Analysis: “True Grit” (Part 4: Theme)
In order to learn the craft of screenwriting, you must immerse yourself in movies. One of the best things you can do in that regard is analyze the movies you watch. I like to view them through four ‘lenses’: Structure, Character, Dialogue, Theme.
As an example, I’m going to analyze the Coen brothers’ remake of the movie True Grit in a 4-part series this week. Today: Theme.
In this series, I’ve presented three principles of screenwriting:
Plot = Structure
Character = Function
Dialogue = Purpose
In this final post of the series, we consider another screenwriting principle:
Theme = Meaning
By way of introduction, let me say I think this subject — Theme — is one of the most misunderstood areas in relation to screenwriting and probably as a result of that one of the least discussed. Yet we all know in order to write a successful script, it is critical for us to understand and handle our story’s thematic elements
There are two ways I’ve most often heard the term theme used:
* Theme as the moral of the story: As in “Rome and Juliet” — Great love defies even death. Or “King Lear” — Blind trust leads to destruction. Or “Macbeth” — Ruthless ambition leads to its own destruction.
* Theme as the “essential idea” of the story: The best version of this take I’ve read is by John August here where he talks about theme as a “story’s DNA.”
There’s merit to both of these descriptions. I wish to propose a slightly different spin on the concept of theme as it relates to a screenplay:
Theme is about the emotional meaning of a story.
Theme is not so much an intellectual exercise — e.g., “absolute power corrupts absolutely — but rather something personal, human, affective. A story’s thematic elements should, in my view, connect to a reader or viewer’s very soul, they should feel the themes, not just think them.
In the screenplay paradigm I use — Narrative Throughline — there are two parts of the screenplay universe:
The External World where we see and hear characters through their Actions and Dialogue. I call this the Plotline.
The Internal World were we interpret and intuit characters through their Intention and Subtext. I call this the Themeline.
External World — Action / Dialogue — Plotline
Internal World — Intention / Subtext — Themeline
If this is right, then themes are grounded in the Themeline, what we may think of as the story’s emotional plot.
The Plotline answers the question: What is the story about?
The Themeline answers the question: What does the story mean?
Hence this idea: Theme = Meaning.
Let’s explore this approach in terms of the movie True Grit.
I believe a central theme of the story is revealed in the first few seconds of the movie. In the soundtrack, we hear a piano version of the old hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”. That melody is repeated over and over and over again in the movie. Why? Because, in my view, it sets up beautifully the ending of the Final Struggle, where…
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
…Cogurn takes Mattie, who has been bitten by a rattlesnake, on an arduous journey to save her life. On horseback. Until the horse breaks down. Then…
IN HIS ARMS! Literally carrying her for miles and miles until he finds a house in the wilderness. So she is literally leaning on his (Cogburn’s) everlasting arms.
It’s a beautiful end point of Mattie’s innocence-to-experience journey: She started off cocksure and assertive, lots of head-learning but minimal knowledge of the ‘real’ world. She leaves the Ordinary World and ventures into the New World, represented by the hunt for her father’s killer. Over time, she opens up — slowly — to the help of others. In the end, she actually needs help. And help she gets from Cogburn who symbolically becomes her surrogate father.
Here are the lyrics of the hymn, which by the way is the song that’s sung when the end credits first roll:
1. What a fellowship, what a joy divine,
leaning on the everlasting arms;
what a blessedness, what a peace is mine,
leaning on the everlasting arms.
Refrain:
Leaning, leaning,
safe and secure from all alarms;
leaning, leaning,
leaning on the everlasting arms.
2. O how sweet to walk in this pilgrim way,
leaning on the everlasting arms;
O how bright the path grows from day to day,
leaning on the everlasting arms.
(Refrain)
3. What have I to dread, what have I to fear,
leaning on the everlasting arms?
I have blessed peace with my Lord so near,
leaning on the everlasting arms.
How perfectly those lyrics fit Mattie’s hero’s journey. In the External World, she leaves her ordinary world and travels into the new world of adventure with a conscious goal (want): to find and kill Chaney, the man who murdered her father.
In the story’s Internal World, Mattie’s journey is about a personal metamorphosis from fierce independence to a willingness to be dependent (that is her unexpressed goal / need). To go from the disconnect of her existence as this adult-child, separate from anyone else, to finding points of connection with LeBoeuf and Cogburn.
That is why when Cogburn goes to the extraordinary lengths he does to save Mattie’s life at the end of the movie, we see that theme played out not in an intellectual way, but a beautiful and powerful emotional fashion. For that perhaps 3-minute series of scenes, there’s hardly any dialogue, it’s all just visuals, primarily of Mattie leaning into Cogburn’s chest (on horseback), then hanging from Cogburn’s arms (on foot).
I don’t know about you, but I found that deeply moving, the perfect resolve of that thematic aspect of the story.
The ironic thing is that Mattie does not change, at least discernably. As we see in the Denouement, she is still the fierce, independent woman she was as a 14 year-old. My take on it is that she might well have moved from her position of disconnect to the world to connection had it not been for the fact that her experiences on the trail with Cogburn and LeBouef were so profound, they became these sort of archetypal ideals no other humans could possibly match up to. I mean who could she possibly meet in life who could be as much of a Mentor as Cogburn and a potential lover (Attractor) as LeBouef, particularly since as noted in the second part of this series, each represents aspects of her persona. For the rest of her life, Mattie need only look at her missing limb to be reminded every moment of every day of those seminal experiences with these two men, so deeply seared into her consciousness. She had found a connection, all right. It was, however, with these two powerful figures who dwarfed everything else that followed.
And it’s that type of texture, multilayered levels of interpretation and emotional truth I think of as comprising a story’s theme. Much more than the moral of the story or premise, rather a story’s emotional, spiritual, and/or psychological meaning.
The Coens handled beautifully the thematic elements of True Grit — from the very first notes of that hymn to the Denouement, it’s a powerful story of an headstrong young soul finding two soul-mates, allowing herself to move from independence to dependence, from adult to child. Because of that experience with this pair of equally distinctive men, one a Mentor (Cogburn), the other an Attractor (LeBouef), Mattie never found anyone who could possibly compare to them.
We are left with a bittersweet ending. Mattie never strayed from her independent ways throughout the rest of her life. She never got the chance to say good-bye to Cogburn when he was alive, but now that he’s dead, she communes with him daily at his grave site. And all the while, she lives with the hope that one day, she’ll lift her gaze toward the horizon and see a man riding on a horse, spurs on his boots, a pipe in his mouth, and a dusty hat atop his head from the many miles he’s journeyed from Texas — to be with her.
For Part 1 on Structure, go here.
For Part 2 on Character, go here.
For Part 3 on Dialogue, go here.
Note: The principles I laid out above are just a few of the ways we teach theme at Screenwriting Master Class. I will be teaching it for the first time as part of a 4-week Core IV: Theme and Rewriting course in May. For more information, go here.