Critique of Restorative Three-Act Form
In restorative three-act stories, there is an implied contract between the viewer and the filmmaker, a tacit agreement that, although the characters will err, we are never to lose sight of the costs. Although part of us may wish that the heroine gets away with something, we need the satisfaction of payback to fulfill our sense of dramatic completion.
But this need for payback is not inevitable; there are many stories that satisfy us precisely because the character is not governed by such a fixed moral system and its consequent need for retribution. Rather, we seek payback in most mainstream films because of the way that the restorative three-act structure organizes our expectations. Because we are invited to identify with the transgressing character, which is clearly defined at the end of the first act, we are positioned both to understand the character’s motivation and to see her mistakes.
This helps explain that familiar feeling of sitting in a theater and begging the character on the screen not to do something. She always does, and the thing she does always comes back to haunt her. Thus, in the broadest sense, the premise of most restorative three-act stories is that crime doesn’t pay, that good will triumph over evil, and that there is no confusion over which is which.
But suppose this simple morality is foreign to us? Suppose the world we know is more likely to be marked by small missteps, unexpected tenderness, and, most of all, a lack of overriding predetermined purpose or clarity? Suppose we realize that the corruption of money and power is much subtler than that portrayed in Wall Street? Suppose we know that situations are rarely as unambiguously unjust as the one faced by Galvin in The Verdict, and that good deeds are frequently tainted with blurred motivations? Forget corporate raiders and do-good lawyers. Suppose we find ourselves asking questions such as: Why do our lives seem to slip by in a succession of little details that appear so unimportant? How do we reconcile material success with personal malaise? Are we free of values long considered traditional, or do they haunt us in unexpected ways? How do we respond to the call of the larger world?
The creative screenwriter may not find it possible to answer these questions in a restorative three-act script. Although many restorative three-act films have less naked and less emphasized act breaks than do Wall Street and The Verdict, that structure still, like all forms of storytelling, suggests a point of view. No matter how we disguise it, a story with a clear violation followed by recognition and redemption seems like a moral tale, a reaffirmation of a preexisting, commonly understood ethics.
Are we saying that to write a thought-provoking script, you have to abandon the restorative three-act structure? Absolutely not. The purpose of this book is not to prescribe, but to explore. No one can tell you in which style to write. If you allow someone to do so, you are ceding your power as a writer. We can, however, look at the things that are communicated by different styles and different approaches, and invite you to consider whether these correspond to the way you see the world.
You can go even further and ask: Is the form of the story really that important? Is there such a thing as neutral form, one into which we can pour any story? The answer is No. This is the focus of this chapter. Nothing is neutral; form is inextricably linked to content. There is no single way to tell a story, no right way, because the choice of form is a creative decision. The scriptwriter’s choice of form communicates a basic feel and a point of view that fundamentally determines how we understand the story.
Before we look at alternative structures, we need to examine in more detail the point of view suggested by the restorative three-act form. When we decide on how we will tell our stories, we need to know what comes along for the ride, whether we want it or not. We will see how the restorative three-act structure implies broad perspectives on issues of free will, the relationship of character to society, our ability to change ourselves, and the transparency of motivation.
Story Over Texture
In the beginning of the last chapter, we stated that restorative three-act stories disclose their essential meanings through the playing out of their structure. While all stories reveal their meanings over time, restorative three-act stories are particularly horizontal in design. If we halt their forward plot movement, we have little left to organize the story.
To create the forward movement, each major scene must push the story toward the plot point, which, with its own circular logic, gains its significance because it is the moment toward which the story so carefully builds. This progression leads to a clear hierarchy of values for the viewer—we understand what is important (that which brings us closer to the plot point) and what is merely background (texture and detail). In a restorative three-act script, forward movement comes at the expense of texture, of resonance, and of ambiguity.
One of the fundamental problems in grasping real-life experiences is that these experiences have no inherent focus. A million things compete for our attention. How do we know what is important? Once we find what’s important, how do we maintain the clarity to follow it? If we are to write scripts that reflect this ambiguity, we have to go beyond the clear-cut order of the restorative three-act structure to suggest the sheer overabundance of detail, of stimuli in contemporary life.
