Stick a stake in it

I loved The Lighthouse (the first effective Lovecraftian horror movie to date) and really enjoyed The Northman (for all that it was more Robert E Howard than authentic Viking) so had high expectations for Eggers' Nosferatu. Visually it's gorgeous, with moonlit-monochrome landscapes, castles that look bleak and comfortless, hillsides where you can feel the winter chill.

Why is there a but? The original Nosferatu was silent; this is the talkie version -- and, oh boy, is it full of talk. There are three problems with the dialogue. There's too much of it, to begin with. Eggers has to pad a very slight story (which was stretched even at the original runtime of 80 or 90 minutes) which is after all no more than Dracula Lite, so characters prattle on and on in scenes that aren't really adding anything. 

Also the idiom is weird. It's a parody of the way people talk in early 19th century novels -- sometimes with modern neologisms, as when Van Helsing (or whatever he's called in this version) says, "I came here all these years ago" when he means "all those years ago". The effect is a bit like The Fast Show's Regency sketch ("I'll get me cloak") stretched out over two hours. Of course, characters in the movie can't talk as people really would have done in 1838 -- it should all be in German, for one thing -- but it shouldn't come across as fake and risible. Unless your goal is Young Frankenstein, say, which this film could easily have turned into with just a nudge.

And then there's the way characters describe what's going to happen. Normally when they do that in a movie it sets up a plot twist. "We'll go to X, find Y, and meanwhile you do Z" means that that whole plan is destined to go awry. Here they talk about what they're going to do and that's exactly what does happen. There was a car safety ad that ran in the cinema just before Nosferatu, and that ad had more surprises in two minutes than this whole movie.

Maybe there just isn't much you can do with the story, given that it was only ever a stripped-down rip-off of Dracula. Eggers bulks it out with a psychic, an occultist, an alchemist and a vampire (Blake Snyder would call that quadruple mumbo jumbo) without adding anything. The psychic is superbly irritating, coming across like a conspiracy nut ranting insensitively at everyone around her when anyone less fanatical would see it wasn't a good time. The alchemist disapproves of modern science, and says so at great length in that cod-Victorian idiom, yet his main weapon against the vampire seems to be kerosene, plentiful here a decade before it was actually invented.

The vampire is much bigger and growlier and more muscular than in previous versions, so if you find tigers and lions scary you'll like that. I kept feeling I'd seen all this before, which may not be Eggers' fault. Maybe this just isn't a story worth resurrecting.

According to the mighty working

In Bright Young Things (Stephen Fry’s adaptation of Vile Bodies), the protagonist Adam arrives at Dover and in a scene played for broad farce (‘I know filth when I see it, and this is filth!’) has his novel manuscript taken away for burning by Customs. This triggers a whole series of misadventures as Adam needed the book to raise money to get married.

The trouble lies in making it completely arbitrary. It’s as if Fry was saying, ‘Look, I’m not even bothering to explain this because we all know it just has to happen for the sake of the plot.’ Audiences are willing to collude in that kind of thing but you do at least have to give them some kind of rationale, however flimsy.

In the novel, Waugh has the Customs officer look through the manuscript and become increasingly appalled by what he reads. The movie doesn’t have time for that, but it should at least have him light on one line – something read out of context that sounds subversive or obscene. Anything, however spurious, would do. In fact the more absurd, the better; it makes us take Adam’s side. And that line out of context could be funny, too, which would recruit our sympathy even more strongly. But to have no reason given at all leaves the audience no reason to connect with the character and buy in.

It’s an abstract injustice and thus a failed opportunity. Blake Synder would never have let that pass. Do watch the movie, it's a lot of fun and I wish Fry wrote & directed more movies, but read the novel first. Waugh tells a tougher and truer story throughout than the one the filmmakers have put on screen.

Is it a story about me?

“Once upon a time there was a handsome young prince…”

“Was his name David?” Or (having the art to conceal one’s interest even at a tender age): “Did he have blond hair and a red pedal car?”

That stage doesn’t last long. As we get older, we stop expecting to be cast in the starring role, but we do want to be poured into the skin of the main character. No longer an avatar of our everyday selves, they become a persona we adopt. A channel for us to vicariously live another life.

The first thing an author has to think about, ahead of making a lead character likeable (which is overrated) or interesting (which is underrated) is to make him or her relatable. Without that, we can’t identify with his predicament. And if we’re always watching from the outside we’re never going to care.

Humans empathize, but they also fear otherness – a paradox for the writer. To make an interesting story, you must take the reader on a strange journey, in the company of the kind of character who would undertake that journey. Yet we need to see enough of ourselves in him or her to start with, or we won’t connect.

Does that mean the lead character has to be exactly like us? There certainly are Everyman figures in some of the most powerful stories. Think of Neo, too frightened to get out onto that window ledge. Or most of Hitchcock’s hapless heroes. But most of the time if a writer starts off with a character who’s just like the audience, it's with with the sole intention of whisking them out of Kansas as quickly and rudely as possible.

