18
MINIMAL CONFLICT
INTRODUCTION: THE BALANCE OF TEXT AND SUBTEXT
Every line of dialogue strikes a balance between the literal meaning of the words said and the unsaid meanings that the reader/audience senses resounding through the subtext.
When this balance tilts so that a minor motivation causes a massive vocal response, dialogue sounds hollow and the scene feels forged. Recall the definition of melodrama from Chapter Six: the overwrought expression of limp needs. Like chefs who use rich sauces to hide spoiled food, writers who whip up blubbery stylistics to smother stale content risk the sour odor of melodrama.
When balance levels out so that unsaid thoughts and feelings transcribe directly and fully into what is said, we call this blatancy writing on-the-nose. If a scene’s implicit and explicit meanings echo each other, subtext turns into text, depth dries up, lines sound tinny, and the acting clanks.
When the balance favors content over form, when minimal words express maximal meaning, dialogue gains its greatest credibility and power. Using Robert Browning’s famous phrase, “Less is more.”1 Any word that can be cut should be cut, especially if its loss adds to the line’s effect. Sparseness of language gives the reader or audience a chance to peer ever more deeply into the unsaid and unsayable. With few exceptions, when understatement takes the upper hand, dialogue resonates.
What follows is a superb example of the fewest possible words used to express the maximum possible feeling and meaning.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
Sofia Coppola wrote and directed LOST IN TRANSLATION when she was thirty-two. It was her fourth script to reach the screen and her second feature to direct. The film won numerous awards around the world, including an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Coppola grew up surrounded by artists, she has traveled to Japan many times, and, like all of us, she has won and lost at love. So although it’s fair to assume that personal experience influenced Coppola’s storytelling, it would be a mistake to treat LOST IN TRANSLATION as autobiography. Rather, her writing expresses the widely read, finely tuned mind of an artist who uses fiction to express her insights into life’s secret places.
In Coppola’s minimalist writing, dialogue progression does not use arguments to sling words like stones (the conjugal hostilities of A Raisin in the Sun) or manipulations to weave words into a trap (Daisy’s malicious feigning in The Great Gatsby). Instead, subtle, indirect, sparse language shapes implicit, virtually invisible but deeply felt conflicts that haunt her characters out of their pasts and into the present.
In the scene below, Coppola works into the inner selves and past selves of her characters simultaneously. She reveals both in each without resorting to choices under the pressure of dilemma.
Choices between irreconcilable goods and the lesser of two evils, once poised, are profoundly revealing of true character but relatively easy to dramatize. Coppola takes another path: Her characters are not in conflict with what life imposes but with the emptiness of what life denies. This quiet scene hooks, holds, and pays off without direct, indirect, or reflexive conflict.
SETUP
The key to creating a scene of minimum dialogue and maximum impact is its setup. If, prior to a scene, the storytelling has brought characters to crisis points in their lives, the reader/audience can sense their needs swirling in the subtext. These desires may or may not be conscious, but the reader/audience knows them, feels them, and waits in high tension to see how they play out. A well-prepared reader/audience reads chapters of content implied behind a phrase or gesture.
LOST IN TRANSLATION perfects this technique. The film’s opening scenes crosscut to counterpoint dual protagonists: Charlotte, a recent Yale graduate, traveling with her photographer husband, versus Bob Harris, a middle-aged Hollywood star, famous for action roles. As the two settle into the Park Hyatt Tokyo, we see their differences of age (at least thirty years), fame (everyone ignores Charlotte; everyone fawns on Bob), and marriage (she needs her husband’s attention; he wishes his wife would leave him alone).
That day, they notice each other in passing twice—once in an elevator and later in the lounge. That night, neither can sleep, so they make their way to the hotel bar where they meet by chance.
Scene Intentions
As the scene opens, Charlotte and Bob seem to share a simple need: to kill time over a drink. But if all they really wanted was a drink, they could have opened their minibars. Instead, an unthought wish for someone to talk to sends them out of their rooms. Once they see each other, their scene intention becomes: to kill time with talk.
