The Anatomy of Story (33 page)

■ Weakness and Need
Night sky, Bedford Falls from above.
The story starts with an omniscient, third-person narrator (an angel) and later is carried by an actual character, the angel Clarence. Clarence has a weakness: he doesn't have his wings. Helping George is how he will fulfill his need. George's weakness is that his despair has led him to the point of suicide. This setup is designed to allow the audience to review many years of George's life very quickly and eventually to place the two versions of the town side by side.

The subworld of these two weaknesses, Clarence's and George's, is a God's-eye view of the arena, which is the town, and the night sky, which is a physical manifestation of the religious elements of the story.

■ Desire
George's warm house growing up and the deserted house where he and Mary make a wish.
After high school, George lives at home in a buzzing household with his father, mother, brother, and maid Annie. His father is a benevolent man, and there is much love between him and George. But George is bursting to leave this confining small town. George tells his father his goal: "You know what I've always talked about—build things . . . design new buildings—plan modern cities." This scene places the visual subworld and the story structure step in conflict (usually the subworld matches the step). The warm house shows what a loving family can be like. But George's intense desire to leave suggests the oppression of the small-town world, especially one controlled by a tyrant.

George again expresses his desire when he and Mary walk home after falling into the pool at a dance. They spot an old, deserted house on the hill—the terrifying house—which for George is the

symbol of negative small-town life. He throws a rock at it and tells Mary, "I'm shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I'm going to see the world . . . and then I'm going to build things." Of course, he ends up living in that house, which his wife tries to make cozy and warm. But to his mind, the house is haunted and remains his tomb.

■ Opponent
Potter's
bank and office.
Henry Potter is "the richest and meanest man in the county." When Clarence first sees him riding in his "elaborate horse-drawn carriage," he asks, "Who's that—a king?" Potter is the enemy of George and the Building and Loan because they are all that keep Potter from owning everything and everyone in town. Potter's lair is his bank, from which he controls the town.

■ Apparent Defeat
Bridge in Bedford Falls.
George's apparent defeat occurs when he faces the shame of bankruptcy due to Uncle Billy's losing $8,000. George crosses
to
the middle of the bridge under a heavy snowfall and a hard wind. At this narrow place of passage, George decides
to
end his life.

■ Visit to Death
Opponent's dystopian town of Pottersville.
The angel Clarence shows George what the town would be like if he had never lived and was unable to check Potter's influence. Potter values business, money, power, and keeping the common man down. So begins George's long journey through the deadly subworld of Pottersville, a perfect representation of Potter's values.

The detailing of this subworld, accomplished in the writing, is superb, and the whole sequence is done while George is on the run. Main Street is a string of bars, nightclubs, liquor stores, and pool halls, and dissonant jazz is playing over the scene (some of us actually like this vision). As described in the screenplay, "Where before it was a quiet, orderly small town, it has now become in nature like a frontier village."

Unlike Bedford Falls, Potter's version of a town has no community. Nobody recognizes George, and nobody knows one another. Even more important, all the minor characters, who have been defined in great detail up to this point, are shown as having fulfilled their worst potential. The contrast with their earlier selves is startling but believable. That really could be Ernie the cab driver

living a dark version of his life. That really could he Mr. Gower, the druggist, who's now a bum. That really could be George's mother, turned nasty, running a boardinghouse. (The only miss is Donna Reed as a spinster.) This suggests that all people are a range of possibilities and that whether they are at their best or at their worst depends on the world they live in and the values they live by.

George ends his trip to Pottersville—and his long visit to death— with a visit to the graveyard on a dark snowy night. Here he sees his brother's grave and then narrowly escapes shots fired by a cop. This returns him, full circle, to the bridge, the transition point where he was about to commit suicide. ■
Freedom
The hero's
Utopian
town of Bedford Falls.
When George discovers that he is alive, he experiences the intense liberation that comes from seeing the value of his own life and, even more, what he has been able to achieve as a human being. This is a profound self-revelation for any person. In a moment of intense but inspiring irony, he runs joyously down the main street of the town that only hours before had driven him almost to suicide. It is the same town, but the simple, tree-lined street with its family businesses has become a winter wonderland. George now experiences this once-boring town as a
Utopia
because it is a community that cares. The big old drafty house, once haunted and confining, has become warm because the family that loves him is there, and it is soon filled with all the minor characters whose lives he improved and who are now happy to return the favor.

It's a Wonderful Life
shows a very close match between story and visual world. Unlike the big sensational worlds in fantasies like
The Lord of the Rings
and the Harry Potter stories, this film uses visual techniques in the everyday setting of a suburban, middle-class, midcentury American world
(Big
is a more recent example of this).
It's a Wonderful Life
is excellent social fantasy on the level of Twain and Dickens. And it borrows from them both.

