Architecture of the Story

For discussion of Matt Reeve's Film Let Me In

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gkmoberg1
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Architecture of the Story

Post by gkmoberg1 » Sat Apr 05, 2014 4:02 am

'Let Me In' is like most nearly all other worthwhile stories in that it contains an architecture. I am curious if you agree with me in assessing how this works for 'Let Me In'.

For the layout of a typical story there is an architecture that goes something like this: in an imagined or real story-world there is a protagonist and his/her life. The life of this protagonist is interrupted by an event, one which alters the protagonist's life and forces some type of action to begin. This adventure commonly falls into identifiable categories such as 'A stranger comes to town' or 'A journey is undertaken'. Conflicts, some of which were already present in the story-world and some which are produced by this interruption event, build and compound and raise the tension level of the story up to a second point - which is the story's climax. This second point is typically an irrevocable event, one which resolves or breaks down the major conflicts that have been building. Following this second event the story winds down (the denouement) and the tale draws to its end.

In addition to this we usually have a "journey" that the protagonist undergoes. This journey can be a physical or psychological or emotional and so on. The protagonist begins the story in one state, is confronted & challenged by the unfolding story's conflicts, and by the story's end he/she has changed in some manner (physical, psychological or emotional).

In 'Let Me In', for example, we have Owen and his mother living in an apartment complex, Owen attending school, Owen and his mother & father working through the aftermath of the parents' separation, and Owen trying to survive a debilitating bullying situation. This is Owen's life and world - at the start of the story. Not all of this is clear immediately - much as with most other stories - but as the movie unfolds a bit, we figure all this out.

In 'Star Wars', Luke's quiet & boring life as a child on a moisture farm on Tatooine is interrupted by R2-D2 & C-3PO arriving to deliver an urgent & top-secret message to Luke's secret protector Obi-Wan. Up until that point Luke's life had been a steady progression of sand, heat and all the raucous fun of living on his uncle and aunt's farm. Once the two droids show up, though, his life is forever changed.

In 'The Hunters', Jed is a man going about his life, doing his thing, until he makes a very peculiar discovery - a body of a child hidden in the dirt within a cleft of a some rocks. He brings the body/child home and in doing so forever changes his life. Well, that of the child as well, huh? The act of bringing home the child is the gateway to what becomes the story; for Jed there is no going back to his prior life.

So, for 'The Hunters', this first critical event happens almost immediately as the story opens. Pretty much the same thing for 'Star Wars' - the movie begins with the droids' arrival at Tatooine. It might take the first 15 minutes of the film, but fairly quickly the droids have met up with Obi-Wand and the adventure begins. The interruption that the droids cause is the gateway to the rest of the story; there is no going back to life as it used to be for Luke.

And now for 'Let Me In'. It is simple to say that the first critical event of the movie is Abby's arrival as a new tenant of the apartment building. But is that correct? Or should we say that this first event / gateway is really a bit further into the story. For example at the first or maybe second or even third meeting at the jungle gym? At what point do you feel that there is on going back for Owen? What is the point where his life is tilted in a new direction?

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Re: Architecture of the Story

Post by a_contemplative_life » Sat Apr 05, 2014 6:17 pm

I will need to rewatch LMI to offer an answer because I can no longer recall how the meetings between Abby and Owen play out with precision. Hopefully someone more conversant with the story can join in.
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Re: Architecture of the Story

Post by sauvin » Sat Apr 05, 2014 8:11 pm

a_contemplative_life wrote:I will need to rewatch LMI to offer an answer because I can no longer recall how the meetings between Abby and Owen play out with precision. Hopefully someone more conversant with the story can join in.
LMI isn't terribly far afield from LTROI in terms of how the story unfurls; the claims that it's a shot-for-shot remake aren't completely unfounded. All that really changes is that LMI is a bit more Owen-centric than LTROI was Oskar-centric.

"Conflict" in drama doesn't have to be anything "real", witness that there aren't any real good guys in either movie, or any real bad guys (modulo, maybe, the bullies and furthermore maybe modulo institutional ignorance and apathy). Like LTROI, LMI is just a succession of turning points, each of which serves to turn Owen a bit further away from whatever course his life might have taken if there had been no Abby. Their initial meeting might have veered his life a bit to the right or left by an infinitesimal, their successive dates veered it a bit more by bolstering his confidence and self image.

