Alan McDonald: breaking rules, or those that can, do...

12 April 2000

In the penultimate class before the Easter break (I teach on the MA in Scriptwriting at the University of Salford) an aspiring writer brought in the poetic and sharply-written beginning to a potential film-script which I and a group of students then read together.

The script begins with a voice-over by a deaf young woman whom we see on the screen. After a few minutes, though, we cut away to a sequence of scenes involving the woman's brother and his girlfriend, which the deaf woman couldn't possibly know about.

I said, very firmly, that I thought this didn't work: that the voice-over announced whose film this was to be, and that you shouldn't then switch to scenes she wasn't present at, and doesn't speak over, scenes in a sort of third-person narrative.

The student, equally firmly, referred me to the movie American Beauty.

Agh. Trust me to rule out a device used by this year's Oscar-winner.

Well, American Beauty came to Keswick that very week, so I finally got around to seeing it. Sure enough, it begins with Kevin Spacey's voice-over; then quite soon cuts to other points-of-view, in other scenes that Spacey's character couldn't know about, in a sort of third-person narrative.

Rather hollowly, next week in class I murmured that at the very end of the movie it did seem as if the Spacey character, once dead, was all-seeing. But frankly the game was up. I was wrong.

What made me so sure, so adamant? Is it my greater experience in radio, where I still wonder if the device would need to be followed all the way through? Or some instinct of mine about my own writing which over the years I've turned wrongly into a rule for others?

It's certainly made me think about how and what I teach. I'm off to Ireland for a week to meditate on this and other questions. Write well in the meantime. Take care with people who tell you there are rules :)


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