Thursday 26 February 2009

Thursday

Today I'm going to talk about what I will call the 'Rabbit Hole Moment' (maybe someone else already uses this name, or has a better one for it). This is the moment when a character in a film does something that you wouldn't do, and so separates himself from you and enters the world of fiction. The job of the script-writer is to make this moment as seamless as possible, to make you believe the character would do it, or (even better) to convince you that you would do it too, were you in that situation. I was reminded of this by Jeepers Creepers. The moment comes when the two main characters decide to return to the church and see what is down the pipe where they think they saw a body being thrown. None of us would do this. We can't believe they want to do it either. The writer's best line is: 'What if it was you down that pipe?'. However, this is still not quite convincing enough, and, of course, the characters aren't satisfied with just looking down the pipe. So, it almost works. A better moment comes in Star Wars. Luke visits Obiwan-Kenobi. Obiwan says Luke must come with him to rescue the Princess and learn the ways of the force. Luke says he can't go. Here, we as viewers want Luke to go. Learning the force and rescuing a Princess sounds exciting. Only when Luke discovers his Aunt and Uncle are dead, that there is nothing left for him on Tatooine, does he decide to go. The transition is seamless, and we want it to happen.

1 comment:

Alex Andronov said...

I think it's best to go the way you describe. Ideally you want the characters to say no because of "blah". Then remove "blah" and then everyone says "well that makes sense... there is no blah anymore".

The thing that works well about this is that you can easily forget that when they first mentioned "blah" you actually thought about "blee" and "thingamy" as well as "blah". But by the time you get around to removing "blah" most people have forgotten "blee" and "thingamy".

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