Bad Music Videos

The album Raising Sand with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss is really good.  The two music videos I have seen, however, are really not.  Take a look at these two great songs and associated awful videos.

Sorry for the Vevo ads too.

Adam's Rib (1949)

This is the first old movie on the list.  Old black-and-white movies are something you grow up around, but not usually seeing too much of unless one seeks them out.  I'd never seen a Katharine Hepburn movie before, and probably never heard of Spencer Tracy, or at least didn't know who he was.  (My mom has now greatly recommended me to go watch On Golden Pond now.  That's way down the list.)  It will be interesting as this project goes on to see more deeply what the art of cinema was like in the Golden Age of Hollywood.  All of today's major genres, at least as far as I can think of, were established by that time.  Will what was funny in a romantic comedy then still seem funny now?  Will the movies that scared audiences shitless back then still do so today, when CGI effects make anything imaginable possible on screen?  Essentially, if story itself is immortal, how will the story in old films come off today?  A well-told story should ideally be as powerful one hundred years later as it was when the film was first premiered.  Adam's Rib begins my investigation of this.  

I would classify the movie as a courtroom drama and a romantic comedy.  The plot concerns the married couple of Adam and Amanda Bonner, both lawyers.  Adam has to prosecute a woman accused of attempting to kill her husband when she discovered him cheating.  When Amanda hears the specifics of the case, she is affronted by what she perceives as society's unequal treatment of men and women, believing that no man would ever be brought to trial for what the woman did.  Amanda takes on defending the woman as her cause, and Adam and Amanda battle the issue out in court and at home.

Story Analysis

Act I

Sequence: Doris shoots Warren

• A woman follows her husband unseen through the streets of New York one day after work.  She follows him to an apartment building where she bars the door and follows him in, still unnoticed.  Inside, she pulls a gun out of her purse and bursts into an apartment to find him on a couch with another woman, kissing her.  The kissing couple see her and immediately are scared and jump up.  The husband tries to reason with her, but Doris, the wife, puts her head down and starts shooting.  She shoots several rounds, one of which catches her husband, after which she starts crying and drops the gun.  The other woman then runs to the door and yells for help.

Sequence: Adam and Amanda take opposite sides on trial

• The power couple of Adam and Amanda Bonner, both lawyers, are awoken the next morning by their maid, and find on the front pages of their newspapers the story of Doris Attinger, the woman who tried to shoot her husband.  Their reactions to the news story differ, with Adam despairing that anyone should be walking around the city carrying a loaded gun, while Amanda at least finds some sympathy with the woman for having done what lots of men probably would have done in the same situation.  They continue their discussion of the event as Amanda drives them both to work.  Amanda's grievance is that society seems to permit men to do certain things and not women, and wonders "why let this deplorable system carry over into courts of law?"
• At work, Adam, an assistant prosecutor in the New York District Attorney's office, finds out that he's been handed the Attinger case.  Though his men reassure him the case will be a cinch, he moans that it's "the one case I doesn't want."
• Meanwhile at her office, private defense attorney Amanda asks her assistant what she thinks about the event.  Her assistant also seems to hold the belief that while it's not nice but understandable for a husband to cheat on his wife, it's "something terrible" for the wife to cheat on the husband.  The double standard continues to bother Amanda, when she suddenly gets a phone call from her husband, who tells her with a laugh that he's been chosen to prosecute the Attinger woman.  When he continues to laugh and belittle her negative reaction, she hangs up the phone and declares that she's taking the case of Doris Attinger.

Sequence: Adam discovers they are opposing each other in the trial, lines drawn in sand

• That very day, Adam goes to the hospital to meet Warren, the injured husband of Doris Attinger, to interview him and get facts on the case.  Warren sits back in the bed, his shoulder in a cast, and loudly complains that the whole reason for Doris' attack is simply that she's "crazy."  He does not take the interview seriously, answering Adam's questions with sarcasm and a sense of self-entitlement.  Beryl Caighn, the woman he'd been cheating with, sits behind him, patting his head and even holding his cigarette for him.
• Amanda, meanwhile, goes to the jail to talk to Doris.  Doris is deferent in her answers and almost too polite to Amanda and her secretary.  She tells Amanda the story of her failed marriage to Warren and that she began to suspect he was with another woman when he stopped beating her.  She then recounts her actions on the previous day: after Warren did not come home at night for the fourth night in a row, she had finally had enough.  She took her children to school, then bought a gun at a hock shop.  (The nice man there even gave her an instruction book, as she didn't even know how to use the trigger.)  She followed Warren at lunch, tried to call him at work and angered him, then went to wait for him.  When she states that she wanted to kill him, Amanda interjects, "Suppose we wait until later to decide what you wanted to do."  She quizzes her about what she did at Beryl's apartment.  Doris explains that she didn't want to kill Warren or Beryl, but only to scare Beryl away.  She doesn't remember much of the event though, because the whole thing felt like a "dream," a point Amanda makes sure her assistant writes down.
• Adam returns home that night late with a gift as Amanda and the maid prepare the dining table for a dinner party that night.  She passes by him in a hurry without accepting his kiss on the cheek, instead telling him to get ready, the guests will be arriving in twenty minutes.  Upstairs, he leaves the gift out for her to find it.  She does, and opens the box to find a flowered bonnet.  She loves it, and he lovingly tells her it's the best hat in the world, "for the best head."
• Company starts arriving before they can finish sharing the moment.  As the party gets underway, Adam helps get trays of drinks together.  At the bar, he listens to Amanda talking to a friend who is a judge, telling him about her new case.  Aware that Adam is right behind her and doesn't know yet, she sheepishly tells the judge that she's just taken on the case of defending Doris Attinger.  Adam hears this and drops the tray of drinks, spinning to look at her.
• The guests then all gather to watch Adam and Amanda's home movies.  The film shows comic images of Adam and Amanda on vacation at their house in Connecticut, including one scene where they make the last mortgage payment on the property.  Among the guests is the across-the-hall neighbor Kip, a flamboyant Broadway composer who openly covets Amanda.  Kip makes wry, mocking comments at every scene, as Adam sits sulking in a chair.  Amanda notices Adam's bad mood, and worries about what she may have done.
• After the party, Amanda brings the issue up with him.  Adam pleads with Amanda to please, just drop the case.  He knows it's going to be a media firestorm if they are on opposite sides of the case, but she tells him again that she's going to get Doris freed the same as any man would go free.  In his emotion, Adam starts mixing up his syllables while speaking, which she poo-poohs by saying he's so "cute when excited."  Finally, Adam ends the argument with the promise to cut her up into 12 little pieces and feed her to the jury if she stays on the case.  A tense moment, then they turn the lights out, hug and kiss, and go to bed.

