The Anatomy of Story (25 page)

■ Theme Line
A person lives a much happier life when he gives to others.

■ Story World
A nineteenth-century London countinghouse and three different homes—rich, middle-class, and poor—glimpsed in the past, present, and future.

It's a Wonderful Life
■ Designing Principle
Express the power of the individual by showing what a town, and a nation, would be like if one man had never lived,
■ Theme Line
A man's riches come not from the money he makes but

from the friends and family he serves,
■ Story World
Two different versions of the same small town in America.

Citizen Kane

■ Designing Principle
Use a number of storytellers to show that a man's life can never be known.

■ Theme Line
A man who tries to force everyone to love him ends up alone.

■ Story World
The mansion and separate "kingdom" of a titan of America.

THE ARENA OF THE STORY

Once you have the designing principle and a one-line description of the story world, you must find a single arena that marks the physical boundaries of that world. The arena is the basic space of drama. It is a single, unified place surrounded by some kind of wall. Everything inside the arena is part of the story. Everything outside the arena is not.

Many writers, especially novelists and screenwriters, mistakenly believe

that since you can go anywhere, you should. This is a serious mistake, be-cause if you break the single arena of your story, the drama will literally dissipate. Having too many arenas results in fragmented, inorganic stories.

The single arena is easiest to maintain in theater because you have the natural advantage of the stage frame, edged by the curtain. Movies and novels expand the arena, but that just makes a unified place even more essential for building the drama.

Creating the Arena

I'm not suggesting that you adhere to the rigid "Aristotelian unity of place" that says all action should occur in a single location. There are four major ways of creating the single arena without destroying the variety of place and action necessary for a good story.

1. Create a large umbrella and then crosscut and condense.

In this approach, you describe the largest scope of the story somewhere near the beginning. In effect, you start with the big world and the wall that divides it from everything else. Then you focus on the smaller worlds within the arena as the story progresses.

This large umbrella could be as big as the flat plain of the West, a city, outer space, or the ocean, or it could be as small as a small town, a house, or a bar.

This technique can be found in
Casablanca, Alien, Spider-Man, L.A. Confidential, The Matrix, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, Mary Pop-pins, Groundhog Day, Sunset Boulevard, Nashville, Blood Simple, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Great Gatsby, Shane, Star Wars,
and
It's a Wonderful Life.

2. Send the hero on a journey through generally the same area, but one that develops along a single line.

This approach appears to destroy the single arena, and when not done properly, it does. One reason many journey stories feel fragmented is that the hero travels to a number of very different, unconnected places, and each place feels like a separate episode.

You can create the sense of a single arena if the area the character travels through remains fundamentally the same, like a desert, an ocean, a river, or a jungle. But even here, try to make the journey a single recognizable line and show a simple development of the area from beginning to end. This gives the area the appearance of unity.

We see the single-line journey in
Titanic, The Wild Bunch, The Blues Brothers,
Jacques Tati's
Traffic,
and
The African Queen.

3. Send the hero on a circular journey through generally the same area.

This approach works in much the same way as the second one, except that the hero returns home at the end. You don't get the benefit of the single line to give the audience a sense of a unified, directed path. But by going from home to home, ending back at the beginning, you highlight the change in the character in contrast to the world, which has remained the same.

The circular journey is the foundation for
The Wizard of Oz, Ulysses, Finding Nemo, King Kong, Don Quixote, Big, Heart of Darkness, Beau Geste, Swept Away, Deliverance, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Field of Dreams,
and
Alice in Wonderland.

4. Make the hero a fish out of water.

Start the hero in one arena. Spend enough time there to show whatever talents he has that are unique to that world. Then jump the character to a second world—without traveling—and show how the talents the hero used in the first world, while seeming to be out of place, work equally well in the second.

This approach is found in
Beverly Hills Cop, Crocodile Dundee, Black Rain,
and to a lesser but still important extent in
Witness
and
Dances with Wolves.

Strictly speaking, fish-out-of-water stories take place in two distinct arenas, not one. Consequently, they often feel like two-part stories. What holds them together is that the hero uses the same talents in both places, so the audience comes to feel that while both arenas are superficially quite different, they are in a deeper sense the same.

One of the keys to using the fish-out-of-water technique is to avoid staying too long in the first arena. The first arena is the jumping-off point for the main story, which takes place in the second arena. The first arena has fulfilled its function as soon as you show the hero's talents in that world.

Oppositions Within the Arena

You don't create characters to fill a story world, no matter how fabulous that world may be. You create a story world to express and manifest your characters, especially your hero.

Just as you define the character web by dramatizing the oppositions among the characters, so do you define the story world within your single arena by dramatizing the
visual oppositions.
You do that by going back to the oppositions among the characters and the values they hold.

Return to your character web, and look for all the ways the characters fight with each other. Look especially at the conflict of values, because values are what the main characters are really fighting about. From these oppositions, you will start to see visual oppositions emerge in the physical world as well.

lease out the visual oppositions, and figure out what the three or lour central ones might be. Let's look at some examples in stories and see how they come out of the character oppositions.

