20 Master Plots (31 page)

Harold is devastated. He can't understand why she would want to kill herself. Maude's explanation is simple: She didn't want to live past eighty. She refused to live a life compromised by infirmity. She wanted death to come on her terms, not on anyone else's.

Harold rushes Maude to the hospital. In the ambulance Harold tells Maude he loves her. She replies she loves him too, but he must "go out and love some more." Maude dies shortly afterward.

At the end of the story we see Harold's car plummet over a cliff and crash into the rocks below. For a moment it seems Harold has met death on his terms as well, but as the camera pulls back, we see Harold at the top of the cliff, playing a tune Maude had taught him on the banjo.

The difference between
Harold and Maude
and other examples of forbidden love is that the couple's relationship is affirmed. Love has healed. Although Harold's family is mortified by the idea that he should marry a woman four times his age, society doesn't win this round. Maude's suicide is tragic but it's also triumphant. It's an act of self-determination that affirms the quality of her life and, more important, the act is consistent with Maude's intent.

The first dramatic phase of the story starts with the beginning of their relationship. We learn first who Harold is, but Maude comes into the story quickly. She has an immediate and profound impact on him. Usually society, if it knows about the forbidden love, expresses its disapproval or takes direct action to stop it. The lovers either pursue their affair in secret or in open defiance of what everyone else thinks. The secret affair is almost always found out. Society is always ready to punish those who don't abide by its rules.

The second dramatic phase takes the lovers into the heart of their relationship. It starts out on a positive note: The lovers are on the front end of their affair and all is well. But by the middle of the second phase the seeds that will lead to the destruction of their relationship have already been planted. We have no hint that Maude is going to kill herself, but we do know the love affair cannot go in the direction Harold wants. Harold is naive and in love; he doesn't understand or fear consequences. Maude is worldly and in love; she understands the consequences but refuses to concede the pressures of society. She must be the one to find the way out.

By the second half of the second dramatic phase, the relationship between lovers may be on the decline. In
Madame Bovary
and
Anna Karenina,
the affairs are rapidly dissolving; the illusion of love has been shattered. Reality and the force exerted by society is taking its toll.

In the third dramatic phase, the lovers must pay their overdue bill to society. Death seems just about the only way out. Romeo and Juliet die. So do Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina and Esmeralda and Arthur Dimmesdale and Aschenbach. Only Abelard is spared—he just gets castrated.

The love may continue to burn in the heart of one of the partners, as in the case of Quasimodo for Esmeralda, Hester Prynne for Dimmesdale and Harold for Maude. Or the survivor may surrender to disillusionment and despair. The remaining lover often has lost everything. Society, it seems, never loses.

CHECKLIST

As you write, keep the following points in mind:

1. Forbidden love is any love that goes against the conventions of society, so there is usually either an explicit or implicit force exerted against the lovers.

2. The lovers ignore social convention and pursue their hearts, usually with disastrous results.

3. Adultery is the most common form of forbidden love. The adulterer may either be the protagonist or antagonist, depending on the nature of the story. The same is true for the offended spouse.

4. The first dramatic phase should define the relationship between partners and phrase it in its social context. What are the taboos that they have broken? How do they handle it themselves?

How do the people around them handle it? Are the lovers moonstruck, or do they deal with the realities of their affair head-on?

5. The second dramatic phase should take the lovers into the heart of their relationship. The lovers may start out in an idyllic phase, but as the social and psychological realities of their affair become clear, the affair may start to dissolve or come under great pressure to dissolve.

6. The third dramatic phase should take the lovers to the end point of their relationship and settle all the moral scores. The lovers are usually separated, either by death, force or desertion.

O
riginally the concept of sacrifice meant to offer an object to a god to establish a relationship between yourself and that god. The days of blood offerings are pretty much gone. But the days of divine offerings are still with us, in forms such as the Eucharist, in which bread and wine taken during Holy Communion are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ.

We know the story about the patriarch Abraham, whose faith God tested by commanding him to sacrifice his son Isaac. The tension mounts when Abraham raises a knife to kill his son. (Genesis 11-25)

The Greeks also put great stock in sacrifice. Stories like Euripides'
Alcestis
were common: When Admetus offends the gods and is sentenced to death, Apollo gives him an out: Find someone to die in your place, and you can live.

Admetus goes to his elderly parents and asks if either of them would die in his place. They decline. But Admetus's devoted wife, Alcestis, pledges herself to die in his place—a model of a wife, at least as far as Greek men were concerned. She sacrifices herself out of love. (Hercules later rescues Alcestis when he challenges Death to a wrestling match and wins.)

Modern day literature, as I noted earlier, pretty much took the gods out of the equation. If a person made a sacrifice, it wasn't to

or for a god, but to or for a concept such as love, honor, charity or the sake of humanity. When Sydney Carton takes the place of Darnay on the guillotine in Dickens'
Tale of Two Cities,
he does so because of his great love for Darnay's wife. When Terry Malloy in
On the Waterfront
breaks the code of silence of the docks and informs on the union racketeers, he does so because of his belief that he must do the right thing, no matter what the personal cost. When Norma Rae (in the film by the same name) takes her stand against management and for unionism in the cloth mill where she works, she too is motivated by a higher purpose. The characters sacrifice themselves for an ideal. They subscribe to the belief that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the individual.

