by Lance Lee
It falls into nine parts.
1. Arresting Life
Part 1 or the Past of the fundamental story pattern fits into this stage of the dramatic hero’s journey. Here is that part of the protagonist’s life—as well as those around him or her, whether in a narrow or broad community—that precedes the Beginning, the immediate action of the story. It is a retrospective time we learn of through the immediate action, as the need for its understanding and transformation becomes increasingly clear for the resolution of the immediate conflict that arises in a screenplay.
Much has happened here necessarily already. The prewar Schindler in Schindler’s List is a business failure, his marriage a shambles. He is a fish out of water. Not even being a Nazi has provided the success he wanted. This is the Schindler whose relation to experience is amoral, a man prepared to exploit others ruthlessly at the start of the immediate action, as we see in his guilt-free taking of the Jews’ apartment and manipulation through Stern of the Jewish businessmen.
Thus the behavior we see on the part of heroes at the beginning of the action is the continuation of how they have been in the past which, even worse, is based on a false adjustment to their problem(s). For Schindler, the false solution is the pursuit of greed.
Julie in Blue has lived unaware of her husband’s infidelity, her own creativity submerged in his and her love for her daughter.
Terry in On the Waterfront has let himself be infantilized, bought off, and turned into a bum because of the dive he took for Charley and Johnny Friendly.
Book in Witness lives with a certainty about his milieu that is entirely wrong, surrounded by unperceived corruption in the police.
Hamlet in Hamlet is frozen in development by his perception of the pointlessness of action through the shock of his father’s death.
The wife and husband in Rashômon betray in every version of the encounter with the bandit that they have spent their time together in ignorance of one another and themselves.
Michael Sr. in Road To Perdition has at once been a master hit man and lived as if another son for John Rooney; he is in for a rude awakening.
Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries has spent an entire life smugly self-satisfied, yet even at his end he must learn to see the lie he has been living and grow.
Heroes, then, stand in a false relation to the truth as fact, at the simplest; they may stand in a false relation to themselves, and possibly in a false relation to both the truth and themselves. They may stand in a false relation to morality. They may even stand in a false relation to God. Their lives are a lie, arrested in illusion.
2. Complying with the False
Now we can understand what establishing character, conflict, and milieu are about at the start of a screenplay, however labeled in a given manual. Whether or not we start off with a bang as in Star Wars or gradually as in Rear Window, we immediately settle into an initial stretch of action that lets us identify the nature of the reality of the story, whether magic realism, science fiction, romantic comedy, or any other style, and meet and identify with the key characters, in particular the heroine and/or hero. They behave as they are accustomed to. Their lives display the false modus vivendi with experience that is based on a false relation to truth or self, or both, as seen in Arresting Life.
As audience we don’t immediately realize that falseness, any more than does the hero: he thinks he is coping. He, like ourselves, does not choose to live in conflict, illusion, or falseness, however often that turns out to be the case. We think we are living in accord more or less with the truth and with our selves, and are unhappy to discover that isn’t the case. Lives are always solutions to their perceived problems, even if all too often those solutions in fact prove so unsatisfactory. The initial dramatic situation reflects this common human experience.
In A Beautiful Mind, neither we nor John Nash know he is mad; we accept Charles, for instance, as real. Time passes before we realize we have been living the hero’s error too. The hero at the start of his journey, in a state of compliance with a false estimation of reality, places us through our identification with him within in the same experience of compliance with the false. His “false” may not be literally ours, yet it resonates with our own underlying sense that reality is not what it seems, nor are we as self-knowledgeable as we thought.
We are put, in other words, into Plato’s cave and confuse shadows with reality.
In Lantana Val is under the sway of her daughter’s death, while Leon and Sonja are caught in the failed marriage where Sonja craves passion and Leon feels numb. We see all this in the initial action, as they continue to live as they have been in response to their problems in the past. Terry lives in compliance with Johnny Friendly’s expectations which continues to make him a bum, while Michael and the others in The Godfather continue to act as if his destiny is separate from the family.
Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest lives a double life in ignorance of who he is and what his past is. Indiana has no idea the Nazis will show up that night in Nepal, as he catches up with Marion in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or that his nemesis is allied with them; he has no idea how much is going to be demanded beyond his usual resourcefulness.
Even in Ran, where the inciting event swiftly arrives, we see through the initial hunt, Ichimonji’s dream, and the presentation of his decision to his sons a continuance of how he has been, of how he evaluates reality, self, and others, all of which will be proven thoroughly wrong.
Thus the stage of Complying with the False both allows the establishment of the story realm of the screenplay and draws us into the false relation of the hero to his experience before he knows or admits or we know that it is false. The nature of his compliance with falsity establishes what moral level the conflict is to be played out on, action-adventure to moral redemption. We eagerly go along with all this like proverbial lambs to the slaughter.
The initial phase of a screenplay, then, is always an exercise in irony.
This is the sense in which a screenplay begins in a dumb phase in plotting, as does the hero. The changes visible in the immediate action are illusory so long as the protagonist continues to comply with the false. Whether that will endure or change remains to be seen as the action unfolds.
