ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING: UNDERSTANDING THE REAL RESOLUTION

I watched the finale of ONLY MURDERS tonight. Man was it satisfying. Structurally it followed a pretty standard--and I think tried and true--pattern for mystery shows: the penultimate episode involves some kind of twist that changes our list of suspects entirely. The ep ends with the true killer revealed. And then 110 is both the explanation--we've delayed the exposition as long as we can--and the quest to bring them down--which of course we need, but also well-played becomes a key way of making the exposition more than "and this is the time on Sprokets when we stop and talk for twenty minutes". 

(Don't even get me started on the finale of LOKI.)

Two things I really liked about 109: first, it used Jan's apparent attack at the end of 108 to justify using her doing the narration at the top of 109, all of which directed us to look elsewhere for the killer. And second, the key clue that led Mabel and Oliver down the path toward her was a tiny detail from the very first moment they all met Tim Kono. It's just so damn satisfying to have successfully buried something there. And so hard to do. 

There's lots to be said about the finale, but for me what was most satisfying, what made it really land, was the way it used Charles. If you were going to predict what the resolution of this show was, of course you'd think that some part of it would be the cementing of the relationship between Mabel, Charles and Oliver. When we met them they were each alone, and in each other they found real friendship. 

(One of the things I love about the latter episodes is the way that the intrusion of Jan ends up driving together Mabel and Oliver, who have previously not spent much time as a pair. They're so good together, too, and in a way totally different than Mabel and Charles.)

So yeah, you'd expect some sort of happy resolution about their friendship. 

But each of their introductions in the pilot involved more than just a need for relationship. Oliver needed a successful project. Mabel needed to resolve what happened to her friends all those years ago. 

And Charles' introduction was actually a lot about being the hack-y TV detective Brazzos (and also along with it a hack-y actor). And in the finale, we get to see him succeed at both things at the same time. He pours out his heart to Jan, and it feels very believable. But then he also reveals that he knows that she was the murderer, and in fact knew before Oliver and Mabel told him. She still manages to get the upper hand on him by poisoning not his drink but the ice pack she gives him. But if anything that only raises his stature; the smarter your villain is, the smarter your protagonist looks when they match them (or come close). 

The writers did a nice job throughout the season of alluding to the fact that Charles is not a great actor. But in a sense that became a way of burying the other message they were providing, that he's no detective. And so then to get to the finale and have him secretly ahead of everybody is just so damn satisfying, precisely because they had quietly built in that problem all the way along. 

There's plenty more to be said about ONLY MURDERS and that finale. For instance, riddle me this: how is it that Amy Ryan's Jan can turn out to be so crazy, and yet it never ends up feeling over the top? How do she and the writers manage to pull that off? Is it because even as she's telling him all these crazy things she remains fundamentally the same as the person we've met all along? 

Or how is it that Martin can spend half the episode doing the hilarious physical comedy that you might have expected from the whole series, and yet again it doesn't feel like a departure from the tone of the series? Is it because he has to fight so hard to get anywhere, and also nobody is on his side? Or something else? 

Bottom line, both for storytelling in general and also for detective story writing, this is a great season of television--clever, bold and unexpectedly heartfelt. 

I will be off next week for Thanksgiving, but then back at it after that. Hope you have a wonderful holiday. 

Write on!

ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING: EXPLORING THE SPACE (AND SILENCE)

Yesterday I was talking about the concept of "If This, Then What Else?" If your show features one big idea, what else might that mean, or allow for? It's a way of getting us as a writer to really explore the space we've created, to see how much more might be there. 

Episode 107, the Silent Episode, is an example of this idea married to a similar concept, "What's the coolest thing I can do with the car I'm driving?"  If we're going to offer POV to various characters in the series, what's the boldest version of that? How about 30 minutes where no one speaks until the very last line? And then, what's the coolest version of that as well? If he signs his narration at us in the opening, what else will the episode involve?

But how do you pull that off in a way that's believable? It's one thing for half the episode to be embedded in Theo's POV, where the silence comes from his own lack of hearing. But the scenes with Mabel, Charles, Oliver and Jan have no such obvious necessity within them. 

