Storytelling for Lawyers (5 page)

The genre of
High Noon
is the familiar Western, with its characteristic theme being the ravaging of a vulnerable community by evil antagonists. In the Western's familiar
stock story
, the heroic protagonist, who is also often an outsider and drifter himself, comes into the community to stand up against the outlaw bad guys, save the town from anarchy and destruction, and teach the townsfolk the crucial lesson that courage and self-sacrifice are the costs of survival in this dangerous and lawless territory. Screenwriter Carl Foreman and director Fred Zinnemann retain many of the conventions of this Western melodrama genre in
High Noon
, but they intentionally deepen the stock story in many ways, transforming the theme and implicating other genres.

The plot of
High Noon
, like
Jaws
, can be readily boiled down into a few sentences: Marshal Will Kane is retiring and hanging up his guns after marrying his beautiful, young Quaker bride, Amy. He receives word that the villainous outlaw Frank Miller, whom Kane sent away for murder, has been released from prison and is returning on the noon train. Despite the admonitions of the townspeople and the pleas of Amy, Kane decides not to flee but to stand up to Miller and his outlaw band. He is, seemingly, abandoned by all and must stand up against the outlaws alone.

Of course, this plot summary doesn't do justice to the movie.
High Noon
is a subtle and complex story. Unlike
Jaws, High Noon
emphasizes character and character development in the complex psychological relationships and struggles of the various characters in anticipation of Frank Miller's arrival. There is the internal psychological struggle within the protagonist, Will Kane, who must choose between fulfilling his manly destiny and duty as gunfighter-marshal and respecting the deeply held pacifist beliefs of his Quaker bride. Kane's internal struggle is further complicated by the intimation that there are nonheroic reasons for fighting Miller's gang: jealousy over the Latina temptress who was the lover of both Kane and Miller, competition between the middle-aged Kane with the younger former deputy to protect his former paramour, and desire to prove his mettle (“a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do”).

The other primary characters are equally complex. Kane's pacifist Quaker wife, Amy, and his former mistress are all multilayered, intensely individualized characters, compounded of desires, ideals, loyalties, aspirations, and loathings. The townspeople and other secondary characters (such as the mayor and the young deputy) are vividly portrayed and distinct as well. Only the villainous outlaws have the characteristic simplicity of the melodrama genre. Unlike
Jaws
, where the story is about how the heroes battle against the shark, the plot in
High Noon
focuses on how the complex characters respond internally, and with each other, to the forces of antagonism bearing down upon them.

Thus, the primary themes of
High Noon
are loyalty and betrayal. Under the pressure imposed by the impending arrival of the outlaw gang, characters reveal themselves, are betrayed by one another and the community, and in turn betray themselves. Only at the climax do the principals (Kane, Amy, and Helen Ramirez) seem to redeem their integrity—Kane and Amy by standing up to the outlaw gang to save the community that refuses to save itself, and the Latina temptress by finally leaving Kane and the corrupt town to save herself, not because she is afraid but because she no longer belongs in the community, just as she no longer belongs to Kane.

In
High Noon
, the plot assumes a tragic dimension when, at the coda revealing the meaning of the tale, the hero-protagonist throws down his badge at the feet of the townspeople who have betrayed him, signaling the loss of the value of community and the meaning of law. Kane and Amy leave in disgust, with scorn for the townspeople. Fortunately for the viewer, Kane still has the solace of Amy and maintains his own integrity, as well as the sympathy of the audience.

An initial steady state grounded in the legitimate ordinariness of things
.

Both movies begin with the anticipatory “calm before the storm”: the normative “steady state.”
Jaws
opens with images of the carefree vacationers frolicking innocently (and vulnerably) at a firelit beach party; it is a luminous, moonlit summer evening on Amity Island, a vacationer's paradise. In
High Noon
the steady state is equally idyllic. The older, beloved, and heroic marshal is finally receiving his just deserts and moral reward; having driven the evil outlaws from the community, he is marrying the incandescently gorgeous Amy. Amid the well-wishes of the community, the marshal hangs up his guns, retires his badge in anticipation of the arrival of his replacement, and prepares to depart on his honeymoon.