Act II

Sequence: Amanda brings new challenges to him on several levels

• Before the proceedings even begin on the first day at court, Adam is surprised and dismayed to see Doris enter the courtroom wearing the hat he got Amanda.  The judge begins the jury selection process, and Adam briefly questions a juror and accepts.  Amanda then asks whether the juror believes in equal rights for women, to which he replies "certainly not," and she throws him out.  Adam is thrown off, realizing he's facing a barrage of new, somewhat cutthroat, tactics from his wife.
• Getting home that night, Adam acts reserved and avoids Amanda's kiss.  She follows him and tries to find out what's wrong.  Finally, while cooking dinner, he asks her again, more gently, to drop the case, but she refuses again.
• Just as they're about to eat, Kip knocks on the door, and Adam lets him in.  Kip comes straight to sit by Amanda at the table, praising her about her front page coverage in the newspapers, and hoping she'll win.  Adam sits wordless through the meal, then Kip finally says he wrote a song for Amanda, and goes to play it for them on the piano.  "Farewell, Amanda" is another strong come-on to Amanda; she sits laughing, accepting his praise and adoration, as Adam sits sternly.

Sequence: Testimonies of Beryl, Warren, and Doris

• The next day in court, Warren Attinger's other woman Beryl sits on the stand to be questioned.  After Adam's factual, perfunctory questions, Amanda viciously discredits and embarrasses Beryl, forcing to her to admit that she was wearing a black silk negligee when Warren came over, virtually overturning her story that Warren was only there to sell her insurance.
• She then quizzes Warren about how he has behaved toward Doris in his marriage.  Warren admits he doesn't ever get Doris any gifts, and that he hits her.  When Warren claims not to recall immediately whether he got his wife anything for her birthday, she says that "husbands remember their gifts," a stab at Adam who sees Doris once again wearing the hat he gave to Amanda.  He then baldly states that he stopped loving Doris several years before, when she started getting too fat, which brings her to tears.  Amanda concludes simply by asking him whether he considers himself a good husband.  Warren sits straight in his chair and earnestly tells her that he does.
• Adam then takes his turn with Warren, asking more details about the marriage.  Warren claims that Doris also hit him often, shoving him into doors, attacking him whenever he went to sleep.  Warren claims to have been made into a nervous wreck by Doris.
• Questioning of Doris follows. Amanda asks her about the day of the shooting.  Doris retells the story of the attack, how she was too nervous to take careful aim, and did not intend to kill anybody.  Amanda moves in for the money shot, and asks why Doris did it then; Doris finally cries, "I have three children -- she was breakin' up my home!"  The court is audibly stirred.
• While Doris is still crying, Adam begins his cross-examination.  Unsympathetically, he chides her for her behavior, for hitting her husband.  Amanda breaks him off by objecting, and they get into a personal argument in court, ending by quoting the poet Cosgrave, yelling over both Adam and the judge, who is trying to establish order.
• That night at home, they trade relaxing backrubs with each other.  Adam turns on the radio to look for news, but the song "Farewell Amanda" is playing instead.  He leaves it on, then turns it off when Amanda starts humming along.  Provoked, he finally slaps her on the bottom, hard.  She recoils and covers herself, stunned at his actual display of violence.  They argue about the case, with Adam saying that she is abusing the law in courtroom.  When Amanda starts crying, he then accuses her of using the female "juice," tears, to try to get her way.  She kicks him in the leg and storms out of the room.

