Becoming a better storyteller by studying 100 movies, 50 screenplays, and 25 books in 2020.
The next time I embark on a major project like this, I won’t start a key segment of it with the most complicated example of the form. Lady Bird‘s script is so complex and dense with wonderful examples of what to do, it’s hard to know where to start.
What works?
Everything. But since we have to start somewhere, I want to look at how Gerwig develops and reveals character through concrete and unexpected examples in dialogue choices.
Specific detail: bathrooms
Two of the themes of the movie are social class and ambition. Lady Bird is lower-middle-class, but goes to school with upper-middle class and upper-class kids. Her best friend, Jules, is also lower middle-class. Lady Bird and Jules live with that tension, but Gerwig doesn’t reveal that in on-the-nose dialogue. You never hear the characters exclaim things like, “God, I wish I were rich!” She captures their class ambitions by focusing on very particular details.
Daydreaming is part of aspiration. For these girls, luxury isn’t about cars or clothing or technology (it’s set in 2002, so smartphones aren’t a thing yet) or any of the trappings you might first think of. Gerwig identifies the greatest luxury (for any teenager, but especially one living in cramped surroundings) as private space. She locates that aspiration in something unexpected and yet precisely right: having one’s own bathroom. When Jules says this, the audience is left without any doubt as to who she is.
Specific detail: towels
At home, Lady Bird’s relationship with her mother Marion is tense. Marion brings in the only paycheck, because her husband has lost his job. She never loses an opportunity to remind Lady Bird about it, either. (Note the echo of the bathroom as the symbol of cherished privacy, too:)
Marion’s a queen of the passive-aggressive guilt trip. Gerwig roots Marion’s anger and frustration in a concrete example of their relative poverty: the towel allocation. She reminds Lady Bird that they have one bathroom and one towel apiece, not because we haven’t learned this fact yet, and not because she’s forgotten (how could she?) but as a means of moderating her daughter’s ambitions. You want to go to a glamorous, expensive East Coast college? You can’t even have a second towel, honey.
The laundry argument is not about laundry; other people in the house could do a wash. It’s about Marion’s sense of martyrdom and her desire for respect, and that respect to her specifically means that Lady Bird shouldn’t be so desperate to get away from the life Marion’s struggling to provide for her. The point is, Gerwig could have these two fight about anything. They could have a point-blank argument about Lady Bird’s ambition along the lines of “you’ll never get where you want to go” (in fact, they do have this argument later on). But they don’t fight about this yet. Why?
On a technical/structural level, she chooses to have them argue here about towels (related to the bathroom, the symbol of privacy and luxury) because fighting about the mundane on the periphery of the real issue avoids the problem, thus ratcheting up the tension and setting up a greater fight later on. On an emotional level, this choice makes the relationships feel real because this kind of fight is something that real people do. They fight about things other than what they really want/need to fight about, because real fights are risky and painful.
What doesn’t work?
Nothing I can find yet.
Tip for writing fiction:
Focus on concrete details to reveal character aspirations and to engage the audience.
In any piece of fiction, the most important goal is to engage the reader. Using specific and unexpected details to symbolize a character’s real desire makes the desire feel fresh and real. These choices treat the audience (whether it’s a viewer or a reader) with respect. Asking the audience to think, Why are they fighting about the stupid towels? draws them into the argument. They take sides, identifying with one or the other characters. Then character’s stakes are their own, and they’re hooked.