That gets disrupted by a trouble consisting of circumstances attributable to human agency or susceptible to change by human intervention
.

The trouble in both movies arrives early, the initiating action (the inciting incident) launching the trajectory of the plot.
²⁹
In
Jaws
, it takes the form of a man-eating rogue shark. In
High Noon
, trouble arrives with the announcement that members of the Miller gang are gathering and that Frank Miller, the villain, has been released from prison. This is a somewhat more sophisticated introduction of the trouble. The arrival is signaled through action (the members of the gang gather on the outskirts of town), revisited through imagery (train tracks, clocks ticking down to Frank Miller's arrival at high noon), and even signaled through an explicit musical presentation and foregrounding of the theme (the core story-song), all maintaining the tension of the conflict between the outlaw gang (the villain) and Marshal Kane (the protagonist) throughout the progressive movements and the internal psychological complications of the narrative.

Whether nonhuman or human, the trouble must be susceptible to change by human intervention, creating the
struggle
with the malevolent forces of antagonism and evil in such a way that the audience can side with the protagonist and participate in the deepening conflict. In the movies—just as we will see in legal storytelling—it is important to make the first act short, clarifying
the theme and clearly breaking the anterior steady state to reveal the nature of the trouble and the identity of the antagonist.

In turn evoking efforts at redress or transformation, which [lead to a struggle, in which the efforts] succeed or fail
.

In theater, it is commonly observed that the middle of the story is the most difficult part to construct. The progressive
complications
caused by the antagonist (or forces of antagonism) intensify while the protagonist attempts to reestablish the stability of the anterior steady state or press on toward a new and redefined narrative order. The two movements can be separate: for example, the trouble gets progressively uglier, deeper, or harder to overcome or builds to a cataclysmic climax before the hero finally intervenes. There are other possible patterns: for example, the hero (or other forces) can appear to intervene and superficially and momentarily still the trouble. This, however, is merely a false and premature ending; the victories are illusory, often part of the villain's plan until the villain arises renewed, reinvigorated for battle. At this point the “true” confrontation or struggle between good and evil begins.

In
Jaws
the sequence of events after the arrival of the trouble is extremely purposeful, linear, and forward moving. There are few of the stops and starts characteristic of other genres, other than slowing the pace down momentarily to allow the viewer to catch a breath before the next attack, the next battle, all building toward the final confrontation. Battles between the fishermen and the shark are punctuated by shark attacks and superficial psychological adjustments between the various players along the way. There are, as is typical in melodrama, false and “premature” endings (when, for example, another shark is captured and mistaken as the evil culprit). But these digressions are merely preparatory interlineations, biding time, allowing for the tension to build before returning to the waters for the next round of action scenes that are at the core of the film.

The shark becomes progressively bolder and more relentless, demonstrating the enormity of its evil, and adhering to Hitchcock's maxim. The villainous shark—Jaws—invades a sheltered beach pond and seizes a helpless swimmer; it destroys a boat and kills another victim. It embodies the forcefulness of unstoppable natural forces of disaster packaged into the form of an archetypal villain. As the community veers psychologically from denial to panic, all that is apparent is that the community cannot protect itself; it is up to the heroes to intervene. The two heroes in
Jaws
, an intellectual oceanographer (played with self-deprecating humor by Richard Dreyfuss) and a former New York
City cop (Roy Scheider) enlist the aid of a mythic ancient mariner (portrayed with a mock Shakespearean theatricality by Robert Shaw). The three head out fully loaded with mythic and modern weapons to take on their superhuman prey, to meet on the ocean, a setting far beyond the zone of human habitation. It is a primal scene, in a liminal space, beyond the realm of civilization. The ensuing battle to the death (the climax) takes up the last third of the movie. The outcome of the battle, which is never in doubt, enables the audience to vicariously participate in the ultimate combat, with the shared understanding that such guiltless enjoyment is the pleasure of the genre where the characters (like the villains) are not all quite human.