Sequence: Adam driven to leave the apartment

• The next day in court, Amanda surprises everyone by bringing dozens of women to give testimony, whom she says can give a witness to the years, centuries, of women's oppression by men.  The judge asks her to just do with three, so she brings up in order a highly qualified scientist, a construction foreman whose husband works under her, and an Olympic weightlifter/circus performer.  The last woman gives testimony to how she could lift up a man holding a 350-lb barbell in her circus act.  When Adam gets up to object to the judge, Amanda has the woman slip around behind him and suddenly lift him up.  She holds him up above her head, and the crowd erupts in uproars as the courtroom literally degenerates into a circus.
• Amanda gets home late that night, carrying a gift in a box.  She finds Adam skulking on the couch, but when she sits down next to him, he gets up and walks away.  She follows him around through several rooms in the house, asking him what she's done to hurt him.  She asks if she's gone too far, well, hasn't he ever done so as well? to which he says "Once."  Moving into the closet, he finally opens up and tells her that she's got contempt for the law.  "If a law is bad, then change it, don't bust it wide open."  Packing a suitcase, he tells her that marriage is also a law, a contract between two people, but lately he thinks it has not been fully upheld.  She finally shoves him into the door, which he takes as his cue to leave.  Holding the door open, she warns him not to slam it.  He slams it shut as hard as he can, knocking a painting off the wall and into a lamp, which hits the phonograph that starts playing "Farewell Amanda," sitting out on it.

Act III

Sequence: Amanda wins

• In court, Amanda begins her closing arguments.  She pleads with the jury to treat men and women with equality before the law, but differentiates between the law's letter and spirit.  "Judge not whether the acts were committed, but whether they were justified," she says.  "Any living being is capable of attack if provoked enough."  She then asks the jury to imagine if the sexes of all the persons involved in the case were switched, how they would act.  What would be the view of a husband who went to another man's apartment who had been seeing his wife, and shot off a few rounds to scare him off?  Would that not be treated as an everyday occurrence?
• In his closing argument, Adam starts messing up his words, making Amanda snidely laugh at him, throwing him off even more.  She objects once more during his oration, and they descend once more into a heated personal argument in court.  He finally accuses her of having presented a false view of her defendant to the court, having coached her and costumed her -- and produces the receipt for the hat to show that he paid for it himself, then demands the hat back and snatches it off of Doris's head.  
• The next day, the jury decides not guilty.
• The courtroom scene becomes chaotic once again, as press photographers start hounding all the persons involved in the trial for pictures.  They awkwardly force Warren and Doris to pose together, holding hands, then add Beryl to the mix, then the three children of Warren and Doris.  They also force Adam and Amanda together, neither of whom can force themselves to fully smile.  They exchange a few brief words, Amanda reminding Adam that they have an appointment together to go over their taxes with their accountant the next day,  then they leave separately.

Sequence: They decide to divorce

• That night, Amanda has dinner with Kip in his apartment.  He continues to make more strong passes at her, especially now that her and Adam are seemingly split, but her mind is preoccupied with him.
• Adam comes to the building to confront her once more.  Seeing her shadow through the window, he knows that she's in Kip's apartment.  He borrows the passkey from the elevator operator in a ruse, then, shockingly, draws a gun out before he opens the door.  He enters to find them in what looks like a passionate kiss (Kip was just trying to get her to try a stage kiss with him), and they freeze when they see the gun in his hand.  Kip hides behind Amanda, and she tries to reason with him.  She shouts at him that he can't do that, he has no right.  He asks her to repeat that, and she does, but stops midsentence, realizing the contravention with her argument in the trial.  Adam then puts the gun in his mouth, and just when they think he's going to shoot himself, he bites off the front of the gun: it's made of licorice.
• He sits down, smiling easily to himself, having proved what he wanted to prove.  The three soon begin shouting again, and begin to fight.  They exit the apartment, agreeing that they will settle their properties for a divorce with the accountant the next day as Amanda flees the building.

Act IV

Sequence: They reconcile

• At the accountant's office the next day, they sit far from each other, across the room, and avoid directly addressing each other or looking at each other.  The accountant names check purchases from the past year one-by-one for them to claim.  When they get to the final payment on the mortgage on their Connecticut house, Adam breaks down in tears.  Seeing his tears, Amanda finally feels remorse, rethinks their separation, then instead asks him if he wants to try to make it out to the country house by dinner time together.  They leave the accountant together, reconciled.
• At the country house, they share much better spirits, the old magic of their marriage revived.  Adam tells Amanda that the heads of the Republican party want him to run for an open county judgeship, which race is almost a sure bet.  Amanda congratulates him, then begins to asks, jokingly, if the Democratic candidate is yet picked.  He tells her that he could stop her from running, she asks how, and he says by crying.  He then demonstrates how, like a woman, he knows how to cry to get what he wants.  The tears are real, the emotion is real, but it's just manipulated some to get what he wants.  
• They ask whether men or women are really different after all.  Amanda settles that they are equal after all; he still believes there is a little difference.  Then he tells her, pulling the curtains on the bed shut with gusto, "Hooray for the difference!"

The plots of this film consist of: the strife in the Bonners' marriage, which form the central plot; Kip's pursuit of Amanda's affection, which complicates the Bonners' marriage difficulties; and the trial itself, which besides obviously instigating the problems in their union, also provides a contrast to the Bonners' marriage by showing a completely failed marriage.  

A difficulty I had in diagramming the story was deciding who should be regarded as the protagonist.  Perhaps it is Adam, who takes more willful actions in reaction to the unraveling of their relationship: he gives a gift, he leaves her, he scares her with the fake gun, and he cries to finally bring her back around.  But on the other hand, Amanda seems to take the lead more of the time: she decides to pursue the case (unlike Adam, who is elected to do so within the D.A. office), and it is her revelation and change in behavior at the end, in Jules's office, that finally resolves the conflict in their relationship.  

