute from District 12, has joined the alliance formed by the trained killers of Districts 1 and 2. Yet, over the course of the battle, she is not only able to trust him, but perhaps even love him. And when faced with the ultimate Prisoner’s Dilemma – whether to kill this person she loves – she makes the moral decision that risks her own death but also takes her to higher humanity.

Some critics have pointed out that The Hunger Games is a breakthrough for Young Adult fiction, especially for girls. Maybe so. But the big lesson of The Hunger Games has nothing to do with the age or gender of the reader-viewer. Simply put, if you want to give yourself the best chance of writing a blockbuster book or film – a longshot at any time – write a myth-based story with video game techniques.

Black Swan

Spoiler alert: this breakdown contains crucial information about the plot of the film.

Black Swan is a movie that makes you pay a lot more than the admission price. But the payoff is huge.

To be honest with you, I found most of the film annoying. Yes, the dancing is lovely. But the scenes of self-flagellation and abuse made my skin crawl. And I don’t like stories about madness or addiction. Besides shoving an unlikable character down our throats, these films have no plot. They keep hitting the same story beat. Sure enough, Black Swan keeps showing us and telling us that Natalie Portman’s character, Nina, is terribly insecure about performing the role of the Black Swan and is too repressed to express the role’s dangerous sexuality.

All of this overshadows two excellent decisions the writers make early on that pay off big at the end. Their first choice happens in the opening scene. In my Great Screenwriting Class I spend a lot of time talking about how to open your story, because it’s the foundation upon which every other story beat depends.

Ironically, the opening in Black Swan is not a story beat at all. It’s just Natalie Portman, as Nina, dancing. In effect the writers are saying, let’s get the big question out of the way right up front: can Natalie Portman dance?. This isn’t Gary Cooper, playing Lou Gehrig, barely able to throw a baseball (Useless Tip: if you ever have to pick sides in softball, just watch how everybody throws). This movie star is a first class ballet dancer. Establishing that fact is crucial to the film’s success because the story is about the sacrifice needed to be the best in the world at your craft, whether it’s a sport, an art form or a combination of the two.

The second crucial choice the writers make concerns the key structural technique necessary to make a madness or addiction story work. Don’t make the prime opponent the affliction. If you do, the hero is just punching herself, and the drama dies. Instead, create outside character opposition that challenges and exacerbates the hero’s personal flaw. That way you create plot and build the drama.

In Black Swan the outside opposition comes from the womanizing director, Thomas, and the competing dancer, Lily, played by Mila Kunis. Lily is especially valuable because she pulls the story out of Nina’s head and introduces the possibility that a very real conspiracy is underway that will destroy the hero. Sometimes paranoid people are justified in their paranoia.

Finally we get to the “battle” scene, the performance. Everything in the film has been one long foreplay for the battle, and it’s a killer. Like all great battle scenes, it’s based on the principle of convergence. The climactic moment of Swan Lake is also the climax of the film story and the climax of Natalie Portman’s performance. Nina overcomes initial failure and not only defeats her demons, she dazzles as the Black Swan. She is sexy and dangerous in the dance, and she passionately kisses the director offstage, after having had to fend him off up until then.

For this to be the same moment when Natalie Portman’s performance crosses into greatness is an incredible thrill that only film can give us. It’s not that she can get into the pain of the White Swan; this we’ve seen for the whole film. It’s not that she can suddenly act the passion and dominance the Black Swan requires and translate that into first class dance. The white heat of Portman’s brilliance comes in how she can shift back and forth between vulnerability and dominance at lightning speed, and be each emotion at the moment she hits it.

The end of the dance and the film shows screenwriting as the height of dramatic art. Nina, as the White Swan, runs up the platform to commit suicide and we think she will do it for real since the real has by now melded so completely with art. She jumps. But wait, there’s the mattress. We feel release, victory; she has defeated her demons. And then we’re flipped again. She’s already done the deed, given herself the fatal wound. It’s the act she had to take to get the performance of her life. We plummet. But she knows; “it was perfect.” She’s the perfectionist taken to her logical extreme, given a self-revelation that is at once brimming with truth and utterly without understanding.

Inception

Inception takes off like a rocket and then slowly runs out of fuel. I loved the mind teaser of a plot, but found the longer the movie went on the less I cared. How a film can generate two such different responses has to do with the most important relationship in a story, the one between plot and character.

In the past with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan, along with his co-writers Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer, has shown himself to be one of the masters of movie plotting. Once again, Nolan gives screenwriters a masterclass in how to build plot. Plot is the most underestimated major skill in storytelling, with a lot of specific techniques you must learn to work as a pro. And make no mistake, the ability to pack more plot in your script is the single most distinguishing feature in a script and film that hits big.

Most writers don’t realize that many of the plot techniques they will use for a particular story are determined by one of the first choices they make in the writing process: what genres will I use to tell this story? Indeed, Nolan’s most brilliant move in writing this script was in combining two genres that are almost never together: science fiction and caper.