Part of how the episode overcomes that challenge is by putting them in situations where in fact silence makes sense. We have Charles and Mabel break into the Dimas' apartment, and then having to hide from Theo when he comes home. Later we do another break in, this time Oliver and Mabel at the funeral parlor. And once again, they have to keep quiet so as not to get caught. 

For me, part of the fun of these scenes is the light they shine on the absurd way that TV generally does scenes like this. When you break into someone's home, you don't generally walk around talking, even quietly. And it turns out there's a ton more tension created when you have this built-in sense of having to keep things completely still. Even when no one else is yet around, a character's commitment to silence becomes an unexpectedly compelling high wire act. It just feels hard--which is always a great audience hook. There's a sense of impending doom too; it's a bit like Chekov's gun, actually. If you insist on being silent at the beginning, at some point you're definitely going to fail. 

But still, there's a whole other sequence to deal with that has no need for silence--Charles' date with Jan.  And here in a sense the writers cheat. They have Charles immediately put music on, which then plays as the characters dance and play Scrabble. It's definitely a workable solution. I think it would have worked a little better if they had previously set up this idea of Charles just sitting around listening to music or the two of them dancing together. But certainly we know they both love music, so there's that. (Another alt might have been to have her come in and the first thing they do is play their instruments together.)

Having said that, by the time we get to the Scrabble scene, we've pretty much accepted that this is the solution the writers have come up with. And then they use the characters' silence in such a wonderful way. That Scrabble game is both way hotter and way funnier because it involves this series of quiet reveals of different sexual-sounding words. In fact the silence itself becomes a way of building the tension; speech would have created a kind of release. By the end of the scene these two have pretty much got to go have sex. It's the catharsis. 

One other thing I noted about the silence--just as it made some scenes more tense (or sexy), it also made other moments funnier. There's that scene at the funeral--another perfect justification for silence--in which Oliver suddenly falls off his chair. It's the kind of thing you expect from a Martin Short character, and yet somehow the silence makes it more surprising (and therefore more funny). I'm not totally sure I understand why that is; I'm guessing normally there'd be some sort of verbal tell that preceded a moment like that. And lacking that ends up strengthening the bit. 

It really is a tremendous episode of television. (EVIL also has a pretty great version of a silent episode in its second season, which randomly is its seventh episode of that episode, too.) Definitely one to watch if you're thinking about doing a silent episode yourself, or just to get yourself thinking in terms of exploring the opportunities of a writing idea. It does that so well. 

ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING: TAKING YOUR IDEAS TO THEIR BEST AND CRAZIEST DESTINATIONS

Episode 107 of ONLY MURDERS is so good I'm going to give it two entries. Today, a really simple idea. 

So you've got a show where you use narration in a slightly unusual way--instead of one character serving as the narrator, instead different characters are given that opportunity. 

Great. So you could just ride it out like that. Ooh, let's hear from this random person (like 108 and Sam the fan) or that character that's essential the story (like 105 and Tie Dye Guy).  

But the writers of ONLY MURDERS ask a further question: What's the coolest thing I could do with this technique? aka What's the thing I've never seen before? Or that would be the most interesting? Or that would be the hardest to pull off? 

And out of that comes Episode 107, the silent episode focused around Theo, who is deaf. 

As soon as that episode begins I'm leaning in as an audience member, because it is something I've never seen, it's interesting and it's clearly going to be a challenge to pull off. And also, it is an instinctive delight for the audience to see writers reveling in their own concept. Great craft--it's always attractive, in and of itself. 

There's a great improv idea, If this is true, then what else is true. It's a way of taking an initial concept or move--the housewife who is obsessed with comic books--and expanding upon it in fun ways--she named her kids Peter Parker, Luke Cage and Jean Grey (and yes, she changed their last names, and they are furious about it).  

In 107, ONLY MURDERS shows how that story question can also apply to technique. If I can do POV with any character, what could that mean? 

Does your pilot have an unusual technique in it? If so, what fun things could you do with it in future episodes?

ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING: PLAYING WITH GRAMMAR

As we open onto episode five of ONLY MURDERS, something unusual happens: suddenly we hear from a new character, the mysterious Tie Dye guy, who narrates as he stalks Mabel.