Scene Values
As Charlotte nears Bob sitting at the bar, tension rises. Earlier that day, she and he exchanged a smile, but suppose he turns out to be an arrogant bore, or he discovers that she’s a lunatic fan. The question “Should I talk to this stranger or drink alone?” runs through the minds of both. Those doubts charge the tension of comfortable isolation versus risky intimacy that opens the scene and inflects their choices.
Once they dare to converse, however, a deeper, instinctive need inspires them to move from a chat to confession. As they reveal unpleasant home truths about themselves, intimacy wins out over isolation. That step then ignites yet another value: lost in life versus found in life. Lost/found becomes the story’s core value.
As the film’s title suggests, Bob and Charlotte, each in their own way, feel lost. When the scene opens, lost/found sits squarely at the negative. Over the course of the scene, it never touches the positive; rather, it sinks to the bleakness of Beat 15. At the same time, however, the charge of isolation/intimacy arcs toward the light and by the capping beat, their relationship touches an immediate and natural closeness.
At the end of each beat, I have scored its value charge (+) for positive, (-) for negative, (++) for doubly positive, etc.
Read the scene (printed in bold) straight through to get a feel of the dialogue’s minimalist language. Then review it against my notes on the arc of its beats, subtext, and value charges.
INT. PARK HYATT BAR—NIGHT
Bob sits alone over a drink.
BEAT 1
BOB
(to the Barman)
He got married a couple of times to some nice women, beautiful women, too, I mean you and I would be crazy for these women, but there were always rumors. I never liked his acting, so I never gave a damn whether he was straight or not.
ACTION: Bob trying to impress the Barman.
REACTION: The Barman pretending he’s impressed.
Intimacy/Isolation (-)
Rather than starting with that all-too-familiar image of a solitary man sitting at a bar, staring into the back of his head, Coppola opens the scene with showbiz chitchat. A Hollywood star gossiping to a Japanese Barman makes Bob’s loneliness character-specific and poignant. This first beat hits an amusing note that counterpoints the dark beat that climaxes the scene.
BEAT 2
Charlotte steps up to the bar. The Barman pulls out a stool near Bob.
CHARLOTTE
(to Barman)
Thank you.
(to Bob)
Hi.
(to Barman as she sits)
Thanks.
ACTION: The Barman seating her.
REACTION: Charlotte fitting in.
Intimacy/Isolation (-)
When composing a scene, ask this question before committing to any line of dialogue: At this precise moment, what are my character’s choices of action? Which tactic could she take? Which does she take? Every choice of tactic suggests a quality in the character’s nature and determines the words she’ll use to carry it out. Once again, dialogue is the outer result of inner action.
So, what are Charlotte’s reactions, choices, and tactics as she enters this all-but-deserted bar and sees a world-famous movie star sitting on a stool alone? She could be intimidated and leave, she could give him his privacy and take a table, or she could sit within talking distance.
As the Barman offers her a stool, she makes the boldest choice of the three and joins Bob. Her choice to sit, at the risk of embarrassment, expresses poise.
BEAT 3
BARMAN
What can I get you?
CHARLOTTE
Hmmm… I’m not sure… hmmm.
ACTION: The Barman attending to her.
REACTION: Charlotte testing her welcome.
Intimacy/Isolation (-)
Again, choices: Charlotte could have ordered her favorite drink immediately. But tensed by the risk she’s taking, she hesitates and gives Bob a chance to react. What he does now tells her whether or not she’s actually welcome.
BEAT 4
BOB
(quoting his commercial)
For relaxing times, make it—
BOB & BARMAN
(in unison)
“Suntory time!”
Bob glances at her, impressed.
ACTION: Bob making her feel at home.
REACTION: Charlotte joining in.
REACTION: Bob endorsing her choice.
Intimacy/Isolation (+)
Bob’s choice of self-ridicule makes her feel welcome. As she orders a serious drink, he nods in approval, and their sense of intimacy versus isolation moves toward the positive. Two strangers settle in to talk.
Bob’s self-ridicule announces a character dimension: Actors take their work, even in commercials, seriously, but he chooses to mock himself. This choice of action reveals an inner contradiction between his artist’s pride and self-disdain.
BEAT 5
CHARLOTTE
(to Bob as the Barman leaves for her drink)
So what are you doing here?
