Vertigo: 3-act structure

 

This post is part of the Background to the series
Learning from Alfred Hitchcock
— for writers, movie makers, and viewers

I think that Vertigo exemplifies all three of the kinds of structures I’ll eventually be discussing in this series of posts:

• 3-act structure,
• 2-act structure, and
• chapter structure.

To begin with, it has the 3-act structure I’ve talked about in Star Wars, Lets check over the criteria and definitions I gave. 

There certainly is a protagonist: Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart).

According to Criterion 1, in the previous post, the first act should end when Scottie “makes a commitment that leads to the main action of the movie: Acts 2 and 3.”

He does this so many times that our only problem would be selecting the one that seems best. I have my own nomination, selected more because I have a gut feeling about it than because it fits any after-the-fact rationalizations.

After Madeleine (Kim Novak) jumps into San Francisco Bay and Scottie fishes her out and brings her to his apartment, they have what, for me, is one of the most unusual conversations ever filmed. I mean, here she wakes up nude in a strange man’s bed only to learn that she’s fallen into the bay and he’s rescued her. The two of them pretend they don’t know each other, yet they immediately begin speaking in a civilized, intimate tone — almost like colleagues, fellow conspirators in some plot they’re both eager to see succeed. He’s obviously in love with her, and perhaps she could be with him, but with no apparent effort he repeatedly, gracefully sidesteps the fact that their love might present a conflict of interest in his relationship with her husband, Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore), who’s in constant phone contact.

Some 7 1/2 minutes into that conversation, Madeleine says that it’s her first time jumping into the Bay. It’s the first time for Scottie, too. He offers her more coffee, reaches for her cup, and touches her hand instead. They have an instant of recognition — interrupted by the ringing of the phone.

Although Scottie has previously agreed to help Madeleine, and although he’s previously acted like he’s in love with her, I think this moment is the decisive one in which he first consciously knows that he loves her and that solving her problem and protecting her is the most important thing in his life. He commits — totally.

3-act Structure — Star Wars (original)

This post is part of the Background to the series
Learning from Alfred Hitchcock
— for writers, movie makers, and viewers

Don’t blame me. The screenwriting books ruined everything. It’s almost impossible now to sell your script to Hollywood without paying lip-service to “3-act structure.”

The thing that gripes me is that it’s such simple-minded stuff. They keep chanting, “Every good screenplay has a beginning, a middle and an end.”

Yeah: like every good donut has a top, a center, and a bottom. Right. Sure. Of course.

Not automatically a useful concept for analytical purposes . . . or, if I make donuts and want to get good at it.

To be practical, the definitions would have to fit an operational reality: “Some donuts have a donut, a filling, and a glaze.” This would tell me that, for that particular type of donut, I’d need to mix my batter, my filling, and my glaze separately. Though I’d need more information, I’d have a start.

But, if you question these people, they just repeat it again, slowly, patronizingly — “Every good screenplay has a beginning, a middle and an end.” — as if I’m the one too dense to understand.

All right. All right. I see that I’m letting my sarcasm run away with me.

I’ll try to be more constructive.

Why is 3-act structure an important concept that needs to be understood?

Three reasons:

Introduction to Longitudinal Structure

This post is part of the Background to the series
Learning from Alfred Hitchcock – for writers, movie makers, and viewers

Alfred Hitchcock directing Kim Novak in Vertigo

Movies can have several different kinds of structures at once.

This may seem like a complicated idea, but it isn’t really.

Just think of your body. In one sense, your structure is provided by your skeleton. But, all by itself, that wouldn’t be enough. You’d be just a heap of bones on the floor if you didn’t have another counterbalancing structure of muscles and tendons to keep the bones together, to enable them to stand erect, and to enable them to move. You have other kinds of structure, too: the “organization” provided by your organs, and the structure of perception and action provided by your brain and your nerves.

Normally, you’re not consciously aware of any of this complexity — and you don’t need to be — unless you’re in some kind of training. We’re in training to make (or watch) movies.

When people talk about film “structure,” they usually refer just to one kind: “3-act structure,” which is a lengthwise, or “longitudinal,” division of the movie into three segments, or “acts.”

There are other kinds of longitudinal structure. Hitchcock’s movies are not conspicuous for true 3-act structure. Some show more obviously a “2-act structure” — and many show an episodic “chapter structure.” Most have some combination of the three kinds.

It’s difficult to see the mixed structures of Hitchcock’s movies without having a clear sense of the three basic kinds. So my plan for the first few posts is

Degas, Rembrandt, and Sargent

This post continues my Story Structure series.

Self-Portrait (1850s)
by Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas

A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpinçon?) (1865)
by Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas

John Ruskin, Giotto, and William Henry Fox Talbot

This post continues my Story Structure series.

Scenes from the Life of Christ: 10. Entry into Jerusalem (1304-6) by Giotto

(Click pictures to enlarge)

For those readers who are puzzled why I’ve posted so many entries about old art but implied they’re relevant to new stories — and to screenplays — I offer the following quote from the great Victorian era critic, John Ruskin.