We must remember that the hero has subverted his volition in both Arresting Life and Complying with the False, and willingly perpetuates his own self-deception.
3. Awakening
Into this initial Complying with the False phase of the action erupts the inciting event that leads to an Awakening of protagonists to their inner or outer false relations, or both. The inciting event cannot be solved in the immediate action unless the past falseness is also solved. That past falseness is a willing compliance with error mistakenly thought to resolve the conflict in the protagonist’s life. The inciting event is a wake-up call, a bolt out of the blue as far as the hero is concerned, even if self-inflicted as with Ichimonji in Ran. Once this event appears it must be dealt with.
In Kramer vs. Kramer the inciting event comes as early as in Ran. Ted starts with the best day of his life, living as he has been throughout the years of his marriage, while Joanna has reached the breaking point. She breaks through his smugness when he returns home, refuses further Complying with the False, and leaves. That forces Ted into a reevaluation of his relation to Billy, parenting, himself, and his occupation, meaning his behavior in the world with others.
In Lantana the inciting event comes late in the form of Val’s death, first misperceived as murder. This forces a collision between Leon and John where Leon continues Complying with the False; that is now isolated by the action and Leon slowly and reluctantly driven toward the truth.
The inciting event comes in the middle of the Beginning in On the Waterfront, with Edie’s challenge to Terry’s amorality and plea to help. In Star Wars the inciting event is late, near the end of the Beginning, as in Lantana, with the murder of Luke’s uncle and aunt by stormtroopers; only after that does he join Obi-Wan Kenobi and be
gin to find his true nature. Similarly, the wake-up call is at the end of the Beginning for Schindler in Schindler’s List as he watches Amon Goeth liquidate the ghetto; for Michael in The Godfather it comes as he promises to stand by his father in the hospital scene. For Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest, the inciting event is the deeply ironic command of Gwendolyn’s mother to find a past as she denies his marriage proposal.
The hero’s journey is the same in comedy and serious drama; how we relate to it differs only through the perspective given by the comic angle of vision.
The impact of this moment of Awakening on us jars us into a startled realization of the price compliance exacts: Terry is agonized by Edie’s demand, Book stunned by the discovery of police corruption in Witness, and so on. This is only the beginning of the bitter cup the hero will have to drain: much more of the action must ensue and a deepening price for compliance with the false be exacted before he or we through him or her sees a way out. If the compliance has been with a false estimation of reality, then that will have to be corrected, though at the moment the wakeup call comes no one has any idea how to do that. It is the necessity for such action that is new for the protagonist. If the compliance has been to a false self, then a true self must be found. If the compliance has involved a false moral stance, as it does in our best stories, then establishing the morally right state of affairs becomes the story’s focus.
For beyond the concordance with the inciting event in Awakening, the price of Complying with the False that begins to become apparent with the wake-up call is in proportion to the kind of damage and extent of compliance the hero has inflicted on himself and on his community, for the hero represents his community and his or her falseness to themselves falsifies their community, too.
Worse, the hero begins to become aware that the nowness of his life, the presentness of the action, is an illusion—that, in fact, he is caught up in a repetition of the past and not living in the present at all, however immediate the dramatic action may seem.
Romance offsets the absence of moral and “true/false self” dimensions in stories focused on a purely action level, even in Bond stories. Here the Campbellian “hero as lover” finding his other half comes into play: woman is most obviously symbolic on this level of storytelling and least developed as a person, whether Marion of Raiders of the Lost Ark or Jinx in Die Another Day, whom Bond goes back to save even though pursued himself.
It is in Awakening, finally, that characters begin to define whether they are going to pursue a smart development, which will entail both real transformation in story and character, or remain dumb, whatever the dramatic pressure may be, revealing character growth in terms of an ever greater deepening that is not, however, transformative.
4. Confused Growth—and the Pursuit of Error
If conscience has not characterized the hero before then it must be aroused, for we cannot change except through the perception of error, of being wrong, even in an action-adventure film as we just saw where gaining or regaining the woman stands in for this strand of development. Marion and Indiana’s romance has failed in the past, and Marion is immediately reproachful toward him on his reappearance in her life in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ambivalence is one thing, as we can see with Terry in On the Waterfront with his complaining reaction to Joey’s death, but ambivalence is our human condition and something with which we must necessarily live. Change is another matter, let alone growth, and the perception of error crucial for its motivation. Complying with the False is a moral error, which is the nature of Marion’s complaint to Indiana; Jack is reproached for his having no past in moral terms in The Importance of Being Earnest. His failing may be amusingly put as an act of carelessness, but that act over which Jack had no control is made a matter of his volition by Lady Bracknell and faulted as a failure of character. He did the wrong thing. The case has already been made for Terry in On the Waterfront. For Schindler in Schindler’s List the liquidation of the ghetto is decisive. Before this we see him betray a guilty conscience over the thanks of the one-armed worker; after the liquidation he begins to save Jews from Amon Goeth.
