How good is No Country For Old Men?
It’s now apparently winning golfing trophies, that’s how good.
Screenwriting 101: The Gap
One of my favorite terms that I got from reading Robert McKee’s Story is The Gap.
The Gap is simply the distance between what the protagonist thinks is going to happen and what actually happens. The wider The Gap is, the more interesting your story will be.
Example: you’re at the water cooler, and a fellow employee says “Let me tell you about my morning.” He goes on to tell you about how he ate some toast, watched Good Morning America, got dressed, checked his email and then went out to get the bus. This is a protagonist with no Gap at all, and thus his story isn’t very interesting.
(On the other hand, if you are the protagonist in this story, your Gap is a teeny bit wider because what you expect to happen is that your co-worker will tell you a worthwhile story and what actually happens is he’s a crashing bore.)
If your co-worker says that he bit into his toast and discovered there was a dead mouse baked into the bread, his Gap just got appreciably wider. If he says that he turned on the TV and started a fire because he has too many appliances plugged into his outlet, his Gap is wider still. If he says that he sat down to watch Good Morning America and found they were broadcasting his obituary, his Gap is about as wide as it’s probably going to get.
Since Cloverfield happens to be on my mind, and has an exceptional example of The Gap, let’s look at that narrative for a moment:
Rob in Cloverfield is in love with Beth but can’t bring himself to tell her so. He’s moving to Japan soon and doesn’t want to deal with his newfound emotional detour. What Rob expects to happen is that he will move to Japan, as scheduled, never deal with Beth again, and eventually get on with his life. What actually happens is that Rob’s friends throw a surprise going-away party for him, Beth shows up with another guy, Rob finds all his feelings for her coming to the surface, and then a giant monster comes along and destroys Manhattan.
That, speaking as a professional, is some freakin’ Gap.
Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs is an FBI trainee who is asked by her superior, Jack Crawford, to interview Famous Creepy Guy Hannibal Lecter, in the hopes that she will get him to shed some light on a serial-murder case that’s troubling him. What Clarice expects to happen is that Lecter will creep her out, but ultimately help her in her pursuit of her goal, which is to curry favor with her superior. What actually happens is that Lecter creeps her out to a level far beyond what she would have thought possible, and draws her into a web of intrigue so personal and disturbing that it turns out that Clarice, and Clarice alone, is able to capture and kill the serial killer that’s troubling Jack Crawford.
Richard Kimble in The Fugitive comes home one evening to find his wife being murdered by a mysterious one-armed man. That’s a pretty freakin’ wide Gap right there, but that’s not really the Gap of Richard’s narrative. What Richard expects to happen is that he, sober, bearded vascular surgeon, will simply tell the police what happened and the police will then diligently pursue his wife’s killer. What actually happens is that Richard finds himself accused of his wife’s murder, and is thrown into jail, tried and convicted.
Marion Crane in Psycho steals some money from her employer and high-tails it out of town to make a new life for herself. What she expects to happen is that she will probably be arrested, but almost certainly she will calm down, return the money and get her life organized. What actually happens is she gets so murdered by a guy in a dress that the rest of the movie isn’t even about her, which is probably the widest Gap in the history of movies.
The Ticking Clock is one of the most celebrated of all plot devices, but The Gap is sometimes overlooked, which is a shame. Take Alien for instance, a brilliant motion picture which, brilliance notwithstanding, not only takes its sweet time announcing a protagonist (you would be forgiven for thinking it’s Tom Skerrit for the first half of the movie) but, until the goddamn thing bursts out of John Hurt’s chest, The Gap between what the protagonist expects to happen and what actually does doesn’t seem that wide to me. The team is called to a desolate planet to investigate a distress call, and nobody wants to do it, because they all expect to find something horrible. Which, indeed, is what happens. The Gap comes later, when they think they’ve figured out what the nature of the thing they’ve found is, figuring which turns out to be dreadfully, dreadfully inaccurate.
One way to successfully install a Gap in your screenplay is to have a good idea about who your protagonist is, and a good idea of where you want him to end up, and then look at that protagonist and that ending and see if there’s a way to tweak it so that the protagonist is expecting anything other than where he’s going to end up. If Richard Kimble came home to find his wife being murdered by a one-armed man, and immediately thought “I’ll bet my best friend Pharmaceutical Industry Guy is behind this!” he wouldn’t have much of a Gap. And if Clarice Starling was asked by Jack Crawford to go interview Hannibal Lecter and thought “Aha! I’m going to hijack this case from my superior and kick this guy’s ass!” her character wouldn’t have anywhere to go. And if Rob had just gone ahead and told Beth he loved her that day in Coney Island, he probably could have saved everybody a great deal of trouble.