This week I'm writing about the work of UK TV writer Jimmy McGovern, whose work I really love. To me he's a little like the darkness of David Milch mixed with more beauty and realism. You're not going to find deadbeat cowboys doing Shakespeare, but you will take a journey into struggle or suffering that ends up being filled with unexpected moments of life.
McGovern does a lot of TV movies as well as series. Many of them seem to be dramatic reenactments of events. In 2020 he released ANTHONY, which tells the story of the murder of black teenager Anthony Walker by insane white guys. The film is available in the States on Peacock, and I highly recommend it. Once again he takes the familiar and comes at it in a different way--rather than your typical Let's meet our character and his friends, see what an incredible person he was and then wait for him to die, McGovern starts 9 years after Walker's death, and proposes to show us the life he could have had had he not been murdered. It's about the future that was lost as well as the person, and not just for Walker but for all those he would have come in contact with.
And at the same time, starting in the future somehow makes the film more resistant to anything maudlin. It actually plays like a fun kind of origin story, us seeing him in this great opening place in his life, and then slowly winding back how he got there. And I think because the approach is so unusual, we're left unsure what's going to happen when we fall back to age 16. Are they going to show us those horrible events, or are we somehow going to get the version where he doesn't die? The uncertainty frees us up to just enjoy being with him--in a sense it lulls us into a false sense of security.
Within the film, there's a scene that really stood out to me. It's very late in the story, we're back at age 16, Anthony is in critical condition. And after introducing his mother very gradually -- another benefit of McGovern's year by year flashback approach--suddenly we're in her moment. In fact I'm pretty sure age 16 begins not with Anthony but with his mom singing with her church choir. It's the most alive and vibrant that we've seen her, actually.
So anyway, she's at the hospital and a care worker comes to tell her how serious things are. You've seen this scene, maybe written it. It's all about the dramatic irony of us knowing something the character doesn't, and the suspense of wondering how she will react to it. Her emotions become the moment of catharsis for us, having had to carry the burden of knowing what's happened. The sequence even sets up that expectation. We open into it on an unseen person who picks up a box of tissues and then walks to go meet Anthony's mom.
But McGovern does the craziest thing--instead of making the scene about Anthony's mom, he makes it all about the care worker (who we have never seen before and will never see again).
I'm exaggerating a little--of course this moment is about Anthony's mom. But her reaction is so self-contained and focused on praying to God, it's almost like she doesn't have an arc at all. Whereas the care worker, who agrees to pray with Anthony's mom, seems completely out of her depth by it all, uncertain at first about this whole idea of praying and then slowly devastated by the wave after wave of stories and thoughts that Anthony's mom shares about him.
At the end of the sequence as the doctor comes in, it's the care worker that is in tears, and us as well. The fact that the care worker is so anonymous, someone we've never met before or will again, allows us to project ourselves into her position. Which actually makes much more sense than placing us in the shoes of Anthony's mom. We're not the person who has gone through the trauma; we're the one who has witnessed it and doesn't know what to do.
When you get to something familiar, consider flipping the script in some way. In this case, that means making the scene not about the mom but about the care worker; or making the story of a tragic death not about what led up to it but what was lost after.
I realize this suggestion is a familiar note for anyone who's been reading this blog for very long, but still I say it again, not only because it's true but because when a writer does it well, the scene that results is just something magic.
In some ways this blog is a collection of not thoughts about writing but my magpie collection of shiny things I found along the way. I hope it's also helpful.