In the fundamental story pattern we speak of the false steps the hero takes after the inciting event occurs, as he becomes aware of the dimensions of the problem facing him and tries to find a solution. We see that the end of the Beginning is marked by his choosing or being driven into an attempted solution for the problem that has appeared with the inciting event. That “solution” makes up the developmental line of action in the Middle, Act 2.
This is true, but empty.
The hero, after the inciting event, finds himself unmoored from knowledge. He is not sure what is real or not, whom to trust, or what to do. He is like the man in the Platonic cave after he discovers the true nature of his shadows; how to behave after that is far from clear. Moreover, he is not at all happy about being enlightened. Life was easier before. So his first attempts represent a mix of half-hearted steps forward and a reluctance to let go of what he thought he knew, like Leon to an extreme in Lantana. The hero has the same reactions we would have in his position; he stands in for ourselves.
Consider the Middle in Lantana as Leon assumes John is guilty and discovers Sonja was a patient of Val’s and then makes his ineffective confession, after finally listening to the tape. Leon thinks he has the answers even while his shortness of breath, unthinking violence, and declaration of numbness by now reveal only the extent to which he fights to maintain a false relation to himself even as he tries to solve his problems. He pursues error.
Schindler in Schindler’s List is shocked by what happens to the ghetto and shown overlooking his empty factory. It’s possible he is yet again about to fail: Amon Goeth at this point is a wholly unknown quantity. When Schindler goes to see him, he discovers Amon can be bought just like the other Nazi brass, yet Amon retains Stern in the camp, rightly understanding he is the key for Schindler and so for his own satisfaction through Schindler. Although Schindler regains his workers and resumes making money and now starts deliberately to save Jews, he is confused in conscience and still persevering in a course that at the End he will characterize as being a “war criminal.” He is still far from the decision he will take in the crisis to spend his ill-gotten gains saving “his” Jews.
Jake in Chinatown is steeped in confusion until the crisis, when he finally learns the real relationship between Evelyn, her daughter/sister, and Evelyn’s father, Noah Cross. He is not just duped in the beginning but allows himself to become romantically involved with Evelyn and consistently goes on misunderstanding what is going on. But a detective fascinates us because he must piece together reality, which is to say, move from illusion to truth through error.
Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries is stunned as the reality he seemed to have such a firm grasp on visibly unravels in his flashbacks and fantasies, while his efforts to interest Marianne are repulsed. His effort to change, his missteps, and his confusion are all palpable.
Terry’s confusion is marked in On the Waterfront after Edie demands his help. He veers back and forth between Edie and Johnny Friendly until he takes Edie into his arms after being commanded to forget her. But then the path he pursues is an attempt to sort things out for himself, an illusion for any protagonist, and one which Johnny Friendly sees through instantly: Terry cannot be allowed to act as a free agent. No one can be so allowed by the holdfast character.
All this goes to show why if the initial confusion on Awakening over the inciting event gives way to a settled course of action that dominates the action of the Middle, that action in turn is betrayed in the crisis as a pursuit of error. Technically, if the problem were such the protagonist could solve it right away, there would be no ensuing action. But that solution is not deferred arbitrarily: it is deferred because it can only be discovered through error. The “testing” heroes are subjected to in the Middle is focused on this pursuit of error. Again, it is why the hero is able to stand in for us: he or she, like ourselves when we turn from the sh
adows and contemplate leaving the cave, must figure out how to do so while, just as in drama, the hero’s growth is always opposed by those whom it will most affect, namely, those presently in control of the story.
For the story does not yet belong to the hero.
In On the Waterfront Terry almost loses Edie while Charlie is killed: now Terry’s life is in danger. Failure stares him in the face in the crisis.
This is typical: Leon learns John is not guilty in the crisis in Lantana; Terry is reduced to futile rage; Julie’s resolve in Blue to be involved collapses under Olivier’s pressure. Will in High Noon ends up more alone than he would have been on the prairie before Amy abandoned him, for in the crisis he watches Amy and Helen leave. It is the nadir of his fortunes and felt as such, a pursuit of rectitude about to end in tragedy. All seem about to lose control of the story definitively.
The dramatic hero, unlike the mythological, is all too human. He will not journey to the father above, or below; his marriage, or lack of it, will not be sacred; he will, in the end, be alone, as even Harry Potter is in the Harry Potter films when he must face the basilisk and Tom Riddle in the second, or Professor Quirrell and Voldemort in the first.
The growth of the hero, then, is bound up in paradox. As he rises in awareness of the false and strikes out to find something better, he clearly begins a growth either smart or dumb in nature. But because of his all too marked humanity, that growth comes at the price of pursuing fresh error. His limitation in this regard goes right to the heart of our own as human beings. Terry in On the Waterfront typically grows greatly in the Middle: much as he rails against “conscience,” he pursues it. His journey here represents the fact that all of us find our way in the dark with halting steps, glimpsing the truth like the proverbial light at the end of a very long tunnel, the escape route from Plato’s cave. But that pursuit of error is purgative, for it strips the hero of illusion and to his true capacity, clearly seen at last, by finally revealing that the solution he has sought has been selfish, even as his capacities increase.
