The Anatomy of Story (65 page)

A monologue is a ministory within the mind of the character. It is another form of miniature, a summation of who the character is, his central struggle, and the process he is going through over the course of the story. You can use it to show the audience a character's mind in depth and detail. Or you can use it to show the intensity of the pain the character is suffering.

To write a good monologue, you must first and foremost tell a complete story, which means, as always, hitting the seven structure steps and ending with the key word or key line last.

The Verdict

David Mamet uses a monologue to conclude the battle scene in
The Verdict.
Because it is part of the hero's closing argument to the jury, Mamet doesn't have to justify using a monologue in a "realistic" medium like mainstream American film. This monologue is a beautiful piece of writing, and not just because it tells a complete story. It actually tells
two
stories: the path of the woman he is defending and the path of his own life.

■ Position on the Character Arc
Frank has already had his self-revelation. But this is the final step of his arc: he proves the self-revelation by winning the case in trial.

■ Problem
How do you sum up the case so that it has the maximum dramatic power?

■ Strategy
Make the case and the call to moral action for the jury by secretly describing Frank's own personal development.

■ Desire
Frank wants to convince the jury to stand up for justice.

■ Endpoint
He recognizes that each juror is a human being who wants to do what is right.

■ Opponent
The rich and powerful out there who pound on us every day and make us weak.

■ Plan
His plan is to speak from his heart and so make justice real.

■ Conflict
The monologue shows a man struggling to know and do what is right even as he is asking the jury to do the same.

■ Twist or Reveal
The audience realizes that Frank isn't just talking about this case. He is talking about himself.

■ Moral Argument and Values
Frank's moral argument for acting with justice is a complete seven-step story. He begins with people being lost, feeling like powerless victims (weakness). People want to be just (desire), in spite of the rich and powerful who beat them down (opposition). If we can realize we have power (plan), if we believe in ourselves (self-revelation), we can act with justice (moral decision, battle, and new equilibrium).

■ Key Words
Justice, believe.

Take a look at this film to see what a great actor can do with a beautifully written monologue.

Closings

Chekhov said that the last ninety seconds are the most important of any play. That's because the final scene is the ultimate convergent point of the story. Occasionally, the last scene includes one more plot kick, in the form of a revelation. But usually, plot business has already been taken care of. The final scene then becomes, like the opening scene, a miniature of the entire story. The author highlights the thematic patterns one more time, and the audience realizes that this representation of characters is also the way of the larger world. In short, the audience has a thematic revelation.

To write a great closing scene, you must realize that it is the point of the upside-down triangle of the full story and that the scene itself is an upside-down triangle, with the key word or line—of the scene and the entire story—coming last:

Done well, the final scene gives you the ultimate funnel effect: that key word or line at the end sets off a huge explosion in the hearts and minds of the audience and resonates long after the story is over.

Let's look at some great final scenes to see how scene construction and dialogue work at this crucial moment in the story.

The Sun Also Rises

(by Ernest Hemingway, 1926)
This story tracks the meandering of a group of friends as they travel around Europe and of a particular man who can't be with the woman he loves because of a war wound. This is a great love that cannot be, so these characters spiral down to a point where life is nothing but a succession of grabs at sensation. They are purposeless people, aware of their trap but unable to find a way out.

The final scene is prototypical of the characters' actions in the book. After eating dinner, Jake and Lady Brett Ashley are again on the move. Someone is driving them somewhere in a taxi. As the scene funnels toward the endpoint, Brett says the ultimate Brett line: "Oh, Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together." This mundane, even

throwaway line, also symbolizes the entile story. The might-have-been of grand romantic tragedy has been reduced to having a good time.

The line is topped by the ultimate Jake line: "Yes. Isn't it pretty to think so?" Cursed not just by his injury but also by a sensibility that lets him have an illusion and see through it too, Jake is doomed for eternity.

The Seven Samurai

(by Akira Kurosawa & Shinobu Hashimoto & Hideo Oguni, 1954)
In
The Seven Samurai,
the storyteller's craft is taken to the rarified level of highest art. This is one of the great scripts, masterfully executing virtually every technique described in this book. Its final scene leaves the audience devastated and yet strangely inspired that so much insight into human beings is possible.

In this story, the seven samurai have come together out of altruism and a love of their warrior craft to protect a village from marauding bandits. Katsushiro, a young samurai apprentice, has fallen in love with Shino, a peasant girl. Now the fight is over; the samurai and the villagers have won. But four of the great warriors lie in graves on the hill. And Shino has turned her back on the young warrior and joined the other farmers to plant the next season's crop.

