THE TRAUMA IN THE BOATHOUSE

Screenwriting is mechanics. The producers, if they read a script at all, look at the dialogue, and skip over what they (erroneously) call the Stage Directions.

The term is an error, as Stage Directions, in their correct home (the theater), describe what the actor does, and the various gags the designers may have whipped up (“she sits in the wing chair,” “a window breaks”).

The descriptions in a (useful) filmscript relate what the camera does. If the shots are correctly described and engineered into a captivating progression, it makes no difference what the actor says. (Watch a film with the sound off, and you’ll see.)

The dialogue is of as little concern to a skilled screenwriter as auto paint is to the mechanic. When the machine is correctly assembled, the thing can be painted whatever damn color pleases the money guy. In fact, the money guy himself can choose the paint and slop it on, awarding himself the name of co-creator.

That the screenwriter is a mechanic is not poetry. The skilled scenarist is given an idea or a book to adapt (a load of crap). He must first determine the form: a comedy, a light comedy, a comedy of manners, a tragedy, a thriller, tearjerker, noir, drama. He then asks, “How does it function,” or “Who does what to whom, and then what happens?” He then must find the limits of the machine’s operation: How (why) does it begin? What is the event that brings the thing into being? In Bad Day at Black Rock, the bad Westerners kill a returned Nisei serviceman, and Spencer Tracy gets off the train to avenge his friend. In The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming, a Soviet sub, in the midst of the Cold War, grounds on Nantucket Island, and the sailors must get away unnoticed.

And so on. Without this determination we have the Present Participle Films, the ongoing situation, waiting, being, getting (exception: Being There): the form so beloved by the French.^I The end of the effective piece must be the solution of the problem caused by the beginning. This seems fatuous, but consider how unfortunately often the mechanical verity is overlooked.

Psychological Dramas avoid mechanical connection between cause and effect through Wish Fulfillment. Here, as in the Analyst’s office, the Shrink, through sitting in the dark and (one would hope) listening, finds the “Magic Ticket” in the patient’s monologue, brings it to the sap’s attention, and all is well. The audience, similarly, is cured and released by the all-powerful words “The End.”

But if the solution were that simple and obvious, the problem could not have been that pressing, could it? As Mr. Meisner said, “The Ouch must be related to the Pinch.”

The magical awakening with which the movie-as-shrink brings the neurotic (viewer) to health is exactly that of the kiss with which the Handsome Prince wakes Sleeping Beauty. It indicates we were watching a fairy tale. There’s nothing wrong with fairy tales, but their construction is of small interest to the artisan who delights in sussing out the mechanical cause and effect of human interactions.

Adolescent Achievement Dramas employ the same tools of supernormal intercession (The Bad News Bears, Fame, etc.). In School of Rock, the doofus, anti-talented high school musicians become stone-cold genius rockers when they “just get the idea.” Just as the neurotics (on-screen or on the couch, perhaps) are supposedly cured of their compulsion to X when the shrink helps them to recall “what happened that time in the boathouse.”

The ignorant producer’s eye goes to a narration, in the script, of that boathouse desecration (porn). But to the mechanic screenwriter, not only could it not matter less, it is actually an impediment to the script’s operation.

I’ll prove it to you.

Young Francesca has for much of her life been horribly addicted to senseless acts. The Wise Psychiatrist brings the sufferer to a recollection of THAT REPRESSION WHICH HAS CAUSED ALL THE BOTHER.

We see the poor thing on the couch as her eyes grow wide, tears start to flow, and she turns, hesitant, wonderingly, to the Doctor. “Omigod,” she says, “I remember now!” She leans in toward the doctor and tells him the secret, whispering.

We don’t hear it.

Wait.

Now she is walking out of the office building, smiling, and into the arms of that Significant faithful Otter who has put up with all the bullshit as he knows her essential goodness.

But we never heard the story…

What have we lost?

We waited for the confession of “that time in the boathouse,” and we didn’t get it. So what? For, note, it was just salaciousness, invented to explain otherwise incomprehensible (nondramatic) behavior.

This confession is the noted “death of my kitten” speech, coming midway through the last act, and taking up the slack the dud screenwriter inserted faute de mieux.

That we weren’t privileged to hear the confession entails on us a sort of Hippocratic Oath, as, one might hope, it does on a real psychiatrist. It enlists us in the Service of Reserve.

We are actually ennobled by the frustration of our curiosity, taking away from the film not the sick thrill of another’s dirty laundry but relief at the Hero’s release. The whispering puts us in the same boat as the protagonist, which is the actual job of the writer-engineer.

If the handsome prince is described as a tall, hefty Black man, and the description does not happen to be our own, we are taken out of the story. Which is why, in fairy tales, he is only described as a Handsome Prince (with thanks to Bruno Bettelheim).

If the protagonist confessed the horrors he or she underwent that time at the office party, we may enjoy the gossip, but unless we personally have undergone a similar horror, the story is no longer about ourselves; if, however, the patient whispers, it is. For we experience not the (confected) quiddities of the outrage but community with the sufferer, who, like us, has undergone trauma.^II

In film the inspired music teacher and the psychoanalyst are, essentially, faith healers, preaching that “belief”; and confession will force the Superior Entity (in the religious story, known as God) to cough up the scarlet ribbons.

But the engineer can only work on a mechanical contrivance, which will not respond to wishing, new paint, or anything less than a technical understanding of the machine’s operation.

The craftsman looks at the script (or, indeed, creates one), asking: How is this scene the necessary preamble to the following? If this scene were removed, would the audience still follow the story? If the answer is yes, it must be removed, as the craftsman knows that if it is not, the audience’s attention will not wait but will falter.

One must ask, throughout, if the pinch and ouch are connected, or if they are merely contrivances (fig leaves) allowing one to write yet another meaningful scene. (“Jimmy, I thought I loved her, but she said ex cetera, and so I have to call the engagement off…”)

If the extra scene must go, must not the extra line go also? Yes. The producer plumps for exposition, as that is all he read (if he read anything), but the audience doesn’t care.

My proof concludes.

The reader may still be disturbed or unconvinced by my suggestion of the protagonist’s whispering. What would he have remembered had I actually written the obligatory confession? What does he remember of any of those speeches that he’s heard in films? But you remembered the whispering.

1. I. And by various writers and their adherents among academics and critics insensible to talent. All high school students once were forced to read The Great Gatsby. What was Scott Fitzgerald’s particular and ongoing problem? He wanted to be liked by rich people. He wasn’t fit to puke into the same toilet as Hemingway, whose genius has always been dismissed by dead spirits as “too.”
2. II. The film confession, on the other hand, rewards our acceptance of dramatic ineptitude with permitted voyeurism. The trick is widely employed by showing an on-screen funeral.