In
High Noon
, the breaking of the steady state, initiated by the arrival of the Miller gang, creates a different and more complex narrative structure, progressively introducing new dimensions to the basic problem that needs resolution before the story can end. The plot focuses on the interplay between the various “complex” characters, positioning these characters in relation to the hero and the villain and in relation to one another.

The
progressive complications
of the plot emerge as the clock ticks down toward noon. It is just after 10:30 when the film begins; Miller will arrive at 12:00 to exact his revenge on Kane and, perhaps, the town as well. The film is cleverly shot in a “real” narrative time, with one minute of screen time equaling one minute of story time. As Miller's arrival looms, Marshal Kane first thinks about leaving with his new Quaker bride, adhering to his promise to her to give up the gun. He can't betray himself, however; he returns to town. The story is about the meaning of loyalty and an exploration of the psychology of betrayal. Within this unifying theme the various subplots fit together:

1. Kane's new Quaker bride, Amy, is torn between her love for her new husband and her loyalty to her Quaker pacifist beliefs grounded in her experience of the death of her father and brother in a gunfight years ago.

2. Kane's young deputy, Harvey, betrays Kane and refuses to join him in the fight against the Miller gang, not because he is afraid, but because Kane has betrayed him professionally by refusing to appoint him as the new marshal because he is young and inexperienced.

3. Kane's former mistress has taken up with Harvey, her new protector against her former lover Miller. Perhaps this is more an act of revenge against Kane, whom she still loves, but who betrayed her when he chose his new, very blond, and upper-class Quaker wife (the incongruously East Coast ingénue Grace Kelly), who is less than half his age.

Each of these complex subplots resolves neatly with these important secondary characters making a fateful decision at the moment of crisis: Amy forsakes her pacifist beliefs and chooses to stay loyally by Kane's side, taking up the gun and killing one of the gang herself. Helen Ramirez chooses to be loyal to herself. No longer Kane's lover and no longer in need of a protector from Miller, she recognizes that she no longer has a stake in the community and willfully departs on the same train that brings Miller. Harvey, for his part, tries unsuccessfully to obtain Kane's position as the sheriff and Helen's protector. Equally unable to compel Kane to leave town, Harvey ultimately sells out Kane, refusing to risk his life and join in the battle against the Miller gang.

Meanwhile, the townspeople, one by one and group by group, betray Kane and themselves, refusing to come to his aid to save the community from the ravages of the antagonist. Their abandonment of Kane anticipates the climax of the film by leaving Kane to face the Miller gang single-handedly. This theme of betrayal fits well within the form of the melodrama; it explores the capitulation of good to evil. It is self-betrayal on a grander scale; the community compromises integrity in the face of evil based on self-deception repackaged as rationality.

So that the old steady state is restored or a new (transformed) steady state is created
.

In
Jaws
the climax is dramatic, but purely physical. The characters remain static and unchanged, and the anterior steady state of calm on the island is restored. Transcendent evil has been defeated by goodness and virtue. The dawn breaks on Amity Island, and crowds of bathers will soon be returning to the waters.

In
High Noon
the outcome is much different. The plot pushes forward to a new and transformed steady state. The bad guys have been defeated in the climax; good is victorious over evil. Kane enjoys the sweet reward of Amy's love and his own honor reclaimed. Kane has saved the community and will ride off into the sunset, just as Western heroes traditionally do. But there is no simple resolution. Kane cannot go back into the past; he cannot ignore the hypocrisy and cowardice of the townspeople. The ending is transformative.

And the story concludes by drawing the then-and-there of the tale that has been told into the here-and-now of the telling through some coda—say, for example, Aesop's characteristic moral of the story
.