Starfall and a Critical Commentary on Story, Character, and Multidimensional Travel

STARFALL and A CRITICAL COMMENTARY ON STORY, CHARACTER, AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL TRAVEL By Michael Allan Galvez A Senior Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Major in English and the Bachelor of Arts Degree Stetson University, DeLand, Florida Advisors: Dr. Julia Schmitt, Ms. Krista Franco, and Prof. Grady Ballenger December 4, 2015 Abstract This senior project consists of a spec script and a critical commentary on the script regarding story, character, and multidimensional travel. The spec script is a 35-page excerpt of a feature film screenplay. In the span of a semester, I focused on creating, editing, and revising the first act of this three-act, 90-minute film. The film tells the story of Joseph Kingsley who wakes from a four-year coma unsure of what he is and where he was prior to the accident that left him neurologically damaged. Aside from his name, all his memories do not coincide with his reality. A wife and children he has never known greet him home along with a storied young career as a detective. Soon, with varying visions of days past and present, dreams and reality begin to blur together and his quest to find his identity leads him to a woman, Olivia Harper, who may both hold the key to the information he is seeking as well as the destruction of all laws of time and space. The excerpt submitted for this senior project establishes the foundations for characters, conflict, and narrative structure to give the reader a well-informed idea of the technical and narrative elements of the full screenplay to be completed during the winter and produced next semester. The critical commentary aims to discuss the process and concepts involved in crafting this psychological, science fiction thriller. As mentioned by the title, it will navigate through the three pillars that support the world of Starfall as a screenplay: narrative structure, character development, and multidimensional travel. It will talk about The Theory of Everything (2014), Insterstellar (2014), and the new Doctor Who (2005-present) as the major works that inspired me and how they were useful to my writing as well as the science and philosophy that drives this story. Through a critical lens, it will examine major parts of the creative project and how it fits within the larger world of media and literature. Starfall: A Critical Commentary on Story, Character, and Multidimensional Travel PRELUDE Starfall started, like most ideas usually do, as something very simple. But, like most ideas usually are, it never really was. I wanted to tell a story, something that will contain the beginnings of a fictional universe of stories that look into something as huge as the heart of the galaxy and condense its troubles, its magnificence, its darkness to something so small, yet so significant as the heart of the human experience. I wanted it to live in the realms of science fiction, of psychological drama, suspense. Above all, I wanted this to represent my culmination of studies as a creative writer and an introduction of my work into the professional world. Russell T. Davies put this aspiration to words best: “This had to be more than a script. This had to be a pitch, a budget, a template, a mission statement, an ideal” (10). It is quite a tall order, daunting even to think about. He was of course talking about Rose, the first episode of the Doctor Who series revival in 2005 that he wrote for the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). During the very early days of the revival series, before a single word was even written, BBC already greenlit the production and Davies was deemed responsible for its eventual success or failure. As the lead writer then, his tall order was to “convince everyone -- and I mean everyone within the BBC, long before the viewing public got involved -- that their faith hadn’t been misplaced; that an old, tired, niche, cult sci-fi show could work in the mainstream once again” (Davies 10). And he did just that. Ten years later, Doctor Who was not only revived and placed in the mainstream once again but it also has amassed a number of awards and world records in the 21st century. The 2005 season did it. Rose did it. Starfall is my Rose and it is my hope that it does at least half the things that Davies’ work did in the field of motion picture. SYNOPSIS The screenplay is the story of Joseph Kingsley who wakes from a four-year coma unsure of what he is and where he was prior to the accident that left him neurologically damaged. Aside from his name, all his memories do not coincide with his reality. A wife and children he has never known greet him home along with a storied young career as a detective. Soon, with varying visions of his past, dreams and reality begin to blur together and his quest to find his identity leads him to the total collapse of the laws of time. Ultimately, the answer to one question could save or ruin the entire universe: Who will you be at the end of the world? This paper aims to discuss that and the process involved in crafting this psychological, science fiction thriller. As mentioned by the title, we will navigate through the three pillars that support the world of Starfall as a screenplay: narrative structure, character development, and multidimensional travel. We will talk about The Theory of Everything (2014), Insterstellar (2014), and the new Doctor Who (2005-present) as the major works that inspired me and how they were useful to my writing as well as the science and philosophy that drives this story. Through a critical lens, we will examine major parts of the creative project and how it fits within the larger world of media and literature. FRAMING THE WORLD Finding the correct way to tell this story started with finding the kind of story it wanted