Confession as Narrative Device

Comparing confessions of the Protagonists in The King’s Speech and The Silence of the Lambs reveals how important they can be.

In writing my book ‘The Protagonist’s Journey: Character Driven Screenwriting and Storytelling,’ I have had an interesting experience making connections between disparate cinematic stories. Sometimes movies from considerably different genres share the same narrative device with a similar story function.

For example, it occurred to me that the drama The King’s Speech and the thriller The Silence of the Lambs both feature a Protagonist character making a ‘confession’ to a Mentor figure: Bertie to Lionel / Clarice to Lecter.

By confession, I mean a scene in which one character reveals a deep inner truth which has up to that point in the story been hidden, shrouded in the recesses of the character’s psyche. Sometimes that shrouded state is a conscious act of the character’s will. Sometimes it is an unconscious instinct to protect one’s self from judgment. But in all cases, when a character confesses this inner truth, bringing it forth into the light of consciousness, the moment represents a significant turning point in the character’s psychological metamorphosis.

Consider this scene in The King’s Speech.

By this point in the story, Lionel has gained Bertie’s trust. The scene is framed around a B.O.B. (Bit Of Business) — Bertie finds himself distracted by Lionel’s son’s model airplanes. In this moment, Bertie confesses two dark secrets from his past:

• How his first nanny in effect abused him as a toddler… pinching him to make him cry… withholding food from him as punishment. As a result, Bertie developed some stomach issues, a physical manifestation of the psychological trauma created within his psyche by the tyrannical influence of his nanny.
• How his brother Johnny…