Walking but not talking about it

Monday 30 April

Last night I was talking to Lew about a new script idea which I've called Bully. His main critique was that it was predictable, that it didn't involve any narrative uniqueness. Fair enough. However, what are stories about? Even though movies have a beginning, middle and end, the end is not what I derive joy from. It has been a long time since I did not know intuitively how a story or a film was going to wrap. Catharsis and resolution only perfunctorily bookend a narrative, they are never really ends in themselves. It is always the journey from which pleasure is gained, the setups and payoffs, the fabric of the story which I become entangled in, and the end a necessary disengagement from that story. How then can stories be unpredictable? Given x, y and z it is almost always possible to infer the path the meta narrative will take.

Wonder Boys is a prime example of this – the fun of the story is in its middle and Wonder Boys is a joy to watch despite the fact that the end can be deduced from nearly the beginning. The Matrix is an easier and more universal example to illustrate my point (and an awesome film) – did anyone think that Neo would die at the end of the film?

Perhaps it is conditioning and audience that ultimately decides on the generic end? Maybe films can never truly be surprising and we only hold ourselves in suspense?

That brings me to a wanky question that’s not quite as rhetorical as the previous three - what is an end anyway? As finite beings that function on a basis of created time, we have placed an imperative on beginnings and ends. I don't think I can ever truly trust anyone that says they have done all they wanted in a given time frame as what does that mean? They've finished things? They’ve gained all they could have from that experience? The fact that we live on and are influenced by what we have done means that things never really end. Even death, whether you believe in obliteration or something else, is not the end of someone.

What does this mean for my script? I don't care if people will walk into this film knowing the bully will get his just desserts, I care about how they engage with the story – whether the middle is a new take on an old story.