Interesting stories deliver their relatability in unexpected forms. In Essential Killing, Vincent Gallo plays a Taliban insurgent. What’s relatable about that? He’s running for his life! Another movie starring Gallo, Buffalo 66, introduces his character in a way I can guarantee everyone on the planet will relate to. If you haven’t seen it, take a look.

A story begins with something we can relate to and takes us towards a place we aspire to be. From farm boy to Jedi Master – or Man of Steel. Few of us prefer stories where the hero stays exactly like us throughout. Mostly we're willing to make some kind of imaginative leap to get into the character’s skin. Chances are plucky young Luke Skywalker was just a bit too much of a sap to be your hero of choice. Many found the bad-boy sneer and beat-up charm of Han Solo more to their taste. There was a hero in need of redemption. And more importantly he was cool.

Relatability means not just like us, but like we’d like to be.

If your audience is small and has very specific interests, you can trade on their fear of the Other to create a strong identity they will eagerly embrace. For mumblecore fans, the world is divided into twentysomething, white, middle-class slackers – and then there's everybody else, but they don’t count.

Yes, that’s a shockingly unfair and sweeping generalization just to illustrate a point. Here’s another: for sci-fi geeks, the hero simply needs to be an elf, vampire or hitman. Preferably all three. And clad in black leather. That’s all they're going to need. Cool is their revenge on the world that’s excluded them, and it’s sufficient to provide the hero with all the relatability he or she needs. Writing for that audience, you may not even need what Blake Snyder called a Save the Cat scene designed to ease us into empathy. A bar full of lowlifes, the door smashes down, and the vampire manhunter comes in with shotguns blazing – with that first scene the geeks are hooked, their popcorn forgotten. These are folks that don’t need any foreplay.

If you’re not an urban fantasy geek and what I just said makes you feel smug – don’t be. The rest of us are just as shallow. Often the only ingredient necessary for a character the audience wants to relate to is to make them a handsome prince or beautiful princess. There’s a reason that movie stars get paid a tenth of the production budget, and it’s not usually because you’d kick them out of bed. A recent movie review criticized Luc Besson for casting too beautiful an actress in the part of Adèle Blanc-Sec. Oh, wake up and smell le café. That would be valid only if the intended audience was a tiny hardcore of bande-dessinée fans (like yours truly). Monsieur Besson didn’t invent our preconceptions, he just has to cater to them. Personally I prefer the characterful and far from fragile Adèle of the comics, but I can see why a director with his eye on the broader market can't afford to think that way.

In Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman describes how he accidentally stumbled on the importance of relatability when he was asked to write an opening credits scene for his movie Harper. It’s a masterclass in making us care about a hero.

Now get what I’m saying. They don’t have to be likeable. Remember the parable of poor, well-meaning, young Luke Skywalker and shoot-first-and-never-mind-the-questions Han Solo. Jack Ember, the hero of Mirabilis, has a chip on his shoulder. The scene early on where he gets promoted, he is basically being as mouthy as hell and deserves everything he gets, good and bad. I see Jack as a young John Lennon. That way, he feels more real and hopefully you find his flaws make him more relatable. If I’d made him passively hard-done-by, a sentimental working-class hero wringing his cloth cap while gazing in envy at the uncaring privileged – well, ugh.

Of course, I didn’t write myself a memo: “Must make Jack relatable.” I prefer writing him that way. But I did stop to consider that the reader doesn’t know anything about my character to start with. I can’t just assume you’ll empathize with him. It’s my job as writer to create some scenes that show you why you should.

You may say, “Oh, but I just write for myself.” Sure, so does every writer worth reading. But unless you’re writing fanfic, you want to reach out to an audience of people who aren't necessarily like you. You aren’t just preaching to the choir. A craftsman finds a way to connect, not to willfully seal themselves in a niche and damn everybody outside. If you do that, you’re not an artist, you’re a cultist.

Relatability isn’t hard. It’s what we all strive to project every time we meet someone new. It’s only in zombie films that the entire human race wants to shoot each other the moment legal restraints are removed. In reality we desire that spark of connection more than any other, so we don’t stand sulkily in the corner expecting to be liked. We reach out. We engage. Assuming you’re not psychotic or prejudiced against the other person, you’ll try to find common ground. And that’s all you need to do with your lead character – just remember they are meeting the reader for the first time. And first impressions are the ones that count.

Rabbit

“Hi how are you I’m fine.”

That’s how the late Blake Snyder characterized bad dialogue. “Engaging characters talk differently than you and I,” he wrote in Save the Cat. “They have a way of saying things, even the most mundane things, which raise[s] them above the norm.”

So, writers must find ways to say familiar things in an interesting way. That applies to all prose, naturally, not just dialogue. When it works, you get lines whose poetry lets you see even a commonplace scene with fresh eyes. Buffy the Vampire Slayer ran seven seasons – call it 110 hours – throughout much of which we were watching friends arguing or making up (or making out). Happens every day, right? Yet in the hands of skilled writers like Joss Whedon, Jane Espenson, Drew Goddard, Marti Noxon and others, it was never boring. Buffy always had a new way to say “I love you”, “I hate you” and “I’m gonna dust you.”