The mere discovery that she's a vampire had to have had a profound impact on him, regardless of anything that might have come after. Even if she'd run away and disappeared forever from the reach of his personal radar, he'll have known there are far stranger, deadlier and terrifying things under the moon and stars than are dreamt of in any number of works of fairy tale, folklore, science fiction or horror movie. Genocides in times gone by, continuing bombings in the Middle East, drug cartel massacres south of the border or whatever else you might bring on, these are human things, but Owen will now carry around for the rest of his life the certain knowledge that people are not at the top of the food chain, and that the evil that is in men's hearts may not be the most profound on the planet's surface. Worse, he's bound to suspect that where there's one, there's another, and another, and another. Worse even yet, though, is the knowledge that this knowledge cannot be shared, because he can't substantiate this knowledge, because he can't convince people to believe something that's contrary to their lifelong stores of knowledge, and because he knows that people will just think he's crazy, and possibly dangerously so.

Do you believe there's such thing as Evil?

It's hard to say when his life may have been turned irrevocably towards one of real darkness, but to my mind occurs between one of two events: the cop's death and the movie's conclusion at the pool. The latter is more obvious, and may be more likely. A twelve year old boy witnessing firsthand a fully grown adult - an armed cop, no less - being attacked, gored and consumed by a vampire who's (mostly) still human is bound to have had a profound psychological impact that'll flavour his nightmares for many decades to come, but what's telling to my mind is that he wasn't initially unmanned by the experience. In fact, he accepted a bloody kiss with equanimity at worst, and possibly with controlled eagerness.

I don't find there's a lot of "architecture" to the story, same as there usually isn't much such in most movies simply involving "les gens comme ils sont". It struck me more as just being a story of "les gens comme ils pourraient etre, si seulement...."
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Re: Architecture of the Story

Post by gkmoberg1 » Mon Apr 07, 2014 1:44 am

I might be trying too hard to view the story from a perspective that doesn't necessarily apply. I am sort of like the child who has been given a hammer: everything becomes a nail. Applying the typical story architecture against LMI might not be the right approach; yet for now that's what my mind keeps trying to do. I too need to watch the movie again. What I will be watching for is that point wherein the development becomes such that Owen's life can no longer be the same. Will it be simply the moment when Abby arrives to become his new neighbor? Or is it further into the movie? Could it be delayed all the way to the point in the basement scene, where he sees enough to realize what she is and the situation that he has become apart of? Or is it some point before that? "To Kill A Mockingbird" comes to mind - the book's protagonist is the child 'Scout'. The first bridge that the book traverses - the one which is the point/event that forever alters Scout's world - is when Atticus (her father) takes on representing Tom Robinson. What's interesting about this, well interesting to me at least, is that this event is something that primarily concerns the protagonist's father and not the protagonist directly. Yet, it carries her along with it, because once her father become's Tom's legal counsel, the story propels forward in a manner such that little Scout's life simply cannot return to how it had been before. That's the moment I'm looking for in LMI. What I want to watch for is that moment, while wonder if it could be something as quiet to the protagonist as the simply act of Owen acquiring Abby as his new neighbor. Yet, I suspect I'm trying to apply a perspective onto LMI, one which might not be the best to use to look at the story.

Good point about the two defining moments near the movie's end. Experiencing either would be a enough for most people, let a long a child. Yet Owen experiences both - including, I assume, taking on hiding the policeman's body. The impact of this first event gets pushed away in the movie because it moves along almost immediately to seeing Abby depart and then Owen's sorrow in losing her. If she had truly been gone forever from his life at that point, your comments have me thinking of this, I wonder what all this would have meant to him over the next months and years. What you lay out seems right. He would have a very rough time resolving these final experiences with Abby from that time forward.

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Re: Architecture of the Story

Post by sauvin » Mon Apr 07, 2014 6:10 pm

gkmoberg1 wrote:What I want to watch for is that moment, while wonder if it could be something as quiet to the protagonist as the simply act of Owen acquiring Abby as his new neighbor. Yet, I suspect I'm trying to apply a perspective onto LMI, one which might not be the best to use to look at the story.
Since I seem to remember having failed more than one English or American Literature class, maybe I'm not properly appreciating your goal. If you're looking for a "defining moment", then maybe you could explore the parameters of your investigation by removing scenes or interactions from the story and trying to see the story developing as a result.

Example: suppose Eli or Abby had never come out to the courtyard to ask Oskar or Owen what he's doing. Suppose there'd been no Rubik Cube interaction, no bedroom scene, no kitchen scene, no bleeding out in the boy's living room, no bathroom attacks. Suppose, in fact, Eli or Abby had just shown up some night when the bullies started getting really rough with him. Imagine it: blood, gore and puzzle piece body parts everywhere, the boy is brought back from the very brink of death to stare into cat's eyes in the face of a girl he'd never seen before, and between its bloody fangs it asks "Would you like to run away with me?"

