by Jim Mercurio
Growth, emotional fulfillment, and the path to becoming a man all involve letting go of the comfort of certain childhood tendencies and taking risks in more challenging relationships.
Your greatest power as a storyteller comes from controlling your protagonist’s impending climactic choice and the consequences that ensue. As simple as that sounds, the subtle permutations that derive from this single choice are almost infinite.
Consider several movies that funnel characters toward a violent showdown. Although the crises in these films superficially resemble each other, the protagonists sometimes make vastly different choices. Instead of a mindless shootout, which could yield a theme like “Killing the right people can save the day,” each of these films contains aftermaths that allow for deeper reflection and produce themes along these lines:
• Dirty Harry—When a weak and liberal society fails to uphold justice for its citizens, only an antiestablishment individual, who is willing to exact strong, decisive, and selective vigilance, can bring order to the city.
• Unforgiven—Eastwood tried to make amends for the thematic message carried by Dirty Harry and by some of the earlier genre films in which he starred. Unforgiven’s thematic message is more akin to “Vigilante justice doesn’t solve anything; nor does it bring satisfaction to the victims of the original crimes.”
• Blade Runner—Killing dehumanizes the killer.
• No Country for Old Men—Even thinking in terms of a violent showdown being able to offer a sound and satisfying resolution is absurd.
You can also consider how the growth and evolution of the protagonist embodies the main theme. In 28 Days Later, Selena’s character arc plays out in her decision to risk her own life with a potentially deadly delay as she waits to determine whether Jim has, or has not, been turned into a zombie. This character arc encapsulates the powerful thesis: “Love is more important than mere survival.”
In Star Wars, Luke has to choose between the Force and powerful technology (the kind that built the Death Star). When he chooses the former and saves the day by destroying the Death Star, it creates a theme akin to “Humans, faith, and intuition are more important than technology and machines.”
The meaning of a single action may be open to interpretation, so your ultimate success in accurately conveying your theme depends on your ability to layer in various subtle clues, rhymes, and hints that support your thesis.
Sometimes filmmakers want to express something powerful, honest, and universal, but without forethought and mastery of these principles, they may inadvertently express a nonsensical or inhumane theme. A thematic message is also open to manipulation by the other filmmakers (including the editor, producer, and director) during the process and ultimately to interpretation by the audience.
Late rewrites, script changes on the set, or even cuts in the editing room can disturb a delicate trail of breadcrumbs left by the screenwriter that would have led the audience to an understanding of a coherent theme. This is why, as we will discuss, it’s so important to leave as many clues as possible, in as many scenes as you can, across the entire film.
Here are a few examples of movies in which the ultimate message seems different from what the screenwriters or even the filmmakers probably intended to say originally:
• Forrest Gump—The key to an interesting life is random, dumb luck.
• Seven Pounds—It walks a tightrope teetering over the question of whether the suicide of a perfectly healthy human can ever be a noble or heroic act worthy of celebration.
• Dirty Harry—A deeper reading of the film and the supporting elements might reduce it to a less complex message than we found above: “Vigilante justice is a great solution to society’s ills,” or “The guy with the biggest gun gets to make the rules.”
The protagonist in Ransom is targeted by kidnappers because he has a reputation for buying his way out of trouble. Here’s the underlying thesis posited by the actions in that film: “If you buy your way out of everything, even when your child’s life is on the line, you will save his life, reunite your family, and live happily ever after.” Ransom is simply dishonest.
By contrast, Avatar delivers a satisfying, coherent thematic message. The protagonist’s ultimate action is to unite everything—the different tribes, the different species, the living with the dead, and even some humans with the Na’vi. This produces a theme that suggests everybody and everything are all connected and that we are most powerful when we band together. The idea of connection permeates the entire film, even in the smallest units of story: scenes, dialogue, and even action description.
This is how theme works at the scene level. All of the elements from the biggest (structure and character) down to the smallest (setting, images, and dialogue) support one overriding idea.
Now let’s take a look at the second-biggest element that supports theme: supporting characters and subplots.
Supporting Characters and Subplots
Most great stories focus on one central conflict, and how its various permutations play out among all of the characters. Essentially all supporting characters are a foil—the same, but different—to the protagonist. The supporting characters are faced with a choice that, even if subtly disguised, mirrors or contrasts the protagonist’s dilemma. Subplots spin off from these choices.
Character orchestration is the description of how the various character traits and perspectives, in light of the overall dilemma, are distributed across the cast of characters.
For instance, in Dead Poets Society, every character wrestles with a form of societal pressure—from peers, siblings, status, and even cult-like tendencies of organized groups such as cheerleaders and football teams—that pushes each boy to conform.
The supporting characters in Avatar have perspectives that clearly relate to Jake’s (Sam Worthington) ultimate understanding that humans and Na’vi are the same:
• Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang): Sees Na’vi as opposite of same—as totally different, the “other.”
• Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), the Businessman: Like a corporation, sees that workers aren’t the same, they are less—savages to be manipulated for profit.
• Grace (Sigourney Weaver), the Scientist: Intellectually knows that biologically, the Na’vi are practically the same.
• Jake: In his heart and soul knows they are the same. He literally embodies this notion by becoming one of them.
These attitudes are also found in characters who serve as mirrors and doubles in the Na’vi community. Tsu’tey (Laz Alonso), a warrior, has a similar rigid hatred for the humans as Quaritch does for the Na’vi, but with less resolve than the Colonel. Neytiri’s mother, Mo’at (CCH Pounder), is a counterpoint to Grace, whose sympathy for humans comes not from rational science but rather from her earth-mother nature: intuition and emotion. Even the shift in allegiances for the minor character Trudy (Michelle Rodriguez) is along the same axis from different (Colonel’s perspective that Na’vi are the enemy) toward same (Jake’s side, that the Na’vi deserve the same treatment as humans).
The way the supporting characters’ points of view interact and clash creates opportunities in your story to explore various facets of the theme. An implicit rhetorical debate rages around the central issue in Avatar. Grace is a foil character to Jake, and understanding the subtle contrast between their perspectives contributes to the explication of theme. Moments before her death, Grace clarifies their difference:
GRACE
I -- always held back. But you gave them your heart. I’m proud of you, Jake.
Grace’s pure but limited embrace of sameness isn’t sufficient to allow her to survive the ritual to become a Na’vi. Because Jake figuratively embodies, with all his being, that Na’vi and humans are the same, he survives the transformative ritual that allows him to literally embody the Na’vi and make their home his own. Avatar’s ultimate statement about the world does not celebrate merely an intellectual embracing of a notion that we are all the same, but act
ually puts forth the idea that we are all one of mind, body, and soul.
Making Your Case
In regards to theme, Samuel Goldwyn allegedly said, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union (a company that once delivered paper messages called telegrams).” He wasn’t advocating that movies be merely vapid, meaningless spectacle, but rather that we avoid blatant didacticism in our storytelling.
In a movie about brotherly love, rather than making a character preach, “Can’t we all get along?” show how everyone gets along. Dialogue is considered on the nose when text equals subtext. Theme is on the nose when the text equals concise articulation of the central thesis of your film. Audiences do not want to have the theme spoon-fed to them. It bores them and insults their intelligence. It stops the drama dead in its tracks.
Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz would roll over in their graves if someone rebooted their film Citizen Kane and added a scene in which Jedidiah (Joseph Cotten) tells the reporter something along the lines of “You cannot reduce the essence of a man to a catalog of recollections about him. Memory is tainted by subjectivity and people make mistakes, so it’s not reliable.”
In a trial, this line of dialogue would be like catching the defendant in the act of committing a crime. It’s direct and irrefutable evidence. What we prefer, when delivering theme, is to support our ideas not with direct evidence, but with circumstantial evidence, which is fuzzier and open to interpretation. It’s only with additional circumstantial evidence that one inference can be corroborated over another.
Although we must be subtle and indirect, the writer leaves clues, like breadcrumbs, at the scene level to point the jury, or audience, in the right direction. In doing so, you build context and clarity. You shape the audience’s perspective in such a way that each viewer comes to see things roughly the way you want them to.
The process of leading the audience toward accepting your perspective and truth is what almost every instance of theme does at the scene level. It’s referred to as reframing. A literal reframe with a camera or photograph is where you change the angle and choose what to include, exclude, contrast, or accentuate. Figuratively, when you reframe an idea or belief, you impose an alternative perspective that challenges the original assumptions and considers them in a different context.
The real Citizen Kane does include a nice piece of indirect evidence to help us understand its theme. When the reporter comes to visit Bernstein (Everett Sloane) to interview him about Charles Foster Kane, Bernstein tells him a story:
BERNSTEIN
One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry. And as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in. And on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all. But I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I hadn’t thought of that girl.
Without explicitly stating the theme, this supports the idea that it is utterly futile to decipher a man through the lens of a single utterance, like “Rosebud,” even together with the recollection of his acquaintances’ memories.
However, there are far more lines in Citizen Kane that dance around the thesis more indirectly in support of the theme. Here are two nonconsecutive snippets of dialogue from other characters:
JEDEDIAH LELAND
I can remember everything. That’s my curse, young man. It’s the greatest curse that’s ever been inflicted on the human race: memory.
RAWLSON
It isn’t enough to tell us what a man did. You’ve got to tell us who he was.
Such thematic touches at the scene level, which are almost always reframes of the theme, act as subtle clues for the audience. With purposeful and finessed repetition—of things both seen and heard—you can reframe neutral elements or ambiguous events to coax the audience toward seeing the perspective of you and your characters.
What We See
Visuals, what we see in a scene, can be ambiguous and do not always, individually, express profound thematic meaning or communicate your intention. To clarify their meaning, layer in dozens of images, props, and settings that rhyme—have a similarity in their figurative meanings—to help the audience understand your intent.