BOB
Couple of things… Taking a break from my wife, forgetting my son’s birthday, and, ah, getting paid two million dollars to endorse a whiskey when I could be doing a play somewhere.
CHARLOTTE
(staring in disbelief)
Oh.
ACTION: Charlotte inviting a conversation.
REACTION: Bob confessing to his three chief failures in life.
REACTION: Charlotte concealing her shock.
Lost/Found (--)
Charlotte opens a door to the unexpected. If you were her, imagine your reaction as you sit next to a world-famous movie star whom you think leads an enviable lifestyle, ask him how he’s doing, and, offhandedly, he tells you that his life is misery. The phrase “taking a break” doesn’t tell Charlotte whether Bob blames himself, his wife, or both for his marital problems, but he clearly damns himself for forgetting his son’s birthday and, most of all, for corrupting his creative life by choosing money over art.
Bob’s declaration of failure not only surprises Charlotte, but it crosses a red line—that formal distance we traditionally keep between strangers and ourselves. His trespass puts Charlotte under a bit of pressure. Now that the personal value of lost/found has entered the conversation, she wonders if she should take a giant step toward intimacy and add her confession to his. She does. Bob’s revelation wrenches their chat into cycles of confession.
BEAT 6
BOB
But the good news is the whiskey works.
She laughs.
ACTION: Bob soothing her feelings.
REACTION: Charlotte sympathizing.
Intimacy/Isolation (+)
This beat of mutual empathy takes them a smidge closer to intimacy. Bob’s confession in Beat 5 upset her, but he’s sensitive enough to see what he has done and regret it. He quickly softens the moment with a joke. She, in return, sees that he’s embarrassed, so she laughs in sympathy to ease his chagrin.
BEAT 7
BOB
What are you doing?
CHARLOTTE
Hmmm, ah, my husband’s a photographer, so he’s working, and, hmmm, I wasn’t doing anything, so I came along. And we have some friends who live here.
ACTION: Bob inviting her confession.
REACTION: Charlotte confessing to an empty, perhaps troubled personal life.
Lost/Found (--)
From the moment their eyes met in Beat 4, they communicate openly and honestly. Cocktail chat becomes in vino veritas. In Beat 5 Bob dared an intimate confession, and now he tempts her to join him. Once again choices: She could have replied, “Oh, I’m having a wonderful time. My husband’s on a photo shoot and I’m enjoying some old friends.” Instead, her passive, tepid phrases imply the unflattering truth of her married life. Bob reads her troubled subtext.
BEAT 8
Bob lights her cigarette.
BOB
How long have you been married?
(pause)
Two years.
BOB
Twenty-five long ones.
ACTION: Bob readying his pass.
REACTION: Charlotte preparing to take it.
REACTION: Bob making his pass.
Intimacy/Isolation (--)
Charlotte has just confessed that her married life is unfulfilling, so Bob cannot resist making a pass at this beautiful young woman by complaining about his unfulfilled married life.
Note how Coppola has the older man make his move: He reacts to his own action. He asks Charlotte how long she’s been married, knowing that whatever number she might name, he can top it with a quarter century of dissatisfaction.
Note also Charlotte’s choice. As he lights her cigarette, she sees the pass coming and could have deflected it by answering, “Two wonderful years,” or more aggressively, with a question of her own, “Why do you ask?” Instead, she lets it skate.
But make no mistake. This is a sexual proposition. How serious is hard to say. Bob could be doing it out of masculine ritual, but when a middle-aged guy laments his lengthy, less-than-happy marriage to a young woman at a bar, he’s hoping for more than sympathy.
Bob’s pass could push Charlotte away, but instead, she moves closer:
BEAT 9
CHARLOTTE
You’re probably having a midlife crisis.
BOB
(amused)
You know, I was thinking about buying a Porsche.
ACTION: Charlotte foiling his pass.
REACTION: Bob complimenting her wit.
Intimacy/Isolation (+)
Charlotte knows his pass is halfhearted at best, and so she teases him about his age in order to say “No” with a touch of kindness. He graciously acknowledges her wit.
BEAT 10
CHARLOTTE
Twenty-five years… that’s, ah… well, it’s impressive.
