The Power of Emotional Storytelling

“If I’m gonna dole out $20, I want to be transported.”

An emotional scene from ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’

Some time ago, the featured movie in my Daily Dialogue series was Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It elicited this response from Marly Kurtzer.

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is the first movie I watched in English without Spanish subtitles when I came to the U.S. as a nine year-old. My Mom usually translated this kind of thing, whispering into my ear in the movie theater. Except this time my Mom wasn’t there because I’d gone to see it with my little sister and two teenage friends — none of whom were going to do any simulcast translating. You know what? I still knew what was going on. I didn’t need to know the dialogue. That’s the power of great storytelling. You really don’t need to know the dialogue. It reminds me of Hitchcock telling Truffaut in one of his interviews that he was fortunate to have come up during the silent era because he had to think of visually impactful ways of getting his message across. And what Hitchcock and Spielberg both share is a gift for emotional storytelling. They just suck you in, shut down the logical part of your brain and just take you on a ride. Then you come out of the theater, blinking in the harsh light, and your body is back in the real world, but you’re still under the influence of the potent drug of cinema. Man, that’s the feeling I want to get when I watch a movie. Kidnap my brain! Take me hostage into your take of unreality! I don’t want reality. What am I, a schmuck? I’m gonna pay almost $20 to see reality? I live in NYC, man, all I have to do to get stinging dose of reality is walk out the door. If I’m gonna dole out $20 I want to be transported.

I was so struck by Marly’s comments, I asked permission to reprint her comments and she agreed. There’s a lot at work here:

• Who among us hasn’t had a similar childhood experience as Marly, watching a movie that to his day we can recall in vivid detail?
• When Marly writes, “That’s the power of great storytelling. You really don’t need to know the dialogue,” she is absolutely right. Movies are primarily a visual medium. As screenwriters, our default mode is to think, “How to write this scene as visually as possible.”
• But the main point is the one Marly makes about “emotional storytelling,” how filmmakers like Hitchcock and Spielberg “suck you in, shut down the logical part of your brain and just take you on a ride.”

Check out this scene excerpt from the first movie Marly saw in English — Close Encounters of the Third Kind, written and directed by Steven Spielberg:

Every single camera shot elicits an emotional response in the viewer. Every. Single. One.

A while back, I wrote an article on editor Walter Murch and The Rule of Six he uses in guiding his decision-making process when editing a film. The six are:

1. Emotion — How will this cut affect the audience emotionally at this particular moment in the film?
2. Story — Does the edit move the story forward in a meaningful way?
3. Rhythm — Is the cut at a point that makes rhythmic sense?
4. Eye Trace — How does the cut affect the location and movement of the audience’s focus in that particular film?
5. Two Dimensional Place of Screen — Is the axis followed properly?
6. Three Dimensional Space — Is the cut true to established physical and spacial relationships?

Note what’s at the top: Emotion. In fact, Murch puts a numeric value on each of these six and he gives Emotion this rating: 51%. That means over half of what he uses to edit a movie is about eliciting emotion in the viewer.

As Franklin Leonard, founder and CEO of the Black List says, “We don’t go to the movies for plot. We go to the movies to feel something.”

Which brings us back to Marly’s comments: “You come out of the theater, blinking in the harsh light, and your body is back in the real world, but you’re still under the influence of the potent drug of cinema. Man, that’s the feeling I want to get when I watch a movie. Kidnap my brain!”

There is power in emotional storytelling. And where does that emotion lie? In the story’s characters amidst the context of the plot. Characters — and especially the Protagonist — provide an emotional conduit for the audience to enter into and experience the story.

Takeaway: When developing your characters and working out your story structure, always be mindful of the emotions in play between the characters. Script readers and development executives want to feel something when they read a script, and your story’s characters are key to accomplishing that goal.

Yes, we must put a lot of thinking into our story-crafting and page-writing process, but we must also embrace the power of emotional storytelling.

Thanks, Marly, for your thoughts and letting me share them with others.