Save the Cat?

I love movies. I love thinking about them and geeking-out while figuring out how they work. I read Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art while in college. Well, mostly I just flipped through it a lot. It provides tools for disassembling a movie into its tiniest pieces—too tiny for most purposes, really. Sure, one needs to know stuff like the difference between a cut, a dissolve, a wipe, and a fade. Sure, to use rapid cutting or to use a long, uninterrupted tracking shot is a choice potentially pregnant with meaning. It is fun to ponder why Touch of Evil needed to delay its first cut until the car explodes. But one can easily get lost in this minutia. It’s like trying to explain how a car works at the level of subatomic physics. I wanted to be able to take that car apart into larger pieces: carburetor, radiator, axles.

My epiphanies began when I started reading screenwriting books. Syd Field’s Screenplay was eye-opening. A movie has three acts!?! At the end of the first two comes a “plot point” that spins things into new directions!?! His Screenwriter’s Workbook was even more helpful. It introduced something called a “midpoint.” That’s another direction spinner like discovering Dil is a dude in The Crying Game. I felt I was making progress, but still wasn’t much beyond the saying, “Act I is about chasing a guy up a tree, Act II is about throwing rocks at him. Act III is about bringing him back down again.”

Then I came across this guy named Christopher Vogler. He introduced me to “The Hero’s Journey.” It’s all about a guy (or gal) with a problem travelling from a familiar place to a special place to learn how to solve the problem and then returning to the familiar place finally able to lick the problem. It showed that each act had a purpose. It was also about ideas that were as old as mythology. George Lucas had overdosed on the stuff and out popped Star Wars. I didn’t need any more convincing than that. There was still a problem though. I was faced with long stretches of script/movie that needed to accomplish things that sounded almost too mythological like “tests, allies, enemies,” “seizing the sword,” and “return with the elixir.” I didn’t want to write about dragons. Not all movies have damsels in distress. (Or do they?)

Then I found Blake Snyder. He was clearly still talking hero’s journey with story as an engine of transformation, but his language was something even this idiot could put to use: “opening Image,” “debate,” “fun and games,” and “closing image.” Sure, he briefly became obtuse when he named the three acts Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis like some Dr. Jekyll who’d once talked about dudes with problems becoming fish out of water after saving cats stuck up in trees suddenly becoming a mad Hegelian Mr. Hyde. On the whole, though, I knew I’d found the larger pieces I’d been seeking along with nice, friendly labels.

My favorite analogy for what Snyder’s beats made easy is that of a nerdy kid taking a radio apart, spreading the parts out on a tabletop arranged in functional groups, and placing little white labels beside each. She can then talk about what each part does and explain why without one of the parts the whole darn thing would stop working. You can even speculate on how if one of the parts is replaced with a new and improved, but functionally equivalent part, the radio would still play—maybe even better than before. Someone asked me, just today during lunch, believe it or not, “But doesn’t knowing how a movie works take all the fun out of it like a magician giving away his secrets?” I said, “No. Not for me. I have fun while it’s in pieces. Then I put them back together again and go right back to listening to beautiful music.”

What did my dissection reveal about Drugstore Cowboy? I’ve watched the movie many times. I’ve been a Van Sant aficionado for as long as he’s been making movies, but I’d never taken this movie apart to see how it works. I still have a ways to go before I fully understand it. I probably completely screwed up a few of those beats. I did notice some new things though.

The pattern of withering away we see in Bob’s life as illustrated by his series of domiciles is striking, compelling: a house, (the glimpse of his boyhood house), an apartment, a cheap motel, and finally a return to a forlorn barely-apartment. It’s the sort of thoughtful use of mise-en-scène that’s always ignored on Oscar night.

I noticed how intertwined are Bob’s two addictions: to drugs and to his wife. He loses one, he loses both. It’s like some druggy rock ‘n’ roll song come to life. “Heroin, it’s my wife and it’s my life,” sang Lou Reed. “Sweet cousin Cocaine, lay your cool cool hand on my head,” sang Mick Jagger.

I noticed how intricately interwoven are the scenes of Nadine’s death and burial with those of Dianne’s leaving Bob and winding up in Rick’s arms. (Was that the reason for the name anagrams? Where did that pickup truck come from?) The self-recognition on Bob’s face when he watches his doppelgänger Rick punch a hole in the wall is achingly apparent. And the twin scenes of Dianne’s wanting Bob to make love to her and later Bob’s desires finally, desperately catching up, far too late, are puppy-sad, pathetic, and beautiful.

Yeah, those last two scenes now truly are the movie for me.