to become; I needed to identify the genre. I say “it wanted to become” instead of “I wanted to write” because it is not often that I feel total control over my work; it is usually vice versa. Let the characters speak to each other and write themselves, someone once told me. For this one especially, the search for direction was particularly difficult. I knew what I wanted to be done. The aim of the narration is to repeatedly have the audience question the reality of the current story plane. Are we in a dream? A different dimension? At the same time, I wanted the story told as though it was in a time loop. The beginning is the end. The first minute should frame the world so tightly that it could tell you almost the entire story if you knew how to look at it. I knew all of that; I just did not know how I wanted it done. The answer came in bursts at different points in time throughout the semester. It began with viewings of The Theory of Everything and Interstellar in the summer. These two films provided the backbone for the style I wanted. Both are different in focus, genre, production budgets but both deal with the same thing in the same way: they show that faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, predetermined by some almost unstoppable force -- such as Stephen Hawking’s motor neuron disease or a crop blight and a supermassive black hole combination -- we, as humans, shall push on for the sake of truth and of those people we love. As Stephen said in the film, “There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope.” This theme aided in the search for genre and consequently the creation of structure. Both films’ storylines centered around the experiences of one man and how his past and future are uniquely intertwined. In the world of The Theory of Everything, Stephen and the audience found out about his future through a doctor’s diagnosis. We knew that gradually, eventually, he will lose the ability to control the voluntary muscles of his body. In Interstellar, Cooper observes that what his daughter, Murph, believes to be a poltergeist in her bedroom is giving them geographical coordinates to a secret NASA facility. At that film’s climax, the story reveals that the poltergeist was no poltergeist at all but Cooper himself communicating to his past from inside the tesseract. In both instances, the writers of these films present early on a fate sequence -- a scene or series of scenes that predetermines the path for that central character and indirectly establishes the stakes for that story, done in a fashion that may be overt (as is the case for a biographical film like Theory) or subtle (as is the case for a science fiction thriller like Interstellar) depending on the overall scheme of things in the story world. This fate sequence is something that we come back to over and over again to underscore its meaning and compare its prophetic vision of the future with reality in a linear narrative. Theory does this through the visible degeneration of Stephen through the years culminating in a lecture in America where he imagines picking up a pen that a student has dropped yet being unable to do so in reality. He remembers the time before his disease and how it has affected his life and delivers the speech of “While there’s life, there is hope” mentioned just a few paragraphs above. Interstellar’s approach is more mysterious and subtle as necessitated by its genre. We have the presence of “ghosts” and “aliens” that deliver messages through bookshelves and gravitational anomalies or attempt to reach out to humans while travelling through a wormhole. All of these ultimately turn out to be Cooper reaching out in the end from beyond the unknown depths of space and time inside a black hole. This revisiting of the fate sequence establishes a unifying frame and a cyclical feel to linear history of events within the story world. This, I believe, solved my problem. Starfall opens with these scenes: This is the fate sequence and framing device for this screenplay. This first page tells you almost the entire story and the destination of our central character. This is a time and place -- Ndoto (also known as Joe) at a typewriter, talking to himself, recording his thoughts in his study -- that we will come back to numerous times at specific intervals later in the screenplay. The difference between these two films and Starfall is their narrative structure. Starfall’s narrative is nonlinear in nature because of the subject matter it focuses on. Multiple realities, the destruction of time, and loss of memory are better explored for our purposes in a manner that is less straightforward than a linear narrative. A nonlinear narrative emulates for the audience the confusion the lead character is feeling about the events surrounding him. Another reason for this choice is-- CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT From the onset, I knew that I wanted to have an unreliable narrator. The premise of the screenplay essentially demands it. From that mold, Joe was born. After that, I thought that was quick and painless; character creation should be as easy as always. But soon, I found, that I am working on a different framework this time around. For character development, I always depended on the personal histories for characters to dictate their personalities and self-identities. Here, it is almost impossible to do that. The most essential thematic thread is expressed in the synopsis, the question: “Who will you be at the end of the world?” This story centers on the lead characters’ search for identity. Their memories, their reality, all that they thought defined them are put into question. At one point, all realities and all versions of the characters living in multiple planes of existence converge. What will be one’s identity then when several differing, conflicting personal histories join