In my reading on this movie around the internet, I came across one page that provided a useful answer to this conundrum, which I vacillated on several times.  Some blog or page somewhere made reference to the idea of regarding Adam and Amanda's love as the true protagonist, an idea which does work, and which I was beginning to guess at by the time I read it.  It is really their love we are rooting for; knowing that they have a good marriage, we do not desire to see one or the other prevail, which would be the case if only one of them were the protagonist.  Rather, the audience desires to see them level with one another, to preserve their marriage.  It seems that this is a convention of the romantic comedy genre; I am going to do more reading on it in a book called Writing the Romantic Comedy, which the NY Public Library luckily does have.  

As far as my story analyzing goes, either McKee's book differs from these movies, or I'm not getting fully what scenes are.  McKee says that a typical movie has 40-60 scenes; my breakdown here, where each bullet point is supposed to represent a scene, has 31.  A scene is supposed to be a "story event" according to his definition, meaning that it is an event in which at least one story value changes for a character: some event that creates meaningful change.  I tried to honestly break this down into the smallest bits I could that made sense, but still wind up with relatively few, and I know my past analyses also have had less than 40.  I'm not fully sure how important this even is, but if I want to be able to do it, I should probably understand it.  Perhaps some things that could have been broken down more would be the starting sequence, for example, where Doris pursues Warren and shoots him.  Perhaps the first event could be when she spots him leaving work, sparking her motivation and curiosity again.  She follows him through the city, and finally sees him go into an apartment building.  She is now standing inside the lair, pulling a gun out: the event is actual confrontation with the other woman, which crystallizes her anger and causes her to decide to go in and shoot up the room.  Doris then enters and does so, which is itself an event, resulting in the changes of being shot and frightened for Warren, being attacked and frightened for Beryl, and being overwhelmed by emotion for Doris, who collapses and does not attempt to flee.  Why does it matter that all of these things are divided as separate scenes, story wise?  The small events seem to really be of little consequence; it felt to me when looking over the story over all that the thing to really note about this is that Doris shoots Warren, which kicks off everything else.  Of course, as McKee does himself say, a sequence is supposed to bring about a moderate level change, while a scene is really only supposed to bring about minor change.  So perhaps I do need to take closer looks at what I have called large scenes that conclude sequences, and try to see how they can be broken up.

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

On vacation (sort of) with the family in Savannah, Georgia.  Today after stuffing ourselves silly at Paula Deen's restaurant, we came back to the hotel and rested.  There was nothing worth watching on the 20-odd channels of hotel TV, so my family decided for the first time ever to order an on-demand movie, The Adjustment Bureau, and watched it together as one.  (I expected it to cost just a few bucks, but it cost $15 plus tax, which I really didn't think was worth it, but we got a sentimental experience out of it anyway.)  Then tonight, as per usual for staying in a hotel with the fam, I couldn't sleep at all, so now I'm down in the hotel's "business center" -- an old computer on a table by the front door in the lobby -- writing this up, rather than spending more brooding hours with nothing to do in a pitch dark room.  I'm leaving for the airport at 4 o'clock, about an hour and fifteen minutes from now, and would rather finish this now, so the "scene analysis" may be skimpy here.  No great loss for this movie.

The plot concerns a rising New York state politician, David Norris, who meets his One True Love on the night of a lost election.  He is prevented from calling her again later, but doesn't forget about her.  Three years later, he runs into her again, and shadowy men in hats start overtly interfering in his life to keep him away from her.  He resists again, fighting for his love, at which point they tell him he better stop.  He doesn't, then he does, then when she's about to get married he runs to go claim her back once and for all.  She's a bit pissed about his spotty behavior in the past, but trusts him, and then they seemingly have to flee from destiny itself.