With Shichiroji, the other surviving samurai, the lead samurai, Kan-bei, witnesses Katsushiro's heartbreak, the farmers planting new life, and the four graves of his comrades on the hill. And he has a final insight. Though victorious, he knows the samurai have lost, and their entire way of life is over. The deep differences between people, erased for a moment, have returned, and the heroism of the four dead warriors is as lasting as a gust of wind.

Seen in such a shortened form, this moment may appear to be a baldly stated self-revelation. But for many reasons, it doesn't come across that way. First, it comes after an epic struggle in which seven samurai defeat forty bandits just to save a few farmers who are strangers to them. So it's a tremendous emotional twist. Second, this is a huge revelation, and it comes in the very last moment of the story, much like the shocking reversals at the end of
The Sixth Sense
and
The Usual Suspects.
Finally, it is also a thematic revelation in which the hero sees the death of an entire, and in many ways beautiful, social world.

EXT. VILLAGE DAY

Kanbei lowers his head and looks at the ground. He takes a few steps toward camera and then stops, looking back toward the paddy fields. Then he turns and walks back to stand beside Shichiroji again.

KANBEI

We've lost again. Shichiroji is surprised. He looks questioningly at Kanbei.

KANBEI

No, the farmers are the winners, not us.

Kanbei turns away from camera and looks up; Shichiroji does likewise; the camera tilts up the side of the burial hill, losing the two samurai and holding on the four samurai burial mounds silhouetted against the sky. The samurai music comes in over the planting music as the wind blows up the dust among the mounds.

The Great Gatsby

(by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925) The Great Gatsby
is justly famous for its closing. Gatsby is dead. Nick has realized the falseness of his quest for success in the big city and has decided to return to the Midwest. The final page finds Nick looking one last time at this rich enclave of the East Coast.

Fitzgerald's final sequence bears careful study. Through Nick, he says the big mansions have closed for the season. This is a specific fact in the story that also symbolizes the end of the phony Utopia of rich parties that died along with Gatsby. He then jumps back in time and up in scope when Nick imagines the island at America's beginnings, when it was a natural Eden, all potential, "a fresh, green breast of the new world" and "the last and greatest of all human dreams." This creates a stark comparison to the same island today, where real desires by real people like Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom have turned the lush forests into the false idols of big houses and fancy, meaningless parties.

From this big-picture comparison, Fitzgerald focuses back down to one person, Gatsby again, whose own desire pointed laserlike to the green

light at the end of Daisy's dock. Gatsby is the false dreamer who, like the classic myth hero, does not know that he already had it all back in the "dark fields" of the Midwest where he started.

As Fitzgerald closes in on the point of the triangle at the end of the scene and the story, he speaks of the symbol of that fake desire, the green light. Unlike so many stories that end falsely with the hero's desire accomplished and everything settled for good, Fitzgerald ends on the desire that never stops, the effort that redoubles as our human goal recedes into the distance. His last line is a thematic revelation that stands for the entire story: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

B
utch
C
assidy and the
S
undance
K
id

(by
William Goldman, 1969)
Just as
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
has one of the great openings in movie history, it also has one of the great endings. And in many ways, the final scene is a mirror image of the first two scenes.

■ Position on the Character Arc
The tragedy of these immensely likable guys is that they can't change. They can't learn. The new world that's coming on fast is too much for them. They can only die.

■ Problem
How do you create an ending that expresses the heroes' essential qualities and shows the result of their not being able to learn?

■ Strategy
As in the first scene, the characters find themselves in a tight room with everything closing in fast around them. As in the second scene, the characters face a crisis that defines them. First, they are defined by the way both men face death with extreme confidence—they have no doubt that they can get out of this.

And Butch is already planning their next stop. Second, the crisis shows their differences: Butch is still coming up with ideas, while Sundance is the one who has to get them out of the trouble that always ensues.

Again, Goldman showcases the beauty of their teamwork when Butch runs out to get ammunition and Sundance covers him. If Sundance was impressive when he shot Macon's gun across the floor, he is downright dazzling when he whirls and shoots every policeman in sight. But what

makes the audience
love
this team is how they work together comically. Their never-ending comic bickering, present from the beginning, with Butch the excited one and Sundance the cool skeptic, shows the audience once more that this really is a marriage made in heaven.

But Goldman sets up one more contrast in the scene that expresses the main theme and the lack of character change: these two guys can't see the world that's coming. Goldman crosscuts their comic bickering over Butch's latest idea for dodging the future—Australia—with the arrival of what appears to be the entire Bolivian army. The increasingly extreme contrast between what the heroes know and what the audience knows underlines what has always been there from the beginning: Butch and Sundance can't see beyond their little personal world. Lovable as they are, they aren't that smart.