Magical Realism and Visual Storytelling
the screenplay debrief
Hello, sequel scriptwriters. As trailed, what I have for you this week is a work of reflection about the short screenplay I posted last week about a Catholic priest with a secret; the screenplay PDF is here in case you want to revisit it (or arrived at this page first): Let Us Pray
This was written as an academic essay, so please excuse the somewhat stiff written style. In it, I talk about magical realism and what I was trying to do in Let Us Pray. Magic realism is a technique I’ve experimented with in my prose fiction writing before, and visual storytelling is what I think I was learning about in screenwriting.
Magical Realism and Visual Storytelling
In this essay, I will describe why and how I employed the technique of magical realism in the process of developing my short screenplay ‘Let Us Pray’. In discussing how I was able to use this narrative technique to solve structural problems in my own work, I will also consider its use in screenwriting more generally.
My underlying idea for ‘Let Us Pray’ was the idea of a Catholic priest, on discovering that she is a transgender woman, becoming de facto the first woman priest in the Catholic church. However, it was clear from the outset that many aspects of the story I had in mind are essentially non-visual. The church’s objections to women priests depend on a great deal of theology: an inherently dry, abstract topic. And gender identity (like sexual orientation) is also a fundamentally internal phenomenon. In literary fiction, this is not a problem, since a character’s thoughts can be explained through narration or close-third-person description. But film is a visual medium, moving pictures having branched out from photography in amusement fairs, a “new type of showmanship”[1] as Georges Méliès put it. So, in film, it is imperative that thoughts and emotions be expressed visually. Instructions to ‘show, not tell’ can be found in all screenwriting books; the example which resonated most for me is advice from Mike Skinner paraphrased by John Yorke: “why tell us she’s angry, when you can show her tapping her foot? We see her face, we see her foot, and we know.”[2]
It is also critical to show the characters’ motivation, and their progress towards their goals (formulated by Frank Daniel as “somebody wants something badly and is having difficulty getting it”[3]). But I was wary of attempting to portray the transgender experience in a shallow, superficial way in order to make it visual; being transgender is fundamentally about body dysmorphia and gender roles within the family and society, not about clothes and mannerisms. Mainstream cinema has tended to portray homosexuality visually through the use of flamboyance or camp (for example in The Birdcage, The Producers etc), while portrayals of transgender people are still almost unknown outside of specialist films such as The Danish Girl and the documentary A Deal with the Universe. But the lack of positive portrayals of LGBT+ characters was one of my motivations to pursue the idea.
And yet, as modern feminism widely holds, gender is performative[4]. It struck me that, for that matter, so is being a priest. The key idea of ‘Let Us Pray’ is that both being a woman and being a priest are identities, things that people may strongly believe are what they must do with their life (in this case producing a conflict). But since both of those things are roles that people perform, I was encouraged to hope that there might be a way of telling the story by showing them being done. And preferably in a more sympathetic way than Jimmy McGovern’s 1994 film Priest, which externalises the experience of being gay as putting on a leather jacket and going out to a gay bar to pick up an attractive stranger for car sex.
An idea I hit upon in an early draft as a visual metaphor for ‘transition’ was to use footsteps, as Sam (the priest character) moves from one place to another. In later drafts I made even more of the action involve walking, partly to emphasise this point, and partly to add visual interest. In doing this I was also motivated by studying the screenplay of Love Me or Leave Me Alone, another film which is almost all movement; I noticed that certain scenes in the screenplay which were static, for example an early scene where Steven sits on a sofa smoking and watching TV, were absent from the final cut.
It was the idea of visual metaphor which led me to think of magical realism. Before this, I was struggling to reconcile the need to tell the story in a visually interesting way with the need for the protagonist to engage with the rules of the Catholic church to bring out the conflict central to the story. Clearly that would require dialogue, and at the beat-sheet stage I had designed various other characters for the priest to talk to, but each of my attempts to use that approach raised the problem that introducing other characters diluted the main character’s story.
Magical realism involves “the interaction of the bizarre with the entirely ordinary”[5] – the use of fantastical elements to help show contemporary reality in a new way, often beginning as a metaphor that is extended into the narrative as though it were part of the realism (and treated by the characters as though it were). It struck me that because visual metaphors were what I needed, this could be a useful narrative technique. And as Maggie Ann Bowers has noted, a characteristic of magical realism “is its inherent transgressive and subversive properties. It is this feature which has led many postcolonial, feminist and cross-cultural writers to embrace it as a means of expressing their ideas.”[6] This seemed a perfect fit with my screenplay’s feminist and intersectional stance that women, including of course transgender women, should be able to be priests.