BOB
Well, you figure, you sleep one-third of your life. That knocks off eight years of marriage right there. So you’re, you know, you’re down to sixteen and change, and, you know, you’re just a teenager… like marriage… you can drive it, but you can… there’s still the occasional accident.
CHARLOTTE
(laughing)
Yeah…
ACTION: Charlotte offering a silver lining.
REACTION: Bob confessing his rocky marriage.
REACTION: Charlotte complimenting his wit.
Lost/Found (--)
From previous scenes, we know Charlotte has doubts about her husband and her future. When she tries to compliment Bob’s marriage, he reminds her of a reality she knows from her own life: Relationships rarely live up to our dreams. Bob softens that harsh truth with a deft comparison of marriage to teen driving, but his cynical answer offers no hope. Nonetheless, Charlotte laughs to compliment his insight.
Note that Beats 4, 5, 8, and 10 play in three steps, rather than the conventional two. Normally, a new action immediately follows an action/reaction. Instead, these beats run action/reaction/reaction. When a reaction triggers yet another reaction, it often signals a deeper connection between the characters, a greater sense of intimacy.
As Oscar-winning screenwriter Philip Yordan put it: “Do not drown your script with endless dialogue and long speeches. Every question does not call for a response. Whenever you can express an emotion with a silent gesture, do so. Once you pose the question, permit it to linger before you get a reply. Or better yet, perhaps the character cannot reply; he or she has no answer. This permits the unspoken response to hang in midair.”
BEAT 11
BOB
What do you do?
CHARLOTTE
Hmmm, I’m not sure yet actually. I just graduated last spring.
BOB
And what did you study?
BOB
Well, there’s a good buck in that racket.
CHARLOTTE
(embarrassed laugh)
Yes… well, hmmm, so far it’s pro bono.
ACTION: Bob inviting her personal story.
REACTION: Charlotte confessing to an unpromising future.
Lost/Found (--)
Having made his second confession in Beat 10, Bob draws Charlotte out again, and she confesses that, like her personal life, her professional life is adrift.
BEAT 12
BOB
(laughs)
Well, I’m sure you’ll figure out the angles.
CHARLOTTE
(laughs)
Yeah…
ACTION: Bob offering false hope.
REACTION: Charlotte laughing it off.
Intimacy/Isolation (+)
Lost/Found (-)
The world-weary Bob offers hope encrusted with irony. Charlotte’s laugh lets him know she gets it, and then she needles him with:
BEAT 13
CHARLOTTE
I hope your Porsche works out.
Bob nods.
ACTION: Charlotte also offering bogus hope.
REACTION: Bob signaling that he too gets it.
Intimacy/Isolation (++)
Lost/Found (--)
They both get it: Unhappy as they are, they won’t lie to themselves. Sharing this tough truth draws them closer yet.
BEAT 14
CHARLOTTE
(toasting)
Cheers to that.
BOB
Cheers to that. Kam pai.
ACTION: Charlotte celebrating their victory over self-deception.
REACTION: Bob joining her celebration.
Intimacy/Isolation (+++)
This upbeat gesture prepares for the downbeat turning point that caps the scene.
BEAT 15
A long pause.
CHARLOTTE
I wish I could sleep.
BOB
Me, too.
Another long pause.
ACTION: Charlotte confessing she feels lost within herself.
REACTION: Bob confessing that he, too, feels lost.
Lost/Found (---)
Intimacy/Isolation (++++)
The lines “I wish I could sleep” and “Me, too” intimate a subtext of suffering as moving as any I can remember.
Sleep restores sanity. Without it, existence becomes a mad, ticking clock. When you toss and turn, unstoppable racing thoughts send worries and fears swirling and churning through the mind. Charlotte and Bob cannot sleep. Why not? Jet lag? Racing thoughts?
In my reading of the subtext, their sleeplessness has a deeper cause. As their confessions reveal, they feel cast off from their marriages, adrift in their working lives, and at sea within themselves. A hollow place has opened up inside both that neither family nor work can fill. Charlotte and Bob have lost their purpose in life.