At first, this choice is a little jarring. Only the 1st episode featured individual narration. But then each of the three following eps did focus in particular way on one of the three characters. And there was narration going on all along in the recording of the podcast itself. 

But most importantly, the set up and style of the narration follow the exactly format of the three leads in the pilot--it happens at the opening, and involves our mysterious Tie Dye Guy talking to us about some aspect of living in New York City, which ends up being a way of talking about something personally significant to him--in this case, Mabel herself.

So rather than seeming like a random turn, the choice seems to signal that we're introducing a new co-lead. 

Which, as it turns out, is not correct. Tie Dye Guy, aka Oscar, is certainly important in episode 105 and has a role to play going forward. But that's it. He'll come and go, just like Charles' Jan. In fact the twist on the narrative technique (episode 105 is in fact called "Twist") establishes a new pattern, in which each new episode is narrated by someone else that is now significant to the case--Detective Williams; Theo Dimas; Sam the new super fan. It expands our notion of the universe of the show--dramatically, once we get to Sam and the other Arconiacs. It becomes a new part of the game of the show, if you will; you enter into the next episode wondering who's POV you're going to get now. 

And that change creates a break in the storytelling. The first four episodes were in a sense Act One--and they take us through the opening moves of the team's investigation, right to the moment the men realize Mabel is involved and now everything has changed for them. The next five are Act Two, with the additional voices signaling that things are getting more and more complicated, unpredictable and bigger in scale. And the finale, which I'm going to guess is going to feature either Tim Kono speaking from the dead, his murderer, the 3 leads again, or, maybe, Cinda Canning, is going to offer us some sense of resolution--which if I had to guess will also expand the universe of the show that much farther. (I'm two eps from the end, by the way.)

Tomorrow I'm going to talk about Theo's silent episode, ep 107, which is not only the purest and finest iteration of the Act Two narrative strategy but just one of the best TV episodes any of us are going to watch this year. Where episodes like 105 lay the track for having other characters speak, 107 is absolutely Theo's episode, and it's kind of a masterpiece.

But today I just wanted to highlight the show's choice to take a pre-existing technique of the show and repurpose it. It's not something you see a lot of shows do With every single move we make in a pilot, we establish a grammar for the show, a storytelling language. Generally shows then use that grammar to tell their stories. THE WIRE pilot has things going on amidst the cops and the dealers and politics of various kinds and conversation about America. (Wow that's oversimplified.) And then that's the show. THE SOPRANOS involves mob stuff and Tony's family and Jersey and also dreams and anxiety attacks. And then that's the show. 

It's the rare show that will do more than that with the grammar it's built, especially in season one. You don't want to confuse the audience or make them unhappy. But ONLY MURDERS shows it can work, in fact it can add whole new layers to the story. You just have to make sure that it also connects back enough to its original "usage" that it's clear this is still the same show. 

Rereading a pilot of your own, what are the rules or the language you implicit set up for your story? What might be some ways you could play with those rules down the line?

SHANG-CHI AND THE SUPER HERO ORIGIN STORY

I've got some more to say about ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING this week, but I wanted to break in here at the top of the week with a little piece about Marvel's SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS, which I finally saw over the weekend and liked a ton more than I expected to. 

I'm a little burnt out on super hero storytelling, and maybe also the Marvel method of an origin story, which normally involves the main character a) making a big mistake which motivates their drive to be a hero; and b) some family member and/or person with the same power as them being the villain. 

Both of these things in fact do prove to be true in SHANG-CHI (sigh), but there's some pretty creative differences in the way the film does the origin story, too. If you're looking for some ideas on how to mix things up in your own work, here's what writers David Callaham, Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Lanham came up with. 

1) Bury the Lede: The typical super hero origin story literally follows the hero through the whole process of getting their super power and everything that ensues from that. 

SHANG-CHI looks like it's going to do the same. When we meet the adult "Shaun" he's just a hapless hotel car attendant. It's all very Spider-Man. But then suddenly after we've got to know him and his friend Katy, he's attacked on a trolley car and reveals to us--and her--that he is this bad ass martial artist. 

Basically, the writers know our expectations, and play into them, precisely so they can then surprise us.

2) Disrupt the Story: Another typical move you see in hero movies is some sort of flashback narration about what happened before, how the character got to this point. 

