WORDS AND THE SPACES BETWEEN THEM

I always had real trouble with music produced by Stock Aitken Waterman.

You’ve probably heard their work. Hugely successful through the ’80s, they produced Kylie Minogue’s early tracks (the ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ era), Mel and Kim. And if you’ve ever been Rick-rolled… (You know where it goes)

I was almost allergic to them. Not just an ‘Oh that again – change the station’, but a more visceral ‘Get that out of my ears NOW’ – as though someone were scraping fingernails down a blackboard. And I could hear them coming – if I heard a Stock Aitken Waterman produced song, I didn’t need to be told who produced it. I. Already. Knew.

In the years since I’ve occasionally wondered why I couldn’t abide them. It wasn’t about being cool (they were ‘cool’ at the time). Eventually I realised it was about structure and surprise – specifically a lack of surprise. In terms of lyrics and music both – their songs went everywhere you expected them to, and nowhere you didn’t.

Structure sets expectations. It’s true in music, and it’s true for screenplays too.

If you use a three-act structure, wily audiences clock things like the ‘all is lost’ moment and the ‘refusal of the call’. Whether they give them these labels doesn’t matter: they know how the story is supposed to go.

Similarly, if you draw structure from the story setting/events (a wedding, an academic year, a war, a sports season, a performance, a road trip etc.) – that also sets expectations, whether or not you overlay still more structure on top.

And once you set expectations, the expectation is you’d better satisfy them…

… Except if you satisfy every structural expectation, where’s the surprise? Where’s the thing that jolts the audience out of ‘Oh – I know how this goes… The twist is coming any minute now and I don’t know what it is yet, but I know it’s coming… now..’ – to actually sitting on the edge of their seat wondering ‘Where we even go from here?’

I think one of the most powerful ways to get an audience to sit up and take notice – if you can pull it off – is to say an emphatic ‘no’ to a big structural expectation.

THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT – a road movie with performances on top – does this brilliantly.

After a disastrous performance, Tick, Adam, and Bernadette set out from Sydney to perform a drag show at a hotel casino resort in remote Alice Springs, at the behest of Tick’s ex-wife.

Christening their tour bus ‘Priscilla’ they have adventures on the journey, making new friends, developing their new act, bonding/squabbling among themselves – and surviving a gut-wrenching homophobic encounter.

Their new act draws inspiration from the wildlife they’ve seen in the desert – frilled lizards and emus – all capped off by a tribute to the Sydney Opera House. There’s a silver slipper slide!

Structurally, it’s set up to be their triumphant comeback – they’ve got an audience. It’s in the right place to be the big emotional climax of the film and…

It fizzles…

The trio do their valiant best, but they’re dying up there on stage. The audience isn’t hostile – they watch attentively and clap politely – but they’re not really along for this ride. It’s all a bit cringe…

And to top it off, Tick realises to his horror that far from being tucked up in bed, his son is out there in the audience watching.

The performance doesn’t even get a post-mortem. It’s just… derailed.

But there’s nothing like a derailment of structural expectations to get an audience to focus. Undermining the ‘big movie moment’ opens up space for a more nuanced, less predictable conclusion.

The emotional core of the movie is – I’d argue – packed into the ‘falling action’. Getting to know his young son on a picnic, Tick grapples with internalised shame about his own identity, before joining Adam and Bernadette on a glorious ascent of King’s Canyon (Watarrka) – but even that is slightly underplayed. Arriving at the top of the canyon, they look out across the vast expanse and observe that ‘It never ends, does it?’

This late in a film, audiences are often already mentally transitioning out of the movie back into their everyday life. But in this case, because the audience got given vicarious embarrassment when they expected celebratory triumph, they’re not doing any such thing. They’re right there, paying close attention – all the way back to Sydney, and ABBA and the real party.

So what’s the takeaway? I think it’s that if you’re going to worry about structure (and you probably should), worry about how to use it to direct and focus attention on the moments within your story that you think really matter.