Virtual Studios

The Hero's Decision: Cause and Effect

You've probably heard story gurus like John Truby tell you to always be mindful of the cause and effect line in your screenplays. More writers go out on this than they do with spelling and punctuation. I'm forever telling writers of articles, treatments and screenplays that punctuation, like periods and commas, go OUTSIDE Inverted Commas.

But that aside; unless you know exactly what Cause and Effect is and how it applies to your hero and all the other characters, you will always only run with the concept to cause AN effect, which means to play out conflict only. Running just with conflict is what makes a story stink or suck, and negates the communication between characters and the communication between the film and the audience.

The ultimate underlying goal for the hero is to end up as cause in his life by the end of the movie. It is this learning to be cause in his or her life where they are going to make their mistakes... and you have to show the audience how being an effect causes them to make mistakes and not treat people the way that should be treated, which is a major lesson the hero should learn by the battle, where he is fully at cause.

It is at Apparent Defeat (about halfway through the script), where your hero has a major stumbling block and becomes the effect of his own cause. The light bulb bursts into life above his head after receiving a major piece of information about the opponent, and he has a major revelation that forces him to change his life from wimp to winner by becoming cause in the situation and in his life.

In this way, we switch who is at cause and who is at effect. At the beginning, the hero is the effect of the opponent, who is at cause. By the end of the movie, we want the opponent to be at effect from their own evil or misguided ways and the hero to be at cause.

Here's cause and effect.

There are only two rules, really, in living a life: Always be cause. Be cause as yourself, or be of a group which is cause, or a species which is cause, or be cause as life, or be cause as the material universe, or be cause as life itself, or be cause on the infinity of all cause. That's rule one. Of course, that goes without saying, in rule one: "Never be effect". This was, with all its pristine purity, the highest goal that you could attain: to always be cause, never be effect.

Of course, you say right away that's impossible. When you look it over it becomes impossible, unless you changed your state in some fashion or other, as the hero will. And not in the existing state could you always be cause. No, you couldn't be. But by looking at these rules of the game, your hero can change their state and always be cause and still have good interpersonal relations and still be happy.

And the other one is: Never be the effect of your own cause. And that was the deadliest sin of all. Don't cause something and then become an effect of it. Actually, every time you decide something you become an effect of your own decision.

"So, all right", your hero says, "I am a man". Two seconds later he's a man, if he were deciding like that. He's now thinking of himself as a man. He's saying, "I will now be a man!" Two second later he's now being a man. So he sweeps on down the track now being the man. The only trouble is he goes into a problem where the solution is not to be quite this man.

Maybe he goes into a problem where swinging a little hot music on the boom box would resolve it a little better (under a window or something of the sort) serenading her instead of being the MAN. Well, if he's hung up with this solution and he wants this girl and this girl doesn't appreciate a MAN, but just loved that fellow twiddling on a fiddle, he's stuck! With what?

It isn't that he can't resolve the problem; it's the fact he's made a decision which makes the problem impossible to solve. Because the second he goes up against one of his own decisions, he says, "I'm wrong" and that's the bottom of the emotional Scale. So he can't go down to the bottom of the emotional Scale just to be right, because if he did he'd be wrong. Maybe. See? So what's he going to do? There isn't anything he can do about it, I guess, except, of course, pick up the decision. But that's rather obvious.

If you're in good shape, you can pick up all the decisions you ever made clear back to the beginning of time. I won't say what you'll come out to be here though--you might suddenly turn into a griffin. But that's a danger you can risk.

So it doesn't matter what decision your hero's made. That decision is bound to make him into an effect by it. So you must be willing to some degree (if you're going to let him live in a time stream, in a timespan), then you have to be willing to some degree to allow him to be an effect, and he has to allow himself to be an effect. See how that is? I mean, if you're going to put him in a time stream at all, he must be willing to be an effect at least of himself. And of course, most everybody is affected by everything. This society makes a complete dance out of being effect: "Never be cause, be effect".

Or, if you wanted to avoid this utterly, you'd have him live in "no" time. Maybe that's desirable, I don't know. Here's "no" time. It's desirable if it's up here at the top of the Scale where he's happy and enthusiastic about life, because he can get everything done in the world. Because up at the top of the Scale, you see, he doesn't have any concept of time, you have concept of action, which you can change at will. Down here at the bottom, why, it affects him...

