Getting Out Of Gaslights

by Judy Kellem

There are numerous ways to "gaslight" (ie: in Hitchcock's terms make nuts) your reader but the most surefire ways have to do with being inconsistent and unclear in your material. We are a delicate breed, we humans, and non more so than your Hollywood producer who's sleep-deprived and ulcerating under an immense studio pressure to find good scripts.

Despite a universal delight in surprise, desire to shatter monotony, to innovate and ever invent, when it comes down to it, we all need a certain amount of repetition and order to maintain our sense of comfort, keep us confident that we are in some control. In life and art we rely on anchors, predictable and reliable structures we can hold onto that permit us to relax into an often chaotic and nonsensical reality. Screenplays demand that no matter how avant-garde, experimental or conventional your writing, there be some basic elements that hold us inside of your fantasy. You are inviting us into another space, another world and it is your job as the creator to make us feel safe about entering that dimension.

If your pages become convoluted and incomprehensible, chances are your reader will get a migraine and trash the lot. Friends, there are three particular areas that often break down and cause this feeling of disorientation in the reader/viewer:

A) TIME
B) POINT OF VIEW
C) GENRE

In the case of time, we often find that writers will forget to indicate the days or hours that have passed from scene to scene, whether a given sequence belongs to the present or future is a flashback or dream. Nothing is more alarming for your reader than having a character comment that a month has passed since the last time they saw another character, yet for the reader it was assumed the two chatted yesterday because no time tag has indicated the jump.

Re how to make clear time cues, I'd recommend you look at some professional scripts to see exactly how they've placed them, but as a rule of thumb best to:

A) Put it at the scene heading if the time lapse is very minimum (i.e. "three hours later"; "next morning"; "later that evening")

B) Build it into the dialogue and include some kind of montage to show us a time jump if some minimal time has past (i.e. image of Bob on a train pulling out of a station, disappearing into a fog followed by a living room scene where character says, "How was the trip, Bob, a week's a long time to travel")

C) Write in a title insert (so we read it on the screen) if years, decades or centuries have past (i.e. "15 years later"; "5 years earlier")

Remember, these time cues can also be used as a narrative convention, written into the dialogue or put in a screen title insert to evoke, for example, a sense of "countdown" or to make us jittery from a character's pathology when, for instance, you have someone ever obsessed and distracted, going mad even as they keep "slipping" into their worst memory. In such cases be sure to always introduce such with "flashback" and close it with "end flashback" before moving us into another scene. Otherwise, all the moodiness and tension built from these repeat recalls
will dissipate, the story will become jarring and your hurried producer will pop twelve aspirin and call it a day.

So too with shifting points of view. If you're writing a round robin type movie where the perspective is constantly changing, be very very clear about who is filtering the story at what point and be generous with your reader, hand hold us a bit, give a transitional image, a momentary bridge to alert your reader that we're moving from Jane's head to Jim's. If your script is well secured in an individual, be careful not to let other characters hijack the spotlight. Best not to close a scene, for example, between your hero and her lover on the lover's line of dialogue or walk through the door. Let him say what he needs, let him disappear through that door and then return to YOUR HERO and leave us with HER perspective on what just happened. Keep us trained on her experience of the story. Otherwise, your script will lose its muscle, will become cold and we will not only disengage, but go mad trying to figure out who's got the leading role, who in fact is the protagonist.

And lastly, if you really want to drive your reader MADHATTER MAD, shift genres on them! Write a serious country western and then have Darth Vader appear in full garb ready to chat; thrust us into a dramatic rendition of a Bible story but drag a gang of rifle weilding mobsters into the frame.

It happens, my word to God.

Yes, if you are clearly writing a satire or spoof such can work. If you are going the Wim Wenders route, creating a hyper real dreamscape built on a deliberate mix of familiar images, manipulations of archetypal symbols, then anachronisms and the like can work. But this kind of conceptual art, collage, eclecticism is a tough order to fill and takes much restraint and razor sharp intention on the part of the writer. Those who are able to pull off mixing vinegar and milk are able to do so because they have a very specific, meaningful reason for making the choice. They are using odd elements poetically to commentate or render a hightly crafted alternative reality to make very clear points.

However. If you aren't one thousand, five hundred percent sure of WHY your movie was a slice of life drama in act one and then turned into an E.T.-style science fiction fantasy flick in act two, DON'T GO THERE. Decide which kind of movie you want to write and stick close to your choice, be consistent and harmonious in the rendering.

Remember, we are all like children at heart. We love peek a boo and roller coaster rides, opening mysterious boxes and playing hide and seek. But when push comes to shove we want the routine of our oatmeal each morning and the certainty that our parent will arrive when they said they would. The second these staples change or are lost, we become nervous and suspicious, unsure if we can really trust our environment. And then we throw a temper tantrum while withdrawing.

My point (probably ad nauseam) is, write the wackiest world you can possibly imagine if it so pleases you, but make sure your reader has his or her spot at that narrative table. Otherwise, they will soon rise and change rooms, choosing another's place as a keeper.

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