You Don't Have to Save the Cat
Michael Haneke's radical approach to structure in Code Unknown.
There is one piece of screenwriting advice that has always irked me: that every writer must master “structure” before moving on to more experimental work. My problem with this advice isn’t that it imposes a constraint from the get-go. After all, constraints are good for the creative process; they limit the overwhelming number of approaches one could take in the same way that the size of a canvas, along with the availability of certain brushes and colors, limit a painter, thus focusing the creative task on a reduced set of possibilities. Rather, my problem is what this advice really means is that every aspiring screenwriter must master a specific type of structure that has been lauded for decades by the screenplay self-help intelligentsia. It breaks down like so:
Film introduces a compelling protagonist.
Protagonist receives a “call to adventure” (which they initially refuse, but eventually accept).
Protagonist adjusts to new circumstances that lead the story to a “midpoint twist” that upends our understanding of the narrative thus far.
Protagonist endures ever more difficult obstacles that lead to a climax in which they almost lose everything (a.k.a. the “all is lost” moment).
Finally, against all odds, the protagonist overcomes these obstacles and returns to their familiar circumstances, having changed.
There are several variations on this basic structure from the classic Freytag pyramid to the Dan Harmon story circle, but Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat takes the cake for formulaic approaches to screenwriting. Its major contribution is on one page: a fifteen point “beat sheet” that provides aspiring screenwriters with a set of checkpoints to hit on specific pages in order to lay the foundation for a sellable screenplay.
The key word here is “sellable” because that’s how these books treat screenwriting: as a profession, not an art. It’s an arrangement that suits the dilettantes in control of the American film industry quite well. As long as those beats are accounted for, all that’s left to do is make the film look and sound pretty, which can be accomplished with the right actors, the right cinematography, the right editing, and so on. But all of those other elements rest on a base confidence in structure that is measurable, predictable, and money-back guaranteed.
No doubt this is partially the result of market incentives and other kinds of philistinism that thrive at the top of the Hollywood food chain. But those institution-level rationales distract from the more basic issue I have with this dominant approach to structure, which is the same issue I’d have with any art form that reduced itself to one creative method: it’s boring.
It doesn’t take an MFA in Studio Art to understand that when one specific set of constraints becomes the default for an artistic practice the mechanical repetition of process can disrupt the more basic goal of creating a work of art that moves a spectator whether by subverting or, better yet, reorienting a spectator’s expectations of what the artist can do.
These days, I find the films that move me most are those that dismiss familiar (i.e. formulaic) constraints in favor of more unconventional ones. Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown is a good example. In fact, its only major commonality with the formulaic approaches mentioned above is its inclusion of an event at the beginning of the film that sets off the central drama (i.e. an inciting incident). In summary:
A block away from her apartment, Anne (Juliette Binoche) runs into Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) – the disaffected teen brother of Georges (Thierry Neuvic), Anne’s war photographer boyfriend – and gives him the code to her building so he can hang out in her apartment while she tends to some errands. Shortly after parting ways, Jean throws garbage in the lap of Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu), a Romanian beggar, as he passes her on the street. Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), a young teacher of Malian descent, witnesses Jean’s incivility and immediately confronts him. “Was that a decent thing to do?” he says. Quickly, Jean shrugs him off and tries to flee the scene, but Amadou won’t let him. As the back-and-forth between them escalates into yelling, Anne (no more than a few blocks away) hears the commotion and runs to Jean. Soon the police get involved and defuse the situation: Jean and Anne are let go while Amadou and Maria are booked for the disruption.
It’s a depressing conclusion to Jean’s hostility that lingers in one’s mind for the rest of the film even as it starts shifting perspectives between the five protagonists, and a few supporting characters, via sudden cuts to black, as if some omniscient presence were flipping channels between them: Anne continues her life as an actress; Georges returns from the war to visit Anne; Jean goes to live on his father’s farm; Amadou’s family deals with the fallout from his arrest; and Maria returns home to Romania. Thus, the unusual constraint that Code Unknown embraces is that each scene, following the inciting incident, must linger on one protagonist or secondary character for a fixed period of time before jumping to another character at some point in the future (i.e. no flashbacks or jump cuts allowed).