And once again, the writers lean right into that expectation so as to mess with us. Shang giving a very serious monologue over flashbacks of him learning to be an assassin and then being sent on his mission. 

But before we can find out what happened, we cut to him and Katy on the plane to Macau and the airline attendant asking their meal order. And it's not a momentary gag. It has three beats actually--the query; finding out the airline doesn't have what they requested; and then the query again. By the time it's over there's just no going back to the story. Which actually ends up delighting us, precisely because it is so unexpected. 

3) Vary the Conventions: So again, there are two big conventions in the Marvel origin story: the hero has some reason to redeem himself; and his enemy is a relative or someone with the same powers.

SHANG-CHI has both, but varies them in some interesting ways. It hides that Shang has anything to redeem for a very long time. He actually tells Katy he didn't kill anyone as an assassin, and his training is painted as his father's doing, when in fact he agreed to it (though as a young and traumatized child). It's not until the end of Act Two in fact, that the truth is revealed. Which as the low point of the story, and the moment Shang has to make the decision to step up, is a great place for that kind of reveal anyway.  

And then on the flip side, while the dad is presented early as a straight up villain, Act Two then keeps turning over cards that humanize him further and further. First we find out he thinks their mother is still alive somewhere, and that's the motive for him stealing their pendants and them. And that could be enough, really, to make him more than the standard bad guy. Certainly you walk away from the first half of Act Two thinking you've been told all there is to know. 

But then we get the reveal that his dad loved his mom and them so much he actually gave up being a supernatural crime lord, after 1000 years of doing it. And it was only the murder of his wife that set him back on that path. 

So where the beginning suggests we're in GODFATHER territory, basically, the bad family coming to take back their son, the story keeps flipping over cards to say actually no, this father figure is much more interesting. He's a guy who found his way to a kind of redemption and then lost it.   

As Marvel has honed its storytelling this kind of approach to a villain has become more the norm. Think: Thanos or Vulture. But even so, SHANG-CHI represents innovation in that it only shows us Shang's dad's goodness gradually.

ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING: HOW TO YES, AND CRAZY

In addition to its fantastic Tina Fey scene, ONLY MURDERS 104 features an insane twist: Martin's Charles looks up at one point and we cut to life-size Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig characters sitting there, listening to him. The first time we see them just for a moment, but within in the episode they keep reappearing, as Charles tries to get up the courage to go on a date with and then be real with the lady he's smitten with, Jan. And the episode ends with Charles revealing their existence to Jan and also giving us the painful story of his ex and her daughter that explains their presence in his life.

On the one hand, I think the episode moves a bit faster through all this than it probably needs to. The idea that this show also includes hallucinations of Warner Brothers Cartoon characters is a lot to take in, and also a lot to play with. If there can be life-sized formerly-cartoon characters walking around, what else might we be in for? It's like the pilot ep was a school friend inviting us to come to their house to hang out and then after a couple hours there they showed us that their parents have a massive underground lair. Yes, we want that explained, but first can we just see everything?

But what I find most fascinating about the move is that it absolutely works. It shouldn't. There's been absolutely nothing in the first three episodes to signal the possibility of something so weird playing a part in this series. And there wouldn't seem to be any need for it, either. 

So how the heck do they do that?

Three thoughts: 

1)  They Maintain the Rules of the Series: The reveal of Bugs and Porky occurs within the context of the ongoing story of the show. It's still a murder mystery, and Charles a lonely man who has had his heart broken. He can't now fly or read minds. He's just a wee bit disturbed/haunted. 

Even the way the reveal first happens, the cutaway reaction shot to them and Charles acting like this is normal, is a way of teaching us how to think about it. This is about Charles and nothing else. The world we've been introduced to is still the world.

2) They are a Way of Expressing Something about Charles' Character and Journey: Really this is the same note as from yesterday about keeping your eye on the ball--Bugs and Porky work because they are at the service of Charles' story. They expand our understanding of what is holding him back, offering a physical manifestation of that burden he's been fighting against. So rather than making the story somehow uncanny or fantastic they give flesh to Charles' human struggle, make it a physical antagonist that he has to wrestle with. Which leads to the last point...

