This was a project that involved examining the story structure involved for screenwriting, which is related to Aristotle's techniques for play writing. The project involved taking a film which used award winning structure and comparing it with another film by the same screenwriter. I used "No Country for Old Men" in a previous project for award winning structure and decided to start there.
For the award winning structure I
chose No Country for Old Men, adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen for the screen.
They also direct most of their movies so I decided to try and just find a movie
that seemed sufficiently different enough that the direction style would be
different even though the same screenwriters were heading the movie. I settled
on the Big Lebowski. In my mind, the two movies lied on opposite sides of the
spectrum; Lebowski is a film rooted in comedy and No Country is a thriller.
Both movies also have a very different cast of characters, and the stories go
in different directions as one involves a mystery and the other is a large
hunt. Both movies also happen to be almost identical in timing: around 116
minutes for No Country for Old Men and 112 minutes for Big Lebowski.
I recorded when the major moments of both films happened and tried to identify what they were as best as I could. The major events of a movie can be very subjective and I chose what I felt would best fit into Aristotle's thoughts on structure. For example: Desis is defined as a complication in plot, and commonly takes place in the rising action of a story. an example of this in No Country could be when the character of Carson Wells is hired to kill Anton Chigurh, or in the Big Lebowski when the Nihilists break into the Dude's apartment and threaten him (funnily enough these two events happen within 4 minutes of each other).
I took the information from the two viewings and created a graph. The events on the bottom are what was recorded while the numbers on the left represent at what point in each movie they occurred.
That's amazing...
After
watching both movies and timing when moments happened in between the films, I
was extremely surprised to find that they synched up incredibly well. Yes, the
fact that both films were written and directed by the Coen Brothers may have
had a hand in that but it should not have affected the movie that much. The
timing of the two films really comes down to within one or two minutes of one
another. The opening narration of the two films and set up for the story both
last five minutes and multiple cases of the Desis occur very close together
between the two films.
The genres of the two films are
completely different, as well as the way the scripts were written. The Big
Lebowski was something that was created completely by the Coen Brothers where
as the story for No Country for Old Men they adapted for the screen from the
novel by Cormac McCarthy. The thinking behind the adaptation would have been
what to include and not to include in the film in order to shorten it into a
more manageable state, while Lebowski would have called for more creative
handling as a story was being more or less crafted from scratch.
The way the films are shot also
makes them extremely different. For example the script for No Country has
extremely little dialogue where as it’s the opposite for Lebowski. Although
this is the case there is little deviation in the timing of events and the
movies are only four minutes longer than one another. With the differences in
shooting style and genre, one might think that the scripts would be different
sizes as well however this is not the case either as the scripts are even
closer in size at 117 and 118 pages! It’s also interesting the note that
Lebowski is the shorter movie and yet has a longer script by a page.
Something tells me that the
similarities between the timing in the movies isn’t intentional and that, psychologically,
filmmakers will put events at similar times in a film because the pacing is
something that the audience is used to. In all honesty, it surprised me that
the films were the same length; No Country for Old Men feels like a much longer
movie than the Big Lebowski, probably because of the length of scenes and the
shorter dialogue. It seems like knowing that the beginning and end of a film
usually are about the same length of the middle of a film makes many different
movies immensely comparable. The fact that the two movies compared were made
nearly ten years apart only heightens this sense of subconscious ordering and
storytelling.
It is true that the Coen brothers
had a huge hand in both sides of the process of scriptwriting and directing for
the movie but the real fact is that these movies aren’t completely in the
control of them. There’s a different story to the screenwriters, a story to the
actors, and especially a story for the editors; No Country for Old Men was
edited by the Coen brothers, but the other film was edited by Tricia Cooke, who
had a lot of control over the length of the film because of the amount of
establishing shots and not character driven shots present in the film.
If the two films had a more similar
genre, I’d absolutely say that the Coen Brothers use a formulaic screenwriting
technique, but as there are so many differences between them, I find it a bit
harder to believe that they would think about these methods of timing during
the writing process. I find it much more likely that the similarities between
these films are more about a subconscious method of storytelling that more
filmmakers than the Coen brothers use. If the method is formulaic, however,
then the Coen brothers are very gifted in their ability to make something homogenous
into very different films using a very similar structure. Looking at the
graphed tables of data between the two films is very convincing for this part
as well…
That was my analysis between the two films. I hope to add another film for analysis in the future (and only a little of my reasoning is for those sweet sweet creative points).
I also have below the notes I took during the movies, in case you're interested in what I decided the major moments were in the films.
Film comparison
No Country for Old Men
Set Up: Sheriff Bell’s Narration/ Chigurh’s introduction-
0-5 mins
Inciting Incident: Finding the money/ the hunt begins- 5-25
mins
Desis:
1.
Llewellyn flees town/ Chigurh gets involved/
Sheriff Bell investigates- 25- 30 mins
2.
Chigurh,
the cartels and Moss all get to hotel- 44-52 mins
3.
Carson is
hired to kill Chigurh- 52-55 mins
4.
Showdown
at the town inn- 55-68 mins
5.
Wells
Find’s Moss/ Chigurh kills Carson 75- 84 mins
6.
Chigurh
makes deal to meet Moss for final showdown-85 mins
7.
Carla Jean calls Bell and he heads for the
meeting-93 mins
Peripetiea: Cartels kill Moss- 95- 102 mins
Climax: Chigurh kills Carla Jean-107-111 mins
Lusis: Bell investigates, trail runs cold, quits the dept.-102-107
mins;
Chigurh escapes-111-114 mins
Anagorisis: Bell realizes that he is a man from another age
“and then I woke up”- 114-116 mins (end)
The Big Lebowski
Set Up: Narration of “The Dude”/ break in- 0-5 mins
Inciting Incident: Meeting the other Lebowski/ putting the
dude on the case- 5-24 mins
Desis:
1.
Dude’s rug gets stolen/ money handoff goes
south- 29-39 mins
2.
Dude’s car is stolen/ Dude meets Maude Lebowski-
39-47 mins
3.
“Bunny’s” toe cut off/ Nihilists threaten Dude-
48-56 mins
4.
Car is rediscovered/ Dude investigates Sellers
kid’s house -56-73 mins
5.
Jackie Treehorn meets with Lebowski/dream
sequence- 74- 85 mins
6.
Bunny has all of her toes/ Dude and Maude are
lovers -85-91 mins
Peripetiea: Bunny Kidnapped herself (The Dude is the fall
guy for embezzlement)-91-99 mins
Climax: face-off with the Nihilists-99-104 mins
Lusis: Donnie dies-104-109 mins
Anagorisis: The Stranger meets the Dude again, wraps up the
narration-109-112 mins (end)
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