‘Unbreakable’ and why structure matters
JUNE 4TH, 2016 — POST 182
This will contain spoilers for a sixteen year-old movie, Unbreakable.
There’s constant bickering between those that see themselves as adjacent or immersed within screenwriting, specifically of feature-length movies. If you listen to Scriptnotes — a podcast hosted by John August and Craig Mazin and a touchstone in this community — you’ve probably heard Mazin give lengthy explanations on why, when it comes down to it, stock beat sheets and rote structure is a bunch of garbage. Mazin’s central point is that it is trivial to identify beat trends when looking at a finished product. But that to actually create something, expecting to land certain beats at certain pages is the first step to making something that ultimately fails.
For the structure fetishists, of even those who want to know what all the fuss it about, there’s Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat, one of the more popular prescriptive works specifically of motion picture structure. Snyder breaks down the single structure that, if you squint hard enough, every movie falls into — or at least the ones you, young screenwriter, are going to want to emulate. The bulk of this isn’t particularly inspired but rather insightful: there’s a pretty clear 1:1 mapping of Snyder’s beat sheet with the Hero’s Journey, as detailed most notably by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. For those unfamiliar, Campbell’s seminal text is a work of comparative mythology, putting forth the monomyth — the story we’ve told for millenia and just keep on telling.
But the consensus on formalised structure might describe it like a pair of pants: you’ll probably have a hard time doing anything but putting two legs where they’re supposed to go — story structure is arguably imprinted upon us. But if your outfit feels like it wants those pants on your head, go for it.
In a half-hearted attempt to get through Netflix’s catalog of science fiction, last night I watched M. Night Shyamalan’s superhero movie Unbreakable. Whilst it serves as a masterclass on visual composition and how to move with a camera, and it lets performances from both Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson play out, its clock feels off. The ending is utterly unsatisfying and instead of chewing on those images as the credits rolled I was struck wondering what exactly went wrong. How did the movie blow its promises so swiftly?
The Hero’s Journey pretty clearly stipulates the events leading up to what we think of as Act Two. In Act One, the hero is given a Call To Adventure™ — one the hero immediately refuses. Think of Men In Black. After completing his training, J. (Will Smith) gets told the “world is full of aliens” story, one which he just doesn’t believe. Sure, it’s a brief moment of refusal but it’s one that K. (Tommy Lee Jones) has to work passed. After some soul-searching, J. accepts the Call. …And then we’re in Act Two.
The first act of a superhero movie, especially something that amounts to an “origin story”, is super rote at this point. From Spiderman to Kick-Ass, we know how this goes. But for Shyamalan, working before the current cycle of superhero movies, Unbreakable is intentionally obtuse in its first act. After David (Bruce Willis) is the sole survivor of a train derailment, he is tracked down by Elijah (Samuel L. Jackson), a comic-obsessed art collector who believes David to be the real deal: a superhero who can’t get injured. David tells Elijah that he doesn’t believe all this, that he couldn’t be a superhero. He refuses the Call To Adventure™. Now where The Hero’s Journey stipulates that the preceding scene would put David or someone he cares about or just some random in danger, some way in which his superheroness might be tested, we don’t get this. Shyamalan is adamant: this movie will simply be about the acceptance of the Call.
As such, we’re left without a bookend on Act One, and an Act Two that feels as graspable as soup. There’s no big bad to pursue and take down, no damsel to rescue (and woo), and that’s the point. Shyamalan simply isn’t interested in delivering a canned superhero story. The only problem with that is we all know he’s superhuman. Short of one scene, there is no evidence that goes in the “not a superhero” camp — one “instinct” that David gets wrong. So instead of a story about organic discovery of one’s own powers, a realistic “What if superheroes where based upon legitimate natural outliers of humanity?”, we’ve got a mystery story where we see the killer in harsh daylight in the first ten minutes and watch our detective bumble around trying to identify him.
What’s worse is that Unbreakable is superbly enjoyable. Technically astounding and totally perfect, it’s like a thoroughbred speeding at full clip. Until the horse realises that, actually, this is showjumping and there’s no fucking way it’ll clear that hurdle. The hurdle for Unbreakable is a conclusion. When David finally accepts the Call in what could be identified as the beginning of the third act, we get one sequence of legitimate crime fighting — taking down some sick fuck who’s torturing a family in their own home (a sequence that would belong at the beginning of a typical second act). But now the movie realises it’s only got twenty minutes to go so we better wrap this up quickly. This bottlenecks all the payoffs, and none particularly satisfyingly, into one scene between David and Elijah — one where Shyamalan seems to fall prey to every superhero convention he didn’t want to play by up until then.
Unbreakable almost does the impossible: tell one of the most well-trodden stories in a way we’ve never seen. Almost.
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