Scene Analysis

• David Norris is a candidate for the US Senate in New York State, 2006.  His political rise was legendary: after losing both of his parents at a young age, he eventually becomes the youngest congressman ever elected.  His youth and personality endear him to the young people of his district (Brooklyn, incidentally), for example, getting into a bar brawl on the night of his first electoral victory.  However, a late-breaking scandal in this campaign has ruined his chances in this, his first Senate campaign.  As he receives the dismal numbers in his campaign HQ, a group of men in polished suits and hats mysteriously talk about how they are tired, and ready for the race to be over.
• David excuses himself to a bathroom in the hotel for a private moment, and to put his thoughts together for a concession speech.  After running through the speech several times, a woman finally comes out of one of the stalls and apologizes for being there the whole time.  She's hiding out from security, having crashed a wedding upstairs, to which he replies that he too has crashed a few weddings in his time.  They spark up a conversation, and she recognizes him as the Senate candidate, and gathers he has lost.  He tries to say his loss doesn't bother him, but she sees through his facade and he talks for once about the reality and the inauthenticity of his job.  He just begins to kiss her when his campaign manager Charlie comes in the bathroom and interrupts them.  She flees, and he's pulled reluncantly to give his address.
• David begins his boilerplate concession speech, but abandons the script and instead gives a sincere address about how prepared his tie was, the lines of his speech, how his shoes are chosen to have just the perfect amount of scuff on them to appeal to voters.
• The speech ironically sells him to voters beautifully, and he becomes the presumed front-runner for the next Senate election.  About a month after the election, David is heading to his new position at an investment bank one morning.  He gets on a bus and happens to run into Elyse, and they rekindle their conversation like longtime friends.  A man in a hat, meanwhile, has missed his mark and chases after the bus, trying to ruin David's conversation with her.  David spills his coffee on Elyse, but they still end amicably, and he gets her number. 
• David gets to his office and immediately calls Charlie to rave about having run into the girl again.  He heads to a meeting, for which he is earlier than expected, and opens the door to find men in hats seemingly preparing the room, shining a light on the bald head of a frozen Charlie.  They betray surprise, and start to come for him, causing him to flee through the office.  They finally corner him and put him under.
• He wakes up in some unknown concrete warehouse room.  There they talk to him and tell him he is not allowed to try to find Elyse any more.  He has already seen something he's never supposed to have seen, and he is forbidden to tell anyone else what has happened, or they will literally reset his brain, making him dead to the world.  They seem to have superhuman powers, such as mindreading, and say that he is messing with the plan.  The leader takes the paper with Elyse's number and burns it, then they let him go.
• David goes to talk to Charlie, but he remembers nothing about the men in his office, nor of hearing about the girl.  He notices David acting strange, and David excuses himself to take the rest of the day off.
• He sits in a bar for lunch and is trying to remember her number when the first man in the hat sits down next to him and starts talking about the situation.  David demands answers from Harry, but he simply tells him to meet on a ferry later.
• On the ferry, David tries to ask why he cannot see Elyse any more, but Harry is tight-lipped, and just tells him it's better for the both of them if he does not try to find her.
• Three years pass, when David finally sees her again on the sidewalk.  He catches up with her, and tries to apologize, but she was baffled and hurt at how he left her hanging last time.  However, they reestablish a positive connection.
• Two of the mystery men, the leader (Richardson) and one who was possibly Asian or Hispanic, observe this meeting and express chagrin.  They consider options for how to sever the link between David and Elyse once more.  When David kisses her good-bye on the cheek, they realize the connection has been made very strongly, and the ripples may be too great for Richardson to interfere.
• David leaves to go give a speech announcing his campaign for Senate, and plans to come to Elyse's dance rehearsal immediately afterwards at the nearby Pier 17.  The hatmen interfere and have her rehearsal moved to an obscure studio called Cedar Lake, and she must make the career choice between seeing David or going to her rehearsal.  She goes to the rehearsal.
• David finishes his speech and quickly boats across the river to the Pier 17 studio, but sees a sign posted on the door saying the rehearsal was moved to Cedar Lake.  He tries to use the phone in a parking booth to find where Cedar Lake is, but the hatmen make the line fail.  He finds out from a person where Cedar Lake is, but then cannot hail a cab.  Finally he reaches Cedar Lake, and sees her dancing, which cements his desire for her, against the wishes of the hatmen.
• Richardson goes to advise his superior of the situation with David Norris.  The man, Thompson, pulls out a book and explains that in an earlier version of the plan, David and Elyse were supposed to in fact be together.  When the plan was changed, not everything could be fully undone, so certain elements of the world seem to impel them together.
• David, meanwhile, goes to a club with Elyse.  Lots of the young drunk people there recognize him and say they voted for him.  He and Elyse talk afterwards at her place, about his parents, his childhood dreams.  He comments he just told a lot of personal stuff to someone he admittedly does not even know all that well -- is she even single?  Yes comes the answer, and down go the panties.  They make love, then sleep in each other's arms, as Richardson observes tut-tuttingly.
• The next morning, they awake and Elyse finds that she has four missed calls from her ex-fiance Adrian.  David asks why she didn't marry him.  Elyse explains that she knew what she had with David was true love, and she was waiting for him to reappear.
• David doesn't want her to leave his side, so he takes her with him to an interview on the Daily Show.  However, backstage he's taken aside by Richardson, who finally attempts to stop David's resistance by telling him what the plan is.  Richardson takes David to the theater Elyse is now performing in, and tells him that she is also destined to become an internationally renowned dancer and master choreographer.  She is on the verge of a major career breakthrough, but if she stays with David, her career will start and she will "teach ballet to six-year-olds."  Peeking in the door, David watches as Richardson messes up her jump, and she falls and is hurt in the middle of her performance.
• David goes to see Elyse at the hospital, where she has a sprained foot.  She is glad to have his support, but conflicted over what he has been told, David finally tells her he's going to make a phone call, and doesn't come back.
• The hatmen converge once more after this to go over the plan.  Richardson reassures a doubtful Harry that Thompson has corrected their paths, and nothing will go awry now.  Harry begins to seriously question the wisdom of their mission.
• Eleven months later, David sees in the newspaper that Elyse, now being covered in the dance section of the New York Times, is engaged to Adrian.  David mourns the development, but relegates himself to his fate.
• He leaves work for the day, and goes to the bar.  To his surprise, Harry has left a note for him to come meet him that night.  David meets Harry, who then explains that Thompson has in fact been lying--David can be with Elyse, but doing so would stifle his drive to become President, which does interfere with the grander plan overall.  Harry, in his disillusionment with the organization, decides to help David to get past the other men in hats and reach Elyse.  
• By wearing a hat, David can use doors as portals to other doorways far off.  New York turns out to be a maze of these "substrates," but David memorizes a path to take him past the hat men and to Elyse's wedding at the courthouse.
• In the morning, David breaks out of his hiding place near the water, and starts pursuing Elyse with something like 10 minutes left before her wedding.  The hatmen are monitoring the situation, and begin chasing when he leaves the building to come after her; they are surprised however when they realize he has started using the substrates.
• After a chase, David comes to the courthouse, where he searches for Elyse.  He finds her in a bathroom, where she is crying a little before her wedding--inside, she doesn't really want to go through with it.  He confronts her, and tells her rather clumsily that he loves her and he's not going to let her marry that guy.  He tells her he can explain, but for now they need to run.  There is a lot she needs to know, but for now he gains her trust by demonstrating how he can step through doors to other places with the substrate.
• They run through a few places, with the hatmen trailing behind.  Finally they reach the Statue of Liberty, and stop for a bit.  He knows that they can't outrun the hatmen forever; he must somehow stop their action.  David realizes they must take the matter to the Chairman, commander of the hatmen.  He tells her where they are going, and they could be in danger of losing their minds, but she has to trust him, and does she want to take that chance with him?  She finally does, and together they go through a door opened counterclockwise, taking them into the HQ of the hatmen.
• Inside, they find a maze of a building that looks something like the New York library.  They start running through, going past desks, security people and such.  The agency soon realizes they have intruders, and what look like Nazi footsoldiers start chasing them, marching in a line.
• David and Elyse are chased until they reach the top of the building, a skyscraper roof.  Trying to escape being cornered, David and Elyse go through a door only to wind up back on the roof.  They turn and await the vicious hat people army, but it doesn't come.
• Instead, Richardson and Harry appear on the roof with them.  Richardson is telling them why they are being pursued: these men are the adjustment bureau, who have had a hand in controlling most of human history.  He explains that for thousands of years, humans had no free will, but were controlled secretly by the adjustment men.  Finally some of them said that humans should be allowed to make their own choices--free will.  What followed was the dark ages for a thousand years or so.  Free will was suspended again for the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so forth, until 1910, when humans were given another shot at controlling themselves.  After two world wars and the Great Depression, free will was put on hold again.  This is the role the Adjustment Bureau men play, altering humans' paths to conform with the plan from above.  Harry suddenly interrupts with an envelope, saying he has a message from the chairman.  Richardson looks inside, and says "I see."  
• Harry then speaks to them, and shows them the message: a paper with the complex path of David and Elyse, travelling in parallel through much of the mire, then a dotted line dived the page, and their paths cross over into blank space on the other side.  They have been awarded with free will.
• David and Elyse live happily ever after, telling the audience the message about people making better choices for themselves; deserving free will once they have made difficult choices.