Borrowing from other storytellers is a technique that you can use if you use it playfully. Keep the references light. People who get them will enjoy them. Those who don't will still appreciate the story's added texture. In
It's a Wonderful Life,
the angel who saves George is named Clarence, which is the name of the ally in Twain's
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
Clarence is reading
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
when he is called to action. And of course, the story is an American version of Dickens's
A Christmas Carol,
with a heavy dose of
David Copperfield
thrown in.

Notice that you can borrow all the way up to the designing principle of another story. But if you do, you must change it enough to make it unique. Your audience will appreciate, even on a subliminal level, the artistry of making that change.
It's a Wonderful Life
is not about a crotchety old American who visits Christmas past, present, and future in New York. It is about a middle-class American whose whole life is laid out in detail and who then sees an alternative version of what his hometown would be like had he not lived. That is a wonderful change to make to the designing principle of
A Christmas Carol.
You may be surprised to learn that audiences didn't take to this film when it first came out. Though
It's a Wonderful Life
is very sentimental, it may have been too dark a social satire for the mass audience of its day. But over time, the excellence of the film, especially in connecting character to story world, has won over the crowd.

Sunset Boulevard

(by Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder & and D. M. Marshman, Jr., 1950) Sunset Boulevard
is a cutting satire about a modern kingdom whose royalty are movie stars. These kings and queens live and die by selling beauty.
Sunset Boulevard
appeals especially to people who know story—not only because its main character is the modern-day storyteller, a screenwriter, but also because its visual world is laden with all kinds of story forms and story references. These are just a few of the story world techniques in this brilliant script.

The overall world is Hollywood, which the writers set up as a kingdom, with a court of royalty and a rabble of hardworking peasants. By using a writer as a voice-over storyteller, the writers are able to make all kinds of literary connections to the world.

■ Problem
Hollywood apartment.
Screenwriter Joe Gillis is out of

work and broke, and he lives in a run-down apartment. He is also a

Hollywood factory writer, "cranking out two stories a week." His

problem gets worse when two men come to his apartment to repossess his car.

■ Weakness and Need, Opponent
Run-down mansion and pool.
When he first sees the run-down mansion—the terrifying house—of Norma Desmond, Joe thinks this secret subworld has just saved him. He can hide his car there, rewrite Norma's awful script, and make some good money. But he has just entered the opponent's subworld, from which he will never escape. It holds him because it feeds his great weakness, which is his hunger for money.

Here's how Joe, the screenwriter, describes the world:

It was a great big white elephant of a place. The kind crazy
movie
people built in the crazy '20s. A neglected house gets an
unhappy
look. This one had it in spades. It was like that old woman in
Great
Expectations,
that Miss Havisham and her rotting wedding
dress, and
her torn veil, taking it out on the world, because she'd been
given
the go-by.

As he retreats to the guest house, Joe makes his way past the overgrown vines and thorns, just like the prince in
Sleeping Beauty.
Out his window, he sees the empty swimming pool, crawling with rats. The images of death and sleep in this world are everywhere.

■ Opponent, Apparent Defeat
House revitalized, Joe captured at the pool.
This fairy-tale world, with its haunted house, its thorns, and its Sleeping Beauty, is also the home of a vampire. As Joe becomes more deeply ensnared in the trap of easy living, Norma and the house are revitalized. The pool is now clean and filled, and when Joe emerges from a swim, Norma, flush with new blood, dries off her bought young man with a towel, as if he were her baby.

■ Battle, Death
Shooting at the pool.
In a short, one-sided battle, Norma shoots Joe when he tries to walk out on her. He falls into the swimming pool, and this time the vampire has left him dead.

■ Opponent's Slavery
Norma on the staircase, descending into madness.
With such a great human opponent,
Sunset Boulevard
does not end with the death of the hero. The opponent literally descends into madness. Her ability to distinguish fantasy from reality now gone, she is both her character—"Down below, they're waiting for

the Princess" and an actress performing in another Hollywood movie. As the newsreel cameras roll, Norma walks down the grand staircase of the "palace" into a deep sleep from which no prince will awaken her.

Ulysses

(by James Joyce, 1922)
At first we might be wary of looking at Joyce's
Ulysses
to learn techniques of great storytelling, precisely because many people consider it the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Its incredible complexity and brilliance would seem to take it far beyond the grasp of us mere writing mortals, and its intentionally obscure references and techniques would seem to make it totally unfit for those wishing to write popular stories in the form of films, novels, plays, and television scripts.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Although Joyce may have had tremendous natural talent as a writer, he was also one of the most
trained
storytellers in history. Even if he opted to use that training to write with a complexity that you might want to avoid, for all kinds of legitimate reasons, the techniques he used have universal application for great storytelling in any medium.

Ulysses
is the novelist's novel. Its secondary main character, Stephen, is a man struggling to become a great writer. It uses a wider, more advanced array of storytelling techniques than any book ever written (the possible exception is Joyce's
Finnegan's Wake,
but no one has actually read it from beginning to end, so it doesn't count). In myriad ways, Joyce challenges other writers, saying, in effect, Can you figure out what I'm doing, and can you do it yourself? Let's give it a try.