Magical realism is a narrative mode which is relatively well-developed in fiction, but there are few examples in film. Examples of magical realism in mainstream film include Being John Malkovich, in which the characters readily accept the existence of the portal, and Amélie, in which objects such as a bedside lamp and a strip of photographs can talk. I was particularly inspired by Amélie, both by its sense of whimsy and by the naturalness with which Amélie’s daydreams come to life. I was interested to see if the same technique could be used to animate the thoughts of Sam, my priest character, given that Sam too is a kind of dreamer, believing in the existence of miracles and saints.
Renato Olivia has argued that magical realism works because images from dreams are as real as any other image in our psyche, and that “in dreams, images of demons and gods are brought back to life […] not only as a representation but as presence, because the archetypes for demons and gods alike are alive and active in the psyche”[7]. This gave me the idea of making a saint actually present, at an early moment in the screenplay, to set up a conversation with a more ambiguous fantastical character, a gargoyle, before the climax. Saint Thérèse and the gargoyle are metaphors for parts of Sam’s psyche, made visual.
As a device for storytelling, I believe magical realism was fairly successful in improving ‘Let Us Pray’, particularly because it is such a short film; to use it more extensively in a longer film would be to risk the magical-realist features upstaging the other subject matter. Using non-realist characters removes the audience’s expectations that those characters will have a context or back-story, and clearly exempts them from “the screenwriting rule that says: Every single character in your movie must change in the course of your story”[8]. And I felt that the using a gargoyle was an especially emotionally potent way of visually expressing body dysmorphia. While I did not find ways to use visual metaphors for every part of Sam’s journey, the use of magical realism did reduce the amount of dialogue needed, making the screenplay more visual. That just over half of the 10-page screenplay is still dialogue, is more a limitation of the premise: the conflict arising because of Catholic dogma which the audience must understand, and the hopeful note at the end resulting from the cardinal’s apparent willingness to discard that dogma. However, I was pleased with the contrast between the magical flights of fancy and the touches of realism from real-life experiences that I was able to use, such as the leg-shaving incident (related to me by a trans woman friend) and the punch-code door lock protecting the vestry which I observed being used by priests in a local Catholic church.
Realism in cinema is itself a set of conventions: “Hollywood and its counterparts around the world invented a way of telling stories through a specifically cinematic organization of time and space”[9] – dissolves to evoke the passing of time, over-the-shoulder reaction shots, and so on. Given cinema’s origins showing “magic” (Georges Méliès in fact trained as a magician under Robert Houdin), it seems to me a neglected area to explore magical realism in films. Writing the screenplay for ‘Let Us Pray’ left me wanting to see not only more sympathetic and realistic portrayals of trans people, but also more magical realism in new films.
[1] C.W. Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. by Richard Winston (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965), p. 195.
[2] John Yorke, Into the Woods (London: Penguin Books, 2013), p. 116.
[3] Quoted in David Howard & Edward Mabley, The Tools of Screenwriting (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 22.
[4] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 2006 [1990]), p. 34.
[5] Rawdon Wilson, “Metamorphoses of Fictional Space”, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community ed. by Lois Parkinson Zamora & Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 210.
[6] Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), pp. 66-67.
[7] Renato Olivia, “Re-dreaming the world”, in Coterminous Worlds ed. by Elsa Linguanti, Francesco Casotti & Carmen Concilio (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopo BV, 1999), p. 173.
[8] Blake Snyder, Save the Cat! (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2005), p. 134.
[9] Robert Stam, Literature through Film (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 11.
As a footnote, I can reveal that I didn’t get a particularly good mark for this work (the screenplay and essay above judged together); in fact, it was the lowest mark I got for any module in my MA (I got a distinction overall). Clearly I’m not cut out to be a screenwriter, so it’s lucky that’s not a thing I want to be. The fact that one of the two (anonymous) markers left me comments that included some obvious transphobia suggests one reason they didn’t like my work.
Anyway, let us leave this side-track behind. Next week, we’ll be back in Sequel Country exploring another topic to do with the art and/or craft of writing a sequel. If you want to find out what it is, make sure you’re a subscriber! As always, it’s completely free.
I agree, there have undoubtedly been women priests before and it's rumoured there was once a woman pope. But it has always been hushed up, so I really meant "first" in the sense of the first not to be hushed up. Yes, Sam wanted to come out eventually - the screenplay is about her making up her mind. Going into a bit more detail about her motivation would have needed more than a 10 minute film.
Thank you for reading and liking - this post got my lowest number of view so far.
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First, I very much doubt your Sam was the first woman priest. We just don't know about the others - I'm pretty sure that unlike doctors or soldiers, any such discovery on death would be hidden immediately. Second, I did get the feeling that Sam wanted to be found out.