But there are pitfalls. In the search to find a new spin on an old line, you can stray off into the realm of the downright peculiar. There was a movie (which will remain nameless because I don’t actually know what it was called) in which the heroine said, “Somebody is trying make me dead” instead of the plain old “Somebody is trying to kill me”. Trouble is, that doesn’t sound like great dialogue, it just sounds like English isn’t the character’s first language. Don’t let fear of a cliché drive you to gobbledygook.

“Match me, Sidney.”

Ah, now - that’s the great Clifford Odets, three words comprising one of the most famous lines in cinema. But but but, you’ll be saying, a simple little bit of dialogue like that can’t work without an actor to deliver it. True; the line wouldn’t have the same impact on the page of a comic as when it’s spoken with chilling egomania by Burt Lancaster. So try this classic Odets writing:

SALLY
But Sidney, you make a living. Where do you want to get?

SIDNEY
Way up high, Sam, where it's always balmy. Where no one
snaps his fingers and says, 'Hey, shrimp, rack the balls!'
Or, 'Hey, mouse, mouse, go out and buy me a pack of butts.'
I don't want tips from the kitty. I'm in the big game with the
big players. My experience I can give you in a nutshell, and
I didn’t dream it in a dream either: dog eat dog. In brief,
from now on, the best of everything is good enough for me.

Nobody talks like that. Of course they don’t. But where “He wants to make me dead” stinks with the sweaty desperation of an impending deadline, Odets’s dialogue comes from truth. It tells us everything about Sidney’s resentments, his fears and what he thinks he needs. And, most importantly, it sings.

But, before you decide how to have a character say something, you need to stop and think whether they need to open their mouth at all. In a moving visual medium, dialogue is the last storytelling tool you reach for. Hitchcock’s test was to watch a movie with the sound off and see if he could still follow the story. In a comic, you’re not going to get the nuance that an actor can bring with just an expression or a gesture, but you do still have a very mobile viewpoint so you don’t need to use as many words as in a novel. (Well, duh. But remember: I’m just talking about the dialogue here.)

Somebody once said you should never have more than twenty words of dialogue per comic panel. There are rules and there are rules. If you look at pretty much any panel in a comic by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman or me (see what I did there?) you’re going to count more than twenty words. Some comics it’s “Hey!” “Stop!” “Never!” Fine, that’s different strokes… We’re not going to talk about quantity here, we’re going to talk about what constitutes good dialogue.

First rule, as always, is hide your exposition. Dialogue doesn’t have to do any work that the images are doing already. Suppose our hero is talking to a wild-eyed guy who’s setting a clock strapped to a makeshift contraption. There’s no need for dialogue like: “Once you activate the timer, this bomb will go off in seven minutes.” We can already see that it’s a bomb, and we know what timers are used for. Instead the hero gingerly picks up the device:

HERO
How long’ll I have?

BOMB MAKER
Plenty of time. Smoke a cigarette. Fill out your
tax return. Make your weekly phone call to Mom.
Just don’t start War and Peace.

Good dialogue serves more than one purpose. The bomb maker is telling the hero he won’t have much time once the bomb is primed. That’s the surface meaning. But notice that every example he gives is a reminder of mortality: cigarettes, taxes, family. Then he caps it with ironic emphasis, because starting a war is exactly what the hero is going to do.

And then later, if you want the tension that comes with a ticking clock, why not insert a countdown in captions from the moment the bomb is activated? Because, you know, “seven minutes” would’ve meant nothing anyway. With a countdown you get immediacy.

Dialogue like the bomb maker’s there is overdetermined. On a subliminal level the best dialogue bombards the audience with a whole bunch of associations and resonances designed to grab their full attention:

“He says there’s a storm coming.”

“I know.”

Or how about one of the most effective dialogue exchanges ever written:

“Do you expect me to talk?”

“No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.”

That’s superb writing because it takes us (and Bond) by surprise and explodes an emotional charge that powers the rest of the scene. Whereas look at something like this:

“You can’t just let them die. It’s inhuman!”

“Who ever said I was... human?”

Yawn. Even the most detail-obsessed sci-fi geeks demand a little more emotional engagement than that. Because most of us are more interested in character than we are in information. And that applies even when the information concerns the deaths of millions of people. On the surface, that’s just a statistic. It takes storytelling to make sense of it on a human level.

Penultimate word on this subject from Mr Blake Snyder: “Dialogue is your opportunity to reveal character and tell us who this person is as much as what he is saying. How someone talks is character and can highlight all manner of that character’s past, inner demons and outlook on life.”

And, to prove that point, the final word goes to Ms Rosenberg, courtesy of Jane Espenson:

“It’s a doodle. I do doodle. You, too. You do doodle, too.”