UNDER PRESSURE

 

Wendall -- every other Thursday

 

I’m currently in the process of updating my screenwriting lecture, “Creating Great Relationships on Film.” It looks back on historic cinema relationships we still talk about and discusses what makes them so distinctive and memorable.

 

 

Through my research, I’ve developed an “equation” of five elements that I feel most of these relationships share, from Sunset Boulevard to Dallas Buyers Club.

 

 

This led me to think about great pairings in crime fiction and whether the same elements apply. I believe they do, especially because one of them is usually automatically built in.

 

In my opinion, one of the crucial building blocks of a great cinema relationship is OUTSIDE PRESSURE—something that is bearing down on and complicating the relationship, possibly even making it untenable in the long term. 

 

 

As Rick says in Casablanca, “I’m not good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”  When the stakes outside the relationship are high, the pressures inside it increase as well, forcing deeper bonds and layers of character. Without pressure, there’s no transformation. 

 

Part of the reason that we remember Rick and Ilsa, Yuri and Laura in Dr. Zhivago, Rose and Allnut in The African Queen, Sally and Luke in Coming Home and the four lovers in The English Patient is because all of these relationships happen during war or revolution. 

 

 

This dynamic forges the relationship between T.E. Lawrence and Sharif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia, while the Bertie/Lionel partnership in The King’s Speech is pressurized first by the Duke of York’s public humiliation, but the outside pressure increases as he becomes King and then King during wartime. War introduces not only danger and unpredictability into a relationship, it requires sacrifice.

 

 

Of course every film can’t be a war movie.

 

Norma Rae and Reuben are fighting together against a wall of prejudice, corporate greed, and social mores as they try to start a union in Norma Rae.  Erin and Ed are up against corporate monster of PG&E in Erin Brockovich. 

 

 

 

Bonnie and Clyde are being pursued by top lawmen who want them dead, as are Butch and Sundance. Ron and Rayon in Dallas Buyers Club have the outside pressure of AIDS. 

 

 

Joan Wilder’s and Jack Colton’s relationship in Romancing the Stone is created by and has to survive the very real threat against her sister, and all the forces who want the jewel. In Up In The Air, George and Anna’s relationship is forged under the pressure of corporate cutbacks, and even Seth and Evan in Superbad are challenged by the weight of their shared virginity and their impending graduation.

 

Will they get home by Thanksgiving????

 

But the built-in plot and relationship pressure we, as crime writers, share with many great films, is murder, or the threat of murder.

 

Philip Marlowe and Vivian Sternwood’s relationship is forged by blackmail and murder in The Big Sleep, Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter’s relationship is tested and threatened by the presence of an active serial killer, as is the relationship between the older and younger detectives in Seven. There’s a reason so many memorable films and television shows have been based on crime novels.

 

 

I feel that this outside force, which creates not only higher stakes, but danger and conflict for private detectives, law enforcement officers, and amateur sleuths, is a large part of why we go back and again and again to Nick and Nora Charles, Holmes and Watson, Nero and Archie, Kinsey and Henry, V.I. and Mr. Contreras, Joe Pike and Elvis Cole, Rizzoli and Isles, Poirot and Hastings, Ruth and Nelson, and so many other great fictional pairings.

 

 

So I’m grateful that, as a mystery writer, I have at least one “built-in” part of the great relationship equation -- a killer. I’m still thinking about how many of the other four apply.

 

If you’d like to know the other four elements of a great film relationship, watch this space for my Zoom lecture, coming in the fall.

--Wendall