Alternatively, suppose there had been the courtyard scenes, the preteen romance at the kiosk or arcade, but no bedroom, basement clubhouse, kitchen or living room scenes, but the boy does sneak out to spend a night with his girlfriend and finds the intruder (Lacke or the cop) the next morning, and the story picks up again (more or less) from there. How do you suppose the boy would have reacted? How would the missing trust-building scenes have coloured his thinking at the pool?
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Re: Architecture of the Story

Post by jetboy » Tue Apr 08, 2014 12:48 am

I can only speak of LTROI because I felt it more and thats what I think it comes down to, are you in tune with whats happening on the emotional level. Are you feeling the sparks. For me and LTROI it was that first encounter with Oskar stabbing the tree. Despite the tough words said, the underlying feelings were that of the pitter pattering of hearts. Is it the same in LMI? Im not sure. Im not even sure people would agree with me on my assessment of LTROI.

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Re: Architecture of the Story

Post by sauvin » Tue Apr 08, 2014 6:11 am

Actually, there is a kind of "no turning back" point. The movie might say so, but it's done with symbols and colours and suchlike, and not made explicit (translation: it escaped this grumpy corn-fed old American), but the novel makes it very plain.

Basement clubhouse scene. Eli vamps out. OK, so maybe Abby vamps out (forgot this is the LMI section), but the effect is the same. She flees, and Oskar/Owen is left wondering "dubya tee EFF!?" I don't remember how this played out in the novel, but very clearly remember that this turn of events had to run a few rings around inside his skull before he realised his girlfriend was a vampire. It was within the immediate neighbourhood of this part of the narrative that he also decided he most certainly wanted nothing more to do with her.

Off to Dad's house. The movie glossed over whole craploads of emotional topography, LTROI and LMI both.Where movie Oskar has to give up his father to a drinking buddy and Owen has to get caught Yet One More Time in the divorce tug-of-war when he tried to ask "Is there such thing as Evil?", novel Oskar very clearly identified the transmogrification his father undergoes when he imbibes, from human to... what? Werewolf? I don't remember. Owen just hung up the phone, cried out a few more buckets of tears and probably realised he was on his own, except for this Evil that seemed to be the only living thing that actually listened to him and seemed to care in a meaningful way.

The novel's narrative spreads this possible "point of no return" across a few pages; in either movie, when the boy shows up at the girl's apartment to ask "Are you a vampire?", that point has already been reached. He didn't ask "you're not, like, nuts and have a blood fetish or something, do you?" - he came right out and asked for confirmation of a fully formed suspicion he'd already had, having a very good idea of what that suspicion might entail and what kind of potentially mortal danger he put himself in when he knocked on her door.

A great number of things happen when she says "yes". I remember having speculated on a few of these some time ago, but one of the more important at the moment is that the boy learns that human knowledge may be very limited, and that the universe may not operate exclusively by the rules he'd just spent twelve years learning.
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Re: Architecture of the Story

Post by drakkar » Tue Apr 08, 2014 8:47 am

sauvin wrote:Actually, there is a kind of "no turning back" point.
.
I don't remember how this played out in the novel..
Oskar repeatedly rides his snow sledge down Ghost Hill, doing something physical trying to shake Eli off and out of his system. His effort lasts about one day (iirc), when he sits in his bedroom listening to his drunk father, thinking which monster do you choose. And then makes the chioce. The rest of the book Oskar is cutting his bonds to "the world" at a steady rate, mentally and emptionally preparing to leave it behind together with Eli.
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Re: Architecture of the Story

Post by gkmoberg1 » Tue Apr 08, 2014 12:45 pm

And he begins as soon as he gets back to Blackeberg, at some very early hour of the morning, by going straight to Eli's apartment and not his own. I find that a frightening moment because nobody (I am primarily thinking about his mother and father) knows where he is at this point, and he goes straight to the person, whom if he right with his suspicions over (and he is) could be the most dangerous person to be going to.

For Owen, what is the equal point? There is no sledding and there is no evening with a drunken father. Rather there is the attack on Virginia by vampire Abby, then about 2.5 minutes which I need to watch again, and then the confrontation scene when Owen goes to Abby's apartment and asks her if she is a vampire. I need to get out the DVD but strongly suspect that it's between these two scenes where Owen gets to the same point of reflection.

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Re: Architecture of the Story

Post by drakkar » Tue Apr 08, 2014 1:25 pm

Iirc, there is the telephone conversation with his father, after which Owen returns to Abby. This is when Abby shows him the photo?
For the heart life is simple. It beats as long as it can.
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