One of the best Westerns ever made, Stanley Kramer's
High Noon,
deals dramatically with the issue of sacrifice in a particularly moving way. The story is simple. Will Kane (played by Gary Cooper) is the marshall of a small western town in 1870. He's just retired and is waiting for the new marshall to get into town. He's also getting married to Amy (played by Grace Kelly). Together they plan to move to another town, open a small store and have a family. In the middle of their wedding party, word comes that a killer Will Kane sent to jail has been pardoned and is due to arrive on the train at noon.

It's 10:40
a.m
. The train platform is deserted except for some of the killer's cohorts, who are waiting for him to arrive. Together they plan to gun down Kane.

Amy is a Quaker. She hates violence. She wants her husband to leave town with her before the killer arrives. She tries to convince her husband it's the new marshall's problem. Even his friends urge him to leave. No one else takes any chances either: Even the judge who had sentenced the killer leaves town. Clearly there would be no shame in leaving. After all, Will has already turned in his badge.

But Will Kane is a moral man. The showdown is a challenge he can't walk away from, even if it means his death.

The train arrives at noon. The killer joins up with his gang, and they walk into the deserted town to confront Kane. The clock ticks off the minutes after twelve.

The climax is famous and many Westerns have copied it since.

It's the classic showdown, four against one. Will Kane has no chance, and there's no one left in town to help him.

In the face of such odds, Kane's wife takes up a rifle to protect her husband even though it goes against her beliefs. Although feminists would object that the wife must give up her beliefs to support her husband's, the story takes place more than a century ago, when attitudes were less than enlightened
(by our point of
view). The film portray's Amy's decision as a surprise, rather than show us her internal struggle to overturn a lifetime of belief and resort to violence. Her love for her husband was stronger than her beliefs against violence, and she knew if she wanted to see him alive again,
she
must be the one to make it happen. Will Kane was ready to sacrifice himself for his code of honor. By doing so, he forces his wife to sacrifice her own code of honor instead. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place! It's a no-win situation that seems to come out all right: The last scene of the film shows them riding off together to their new life. But at what cost to her? Or their marriage? We're only left to wonder.

That may be the point of sacrifice: It always comes at a great personal cost. It may cost your character her life, or it may cost in profound psychological ways. Your character should undergo a major transformation.

Your protagonist may begin this transformation from a lower psychological state, in which she's unaware of the nature and complexity of the problem that confronts her. But circumstances (or Fate, if you prefer) suddenly propel your character into a dilemma that demands action. She must make a decision. She can take the low road, which is the easy way out (run, play it safe, etc.), or she can take the high road, which is the hard way and comes at a great personal cost (Terry Malloy's brother is killed and he's temporarily ostracized by the dockworkers; Norma Rae is fired; and Sydney Carton has his head chopped off). Generally, your character will balk at doing the right thing. Sacrificing yourself is never easy.

Of course, we've all read books and seen movies in which the hero valiantly gives his life to save another person's (he steps in front of her to take a fatal bullet, and vice versa), but those kinds of sacrifices are instantaneous and intuitive. They may make a nice dramatic twist, but we're more intrigued by the profound internal struggle of a person who must make a decision that will either result in shame (for taking the easy way out) or honor (even though it may cost him his life). And, as in the case of Amy Kane, sometimes you must sacrifice honor for love.

In the early 1940s there was a play called
Everybody Comes to Rick's
by Murray Burnett and Jean Alison. The play is filled with improbable situations and bad dialogue, and it would've been buried and forgotten in the dung hill of literature if it weren't for Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch, who adapted the play to the screen.

The production was just as big a mess. The script was constantly being revised, and the director and cast didn't know from minute to minute what the story was about or what the motivations of the main characters were supposed to be. Because of delays and script troubles, the film was actually shot in story sequence (whereas most films are not). The film was cast with Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan and then changed to Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid and Humphrey Bogart.

Somehow the resulting film—
Casablanca
—not only took home three Academy Awards (for best picture, best director and best screenplay) but has become one of the all-time American movie classics. How did they do it?

In spite of all the confusion, the writers concocted a story that works. The story is about love, but more important, it's a story that climbs to a higher plane, sacrifice for the sake of love, the same sacrifice that Amy Kane makes for her husband in
High Noon.
But where
High Noon
doesn't explore the characters that make these difficult decisions,
Casablanca
does.

The foundation of sacrifice as a plot is character; the act of sacrifice itself is a manifestation of character, and so it's secondary to it.
Casablanca
is about four people and the dynamics among them. The events that surround them are reflections of their characters, and when Rick Blaine makes his sacrifice at the end, everything that has happened before, during and after both shapes and is shaped by his sacrifice.