Friday, July 23, 2010

Why is it Three Act Structure? The cycle of life.

Aristotle's Poetics has long been considered the bible of storytelling. Aristotle applied to stories an absolute truth to all life, there is a beginning, middle, and end. I believe the idea of a life cycle permeates everything known to us in the universe. Alright, this post isn't going to be a discourse in philosophy, I'll stick to story.

While some writers, and teachers, of screenwriting will vehemently say you should forget about the concept of three act structure, I believe this would be the greatest mistake any budding writer could make. Three act structure is simply a way to define the life cycle in screenwriting terms. If you remove the cycle of life from your story, you remove any chance of writing a great story.

To prove my premise, I'm going to use my other passion I have mentioned before on this blog, financial markets. The beauty of financial markets is they're built by humans making them also at the mercy of life cycles. A theory has been created to articulate this called Elliott Wave Theory. Below is an image courtesy of Elliott Wave International that shows standard Uptrend(1) and Correction(2) waves in a market.


Don't worry. This isn't as confusing as it might look. For the purposes of the stock market, each line represents a movement in price. So line 1 is price going higher, line 2 is price going lower, line 3 higher, etc. Now let's see this in action with the Uptrend that started in March 2009.

click to enlarge

The green lines are the waves up and the red lines are the waves down. Pretty amazing how accurate wave theory sometimes can be. This particular Elliott Wave move I would classify as classic Hollywood structure. I have labeled the Acts on the chart. Click on it for a better look.

The blue lines on the chart are Fibonacci retracement lines. If you are unfamiliar with the numbers click here. Darren Aronofsky's terrific debut Pi incorporates Fibonacci numbers in the story, which is a perfect segue to the question, do all movies follow the above three act structure? No.

I'm sure you may have been thinking that and one example is Aronofsky's even more amazing second film, Requiem for a Dream. Am I saying Requiem doesn't contain three act structure? No. It does. Just not the classic pattern of waves seen above. This is because waves can move in a downtrend as well as an uptrend and there is smaller waves within the larger waves. Ok, another chart may help clarify this.


As you can see, there are a lot more waves on this chart versus the first one we looked at, though it is technically the exact same. Each of the single lines in the first has been broken into five or three lines here.

Aronofsky doesn't use classic Hollywood structure where the story's peak comes in Act Three. Requiem's peak comes at the midpoint of the story, right before the "Fall" title card, page 53 of the script. From there it's all down waves, though, of course, he put an up wave coda on the end so we didn't leave the theater completely bummed out.

Looking at the chart above, we would relabel the act structure for Requiem to have Act One end at (3), Act Two end at (B). The movie is a downer for sure, but I love it.

To bring this post around full circle, pun intended, remember that the waves are based of the cycle of life. Aronofsky used the title cards with the seasons to show this. All things natural to our world have cycles. This includes stories.

Look at your script. Can you find the waves in it? Does your story go through a cycle in a classic Hollywood way or is it like Aronofsky's Requiem? Leave me a comment if you agree or disagree with my proof.

1 comment:

Tom said...

Aronofsky once said that if you watch Requiem for a dream and instead view addiction as the hero it perfectly follows the poetics of Aristotle. Each character trends down, but addiction as a whole trends upward. He said he was stumped on making the movie until he realized this which just goes to show that even relatively unconvential filmmakers rely on Aristotle's poetics.