But the scriptwriter should be cautioned. When we talk about writing from the complexity of experience, we are not talking about transcribing reality. If you attempt to merely copy the disorder of direct experience, if you write with a million things competing for your attention—shaving, washing the dishes, tying shoes, coping with the death of a lover, feeding the cat—then all you’ll create is disorder. Reproducing disorder is not a matter of writing in a disorderly fashion. The trick to writing about reality is to find a way to bring to the foreground the conflict between focus and confusion. Although the meaning points in a different direction, this approach requires as much control as does the restorative three-act structure.
Consistency of Tone
To be intelligible, all stories must have some form of tonal consistency. As in a game, the rules can be arbitrary, but once they are established, they must be maintained. Otherwise, events and actions will have no meaning.
In a restorative three-act story, however, tonal experimentation is particularly limited by the need to serve the progression of the act breaks. The film Heathers provides an example of this limitation. An apparent black comedy, the first act of Heathers ends with Veronica and her devilish boyfriend, J.D., killing her tormentor Heather (one of the high school’s three most popular girls, all with the same name) and then covering up the crime with a fake suicide. This is outrageous stuff and it cries out to be pushed further. But by the end of the second act, after two more sets of killings, Veronica’s had enough. She breaks off her relationship with J.D. and, in the third act, seeks revenge. The movie ends with her finally killing J.D., who has been the driving force behind her rage. Simple morality takes over; Veronica is redeemed. She has killed the evil force and now accepts the least popular person in the school, her old friend Martha Dumptruck. The chaos suggested in the first act, the outrageous acting out of impetuous teenage rivalry, is tamped down and made tame in the same way that the more freewheeling tone found early in the movie has been contained to service the plot.
Acts tend to start out loosely structured and then gradually focus, constricting the character and forcing some decision. As we reach the act climax, we get the feeling that all action would stop and the movie would end if the character did not make the decision that moves the story into the next act.
It is impossible to mistake the fact that a decision is being made or the importance of that decision. The overall structure of the script builds to and is dependent on the decision-making moment. Often, the moment is slowed down, exaggerated, or frozen. This clear-cut articulation can be thought of as a decision-making space, a moment that is emptied of any distractions aside from the decision.
In Wall Street, Gekko and Bud are riding in a limousine when Gekko proposes that Bud work for him. As the car stops, Bud has a moment to make up his mind before the limousine pulls away, leaving Bud alone on the street corner and with the promise of Gekko’s wealth literally disappearing in front of him. There is no mistaking what Gekko is asking nor that Bud will have any later chance to accept it. Thus, Bud is fully aware of the one-way gate he is passing through.
Rarely do we experience decisions in these clear-cut moments when we can isolate and weigh the consequences and then decide our fate. By decisions, we are referring to the millions of things that define us (the kind of people we like, what we enjoy doing), that are so fundamental to our character that we rarely think of them as decisions at all. If we thought of decisions this way, then Bud would not stand outside his experience enough to weigh the pros and cons of this choice. Rather, all his small actions, his step-by-step revelation of himself that led to his getting involved with Gekko, would serve to make the decision for him. If he did later become aware of what he had gotten into, he would not be able to point to one single moment where that had happened. Of course, if we imagine Bud’s character drawn this way, then reversing his fate would be that much more difficult, if not impossible.
Understanding Motivation
Restorative three-act stories are character driven: The action turns on character decision, and the motivations that underlie the decision are made accessible to the audience. In fact, the essence of the restorative three-act structure is that action is an expression of motives, of character conflict.
Clearly, if we are to write a story about human actions, we must have some way to read motivation. However, the manner in which motivation is portrayed is variable. In restorative three-act stories, it is very rare for the central character to make a decision that hasn’t been carefully prepared for the viewer. The first-act breaks of all the films we’ve discussed—Wall Street, The Verdict, Bull Durham, The Graduate—have been calculated so that we understand the conflicting forces underlying the decision being made. The fact that we weigh the options as we wait for the character to decide gives us a feeling of participating in the decision-making process.
By contrast, in She’s Gotta Have It, Nola’s final decision to abandon Jamie appears, at least initially, to come out of the blue. Her decision makes sense only when we look back on the rest of the film and put things together. Our understanding is not instantaneous. We are supplied with clues not only from the movement of the story, but also from the texture, the details, and, most importantly, from the ellipses, the things not there. Our understanding is more reflective and its full impact may not hit until the film is over.