Character and Dialogue
As the film’s title suggests, the co-protagonists cannot translate their emptiness into fullness; they cannot imagine their future; they cannot interpret life’s absurdity into meaning. In more romantic times, Charlotte and Bob would have been known as “lost souls.”
Notice how Coppola’s aesthetic avoids verbal combat and uses casual, offhanded behavior to imply private battles waged behind a smile. She then squeezes vast content into the fewest, simplest monosyllables: “Well, I’m sure you’ll figure out the angles,” and “Yeah, I hope your Porsche works out.” How does she do it?
First, backstory. Like the scene from The Museum of Innocence, Coppola could have her characters narrate past conflicts vividly and explicitly. Instead, she keeps the dramas offscreen and implicit. Bob and Charlotte narrate three stories apiece—marriage, career, and private self. They end each storyline in a loss and do it with superb economy of language. Bob: “taking a break from my wife/endorsing a whiskey when I could be doing a play.” Charlotte: “he’s working and I wasn’t doing anything.” They tell each unhappy tale with a charm, wit, and self-mockery that guides us around their world-weary facades to their ongoing inner conflicts.
Second, the pause for subtext. Notice how Bob and Charlotte enter sentences on glides such as “Well…,” “Yeah…,” and “Yes…,” putting a thought-filled mini-pause before most everything they say. The actors also space their words with vocalized moments of reflection such as “Oh…,” “Ah…,” and “Hmmm…,” plus non-vocalized reactions of laughter, nods, glances, pauses with eye contact, and pauses staring into space. These hesitations, short and long, halt the words coming out of the character and invite the audience inside. A mini-pause opens space for thought.
Third, naturalistic characterizations. In many of his lines, Bob Harris, a world-famous action actor, sounds in-character. Phrases such as “I never gave a damn whether he was straight or not,” “figure the angles,” “a good buck in that racket,” and “the whiskey works” could have been said by any of the tough-guy characters he plays. Now they infuse his personality.
Charlotte’s vocabulary, in sharp contrast to Bob’s, consists of passive verbs and generalized nouns, absent a single adjective, adverb, or superlative that might add color: “I hope,” “I wish I could,” and “I’m not sure” said twice. Her tone is pleasant but her vocabulary reflects her achromatic, motionless life.
Value Progression and Dialogue
Once we separate the activity of talk from the actions the characters take, the shape of the scene shines through, as escalating value charges progress the dialogue from the first beat to the last.
Coppola designed her scene as a downward spiral that builds its negative power three times over. She progresses it through a series of tumbling confessions that take loss from bad to worse to worst.
First, Bob confesses that as a husband and a father, he’s a fraud, faking his way through his personal life (bad). Charlotte confesses that she’s just tagging along after a husband who loves his work more than her (bad). Bob confesses that he’s a sellout. He should be working as a serious actor; instead, he’s pushing booze (worse). Charlotte admits that she has no career or even the plans for one, and so her life outside of marriage has no direction and no purpose (worse). Then the last beat takes them to the basement. They each confess that they cannot sleep (the worst).
By building the scene around confessions, Coppola peels away the characters’ personae, so they can see each other for who they are. These lost souls confess to expose themselves. To be seen.
Why do these confessions feel progressive and not random? To begin with, Bob and Charlotte live parallel lives: Both have failed in all of life’s arenas. Coppola then composes their confessions so that they alternate in descending order. Which is worse? A personal loss in your private relationships or a professional loss in your working life?
Professional failure. Why? Because failed relationships are a mutual loss. Neither person is entirely blameless, nor entirely at fault. When a relationship fails, you can lighten your load of guilt by heaping it on your partner.
When you lose in your chosen career, however, you know the fault is yours alone. We may make excuses and blame “the system” or bad luck, but in our heart of hearts we know that if we lose in our calling, it will be due to our lack of discipline, talent, knowledge, judgment, or hard work… the usual gaps that spell professional disaster.
But still, is professional failure always worse than relationship failure? Does losing a job mean more than breaking up a marriage? The key to the bar scene is a build toward a loss of identity. So the question is not one of getting or losing a job; it’s one of gaining or losing your identity.
If, for example, a woman were married and had a job clerking at Walmart, then a loss of relationship may prove worse than being fired, because the woman’s likely source of identity comes more from marriage than a job.