Overall, the movie was not that great; it certainly looked better in commercials than it was.  It took what had the potential to be a great political sci-fi thriller, and turned out a lukewarm love story metaphorically about angels and human choice.  What messed it up, of course, was the story.

The story lacked in a few certain ways that were definitely noticeable.  Too many questions were raised and left unanswered.  Who exactly were these men at the Adjustment Bureau?  Were they human?  Angels?  Devils?  Aliens?  Any could be possible, but they seemed to be very politically interested in earth.  The chairman was never actually encountered.  How did they do what they did?  A counterexample which comes to mind is Inception, which opens with a fantastic scene that demonstrates the mechanics of their dream machinery as well as initiating the story.  More detail in how the substrate worked, and a demonstration of their work altering humans' paths would have done a great deal toward filling out the story world.

Moreover, though, one important element McKee talked about was that for a story to feel satisfying, it must feel like every plateau has been reached; the protagonist has been tested to his fullest, and the forces of antagonism brought to bear against him must be fully exerted.  Only one or the other may then triumph.  If this does not happen, the audience leaves wondering, "Well why didn't they just do that?"  In this case, why did the Adjustment Bureau suddenly stop pursuing him on the top of the tower?  David and Elyse crossed the threshold humans were never supposed to cross; they entered the Adjustment Bureau itself.  We see menacing armies of soldiers and men in hats pursuing them, trying to block their path.  We feel concern, mindful of Thompson's promise at the start to "wipe" David and Elyse's brain if they do what they did.  David and Elyse are finally trapped on the roof of the building, and --- what?  Nothing.  No one comes for them.  Expectations were set but not fulfilled.  The guys in hats seem to have given up.  The climax attempted to address this, with the Chairman having changed his mind, but it doesn't really cover it up.  The audience should not be able to imagine anything else that either the protagonist or the antagonist could do to achieve their goals.  Ultimately the true character of the protagonist and the antagonist determine the direction of the climax.  Who is really stronger?  Smarter?  More willful?  More persistent?  More willing to commit evil, perhaps?  More hungry?  If one or the other is brought to a point where they just say, "Eh, I never really wanted that that much anyway," the audience recognizes the dupe, and dislikes the story.

Last of all, I do see McKee's point in this about the abuse of voiceover narration.  The final scene of voiceover attempts to cover up an otherwise weak ending.  It's like canned resolution.  David simply tells us (having never broken the fourth wall earlier) what the lesson of the movie is.  Better to demonstrate through action.

And no, I did not finish the post in one sitting.

