Audience and Character Knowledge

Robert Mckee: Relationships of audience knowledge and character knowledge

Mystery: characters know while the audience doesn't know.
Identification: character and audience know the same.
Suspense / Dramatic Irony: the audience knows but the characters don't - for example, in Double Indemnity we know of the character's demise.

The Hidden Objective of Characters

The hidden objectives of characters can bring about sudden changes to the narrative.

Blocking of Characters:
E.g, ideas man wants finance for his great idea - money men just want to steal his idea - money man doesn't offer ideas man seat as he's about to rip him off by stealing this great idea.

A reversal of status comes about through this conflict - the ideas man goes from hi to low status, as his idea (which gives him his status) is taken from him.

The conflict comes through the characters different objectives:
Ideas man wants the money
Money men want to steal his idea and keep the money

* Phone technique - have to be in the opposite mood for the news for dramatic effect 'so happy to hear from, lifes great!' - 'Your mothers dead, she was run over by a steam roller'. Hi to low.

Sub Text

Is what's going on behind words and actions in a scene.
Teacher quote: 'If scene is about what scene is about, you're in trouble'.

“Text means the sensory surface of a work of art. In film it’s the images onscreen and the soundtrack of dialogue, music, and sound effects. What we see. What we hear. What people say. What people do. Subtext is the life under that surface – thoughts and feelings both known and unknown, hidden by behavior.”

Robert Mckee - Levels of Subtext
1. Intellectual: beneath statements made
2. Emotional
3. Physical: can reinforce the tone / can counterpoint it
- Often linked to pathetic fallacy. E,g, horror: at night, floor boards creek.
- Counter point. E,g , rain on a wedding day can make us doubt the marriage
4. Thematic: Apropo of controlling idea

Dreams

* The unconscious is a store house of stories. Tap into symbols and images and share those that resonate with others.

* Dream Diary - good for ideas. The more you write the more you remember.
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Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams - used widely by screen writers.

The book introduces Freud's theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation and also first discusses what would later become the theory of the Oedipus Complex. Freud revised the book at least eight times and, in the third edition, added an extensive section which treated dream symbolism very literally, following the influence of Wilhelm Stekel. Freud said of this work, "Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime."

Four operations take place in Dream work

1. Condensation - Synecdoche
2. Displacement - Allusion (metonymy) e.g a suit is a business man
3. Representation - thoughts made visual
4. Symbolism - constant relation - things that take on a different meaning, e.g phallic symbols

The Surrealism movement stemmed from Freude's discovery of the unconscious.
Surrealism: irrational Juxtaposition

The Archetype Theory - Created by Carl Jung: “ancient or archaic images that derive from the collective unconscious. The archetypes are also referred to as innate universal psychic dispositions which form the substrate from which the basic symbols or representations of unconscious experience emerge. These are different from instincts, as Jung understood instincts as being “an unconscious physical impulse toward actions and the archetype as the psychic counterpart”. There are many different archetypes and Jung has stated they are limitless, but they have been simplified; examples include the persona, the shadow, the anima, the animus, the great mother, the wise old man, the hero, and the self.

Comedy Techniques

Incongruity - Link

Often identified with "frustrated expectation," a concept we owe to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who says that humor arises "from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing." More is implied here than merely surprise: the suggestion is that humor consists in the violent dissolution of an emotional attitude. This is done by the abrupt intrusion into the attitude of something that is felt not to belong there, of some element that has strayed, as it were, from another compartment of our minds.

www.msu.edu/~jdowell/monro.html

Incongruity Theory Continued

Humor frequently contains an unexpected, often sudden, shift in perspective, which gets assimilated by the Incongruity Theory. This view has been defended by Latta (1998) and by Brian Boyd (2004).^[1] Boyd views the shift as from seriousness to play. Nearly anything can be the object of this perspective twist; it is, however, in the areas of human creativity (science and art being the varieties) that the shift results from "structure mapping" (termed "bisociation" by Koestler) to create novel meanings.^[2] Arthur Koestler argues that humor results when two different frames of reference are set up and a collision is engineered between them.

1. Brian Boyd, Laughter and Literature: A Play Theory of Humor Philosophy and Literature - Volume 28, Number 1, April 2004, pp. 1-22

2. Koestler, Arthur (1964): "The Act of Creation"

Superiority

Schadenfreude: Pleasure derived from the misfortune of others.

Can take the form of laughing at others weaknesses; common in slap stick humor. Often an inability to adapt to a situation is the focus of comedy; we need to be flexible and adaptable to survive.

For Aristotle we laugh at inferior or ugly individuals, because we feel a joy at being superior to them. Socrates was reported by Plato as saying that the ridiculous was characterized by a display of self-ignorance.

Poetics, 1449a, p. 34-35.
Plato, Philebus 49
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Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.

Thomas Hobbes

Memory and Personal Experience

Short Film: Gas Man, by L Ramsey

Notes: Lots of extreme close ups, very intimate
Very tactile, claustrophobic. Feels right in the action; creates the impression of a memory.

Formative experience for Lynn, a young girl, who realises she has a half sister. Lynn becomes very angry with the other girl when she sits on her dad's knee. Lynn knows there's something wrong, something her father is hiding.

Objective Correlative:

A term introduced by T.S Eliot in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919). Eliot observes that there is something in Hamlet which Shakespeare cannot “drag into the light, contemplate, or manipulate into art” , at least not in the same way that he can with Othello's jealousy, or Coriolanus' pride. He goes on to deduce that “the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in a sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” (Selected Essays, [London: Faber and Faber, ...)

The dodgy Santa works as a metaphor for the unsavory situation.