They say a good teacher learns as much as their students. I don't know how good a teacher I am, but I do know I learned a lot teaching my class on the Hero's Journey at the Arizona Thespian Festival this weekend. Above all, I learned that a quite a few people really don't like the Barbie movie.
But more on that later.
This is the second time I taught the class at this conference, and third time overall (I also taught it at the 2016 Colorado Thespian Conference, just before I moved to Arizona). But this time, in a very late move--like the night before my class was scheduled--I made a bold and possibly risky modification to the lesson. I changed my template from a three-act structure to a four-act structure.
Sacrilege, I know. The three-act structure has been ingrained in our culture going all the way back to Aristotle's Poetics. And it makes sense. As writers, we inherently know that every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end.
But what does that middle consist of? And how do we as writers keep the tension building so that we don't lose steam there?
Those are the questions that were bothering me as I was preparing for the class on Saturday.
The answers came, as they usually do, from Blake Snyder's groundbreaking screenwriting book, Save the Cat!
Blake presented his story template as a three-act structure as well. But he divided Act 2 into Act 2A and 2B. And he gave them different names. Act 2A is Fun & Games. Act 2B is Bad Guys Close In.
He also claimed that the midpoint of the story, which divided Act 2 into two equal halves, was the single most important plot point in the story. More important than the acceptance of the challenge that separates Act 1 and Act 2 and more important than the final push that separates Act 2 and Act 3.
It's almost as if he wanted to call them two different acts but didn't feel he could get away with it because of, well, that Aristotle guy.
So as I was preparing my presentation, I finally got to the point where I'd had enough of trying to justify why we call it a three-act structure and just call it what it is. A structure with four acts that were equal, in importance as well as duration. This would make things easier to understand for beginning writers. And it would drive home the point that writers really need to make that midpoint big. Like life-changing big.
It also dovetailed nicely with an observation I'd previously made about those two arbitrarily-divided halves of Act 2. As I discovered, they often take place in completely different physical locations, just as Acts 1 and 3 do.
For example, in Star Wars, the locations of the four acts are:
- Tatooine
- Millennium Falcon
- Death Star
- X-Wing fighter
While in Legally Blonde, the four locations are:
- Southern California
- Harvard Law School
- Professor Callahan's law firm
- Courtroom
Committing myself to this brave new playwriting world, I went into the classroom on Saturday excited and, yes, I suppose a little nervous.
I was assigned two sessions, both in the afternoon. Unfortunately, neither one had as many students as last year. The first session only had twelve students. The second session had a few more, but the students kept coming and going so it was hard to get a definitive count. I would guess it averaged around twenty. And this in a classroom with over 100 seats.
But no matter. The sessions started well--even if I did have to shout when the musical theater class next door broke into very loud song. The students, as always, enjoyed showing off their knowledge of Star Wars trivia. And they were very good at figuring out which events in the film matched up to story beats in the Hero's Journey.
It was when we got to Barbie that things got interesting. I'd mentioned in my last post that I'd chosen this movie because I figured a lot more kids would have seen this movie than Legally Blonde. This was based on my trip to Idaho earlier this year, where only three kids out of a hundred knew the 2001 Reese Witherspoon vehicle.
Well, big surprise! In each session, there were around three students--always boys--who hadn't seen Barbie. And when I asked kids to raise their hands for Legally Blonde, I found that about the number--mostly but not entirely boys this time--hadn't seen that movie either.
So, unsure of how things would work out, I launched into my discussion of Barbie. And it was clear from the outset that even the students who'd seen the movie weren't as familiar with it as they were with Star Wars. They didn't know the names of the characters and they didn't remember the key events of the story.
But they knew the ending. And that's what made things interesting. After a fairly subdued discussion of the Act Two break, and the Midpoint, and the fact that there really was no Act Three, things got very passionate very fast as we came to the ending. You know, the whole "I'm here to see my gynecologist" thing.
Everyone either loved it or hated that ending. Those who hated it (about a third of the class) said it was too ambiguous and unsatisfying. Sure, Barbie had become human, but that wasn't enough for them. They wanted her to find her purpose. They wanted her to choose a career. And they wanted to know what that career was.
Those who loved it, while acknowledging the ambiguousness of the ending, felt it was realistic and satisfying in its own way. After all, humans don't always know what their purpose is. At least not when they're young. The important thing is the search for it. And now that Barbie was human, she could.
I lean more toward the second group. I don't think any one career would have been satisfying to us, the audience. What would she be? A toy designer? A gynecologist.
No, my problems with the movie lay elsewhere. I wanted there to be more of a struggle to defeat the Kens in Act Four. And I don't like how Barbie's external goal (taking back Barbieland) and her internal goal (finding her purpose) were so completely unrelated.
So what do I do next year? Well, I definitely plan on returning to the thespian festival with this class. After teaching it three times now, I'm more convinced than ever that understanding the Hero's Journey and three-act structure--sorry, four-act structure--are vital to the development of young writers. And I was gratified--and not a little surprised--to see how many budding playwrights from last year's class chose to attend the class again this year.
But now it appears I have the flexibility of choosing either Legally Blonde or Barbie for my second film. Legally Blonde is great because it follows the Hero's Journey so closely. But I believe there's a lot to be gained by studying how Barbie veers from that template and what effect that has on us as audience members.
One thing's for sure. I'm going to ask for one of the small class rooms. I think there will be much more give and take if everyone is sitting close to each other.
And I'm definitely going to see if I can get a room next to a mim class.
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