Alien (1979)

Wow.  My shoulders hurt after watching Alien, having been tensed for about two whole hours.  I had never seen this science fiction classic; now I wish I could relive the first time watching it.  At least there's a sequel out there for me, also on McKee's list.  Obviously this post, like all of mine, contains complete plot spoilers.  However, I believe this is the first movie I've posted about where they would make a big difference.  I personally would recommend watching this beforehand so you can have that experience too, although if you've found your way here, you've probably already seen the movie anyway.

The crew of the commercial space towing vessel Nostromo responds to an unknown radio signal coming from a tiny planet along their return journey to Earth.  While on the planet, an alien creature latches onto the face of one of the exploration party members and he is brought back to the ship for treatment.  Long story short, he dies and an alien is let loose in the bowels of the ship, with the six remaining crew members to try to fight it or escape it.

Scene analysis

Act I

Sequence: Going to the planet

• The Nostromo coasts through deep space, towing a gigantic refinery facility and 20 million tons of mineral ore.  The ship moves on autopilot as its mere seven-person crew is held in sleep for the many months of the journey.  On the bridge, a computer screen blips to life, flashing red, as another one activates and begins scrolling strings of numbers.
• The artificial sleep process ends, and the crew emerges out of the sleep state.  Over breakfast, the two lowest workers, engineers Parker and Brett, bring up a grievance over their profit shares for the journey.  The captain of the trip, Dallas, breaks off and goes to the central computer interface, a console called "Mother."  Meanwhile the navigators and pilots head up to the bridge to direct the ship in what they presume will be its approach to Earth.  They soon realize they are not in the solar system, but somewhere far out in the middle of space.  Dallas comes back from Mother and informs them that the ship awoke them when it received a radio transmission possibly signaling intelligent life, possibly a distress call.  Parker now protests the unscheduled and possibly dangerous stop, which he claims is not part of his contract; Ash, the science officer, informs him the contract contains a clause that requires the stop or a complete forfeiture of shares, which shuts Parker up.

Sequence: Alien attacks Kane

• They approach the tiny planet and have a hard landing, disabling their ship for 25 hours or so.  They have landed near the source of the signal, however, so Dallas, executive officer Kane, and navigator Lambert venture out in space suits to see what they can find.  In a misty, dark landscape, they soon reach the apparently ancient wreckage of a ship, not of human origin.  The inside is cavernous but empty; they explore several rooms and see what seems to be a large sarcophagus.  Back on the ship, warrant officer Ripley works on decoding the radio transmission, and finds it not to be a distress call, but a warning.  The adventurous Kane disregards her call to return, as they are already in the ship, and lowers himself into a giant room of eggs.  He touches one, which stirs a life form inside it, and the egg cracks open.  When he leans in for a close look at it, the creature quickly attacks him and breaks through his helmet.

Sequence: Alien gets on ship

• The exploration party returns to the Nostromo with Kane incapacitated, but Ripley, following procedure, refuses to allow them back in with an alien life form.  Dallas tries to command her to open the hatch, but she refuses to put the ship at risk with an alien life form.  Ash, waiting by the hatch door, finally opens the door and lets them in himself, contravening Ripley and the established rules.
• In the infirmary, Dallas and Ash remove Kane's helmet and find a green creature attached to his face.  They discover it has a proboscis going into his mouth and down his throat, feeding him oxygen, and is latched on to his face too hard for them to remove.  Dallas tries to cut its chitinous shell, but the creature's acidic blood splatters on the floor and begins dissolving it.  Worried the substance may eat through the hull, the crew rushes down a level, sees the blood coming through the ceiling and then dissolving the next floor.  They rush down one more level where it finally stops.  Parker remarks wryly that this makes for a great defense mechanism, as "you don't dare kill it."
• Everyone resumes work to leave the planet surface as soon as possible, a bit more worried about the creature they discovered.  Ripley confronts Ash about his choice to let them in, but he defensively blows her off and professes a cool, academic air about the situation.  Below deck, Parker and Brett have forgotten their contractual issues and are now motivated to just get the ship off ground as soon as possible.  
• Ash soon discovers in the infirmary that the creature has disappeared Kane's face, and he, Ripley, and Dallas search for it.  They soon find it dead, and Ripley suggests that they leave it on the planet, but Ash insists they bring it with them back to Earth for examination, and Dallas defers to him.  Then, with the ship not yet fully repaired, but able to fly, Dallas orders the crew to lift the ship off and head back home.

Sequence: Alien kills Kane

• After setting the ship back on autopilot, Ripley continues to bemoan Dallas and Ash's decisions, as the whole crew will now be put under quarantine when they return to Earth.  Lambert informs them that they have about ten more months travel to get back to earth.
• They then get a message from Ash, and head to the infirmary to find that Kane is conscious again, and seemingly okay.  He does not remember any of the attack, but does have a dim recollection of being smothered.
• The crew celebrates Kane's improvement and the continuance of their journey over dinner.  The mood is much more positive, until Kane starts gagging and choking.  He soon is writhing in pain on the table, as the others try to hold him down and control him.  Suddenly blood appears on his shirt, then his chest explodes and a small yellow creature comes out.  Parker moves in to kill it by hand, but Ash stops him.  The baby alien peers around at them, then quickly scuttles out of the room.
• The crew ejects Kane's body out into space, then begins to formulate a plan for how to kill the alien: using an electric shock pole and a net, they plan to trap it and throw it out into space.  They break into two parties and begin searching.

