Monday, December 1, 2014

ENDINGS


For the writer that cares, finding a dramatic resolution to a story can take you into nervous-breakdown territory. If the end of your screenplay is too pat, it can trivialise the complexity you’ve set in motion - if, indeed, there is any complexity at all. And yet the art of plot necessarily requires a apt resolution, even when the underlying human questions and frustrations are unresolvable. Often, what you are dumbly searching for is an illuminating tension between the "right" ending and the impossibility of tying anything up in a neat bow. Freud reminds us that, in analysing a dream, "if an uncertainty can be resolved into an either/or, we must replace it for the purposes of interpretation with an and.” This is what I have some times referred to as "the recontextualisation of the problem". What’s interesting about switching the conjunctions is that it often produces some other, third way, and frees up the secret desire latent in the actions of the characters.

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