Binary Character Psychology
In order to be distinct, acts tend to inflict extreme choices. Bud is either with Gekko or he is not; Crash is either with Annie or he isn’t; there is no middle ground. Since the strength of the restorative three-act structure is its use of progressive acts to chart a progression of character, we see the either/or quality transposed onto character. To side with Gekko, Bud has to turn on his family and their values. To reject Annie, Crash, overtaken by his pride, rejects his romanticism.
In some restorative three-act stories, the third act represents a return to innocence, as in Bud’s return to his family at the end of Wall Street. However, this shedding of all that happens to him during the course of the film may seem unsatisfactory. To return to his family, Bud rejects the greed and ambition that drove his actions for most of the film. The residue of this ambition is never accounted for. How did he come to terms with it? Where did it all go?
In other restorative three-act stories, the third act represents a compromise between the extremes of the first two acts, and we feel that the character’s experiences are more satisfactorily accounted for. In The Verdict, Galvin attempts to defend a case based solely on justice. In the second act, his cocoon-like innocence is shattered. It is only when he is willing to misrepresent himself—to lie, to open other people’s mail—that he gets to the one witness who will help him win the case. At the end of the film, the two sides of Galvin’s character have been integrated. Galvin can now seek justice and play the game at the same time.
The force of the restorative three-act structure comes from a certain willful blindness on the part of the character. In the second act, the character is not aware of what we know about him. This willful blindness allows the second act to build while we wait for the character to fall. This obliviousness generates dramatic force at the expense of self-awareness. The character develops precisely because he does not notice what is perfectly plain to us. When he does, the character tends not to adjust by making small accommodations, but to snap back into place.
At first glance, the restorative three-act structure appears to bring us closer to the characters. Its paradox is that upon closer examination, the comfortable awareness of the first-act transgression places us safely outside of the story. As discussed in the next chapter, other forms of stories—those that don’t have such a clear-cut first-act climax—tend to leave the viewer much less certain about the circumstances and the morality of the situation in which the character finds herself. Since we are not pre-positioned, we have to work constantly to reassess the meaning and the relative morality of the character’s actions. In fact, these kinds of screen stories tend to do away with the larger ethical questions and suggest less the affirmation of general morality than the struggle to deal with an ambiguity that is as problematic to the viewer as it is to the character.
History as Backdrop
The underlying assumption in a restorative three-act script is that the character is restrained by her conflict, her flaw, her psychology. Even though the conflict is externalized (that is, there is a real dramatic problem), the problem expresses an internal conflict. Once the character stops fighting herself (usually in the beginning of the third act), she tips the plot in her favor and eventually triumphs.
So what is the problem with this? Nothing, except that this form of scriptwriting doesn’t account for the particular historical, social, political, economic, and familial circumstances that also condition fate. History, as an event or impersonal force, serves merely as a vehicle for psychological development. The film scholar David Bordwell cites an example of the appropriation of history as a plot device: “As an old Russian émigré says at the end of Balalaika: ‘And to think that it took the Revolution to bring us together.’”1
We see this even in films without an apparent political perspective. Consider Jurassic Park for a moment. Ellie’s role as a professional woman who treats an ailing stegosaurus and who braves the raptors to switch on the power would seem to suggest a much more progressive view of women than is traditionally presented in mainstream film. This is quickly dispelled, however, when we look at Ellie’s dramatic role in the film. She has no doubts, no hesitation, and no conflict or growth, so that her actions indicate nothing about her internal life. Instead, her dramatic function is to smile knowingly at Grant when he is around children, thus serving merely to mark his progress through the acts. While she is portrayed with the mannerisms of a feminist, her dramatic role is that of a static signpost against which we measure the male character’s growth. It is worth noting that even though Jurassic Park is not advertised or thought of as a political film, it conveys, as do all films, a political meaning nonetheless.
While the use of history as a backdrop to psychological development is not always as obvious, barriers of race, gender, class, and history are still presented as secondary to the transcendence of individual will. If we find ourselves suspicious of this worldview, if we feel our history has shown us the limitations and corruptions that underlie our illusion of free will, then we must be leery of the restorative three-act structure. If we are not, we may find ourselves reinforcing, through the structure of our screenplays, the very conservative notions we wish to challenge in our stories.
Motives Outweigh Events
Action in restorative three-act stories services, and gains importance as an expression of, character conflict. The physical world and the force of history are subordinate to their roles as reflections of the character’s personal redemption. The effect of subordination is to coddle the character, to make the consequences of action less important than motives. Redemption is not only spiritual, but is also a literal reconstruction of the circumstances of the character’s predicament. The character is never allowed to get in so deep that he can’t get out.
