Screenplays Full of Holes

In orthodox screenplay theory and screenplay manuals “holes” are a problem. Just to take one example, Robert Mckee has a section on holes in his chapter on “Problems” in his book Story, in which he basically says that holes are not allowed, but there are some ways of covering up or hiding the holes and that smaller holes may be less obvious to the audience.  Others have commented on the cavalier approach to holes by directors like Hitchcock and Hawks, especially in relation to the script of The Big Sleep, which is full of holes but can be watched over and over again, precisely because it somehow skates over its holes with such plot momentum. But what people are usually talking about when they talk about holes in scripts or stories are plot-logic inconsistencies, not more fundamental holes. They are usually talking about small and flaws in story structure, rather than enormous gaps in the structure, that call the structure of the story itself into question, or possibly form an alternative storytelling paradigm. It is these larger holes that I looked at in my presentation. I focused on these bigger holes, by first looking at my own feature film, Starfish Hotel, then tracing the influence of Haruki Murakami’s work on that script, then looking at a more recent film, Lee Chan Dong’s Burning, which is an adaptation of Murkami’s short story Barn Burning, and then at a film from the 1970’s by Seijun Suzuki, Zigeunerweissen, which was another influence on my own film, Starfish Hotel.

I argued in my presentation that we can think of holes in a more positive way in script. Holes themselves can be part of script structure and can bring new elements to script writing and now may be a very good period in which to explore holes deliberately and think of holes not as a problem, but as a solution to the problem of representing the peculiar reality we live in today.

Is there anything more coherent behind this use of holes in scriptwriting?  In the three examples from films that I’ve given and also in the world of Haruki Murakami in general, the holes or “absence” is a result of a psychic disturbance in the structure of reality. For Murakami it was the emptiness of Japanese affluence and material culture, for Lee Chan Dong too the spectacle of a whole society built on credit card debt, in Starfish Hotel it is the death of imagination caused by an increasingly technocratic world. In Zigeunerweissen it is the uncertainty of the whole fiction of Japan itself in the Taisho period, which echoed the Bubble Period in Japan. In other words the holes are part of a greater critique of the storytelling (or lack of storytelling) of post-industrial capitalism – the holes attack the monolith of the story-system itself

It’s a stretch perhaps, but the orthodoxy of conventional script structure, seems to echo the dominant narrative of the historical period from the birth of cinema to the present – that the world makes sense, that it can be logically structured around a set of rational goals, that it is fundamentally a material world, and that material success leads to happiness. By re-introducing holes we introduce radical doubt about dominant narratives.

Presentation at the Screenwriter’s Research Network Conference, Catholic University of Porto, September 2019