Usually, a single image acts as an individual puzzle piece that contributes to a bigger-picture idea. However, let’s start with an exception.
Opening and Closing Image
All surprise comes from setup, and the opening image is the ultimate setup from which the meaning of the entire film will spring. It’s equal parts logic and dream-logic. Opening and closing images don’t waste time.
Whereas reframes are often subtle, the opening image is an explicit and direct statement—if only to the viewer’s unconscious—that says, “Pay attention; the entire movie is encapsulated in this moment.”
Think of the close-up shot of the “No Trespassing” sign on a chain-link fence that opens Citizen Kane and the following dissolves to several shots of other metal fences. The camera constantly cranes up as if ignoring its own warning and the shots move closer and closer to Xanadu. The scene eventually does trespass by intruding on the private moment of Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) on his deathbed saying his final word, “Rosebud.”
In its first five words, the screenplay for Se7en announces its theme and tone and even hints at the genre.
Sunlight comes through the soot…
To come up with a more concise opening image, the filmmakers drew on recurring motifs from the script: chaotic sounds of the city coming through the apartment window of Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman). The opening in the film is a short and static shot of Somerset walking in and then out of his kitchen such that the blocking casually centers him in between the window and his chess set. It raises the question of whether or not the world is filled with unknowable evil and uncontrollable chaos or if, as the game of chess and its logical, finite rules suggest, chaos can be tamed with wisdom and knowledge.
See how smoothly this augurs a perfectly on-point ending with a “verbal” closing image:
SOMERSET (V. O.)
World’s a fine place and worth fighting for. I believe the second part.
Somerset’s final words create a bittersweet ending. Despite the fact that the world contains unknowable and unbeatable chaos (reflected in his inability to prevent his partner from murdering John Doe), he will continue to fight even if there is no clear-cut victory on the horizon.
Setting and Location
Although it’s not true that a sad character impacts the brightness of the sun on a given day or that clouds can be moody, artists strive to find an objective correlative—a set of objects, images, or situations that combine to evoke a particular emotion. In cinema, we imbue the environment with the emotions we want to convey or contrast from the point of view of the characters by manipulating such things as the setting, set design, and weather.
In Se7en, rain constantly pours down on the dark and shadowy city. The weather and gloom serve to establish mood, but they also have thematic power. The darkness serves as a counterpoint to the brightness and hope Somerset holds out for and admires in his partner’s young wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow).
Likewise, Venice, Italy, becomes an equally foreboding presence that foreshadows a dark ending in Don’t Look Now. After their young daughter drowns, a couple, John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura (Julie Christie), move to Venice. The mise-en-scène, in general, uses the deteriorating nature of Venice, a city that is itself slowly drowning, to haunt them and the audience. Individual scenes take advantage of the city’s labyrinthine environment to evoke a sense of claustrophobia, helplessness, and loss.
Amelie uses Paris as a place of magic, fantasy, and possibility, whereas Last Tango in Paris uses the same city to tell a darker story about a doomed man and his fractured psyche. Amelie is filled with bright, colorful locales, often reminiscent of paintings, which create a romanticized dreamscape. Last Tango in Paris uses the natur
al, cold light of winter to capture a stark, atonal view of Paris. The characters inhabit empty rooms and crumbling apartments, reflections of their devastated interior emotional states.
You can also use setting and location in unique ways that are contrary to expectation. At the end of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, the protagonist, Gil (Owen Wilson), is walking along the Seine at night where he has a chance encounter with Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), a woman he met briefly earlier in the film. In the distant background, the illuminated Eiffel Tower with quickly blinking lights hovers over the scene as an essential part of the closing image.
Anyone can use the Eiffel Tower to evoke romance, light, or love, but in this moment, Allen uses it to convey a much more specific notion. It solidifies the idea that there is magic in the present and beauty in the appropriate synthesis of the past, the present, and the old and the new, but not in clinging to the past. How does the film convey this intricate and powerful message without a long-winded explanation? First, it draws from the history of the Eiffel Tower, and then it builds its case for what it wants to convey.
Let’s start with the Eiffel Tower:
In the present day, it represents the past and tradition in a respectful way. However, when it was first unveiled at the 1889 World’s Fair it was considered an eyesore and an atrocity of modernity that violated the Paris landscape. Past versus present. The fast strobe lights that are currently on it are beautiful (heck, Paris is the city of lights, right?), but they are a new and modern addition. Past versus present. Is the Eiffel Tower something new and welcome, or is it something superficial and modern that destroys its tradition? Past versus present.
I added the reminders about the “past versus the present,” but that doesn’t mean that an image of the Eiffel Tower evokes only these ideas or that we can read Woody Allen’s mind and know his intention. All I need you to acknowledge is that those are possible meanings of the Eiffel Tower in the film.