To understand this coddled form of storytelling, compare the restorative three-act structure to classical tragedy. In King Lear, Lear falsely condemns his one true daughter, Cordelia, in the first act. The rest of the play depicts the consequences of that condemnation. His recognition of his wrong, wrought by four acts of hardship and disintegration, leads him to kneel when he finally meets Cordelia again. Yet, such recognition is too late. Although he is finally able to see, he cannot transform the world into a reflection of his own psychology. Forces larger than his motives and desires have been set into motion. He may recognize them, but it is too late to stop the tragedy of his death and the destruction of his kingdom.
In contemporary literature, stories often work the other way. Instead of being faced with the destruction of a whole kingdom, characters confront the stone-cold indifference of the material world. In the short stories of contemporary American writers such as Raymond Carver, Bobbie Anne Mason, and Annie Beattie, the most remarkable elements are the limits of human expression and the lack of a clear-cut ethical imperative in a world that is resistant to universal meaning.
The restorative three-act structure doesn’t work that way. It is a moralistic form of storytelling with the basic premise that good motives triumph, that the world is understandable, consistent, manageable, and responsive to goodness and truth. As a result, external events are rarely arbitrary; instead, they are earned. In a three-act structure script, the character’s fate is not only in her own hands, but as long as she is willing to admit to her mistakes, the consequences of her actions can be eradicated.
One of the dominant aspects of mainstream film is the extent to which it seeks to erase the evidence of a storyteller and to imply that what takes place on the screen would take place regardless of whether a camera were recording it. The screenwriter should be aware of this distinction between showing and telling, dramatizing and narrating. Aristotle makes a distinction between the poet “imitating everyone as acting” and the poet narrating “by being himself and not changing.”2 The poet imitating everyone stands effaced and is an ideal, invisible agent that reproduces, without comment, events that have happened. The poet being himself and not changing is present as a storyteller who stands between us and the events and consciously interprets them. In the first instance, the story is understood to be transparent; the subject is the event. In the second instance, the story is understood to be an indeterminate interaction between the events and the narration. The events may be so minimized that the story is largely about the voice.
Clearly, there is no such thing as a story without a storyteller. No matter how much the storyteller seeks to disappear, there is always an interpreting sensibility or point of view that structures the action for us. Yet, the restorative three-act structure is based on a conventional structure that is designed to divert our attention from narration and to suggest that the story tells itself.
In a novel, we expect to find a narrator, a voice that speaks directly to us. Unlike the more omniscient narration used by 19th-century writers such as George Eliot, most 20th-century literary fiction implicates this voice in the story. Thus, we have degrees of unreliable, first-person narrators or third-person narrators inflected with the voice and emotional charge of characters within the story. We talk about this in Chapter 21. In fact, this overt narrative shaping is one of the reasons why novels can frequently turn on events that have less obvious import than do those in films.
In most plays and films, there is no overt narrator who speaks directly to the camera and interprets events. However, this does not mean there is no narrator. Rather, the narrator is implied, in large part, through dramatic structure. This is why we say that restorative three-act films reveal themselves through their structure—the structure itself functions as the narrator. Structure modulates our interest and gives significance and meaning to events without calling attention to itself, as though the story just happened, as though the characters really control their own fates.
It is critical that we understand the narrative role of the restorative three-act structure. If we want to work with other forms of stories, we have to find other means to serve this function. As we see in the next chapter, one of things that happens when we break out of restorative three-act form is that the effaced narrator becomes increasingly visible and overt.
The pattern of transgression, recognition, and redemption makes the restorative three-act structure a very comforting form. It allows us to identify with characters who have gone beyond acceptable behavior, while at the same time remaining aware that they will be forced to confront their behavior. The three-act structure privileges the individual over any social, historical, economic, and familial limitations. While this may be underplayed, we cannot avoid the implications of the form altogether. If the feel of transgression, recognition, and redemption is what we want, then there is no better way to express this than by using the restorative three-act structure. But to create a different feel, to find a way to respond to the arbitrariness and indifference of the contemporary world, we have to look elsewhere.
References
1. Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, and Thompson, Kristin. The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, page 13.
2. Aristotle. Poetics. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967, page 5.