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Why You? Love SecretsCynthia's Column August 2008 Cynthia's Column August 2008 One of the more difficult things we are challenged with as storytellers is writing compelling, believable, couplings. Why do people fall in love in fiction or for that matter in life? I have a simple theory about real life. It's all karma. We wander through life trying to do better this time around and heal wounds from the past. This doesn't help us in fiction. I have already written about "The Crack" in the heart that makes for an opening through which people can fall in love with each other. The vulnerability factor. The opening. But why should we root for one character to be with another? How do we convince a reader to want these two people to end up together? I've come up with four answers to this question so far. 1. Twins. When you have two characters who are so much alike that they seem destined for one another. Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler fall into this category. They are both arrogant, brash, impulsive, gorgeous, charismatic. He's no gentleman and she's no lady. In fact if Scarlett were a man, she'd be Rhett and vice versa. Tracy and Hepburn were twins. Smart, sophisticated, fast-talking, no-nonsense twins. In His Girl Friday, Roz Russell and Cary Grant talk, think and act at 78 rpm while everyone else seems to be from a different planet altogether. They have to get together because no one else anywhere could possibly keep up with their cracker jack gum popping machine gun firing hilarious adorable banter. Ralph Bellamy? Forget it. Inside of ten minutes he's left so far behind in the dust only his grey fedora is visible. A more recent example of rom com twins is Someone Like You. In the first five minutes it's clear that Ashley Judd's T.V. talk show producer and her co-producer, Hugh Jackman, are fast talking, fast walking, funny smart twin souls. The fact that he's a compulsive Don Juan and she can't stand him only makes it more fun to watch them dance around each other until they inevitably end up in each other's arms. 2. Opposites Attract. Sometimes the equation is two halves make one whole. Steve Barnes talked about As Good As It Gets a few years ago at one of our Tuesday nights at the Old Church. How the Jack Nicholson character has the external world mastered. He has a successful career, beautiful apartment, money and dresses well. But he has no clue about the internal life. How to relate to another human being. Helen Hunt's character has the inner life. She is a mother and daughter and knows how to talk to another person and how to love them. But she has no idea how to function in the external world. She is a waitress who can't even figure out how to get medical care for her chronically sick kid. They literally need each other. He fixes her kid. She fixes his heart. See? The ying and yang make one perfectly functioning, (well, okay, let's just say functioning) whole. Traditionally, in movies, this often looked like the big strong guy and the fragile feminine woman. Think John Wayne or Clint Eastwood with any of their romantic leads. 3. Life Force. Last month I wrote about how to create a Life Force character. But let's look at how this quality works in love stories. Often the reason we root for these two lovers to end up together is that one of them has the Life Force and the other is what Marc Acito calls the "Need" character. The one who is in some way not fully alive. He could be a workaholic or she might be agoraphobic or maybe he's a jaded, cynical business man like Richard Gere's character in Pretty Woman. The hooker he picks up on Hollywood Boulevard, played by Julia Roberts, brings the life force with her. She wakes him up. After meeting her and falling for her, he is not the same guy. She has brought him to life and when she walks away near the end, he faces going back to life before her, which would be a kind of spiritual or emotional death. If they didn't get together, she'd be fine. She's taking the money, leaving town, retiring from hooking and going to college. Totally fine, right? But if he let's her go, he'd be the tragic figure. So of course he chooses Life. He pursues her and wins her. He needs to feel alive. In Harold and Maude, Harold is obsessed with death. He is in desperate need of Life Force energy. It doesn't even matter that it blows into his life in the form of a little old lady played by 82 year old Ruth Gordon. He falls for her anyway. That's how badly he needs what she brings into his world. She is literally the life of his party. Sometimes it's the man who brings the life energy to the woman. In A Thousand Clowns, Barbara Harris's repressed social worker is awakened by the quirky, funny Murray Burns played by Jason Robards. After knowing him only a few hours her buttoned up suit is completely unbuttoned and discarded and she's a whole new fun, lovely girl. In Shadowlands, Anthony Hopkins' C.S. Lewis, oxford don and author, is walking through a half life. He may be intellectually alive and creating Narnia and many other worlds, but he had emotionally and physically isolated himself. He is not touched by love or by a human hand. The American woman, Joy, blows into his musty rooms like a tornado (played by Debora Winger) and brings him to life like a lightning bolt. He hardly knows what hit him, but from the first scene it is clear he will never be the same. In French Kiss, it's Meg Ryan (normally the life force character) who this time plays the needy, shut down, terrified-of-flying, recently-dumped-by-her-fiancé character. When Kevin Kline as the oversized, loud, unshaven, pushy, obnoxious Frenchman sits beside her on the plane, he saves her from a limited, lifeless life. She may hate him, but we love him for her. We are completely rooting for him to get this girl and kiss the starch out of her. Other repressed intellectual professor types abound in the romantic comedy genre. Gary Cooper in Ball of Fire. Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby. Ryan O'Neill in What's Up Doc? Greta Garbo in Ninotchka is this same character, only with a political spin. We will always root for the life force character to unite with the character who is not fully alive. We want to see this story every time. We want to believe it. 4. Soul Mates. This is the hardest one to sell to an audience. We want to believe the mythology that there is one great love for each of us. That we have to search the world to find our one true love. That when we finally meet him we will recognize him "across a crowded room." It will be love at first sight. This is fairy tale mythology. It may be true. I'm not poo-pooing it. I'm just saying it's hard to make it believable in a modern setting. It is somehow easier in period pieces. The Princess Bride. Romeo and Juliet. Tristan and Isolde. Even Guinevere meeting Lancelot. The look. Time stands still. Music comes up. We don't readily believe this in a contemporary story. I see screenwriters who try to write that moment. Eyes meet. Time stands still. They are instantly in love. Yeah, right. This almost never works. You have to have some kind of setup beforehand or explanation afterwards. In a movie like Made in Heaven, they knew each other before. They fell in love in heaven and now have finally found each other on earth. But even then, at the moment they finally find each other and walk into each other's arms, I'm thinking, "yeah, right." And I'm usually a pushover. This is why a lot of stories reunite old loves. That is a story we will believe. Casablanca is an example of this. Some of us even marry our high school sweethearts decades later. (I don't recommend this. Speaking from firsthand experience.) But it's one way to tell the story of fated love. Soul mate love. I'm out of space, here, but all of this deserves looking into. Think about your favorite love stories and ask yourself why do we want these two people, specifically and uniquely, to end up together? Are they twins? Ying and yang? Does one bring the life force to the other? Are they soul mates? If you have other theories or examples, I'd love to hear them. You can email me at cwhitcomb1@aol.com. See you at the conference! Cynthia Whitcomb is president of Willamette Writers, and has had 29 of her screenplays produced. She is author of The Writers' Guide to Writing Your Screenplay and The Writers' Guide to Selling Your Screenplay. She teaches screenwriting classes at Portland State University.and through Willamette Writers. |