To Be Or Not To Be
But "to be" is cause, and "not to be" is effect. And so "to be" in all facets of life you have to be cause in all facets of life. And if, as an actor, when you go into character you can say to yourself, "Yes, I am being that character". No, you're not. If you were being that character, you would be able, actually, to see that other person change, if you were cause. Whereas by going into his character you become effect a little bit and YOU change. See? Different. When you go out in all facets of life, you want to go out in all facets of life so that by being the couch, you don't become the couch, the couch becomes you. See the difference?

Now, there's a very important difference--and by the way, everybody, if they're way up on tone and so forth or even if they've decided themselves way up on tone or they act way up on tone, actually could be very high-level cause. Everybody in the group could be high-level cause. And being high-level cause, this becomes a terrifically powerful group, because anything that faces the group sort of has an effect of being an effect. And then what happens? It becomes part of the group, so the group keeps on being, being, being, which is the same thing as saying owning, owning, owning. You couldn't get a group of people together who all of them were high-level cause, who would fail to do anything but own practically everything they laid their eyes on. Impossible. See?

You take these two characters in a black comedy. Each one of them is about 98 percent effect, and they are so leery of being more effect than they are (because if they go any further down the Effect Scale, they're dead), they get next to each other and they never really make a group. They just stand here and they say, "Which one of us is going to be cause?" because it's an anxiety. Because they're each saying, "Maybe I won't be". An insecurity, an anxiety, "Maybe I won't be cause". And so they never are able to get together. They can't form a group. They can't form a group for the excellent reason that they have an anxiety, each one, that he may not be cause.

In order to be cause, such an individual has to assert his causativeness on himself only and he has to do the darndest things to convince himself. He's really not trying to convince anybody else, if he's himself, he's just trying to convince himself that he's cause.

So the first place we take the riddle to pieces is right here on the basis of "What are you?" And the first moment you realize you're not your body--bang! You can at least stand over here. Your body will always be an effect and there is no reason for you to go on through life going and winding this riddle 'round and 'round and 'round of "Am I a cause or am I an effect? Or am I an effect or am I a cause? Because if I step on a nail I hurt; therefore, I am an effect. Therefore, I could never be completely at cause, because if I step on a nail, why, then I hurt and that automatically makes me an effect"... of the nail

You better locate that part of your hero which is always cause and then recognize that he IS that part. And that's very simple -- very, very simple.

Right here on the middle of "youness" is an imperishable, completely indestructible motion source. It is a motion source which itself has no motion. That is his inheritance as part of divine beingness. That is it. And don't think that is a small part of him or merely a part of him, because it's not. That's him. You have immortality in that part of you which is you; that is immortal. If he didn't have that, he wouldn't be here in the script.

Every cell basically has a tiny spark of this. But your hero, his beingness, is so tremendous, actually, that the force and power of this small "you" can actually burn down mountains. If it couldn't, why does the opponent go to so much trouble to fix him so he can't? Now, that's one of those problems that proves itself. Nobody would have taken any trouble to get him aberrated and get him under their thumb if he wasn't dangerous. At Battle he's dangerous! Ornery, mean, causative! Do you know he's liable to go down the street and cause something?"

All right. There is cause, "to be" and "not to be". The very funny part of this is, if you can get into some of its expression simply through his action, he can make a decision all of a sudden to be perfectly willing to use his body for anything. The second he does that, he takes this tremendous value off the body, so that life becomes much less serious. And when life becomes much less serious it becomes much less worrisome and that he becomes much more able to know and he's able to think and able to do. So if Jack Nicholson's character in As Good As It Gets takes off this tremendous value that he's putting on his body: "Must keep my hands clean, must keep my fingernails cleaned". Well, he will anyhow. I mean, the higher he get up the Scale, the cleaner he gets anyhow.

But if it's a strain to do all this and so forth you say, "Oh, I'd never squash a spider with my foot. Huh, a bare foot on a spider?" Well, why? Why? When did your stuff get that valuable? That's a fact.

Just think of some of the things which you wouldn't even begin to do with this piece of stuff which you have, a human body. Just think of it. Every single one of them is an aberration! Heavy.

Just practice action.

Be willing to use your hero's body to its complete endurance.

Be willing to use it in any direction to accomplish a purpose which you have decided on beforehand. And if you do that, all by itself, he'll come up Scale--whsht! And you can go on from there with more writing.

June 28, 2009 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Add Comment