Enjoy The Show

From the AP:

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can't avoid.

Since Clinton's inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton's second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it.

This fairy tale has two things which interest me: screenwriting, and history.

First, screenwriting. It is a basic tenet of movies that you must announce a time limit somewhere in the story. The next time you watch a movie, listen for the time limit. Sometimes it is explicit: "If we don't deactivate the nuclear device before 5 o'clock, we're all going to die." Other times, the time limit is implicit, but no less important: "When the sun goes down, the vampires will come out to kill us." The sun could go down at six, seven, or eight o'clock, but it doesn't matter: the sun has to go down sometime, and the clock is ticking. Pressure.

If you watch 100 films, 99 will tell you the time limit flat out, and others will hide it, yet just barely. You'll always be able to figure it out if you listen for it. Take Schindler's List: though no time limit is specifically stated, it is implied in the film that the characters must survive until the end of the war...whenever that is. That, too, can be the pressure point: not knowing when the end will come.

You can exert pressure on your characters in a few different ways, like other characters (the bad guy, the deranged husband, the mean boss), external forces (the stock market, the weather, the law), and personal strife (conscience, emotional disturbance, disability). The other big (and easy) way to exert pressure is to put your hero on the clock. It's an old trick, but it's an old trick because it works. Writers are always taught that they need to compress their stories and add the pressure of time.

The time limit doesn't have to appear in the first ten minutes of the story. Sometimes the story meanders along, and the writer gets nervous: the story's second act is boring and he doesn't know how to get to the big finish. How do we speed it up? Easy. "If we don't get to the church by 5 o'clock, the priest will die." Instant drama, cue car chase.

One of my favorite time limit devices can be found in Apocalypto. Since the characters had no watches or clocks, what to do? Mel Gibson came up with a good one. He trapped the hero's wife and child at the bottom of a dry well. When the hero is kidnapped and taken away, he looks to the sky and says, "Don't rain."

Why would he say that?

Good question. Later in the film, it begins to rain. Cut to the woman and child at the bottom of the well, ankle-deep in water. Cut to the hero, racing through the jungle to save them. As the film goes on, it rains harder. The well fills with water, and the woman and child are now waist-deep. Cut to the hero, sprinting, fighting off his attackers, and sprinting some more. Cut to the woman and child, neck-deep in water. Just as it looks like they're going to drown, there's the hero. He arrives just in time to rescue them.

The water in the well could easily have been the clock on a nuclear bomb, the rising water replacing the countdown of digital numbers. Same-same.

Time limits put pressure on the hero and they turn the screws on the audience. It's a necessary device, and if you look closely enough, you'll find one in every story.

Now, go back and read those two paragraphs from the AP and see if you recognize the time limit, the hero, and you.

Why you? Simple. You're the audience for this little movie they've cooked up.

Oh, and as for the history thing, I get quite a chuckle reading this global warming stuff. I was forced to study the ice ages and continental drift in school. I should have saved my time. Had I known we could elect politicians to put Pangea back together again, I would have voted for the Green Party a long time ago.