3) They are (Bizarrely) Relatable: We all have hard things that have happened to us in the past. And even if those things are long since over, some of them continue to be operative in our present day lives. They may only live in our minds, maybe even in ways we're not fully conscious of, but still they are agents with whom we wrestle. 

And so even as the presence of these silent spooky furry versions of animated characters gives us some wild and fun new information about Charles, as we learn why they are there in the first place they become more and more familiar. My version of Bugs might be the fifth grade math teacher who liked to make me stand up in front of the class and compete in math exercises against everyone else to humiliate me or the guy who said he was my friend and then stabbed me in the back, but the point is, I do have my own internal cast of characters. And so rather than making Charles seem crazy, the revelation of his eventually makes him that much more relatable and sympathetic. 

And maybe that answers my opening question as to why the writers would give us so much on these characters so fast--because the point of them is the human struggle in Charles they reveal.

One one level my takeaway is that we can potentially get away with a lot more creativity in what might seem a rather straightforward concept than we might think.  But also, I think I'm left with the question, When I'm dealing with a character with a deep internal battle going on, how can I creatively externalize that struggle?

ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING: GROUNDING THE LAUGHS

For me the biggest barrier to entry with MURDERS was the Martin and Short of it all. Don't get me wrong, I think they're both hilarious and fantastic. But for me a TV show has to have emotional stakes. And a lot of what they have done together has been built much more around just getting laughs. 

As I wrote yesterday, the show does an excellent job of addressing that expectation/question right away. In the first five minutes it's clear, yes, there will be some classic Martin and Short moments here, but also that they and Gomez are each on a personal, human journey. In their own way they're each alone and with a lot of baggage and struggling to find a way forward in their lives. 

In the fourth episode the three of them go to visit Cinda Canning, who is basically the true crime podcasting queen. They go there for what is an entirely absurd reason, to get advice on how to interrogate Sting, who they think might have murdered Short's dog (and also maybe the dead guy). And the crime podcast queen is played by none other than comedy goddess Tina Fey. All in all it had me thinking this was going to be just schtick. Maybe good schtick, but still, nothing substantial. 

And the scene opens with them all gushing and recalling crazy lengths Canning has gone to for her stories, like being buried for 8 hours in raw sewage. Also their meeting is immediately interrupted by a call to buy her company for 30 million dollars, and it turns out her two assistants are both named Cindy. So yeah, it's all pretty wacky. 

But here's the thing: Fey's part is written and performed absolutely straight. You keep waiting for her to join in on the joke, flip us a bit of her 30 ROCK kookiness. And she never does. She takes their belief that Sting is a murderer absolutely seriously and gives them constructive advice on how to convince him to let them question him. It's still funny; she tells this crazy story of baking a turkey for someone in order to get them to let her in. "Who turns someone away who has cooked them a 19-pound turkey?" But it's still on point. It gives them a kind of quest to undertake--what is their version of showing up with a 19-pound turkey?

The scene could have ended there, but it doesn't. Instead writer Kristin Newman adds one more beat. Hearing Martin's character worrying about getting this wrong and making a mess, Fey's Canning stops and corrects him. "Embrace the mess," she says. "That's where the good stuff lives." That's the advice each of them will take into their lives--Martin in his new relationship; Short with his old friend; and Gomez with her own personal investigation. And from a point of view of not just laughs but stakes it's the key beat to the scene. It's the thing that grounds this moment in the bigger and more meaningful story of these characters' personal journeys that we're invested in. 

For me the lesson from Newman is Keep Your Eye on the Ball. Every scene has a purpose in terms of plot. Our heroes learn the thing they need to figure out in order to get Sting to let them in. But it also always has a purpose in terms of the characters' personal stories. Our heroes gain an insight that will challenge them to take a risk in their personal lives. When my own writing starts to read boring or off track, usually that means I've lost touch with one or the other of those two purposes. (And FWIW, usually it's the second and much more important one.

If you're looking for an exercise to try, you might take a pilot you've written or one by someone else that you like, and go through scene by scene, writing one sentence to describe the plot move and story/character move of each. And then see what you've got, where it all works well and where something might be missing. 

ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING: SETTING THE TONE(S)

I've only just discovered ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING. And I have to say, every episode so far has stunned me. It presents as a comedy--you've got Steve Martin and Martin Short as the leading men alongside Selena Gomez. And the premise--two washed theatrical types decide to start their own true crime podcast along with a young mysterious woman after someone in their building gets murdered--very much feels like it could fit in that standard Martin and Short slapstick space.  

But within the first three minutes it's clear that ONLY MURDERS is going to be a lot more than that. And the surprise of that alone had me sitting me and paying attention. Every episode, in fact, I find myself asking, how is it this show is grabbing me so hard? 

So that's what I'm going to look into for the rest of this week. Starting right now with the opening pastiche of the pilot.

After what presents as a typical Martin and Short opening--the two of them running through a building freaking out--MURDERS backs up two months and gives us a vignette for each character, over narration from each of them about living in New York. And each vignette skillfully sets up the character and their main problem. Steve Martin's Charles-Hadley Savage is an actor with one big hit from long ago who despite his general cheeriness is more or less the butt of the joke of life at this point. Selena Gomez' Mabel Mora is a badass with fears of being assaulted by men that she counters dreaming of stabbing a would-be rapist to death. And Short's Oliver Putnam is a theater lover who is trying to reassure himself over his feelings of being lost. 

It's such a simple technique--just let the character talk and have a moment. And yet it's so effective in helping me care about each of them right away. 

I particularly love the opening given to Short. They never tell us he's involved with the theater, but all of his references come from there. He leads with a take on New York based on the musical ANNIE, which plays in the background. Then he recalls what I found to be the incredibly emotional moment of the dancer who keeps falling off the stair case and then bouncing back up. You could turn the sound off completely and understand exactly who Short is and how much you immediately feel for him. 

In a way the three vignettes demonstrate three different ways of making an audience fall in love with a character: Make them an outsider; Make them active; Have them give us something. 

We love Martin because we watch him go through an embarrassing moment and just accept it. It's just built in for us to root for an underdog. 

We love Gomez, on the other hand, because she acts to overcome her fear. Actually really we just love her because SHE ACTS. I've said it before--what really compels people to invest in a character is the choices they make.

And then we love Short really, I think, because he shares something beautiful. He gave us a gift. Who isn't going to love a guy who does that?  

The other thing I find fascinating about that opening is that the three vignettes have radically different tones. Martin is very much in a comedy, Gomez a thriller and Short, despite one standard comedy beat at the end, a quiet human drama. And yet their three moments only seem to complement each other. And in doing so, the writers teach us how to watch this show. I'm not going to be surprised when things suddenly get grisly or emotional, precisely because that opening scene trained me to be open to it. 

Today's a great day to look at the way you introduce characters in one of your scripts. What does that first moment we get with them tell us about them? And how does it serve to get us loving them? 

DUNE THEORY 3: THE ACTIVE PROTAGONIST

[Okay, so somehow this didn't drop last week when it was supposed to. Blerg! Sorry! 

I'll have more tomorrow.]

A lot of things happen TO Paul Atreides. He has visions. He's forced to undergo a test--which itself is about doing nothing. He moves to Arrakis. He's attacked. He's attacked again, along with his entire people. He's taken to be dumped into the desert with his mother. He and his mother are confronted by the Fremen. He's forced to fight for his mother's life. 

Reactive protagonists are a problem. We learn who a protagonist is by the choices they make and the desires they chase. If you're always just reacting, they start to seem passive and purposeless. 

Except that doesn't happen in DUNE. I see three reasons why it doesn't. 

First: Paul actually has goals. He wants to save Johnny Knoxville Duncan Idaho. And more than that he wants to get out into that desert so he can meet his lady friend and his destiny. He may not succeed at getting what he wants until the third act, but he's not just hanging out. 

And once we get to the third act, he absolutely locks in. He's the one that charts their course in the desert to the Fremen and then insists they stay. 

Second: His reactions actually reveal elements of character. Reactivity is not always bad; the way a character reacts is itself a choice. So we learn of the strength of his will when he's tested. We learn of his physical skill when he spots and stops the needle bugs. We learn of his care for Morley Safer Duncan Idaho by virtue of his reaction to the dream he had about him dying. 