But neither of this film’s characters identifies with a marital relationship. Bob and Charlotte find their identities in themselves as artists. Therefore, for Bob and Charlotte, professional failure is far worse than relationship failure. Charlotte has made no effort to even name her ambition, let alone build a career. Later in the film, she hints at wanting to be a writer, but to date, she hasn’t written anything. Who but Charlotte is to blame for that? Bob is rich, famous, and in demand, but he chooses to waste his time and talent mugging for a liquor spot. Again, who but Bob is to blame for that?
Coppola’s next twist of the knife is this: Which is worse? Professional failure or loss of self? Loss of self. Why? Because if we wanted to, we could decide that careers, fame, fortune, and even creative achievement are fleeting and illusionary. We could escape the public realm. Fine, but we have to live somewhere. If we cannot find our place in personal relationships, if we cannot find self-worth in professional achievement, what’s left? We must look inside and find a life of value within our being.
The dilemma at the heart of LOST IN TRANSLATION creates an existential crisis. Bob and Charlotte have no visible reason to be unhappy. They seem well educated, well off, well married, and surrounded by friends—in Bob’s case, by a world of fans. No, Bob and Charlotte are not lonely; they are lost.
The difference is this: You’re lonely when you have something to share but no one to share it with. You’re lost when you have nothing to share, no matter with whom you live. Of course, you can be both lonely and lost, but of the two, lost inflicts the greater pain.
Below are the beat by beat gerunds of action/reaction with the value charges they cause. Overall, the positive charges of isolation/intimacy alternate with the negative charges of lost/found to pace the scene dynamically without repetition:
BEAT 1: Impressing/Pretending
Intimacy/Isolation (-)
BEAT 2: Seating her/Fitting in
Intimacy/Isolation (-)
BEAT 3: Attending/Testing
Intimacy/Isolation (-)
BEAT 4: Welcoming/Joining/Endorsing
Intimacy/Isolation (+)
BEAT 5: Inviting/Confessing/Concealing
Lost/Found Life (--)
BEAT 6: Soothing/Sympathizing
Intimacy/Isolation (+)
BEAT 7: Inviting/Confessing
Lost/Found Life (--)
BEAT 8: Readying/Preparing/Making a pass
Intimacy/Isolation (--)
BEAT 9: Foiling/Complimenting
Intimacy/Isolation (+)
BEAT 10: Offering hope/Confessing/Complimenting
Lost/Found Life (--)
BEAT 11: Inviting/Confessing
Lost/Found Life (--)
BEAT 12: Offering false hope/Laughing it off
Intimacy/Isolation (+)
Lost/Found Life (-)
BEAT 13: Offering false hope/Shrugging it off
Intimacy/Isolation (++)
Lost/Found Life (--)
BEAT 14: Celebrating/Celebrating
Intimacy/Isolation (+++)
BEAT 15: Confessing/Confessing
Intimacy/Isolation (++++)
The personal revelations of losses in Beats 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, and 13 continually top each other in terms of the damage to their lives. In Beats 10 through 12, the characters’ confessions become all the more honest and all the more sad. When Charlotte and Bob toast the wreckage in Beats 13 and 14, their newfound intimacy lifts the mood for an instant, but it turns sharply into the powerful irony of Beat 15.
In the pause that follows their third and most painful confession (“I wish I could sleep”/”Me, too”), each suddenly recognizes a kindred spirit. Their immediate desire is realized in Beat 15 as their lives shift from Isolation (-) to Intimacy (++++). With irony, of course: They can’t sleep (--), but they can talk (++); they’re lost souls (---) who connect with a mirror soul (++++).
When you survey the gerunds that name their actions, notice how Charlotte and Bob mirror each other. When two people sit at a bar, unconsciously imitating each other’s posture and gestures, then echoing each other’s subtextual actions, they connect with an intimacy they themselves may not realize.
The scene climaxes on an overall positive irony and a glimmer of hope. This quiet but surprisingly dynamic scene arcs from easy rapport to bleak loss to the possibility of love. The last beat hooks strong suspense for the rest of the film: Now that Bob and Charlotte have joined forces, will they grow into lives found?