Science fiction is the biggest of all genres, as huge as the universe and beyond. That’s why it’s so notoriously difficult to write well. It has a broad, loose structure that covers vast scales of space and time. The caper, also known as the heist film, is among the tightest and most focused of forms, built on a specific and high-speed desire line. That’s why caper stories are almost always very popular.

By combining these virtually opposite forms, Nolan allows the audience to have their cake and eat it too. They get the epic power of science fiction with the driving speed of the caper.

Using the caper gives Nolan one other big advantage. The caper is one of the most plot-heavy of all genres, right up there with detective stories and thrillers, and is designed to fool not only the opponent in the story but also the audience. The prime technique of the caper writer is trickery. Like a magician, you point the audience’s attention in one direction while the real action is happening somewhere else.

The rich plot provided by the caper is magnified many times when the mission takes us into the dream world where the rules of logic change. This is where the power of science fiction kicks in. Science fiction is the most creative genre, because you can take nothing for granted. The writer must literally create everything, including the space-time rules by which human life itself operates.

To get maximum plot and puzzle, Nolan smartly creates three levels of the dream world, using the technique of “revelation plot.” Plot in this kind of story comes from digging deeper and deeper into the same world, with each new level providing a whole new batch of reveals, and thus plot, for the audience.

In combining the caper story structure with a three-level dream world, Nolan takes the audience on a high-speed but mind-bending journey down three levels and back out. In yet another level, the hero’s guilt-filled sub-conscious acts as the story frame and provides even more reveals. Like I say, this guy is a master of plot.

Spoiler alert!

Creating a multiple-level plot is a real blast, especially when it’s connected to such dazzling visual elements as the attacking freight train, the fold-up city and the ghost-town like land of limbo. But there’s a catch. All this plot can kill character and emotion if you are not extremely careful with the story set-up.

The character/emotion problem for Inception starts right at the desire line, the second of the seven major structure steps and one of the strengths of the caper genre. Desire is the hero’s goal. It provides the spine of the story, along with the stakes, or why this story matters. In Inception, the goal is a concept, specifically planting an idea in someone’s head. Not only is this a cold abstraction, it means the stakes are ultimately meaningless. We are told this idea will prevent ecological catastrophe. But that’s just a line of dialogue. We don’t see it, and none of the story is at all related to it.

Another source of an emotionless story has to do with the hero’s relationship to those most important to him, or lack thereof. No, I’m not talking about the other members of the team, which is where most caper stories gain their emotional juice. Think of the buddy camaraderie among the Ocean’s Eleven team. I’m talking about the hero’s wife and children. From the beginning of the film, the wife is already dead so there is no chance to get to know her or see her interact in the present with the hero. What interaction they do have is tainted by the fact that she is morose, deadly and generally a real drag. Supposedly the hero is doing all this to get back with his kids, but again he has no personal interaction with them, except to see them as an unreachable image.

With such a weak goal – which propels a story forward - and such a strong ghost – which pulls a story back, the narrative drive of Inception must inevitably grind to a halt. And that’s just what it does. We get some beautiful, haunting imagery, but the final part of the film feels like a slow trek through a dream museum.

And that’s the negative side of making your story world the land of dreams. Stories about dreams are almost always less than meets the eye. They seem highly intelligent at first glance, because we are entering the realm of pure mind. But they are also as evanescent as a dream, made of elaborately detailed walls that are just fronts to the nothingness behind.

There is one final structure element that causes this visually stunning film to slow down and become less involving as it goes on. In the 22 Step Great Screenwriting Class, I talk a lot about the moral argument found in all great storytelling. Knowing how to execute this crucial element is one of the marks of a professional writer. It’s the sequence under the surface that made the plot of The Dark Knight build in intensity and was the real key to the film becoming a cinematic masterpiece and blockbuster hit. The plot of The Dark Knight is built on a series of moral tests that The Joker throws at Batman. Each test is progressively bigger and more difficult than the one before, ending with the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma where the passengers of two ships must decide whether to blow up the other ship first.

Don’t think for a moment that moral argument is primarily designed to increase the intellectual quality of a film. It increases the emotional power of a story many times over, because the stakes now involve lots of other people and not simply the psychology of the hero.

In Inception, Nolan again infuses moral philosophy into the plot. In this case we’re dealing with Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith,” literally applied to love (a technique normally used in the thriller genre). But Nolan’s understanding of this moral principle is much weaker than his thoughts about the savior in Dark Knight, and it’s not applied to the plot in as seamless or sequenced a way. Viewers come out of the film confused and think it’s their fault. They believe that this philosophical complexity is the mark of a brilliant filmmaker and far above their meager powers to understand, at least on one viewing. Wrong. Moral argument in story is very complex. Sometimes you nail it, and sometimes you just don’t.

Inception is well worth breaking down structurally to see a master of the screenplay form try something new and challenging. But don’t get caught on the dazzling surface. Look at how the writer’s original choices in combining genres and setting up the story gave him both strengths and weaknesses. The more you learn about the all-important connection between plot and character, intellect and emotion, the better writer you will be.