Third: The story plants seeds for us about Paul, aka Chani. Over the course of the story Paul repeatedly sees Chani in visions. And even as it motivates him, it also very clearly tells us, this is where we're headed. That is to say, it creates a direction and momentum for the story that we internalize. We're going to get pulled along his tale, just by virtue of it that seed having been planted. Story Seeds Create a Sense of Direction.

Each of these things is key in its own way, but the thing that most stands out to me is that Paul really does have goals, such that once we get to Act Three he is now in charge of his own life. It's really satisfying to have a character that has been trying to become something and get somewhere finally achieve that. 

DUNE THEORY 2: ALWAYS LEAVE 'EM WANTING MORE

The cast of DUNE is incredible, right? And when you have so many talented people in a big tentpole film like this, what can happen is a bunch of them really don't get used much. It's a kind of studio bloat: "We want this film to do well, so we spent all the moneys and got all the peoples."  

It makes sense on paper, in a way--More is More! But it can be kind of disappointing as audience. Seriously, you marketed the fuck out of Insert Your Favorite Star Here and then they had a walk on? 

DUNE looks primed for that kind of critique, not only on paper but in practice. Dave Bautista is in like two scenes. Josh Brolin, not much more. Zendaya doesn't even show up in real life until the very end of the film--and she was the narrator at the beginning. It's weird. It shouldn't work. 

But in addition to the clarity of the motivations of many of the supporting characters, which I wrote about yesterday, I also wonder if part of its strength lies in the fact that even the characters who really are more minor are sufficiently interesting that we immediately get locked in on them. Josh Brolin has one main scene, and it's tons of fun, him being a badass teach-fighting Paul. Dave Bautista gets to strut around shouting like Bluto. Stephen McKinley Henderson has some kind of cool mental/supercomputer power. Plus they give him that parasol. 

In some ways the parasol is this trick in a nutshell. It's just a tiny detail, but it's so specific and interesting it makes you want to know more. Vulture did an interview with Henderson about this role and others, and the headline was all about the parasol.

So a second theory as to why the film works as well as it does: It uses the limitations of its character real estate to its advantage, making the characterizations so detailed and interesting we end up hungry for more rather than disappointed with what we got. 

The tl;dr writing tip: Give your characters their own version of a parasol. 

I feel like I've been nibbling at the edges here, talking about the supporting characters and not Paul. Tomorrow!

DUNE THEORY 1: SEEDS AND DESIRES

So my big question this week is why does Dune work? Because on the surface, it's breaking a lot of rules--barely developed characters, a central relationship that never materializes, action sequences that kind of aren't. 

Here's one theory: All the audience really needs from supporting characters is a few seeds and clear desires. 

As I mentioned yesterday, almost all the characters around Paul have a certain thumbnail sensibility. We're told right up front what they want and then as they show up again we see that simple desire play out. 

So Rufus Wainwright Duncan Idaho wants to protect Paul. There's actually a lot more to him than that--he gets sent to Arrakis early to try and suss out the Fremen. But we're shown none of that, because it's not relevant to his One Desire.

Baron Harkonen wants "his" planet back. And though again, there's clearly a lot more to him, from how he treats his own people to the weirdness of the life he leads--dude can fly, y'all--his scenes are all about the reconquest.

Stilgar wants to protect his people. Reverend Mother wants to test Paul. And once they accomplish those things, they're out (or at least until the end). 

Maybe in part the film works precisely because these characters are made so clearly directed.  The film tells us what to expect of them and then fulfills that, and that's satisfying. 

It also plants seeds at times as to things that are going to happen. Right from the start we know that Idina Menzel Duncan Idaho is going to die fighting off a whole crew of warriors. So we go forward in the film waiting for that moment. 

We also know Paul is going to meet Chani, his lady friend, and Jamis, his mentor. And so even after he and his mom are tossed off into the desert and literally everyone else we've spent all this time with are dead, there's no sense of wait, so what is this film now? The film's already laid that path. 

None of this is terribly flashy. Really the biggest twist of the whole film is the fact that when Paul meets Jamis he kills him. We did not see that in a vision. 

But it works. It's clear in what it promises, and it's disciplined in its follow through. Maybe that's part of why this film works. Clear Desires, Fulfilled Promises, Can't Lose?