The Dark Night of the Soul
I’ve been told that I’m too dramatic at times. I complain. I curse. I overreact. I vent. My friends and family know this about me and, thankfully, they know what I know — I really don’t care about 90% of the crap I complain about, nor am I really all that invested in the stuff about which I so often vent. I mean, I’m a Cubs fan. As a baseball fan, I was raised on managing constant instances of what this chapter is all about. It’s what so many consultants and screenwriting experts call — the Low Point. Growing up as a Cubs fan, every day was a low point. For those of you overseas who don’t care about American baseball or know anything about it, imagine a sports team that has been around for hundred years and hasn’t won a championship. There you have it. The Chicago Cubs. But I digress… I need to digress, otherwise this entire chapter will be about my unfortunate love for the Cubs. This 2016 season for the Cubs, however, was very different, but I’ll get to that.
Like I said, I’m dramatic, and I love to complain. It’s who I am and, well, I kind of like that part of me. It helps get the junk out so I can be a happy person again. Because, I actually am a happy person. Nonetheless, just because we like to complain now and then, doesn’t mean that we’re experiencing a low point in our lives. It certainly doesn’t mean we’re experiencing a “dark night of the soul” and hence the name of this chapter. The reason I bring this up right off the bat is because we, as writers, need to understand how low we really need to go in order to present Sequence 9 of a screenplay.
Let me add this little tidbit — another disclaimer as I often tend to do. I may have even mentioned this before, but I need to mention it again as I was recently reminded of how similar terms and phrases are in this screenwriting advice industry. Just because I am mentioning that there may be 12 little mini-movies, little sequences, or separate loglines within a full length screenplay, doesn’t mean that this is exactly what you need to do to build your script. Write two sequences in your first act. Do four! Have seven in your second and one or two in your third. The format doesn’t matter, and whatever certain consultants or classes may say, their “way” is not the only way to do it. No one has the one right or correct way to develop a screenplay. Figure it out on your own by using all consultants’ advice and tips.
OK… the low point sequence of scenes in your screenplay. Let’s just compare these two descriptions that I’ve so far mentioned. A complaint and moment of venting, vs. the dark night of the soul. Which sounds worse? I think you know the answer to that. Just because I curse under my breath and vocally complain with my windows rolled up as some idiot in front of me, while stuck in traffic, has decided to kick back and stare at his cell phone while the light has turned green doesn’t mean I’m experiencing a low point in my life. But I don’t know how many times I’ve read a screenplay when the end of the 2 nd Act is nothing short of, well, boring. It doesn’t impact me emotionally, and it doesn’t feel like… what? All is lost. I’m sure you’ve heard that term a number of times before when describing the low point of a script. All is not lost just because the guy in front of me is perusing Instagram in the middle of traffic. But let’s for a few minutes bounce back to our 30 year-old virgin dating a prostitute story. I’m kind of loving where that story is going.
We last saw our Hero virgin trapped in an abandoned lumber mill with his prostitute girlfriend, and she was complaining to him about not paying attention to her or having enough experience in relationships. He was firing back with some form of a complaint that mentioned she had recently killed two men, and she’s the reason they’re now, currently, surrounded by a dozen men in black with giant guns pointed at them. This moment was leading up to what? Estrangement. Separation. An emotional loss. And please, in your notes, either mentally or literally, draw a big circle around that statement. An emotional loss. Everything we’ve described in our prostitute and virgin story has been almost entirely physical in terms of what they’re experiencing and dealing with throughout the adventure. Now, as we hit the low point, we’re forcing these two characters into…? The dark night of the soul, and with emphasis on soul . This isn’t just a physical estrangement that these two characters will soon experience. They’re not just physically being pulled apart. They’re losing something within themselves because they are separated.
So what could happen to our two Heroes? It really doesn’t matter. As long as we, the writer, have built up their relationship well enough before this point so that the audience understands their emotional connection, but without expressly describing their emotional connection. Everything up to this point has been, like I said, physical experiences of their relationship together. But now what?
The men in black give them a five second countdown. “Come out with your hands up, or we will start firing.” What happens in those five seconds? Not only is a decision made, but an admission of love. He tells her he loves her and will do anything to save her. And because we’ve built up our virgin Hero to be a reluctant one, it would make sense that the prostitute takes action, but… what if there’s a twist?
What if the virgin decides to rush one of the gunmen? What if he pops up and out from behind a bail of hay and sprints at one of them? He’s taking action, but because he just admitted his love for the prostitute. But then? Then the prostitute can’t allow this guy to die for her so she runs out and puts her hands up. Offering herself up to the men. He begs her not to do this, but she does what? Hits him in the soul. She says what he has been so terrified to hear. She doesn’t love him.
Even if she’s lying. Even if she does actually love him, this low point forces the two primary characters to revert back to their original emotional and character flaws as if this entire adventure they just experienced didn’t change them one bit. But it did. They’re just not willing to admit it. She has never been able to allow someone to love her, and he has never been able to allow himself to love someone else. They’re experiencing the two things that they are the most afraid of and…? They deny it, and give in to the fear.