together? For a story that relies heavily on character, this was an issue greater than the last. Luckily, I recognized this problem as I was watching a series that has built a successful franchise over a single character with multiple identities.. Doctor Who first premiered in 1963. Since then, thirteen actors have played the role of the Doctor -- twelve headlined the show and one in the 50th Anniversary Special episode as the War Doctor, the original incarnation that fought in the Time War. This change of actors is written into the show’s storyline in contrast with the James Bond franchise who similarly transitions from one actor to another playing the lead role throughout its existence. Doctor Who’s premise for this transition is that whenever a Time Lord’s body is fatally injured by war, disease, etc., a Time Lord may regenerate his entire cellular structure to overcome death. After each regeneration, a Time Lord takes on a new body, face, and to some extent a new personality. Yet each regeneration is part of a single character regardless of their differences in appearance and likes or dislikes. The Doctor was, therefore, the perfect model for the kind of character development that I aimed toward. Throughout each regeneration, the Doctor has certain elements of his personality that carry over to the next.. First, he hates pears. They are squishy and they make your jaw look weird. The 10th and 12th Doctors emphasize those points specifically. Second, he is always looking for an adventure. Whether that adventure may be the actual purpose of his travels at that moment in time or just a situation he can run away to, he is always searching for a new planet and new experiences. And third, the one thing that any person who is familiar with his character will always tell you: the Doctor lies. Aside from his inherent intelligence, these traits are the core elements of his character. Select consistencies in what he hates, what he likes, and what he always does: this is what the writers of Doctor Who taught me about characterizing a person containing multiple personalities. This is the formula I used in bringing Joe to life. In every plane of his existence, there is always those consistencies that tie together who he is regardless of the situation he finds himself in or the people around him. MULTIDIMENSIONAL TRAVEL This story is a result of my interest in both the arts and sciences. As I have alluded to before, Starfall makes use of various ideas in the fields of physics and psychology. I wanted a cross between The Theory of Everything and Interstellar. I wanted the wit and sincerity of Doctor Who. At the same time, my reading of Jane Hawking’s autobiograpy, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, drew me to a style of narration that was cozy and intimate. All these literary and motion picture works influenced my approach as a creative writer to this project. As for the science components, I took the example of Christopher Nolan in his pre-production stages of Interstellar: he enlisted a scientific advisor. I consulted books such as Kip Thorne’s The Science of Interstellar, Michio Kaku’s Parallel Worlds, and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. In the beginning stages of this project, I envisioned a fantastical narrative grounded in facts and proven science surrounding complex and dynamic characters. As I started writing, I began drifting away from a collaborative scientific-artistic approach to more of the romanticized version of such. I used the ideas espoused and developed by the physicists above as a more of a basis instead of a “narrative collaborator,” (Thorne vii) the term Nolan used to describe his professional relationship with Thorne. The title of the screenplay itself is an example of that. Starfall refers to many things, such as a comet zipping across the night sky or Olivia’s painting of swirling cosmic lights blending with a serene countryside. But at its core, away from the beautiful views of starry nights and impressionistic paintings, Starfall refers to the collapse of the universe. The Big Crunch. This is the big picture behind flashes of parallel worlds and of multiple realities and all the memories that come along with those. Envision Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and its fusion of both Romantic ideals and mathematics. The Romantics’ emphasis on emotions of awe and terror for aesthetic applied to the end of time and space as we know it. Multidimensional travel in the context of this story is not the kind presented in works like Interstellar or Doctor Who. There are no big budget special effects, intensely fact-checked scenes or explosions in the background. Multidimensional travel as referred to here is the idea of separate and distinct thoughts and memories from different realities converging in the minds of two people and how their search for identity may change the course of time depending on the choices that they make. Works Cited Davies, Russell T. Doctor Who: The Shooting Scripts. London: BBC, 2005. Print Davies, Russell T., and Steven Moffat. Doctor Who. BBC. Television. Feynman, Richard P., Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew L. Sands. Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics, Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher. 4th ed. N.p.: Basic, 2011. Print. Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Toronto: Bantam, 1988. Print. Interstellar. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway. Paramount Pictures, 2014. DVD. Kaku, Michio. Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos. New York: Doubleday, 2005. Print. The Theory of Everything. Dir. James Marsh. Perf. Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones. Working Title Films, 2014. DVD. Thorne, Kip S. The Science of Interstellar. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014. Print.