(excerpt from)
Giotto and his Works in Padua

by

John Ruskin

But what, it may be said by the reader, is the use of the works of Giotto to us?

Jan van Eyck — The Arnolfini Wedding

This post continues my Story Structure series.

The Arnolfini Wedding (1434) by Jan van Eyck

Sassetta (approximately)

This post continues my Story Structure series.

What does it mean to tell a story?

I think one of the valid reasons that people often stress 3-act structure in screenplays is that it’s one way of making sure that we write stories that progress and unfold in time, rather than being static snapshots.

Still, some paintings are phenomenal in their ability to suggest stories. The following 3 paintings are by Sassetta, who lived during the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. They’re part of a much larger series depicting the life of Saint Anthony.

Jane Austen: Free indirect discourse

A post in the ongoing series Poetry in the Arts.

Jane Austen

In an earlier entry, on Emily Dickinson, I tried to focus on the way poetry arises by metaphor: the author introduces a beginning that demands an certain ending, but then replaces that ending with a different one that’s only partially compatible.

The incongruities between the two ideas surprise us — they make us see double.

This fits into my main theme in two ways.

• The surprise — the apparent roadblock that we bump into — forces us out of our fascination with the content of the story to look at the author and at the surface of the story, as we try to puzzle our way through the impasse. This looking at the author and at the surface of the story (the way it’s told) is one of the criteria I’ve proposed for poetry.
• The metaphor makes us learn to live with ideas that don’t seem to fit together, even though they individually report a valid aspect of the reality. We have to grow until we build a new idea that’s deeper, subtler, and more accurate. Poetry isn’t just information: it’s a process, an experience, for us. This is another of the criteria that I’ve proposed.

This mode of double vision is very close to the center of what poetry is, I think.

But metaphor isn’t the only way that it happens. It also results when the reader tunes in to multiple points of view within the same story.

de Hooch and Matisse

This post continues my Story Structure series.

Three interrelated paintings (the comparison between the first two is suggested in Modern Art by Sam Hunter and John M. Jacobus).

A Dutch Courtyard (1658-1660) by Pieter de Hooch

The Piano Lesson (1916) by Henri Matisse

Star Wars (the original: is there any other?)

This post continues my Story Structure series.

In the earlier post Two Frescoes, by Giotto and by Taddeo Gaddi, I questioned how many famous movies really are most usefully analyzed as having “3-act structure” — despite the claims of the screenwriting books and the examples they give. Are their analyses fair? And are they typical of the best movies?

Here’s an example of a good movie that does have 3-act structure: the original Star Wars. But it’s also an example of a movie in which it’s useful to ask questions the screenwriting books don’t cover.

Perugino and Raphael

This post continues my Story Structure series.

Here are three similar paintings:

Christ Delivering the Keys of the Kingdom to Saint Peter
by Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci (1445?-1523), called Perugino

Beethoven — String Quartet in C Sharp Minor, Number 14, Opus 131

This post continues my Story Structure series.

Some people may have found the writing examples in my previous posts, Pieter Brueghel and W.H. Auden and Two Frescoes, by Giotto and by Taddeo Gaddi, unconvincing — because a painting, which tells its story in a static snapshot, isn’t like a movie, which progresses in time.

I disagree: I think there’s significant overlap. But, OK.

I can give examples from music, which does progress in time.

In fact, classical music from the “Classical” Period (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) and the “Romantic” period (Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms) had something that superficially might seem like 3-Act Structure.

Dynamic Screenwriting

Note: The series, Story Structure, that I’m currently reposting here, was originally posted in the discussion boards of a well-known website for screenwriters. I had a fairly rich life there, corresponding back and forth with other writers. One exchange happened with my very thoughtful friend Martin Collinson.

Martin wrote about the lack of dynamism in some screenplays, and his comments seemed to offer a way to break out of some of the cliché rules that so imprison screenwriters. One of these clichés is that movies are for pictures not words. (Yes, we obviously all know that already, but how many of you are really ready to go back to silent movies? — Or have the talent to make movies with the level of visual storytelling that King Vidor or Victor Seastrom did?)

Another cliché that they like to hound us with is that action advances movies, whereas words hold them back. The truth is that uninterrupted action gets boring soon — unless there’s story and character to give it meaning. Paradoxically it’s static.

So, even though we don’t want to make movies in which characters deliver speeches — how can we make them actually move?

One suggestion: what if words could be actions?

Two Frescoes, by Giotto and by Taddeo Gaddi

This post is the second in a new series, Story Structure.

In this entry, I write about two Renaissance frescoes with the same title, and try to relate them to the idea of story structure — or, especially screenplay structure, about which so much has been said.

The meeting of Joachim and Anna by Giotto, c. 1305.

The meeting of Joachim and Anna by Taddeo Gaddi, 1338.

Here’s what a standard art history book says about these paintings.