This approach achieves narrative moment without satisfying a traditional plot rubric. There is no “midpoint twist” or “all-is-lost” moment or even a climax to assure viewers of where they are in the narrative; there is only the continuous process of comparing one piece against another or against the whole. As a result, instead of hemming the narrative’s meaning to one protagonist’s journey – as the Snyderians would have it – the juxtaposition created by cutting between “various journeys” allows Haneke to draw associations across the lives of all the characters, including those indirectly involved in the inciting incident. In doing so, the story asks us to contemplate the ripples of this one event throughout each character’s life and encourages us to draw comparisons between them. The result is a patchwork of European life that does not reduce the differences between each individual story to some easy, totalizing synthesis of society. More so, it reveals the complexity of the society and leaves the more sweeping task of analysis to the viewer – a challenge to make sense of so many discrepancies in the lived experiences of these characters.
Even its subtitle, An Incomplete Account of Various Journeys, seems to be a playful joust at conventional narrative form. On the one hand, narratives are always “incomplete” by virtue of excluding non-essential information to focus in on what matters according to the storyteller’s values (or rubrics). Novelists engage in this exclusion when they write enormous character backstories that never make it into their final projects and journalists do the same when they gather loads of information – via interviews, research, and so on – to parse through and distill into a coherent story. Yet the ultimate effect of all this curated incompleteness is often an impression of completeness: a sense that the writer has fully explored their material through a series of carefully selected moments that relate to one another towards some targeted and meaningful result, when what we have actually witnessed is an artfully “incomplete account” of said material.
Code Unknown, rather than reinforcing that fundamental lie of completeness, challenges it by drawing attention to all of the missing pieces of its story, thus making the lives of its characters feel larger than the brief time we follow them around for. The unaccounted for gaps between the various journeys, and the lack of a “complete” story arc for any one character, urge the viewer to imagine what these journeys might look like outside the confines of the film. It’s not offering an escape so much as it is posing a view of the world and asking the viewer to respond to it.
This is a markedly different result from the one generated by the conventional approach to structure, which (via the rubric discussed above) seeks to frame every action according to some logical cause-and-effect chain. That framework works for plenty of material, but what is admirable about Code Unknown is that the shape of its narrative is made to fit its material rather than determining or limiting the possibilities in exploring it. As a result, the film is super effective in rendering its hefty subject matter: the social fabric of France at the turn of the millennium. Obviously, it would be impossible to provide a full treatment of this topic over the course of two hours, but the constraint Haneke uses echoes both the impossibility of that goal and the necessity of exploring the subject nonetheless.1
In appreciating this thoughtful relationship between form and content in Code Unknown, I find it strange that the film industry and its self-help offspring have made the Snyder approach a maxim for all screenwriters. I’m sure there are many screenplays out there that don’t fit the overplayed Blake Snyder rubric yet don’t get produced because of the ideological commitment of the film and television industry to a certain form of narrative. Of course, there are always exceptions, but those examples usually come from the independent world, foreign cinema, or auteur-branded filmmakers whose creations don’t require executive approval at every level of development.
Unfortunately, the major creative decision makers in Hollywood are the executives and producers who control film financing and these are the individuals who enforce consensus around a certain kind of narrative structure. It’s hardly surprising that those who conform to succeed within the institutions encourage conformity in their own decision-making for said institutions. Thankfully there are still bold filmmakers out there who are more interested in making art than carefully calibrated entertainments. Haneke is one of them.
This is a habit in Haneke’s work. See Funny Games (1997), a self-referential take on the bourgeois family horror film that is actually horrifying because it takes narrative agency away from the protagonists (in a rather obscene sense) to undermine the familiar rubrics of the horror genre, and Amour (2012), a love story that gains its narrative momentum by tracking the physical deterioration of one spouse after she experiences a stroke. Here the “all-is-lost” moment is not followed by some triumphant reunion between the lovers; it is followed by death and the question of what love looks like in the face of it.