It's a Wonderful Life

(short story "The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren Stern, screenplay by

Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett and Frank Capra, 1946) It's a Wonderful Life
is structured so that the audience can see two different versions of the same town. Notice that this huge element of the story world, a town, is a direct expression of the fundamental character opposi-tion between George Bailey and Mr. Potter. And each version of the town is a physical manifestation of the
values
of these two men. Pottersville is what you get with one-man rule and unchecked greed. Bedford Falls is what you get with democracy, decency, and kindness.

Sunset Boulevard

(by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder & D. M. Marshman, Jr., 1950)
The central opposition in
Sunset Boulevard
is between struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis, who still has a belief in doing good work beneath that money-grubbing veneer, and rich, aging movie star Norma Desmond. The visual oppositions come from Joe's cramped apartment versus Norma's run-down mansion; sunny, modern, wide-open Los Angeles versus a dark Gothic house; young versus old; snuggling outsiders trying to break in versus the grand and secure but ruthless movie studio; and the common-man entertainment workers versus Hollywood movie star royalty.

The Great Gatsby

(by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925)
In
The Great Gatsby
, the primary oppositions are between Gatsby and Tom, Gatsby and Daisy, Gatsby and Nick, and Nick and Tom (notice the four-corner opposition). Each of these characters is some version of an ordinary midwesterner who has come east to make money. So the first story world opposition is between the flat plains of the Midwest and the tall towers and elegant mansions of the East. Tom is "new money," but he is older money than Gatsby, so there is an opposition within the riches of Long Island between the more established East Egg, where Tom and Daisy live, and the still wealthy but more nouveau West Egg, where Gatsby lives. Indeed, Tom and Daisy's mansion is depicted as opulent but conservative, while Gatsby's mansion and his use of it are portrayed as the epitome of garish bad taste.

Gatsby has gained his extreme wealth illegally, as a bootlegger, while Nick is a struggling, honest bond trader. So Nick rents Gatsby's little guest cottage, where he can gaze on the fake community of Gatsby's parties. Tom is a brute and a bully who is cheating on his wife, so Fitzgerald contrasts Tom's mansion with the gas station of Tom's mistress. Fitzgerald adds another contrast of subworlds when he depicts the city of ashes, the hidden detritus of the great capitalist, mechanistic engine represented by New York City and Long Island. In a final thematic burst, Fitzgerald compares the city of New York, the height of American "civilization," with New York before it was developed, when it was full of promise, the "great green breast of the New World."

King Kong

(by James Creelman and Ruth Rose, 1931) King Kong
sets up its primary opposition between the showman-producer, Carl Denham, and the giant prehistoric beast, Kong. So the main opposition within the story world is the island of New York, the man-made and overly civilized but extremely harsh world where image-maker Denham is "king," versus Skull Island, the extremely harsh state of nature where Kong, master of physical force, is king. Within this main visual opposition is a three-part contrast of subworlds between the city dwellers, the villagers of Skull Island, and the prehistoric beasts of the jungle, all of whom are involved in a different form of the struggle to survive.

Dances with Wolves

(novel and screenplay by Michael Blake, 1990) Dances with Wolves
shifts the central opposition of characters and values over the course of the story, and so the main visual oppositions shift as well. At first, the hero, John Dunbar, wants to participate in building the American frontier before it vanishes. So the first opposition of the story world is between the Civil War America of the East, where the nation has been corrupted through slavery, and the broad empty plains of the Western wilderness, where America's promise is still fresh. Within the world of the Western plains, the apparent conflict of values is between the white soldier, Dunbar, who believes in building the American nation, and the Lakota Sioux, who appear to be savages bent on its destruction.

But writer Michael Blake uses his depiction of the subworlds to undercut this
apparent
opposition of values. Dunbar's cavalry outpost is an empty mud hole, devoid of life, an ugly gash on the land. The Sioux village is a little Utopia, a cluster of tepees by the river, with horses grazing and children playing. As the story progresses, Blake shows that the deeper opposition of values is between an American expansionist world that treats animals and Indians as objects to be destroyed versus an Indian world that lives with nature and treats each human being according to the quality of their heart.

L.A. Confidential

(novel by James Ellroy, screenplay by Brian Helgeland & Curtis Hanson, 1997)

In
L.A. Confidential,
the main character opposition appears to be between cops and killers. In fact, it is between police detectives who believe in different versions of justice and a murderous police captain and a corrupt district attorney. That's why the first visual opposition, done in voice-over, is between Los Angeles as an apparent Utopia and Los Angeles as a

racist, corrupt, oppressive city. This essential opposition is then divided further as the three lead cops are introduced: Hud White, the real cop who believes in vigilante justice; Jack Vincennes, the smooth cop who makes extra money as a technical adviser on a TV cop show and who arrests people for money; and Ed Exley, the smart cop who knows how to play the political game of justice to further his own ambitions. The investigation plays out this opposition of characters and values through various sub-worlds by contrasting locations of the rich, white, corrupt Los Angeles that actually commits the crime and the poor black Los Angeles that is blamed for it.