So the prostitute admits to the virgin that she’s an agent, on the same team as the men in black, but has been on the run. She looks at him and says, “this is the closest I’ll come to love” and shoots him in the leg. “Don’t follow me”, she says. And jumps in a black Escalade and drives off with the gunmen.
So this isn’t just a physical shot to the leg. This is an emotional shot to his heart. He’s heart broken because A) even if she’s lying, she’s, well, lying to him and he realizes that she has been lying to him the entire time, and B) she’s admitting that she doesn’t love him after he just confessed his love to her. It’s a killer and exactly what I’m titling this chapter — it’s the beginning of the dark night of his soul.
Just to be list-oriented and summarize a bit here, here is what should occur in some way, regardless of genre, at the low point moment and series of scenes in your script. It’s the point of the script most often labeled the “false defeat”. It’s a false defeat, because we all know this isn’t the end of the movie, and we all know that our Hero is going to figure out a way to win her back, only after he dives into a deep depression and reverts back to his old fearful ways, but nonetheless, it’s temporary.
Everything gets piled on, as if everything that could go wrong does go wrong, and like our virgin and prostitute example, it’s both a direct physical and emotional punishment.
We can think of the low point or the dark night of the soul moment as the end of the physical journey, and we are now about to embark on the emotional one. The 3rd Act. When all seems lost, it reminds us what we’re truly fighting for. In this case of the virgin and the prostitute, it’s true love. Not just for the other person, but to find it in ourselves as well.
So what sounds more interesting and entertaining? A character sitting there complaining about how a girl doesn’t love him, or getting shot in the leg by an ex-agent prostitute who just lied to him about loving him? The low point is not just a simple series of crappy little things that happen. This is life changing. This is eye opening. This is soul shaking. You have to go that big. You have to grab the audience by their belts and tug. Everything you’ve set up for the character throughout the 1st and 2nd Acts has been done so that you also set up the audience to feel just as low. Please remember that. So while all of this crap is happening to your character, the audience needs to feel the same crap. The same low point. The same dark night of the soul.
I mentioned when I started that I’d get back to the Cubs, so I will, but I won’t go into this too much. Let’s think of the low point in this way. The Cubs have been a professional sports team for around 130 years. Their last championship — the last time they officially won and were dubbed the World Series champions — was 1908. Yeah. That’s nineteen hundred and eight. This sports franchise has basically been experiencing a low point for hundred years. And they’re just now coming out of it. They’re just now, what? Waking up from their Dark Night of the Soul, and moving on to their sequence. Their 3 rd Act ends with a World Series championship, as I’m sure most of you are already aware. And what did that championship do for the fans? What did their 3 rd Act create emotionally? Not only was it a literal victory, but it was an overcoming of fear, failure, doubt, and most importantly, a belief system. Their 2016 World Series Championship changed how their fans thought, felt, and believed in not only their team, but in themselves. It created a paradigm shift in believing what is possible. That is, in no small way, epic, and it is exactly how you need to present your 3 rd Act. While your Main Character may not necessarily tear himself out of his cocoon and turn into a butterfly, he will at least in some small way be better than he used to be. And that improvement comes from and through a new way of thinking. A new belief system. The low point needs to force your character into a life-affirming moment, and we all know that when all seems lost, we can either choose to fully immerse ourselves within the depression of it all, or move on, buck up, and make a change. The Cubs finally did, and if the Chicago Cubs can win a World Series, our commitment-phobic virgin can win back his prostitute girlfriend.
Where explaining how story works is concerned, it’s fun giving examples beyond just a boring lecture on structure. And it’s fun to not just give you crazy vocabulary words that you’ll need to spend hours studying just to understand their meaning. I’ve been through those classes. They’re ridiculous. The theory of all of this is rather simple, really. Make your character’s journey as difficult as possible, so that by the time you completely sweep the rug out from under him, you force the audience to feel the same level of a low point.
This business of writing, this craft of writing, is about instilling emotions into strangers. It’s about entertaining people you don’t know. These people, the movie going and TV-watching public, expect you to entertain them, and they have extremely high expectations. It’s our job as writers not to let them down, so do the work, practice, and don’t let yourself down either.
Now for our quote of the day. Let me say that I am not a strictly religious person. I was raised Catholic, so I sway toward the Christian beliefs, but I don’t practice one religion, nor do I believe one has more to teach than any other. But my quote of the day is to reference a couple of different things. One of which is to give credit to the original creator of the term, “dark night of the soul”. Juan De La Cruz was a Spanish poet who was eventually given sainthood by the Catholic Church and has since been dubbed St. John of the Cross. In Catholicism, the term “dark night of the soul” is used as a reference to a spiritual crisis in a journey toward a union with God. Think about that and how we as screenwriters reference the low point. It’s a personal and emotional crisis. So our quote of the day is from this wonderful poet San Juan De La Cruz. “God has to work in the soul in secret and in darkness because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery, transformation that God and Grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process.”
I don’t think we could come up with a better way to describe what is going on internally when a Hero confronts a low point. So off you go. Be open to this adventure in screenwriting and storytelling. When all seems lost for you personally, just know that there will always be another story, and there is one in particular that you were born to tell.