Act II

Sequence: Alien kills Brett

• Ripley, Parker, and Brett are searching one section of the ship where the lights have gone off when the motion detector begins whirring.  Ripley zeroes in on a small storage locker, and the three take positions around it and prepare to get it.  Parker opens the door and the pet cat Jones jumps out and scampers away.  Realizing they don't want the cat to get lost and taken by the alien, they send Brett by himself to go catch the cat.
• Brett searches fearfully for Jones.  He chases the cat behind a pieces of machinery, but hears a noise on the other side of the room, startling him, and scaring the cat away.  He then notices a slimy yellow object and the floor, and picks it up to see the alien has shed its skin.  He next wanders into a large room with jangling chains hanging from the ceiling and condensation water dripping down.  He stops for a while to let the water drip on his face, then spies Jones in the corner once again.  He moves in to trap the cat, and just when he is about the grab it, the cat begins hissing at something behind him.  Realizing it must be the alien, he turns, but the alien now is a sleek black color, taller than him, and has a ferocious, grotesque mouth, dripping with saliva and containing dozens of sharp teeth.  He screams, and Parker and Ripley come only to see the alien carrying him up the chains and away.

Sequence: Dallas dies

• Down to five, the crew reconvenes to figure a new way to deal with the alien.  Now knowing that it moves in the air ducts, they concoct a plan to force it toward an opening into space, and eject it that way.  Dallas volunteers to crawl through the ducts by himself, with the others monitoring his location on a scanner and controlling the vents.  Realizing their weapons from before will now be useless, Dallas goes in with a flamethrower, hoping the alien will at least be repelled by fire.
• In the air duct, Dallas searches for the alien, with guidance from Lambert.  Growing more scared as he moves, she finally tells him the scanner has picked up the alien, somewhere near the third junction.  He enters this area, and does not see it.  Lambert's scanner starts malfunctioning, and she tells him to stay put.  She gets it working again, and panics to see the alien is moving in on him.  Dallas starts scrambling down the nearest ladder, but at the bottom, the alien jumps out of the darkness and takes him.  Parker goes and finds only his gun, no blood, no signs of Dallas.

Sequence: Ash revealed

• The remaining crew members once more reconsider their dire situation.  Parker wants to just go kill the motherfucker, while Lambert is growing more and more horrified, pleading that they just abandon the ship and take the shuttle the rest of the way.  Ripley is now the highest-ranking crew member, though, and she counsels that they continue Dallas' plan to trap and eject the alien; the small shuttle can't take four people the rest of the way anyway.  She remonstrates Ash for causing this all once more, then goes to see if she can get more information from Mother, as she is now the ranking official.
• Mother says that she can't reveal more about where they are, but Ripley overrides the block and finds out that the ship's coordinates were secretly altered, and the mission changed to collecting an alien life form and returning it to Earth, "crew expendable."  Ash, suddenly standing in the room next to her, tells her there is a very good reason for the change.  Ripley reacts in horror as it seems he knew about the change, and was perhaps even there to ensure the alien came on board.  She tries to escape him, but he traps her in a hallway and starts physically attacking her with superhuman strength.  Parker and Lambert come to her rescue and fight Ash off, who then starts wildly flailing and buzzing.  Parker bashes his head with a heavy object, which knocks Ash's head off from the neck up, exposing circuits and wires inside, revealing him to be a kind of robot.  Ash grapples with Parker some more, but Parker finally manages to subdue and destroy Ash.

Act III

Sequence: Alien kills Lambert, Parker

• Thinking he may have more information for them, the three remaining crew members reactivate Ash's head and ask him how to kill the alien.  He tells them it's impossible, that the alien is a perfect organism, unhindered with conscience, remorse, or reality.  He says they won't succeed, but they have his sympathy.
• They decide now to abandon the ship and travel in the shuttle.  Ripley heads to the bridge to start the automatic self-destruct process, while Parker and Lambert go to fetch some necessary supplies.  While they are stocking a cart, the alien appears, and savagely kills both of them.  Ripley hears their yells and runs to find them.  Their yells stop, however, and she thinks better of going to help them, and runs back by herself to the bridge.

Sequence: Ripley flees the ship

• She calmly begins the self-destruct process.  The operation has a 10-minute timer, with only five minutes in which the process can be reversed.  As she turns the switches, alarms start going off and steam starts coming out of pipes in all the corridors, somewhat impeding her escape.
• Ripley makes her way all the way to the shuttle, carrying Jones with her.  She reaches the last corridor, but finds the alien waiting right around the corner.  Completely panicked, she gives up the hope of escaping on the shuttle, and runs back to the bridge.
• With about 30 seconds left to reverse the self-destruct process, she starts flipping off the switches.  She deactivates them, then hears the countdown come and go: "The option to abort the self-destruct procedure has passed.  The ship will detonate in T-minus five minutes."  Disbelieving this turn, she runs back to the shuttle.
• When she reaches the shuttle, the alien is gone from the corridor.  Cautiously, she enters the shuttle, then with about a minute to go, hurriedly starts ejecting the shuttle from the Nostromo.  The shuttle Narcissus finally detaches, and she collapses in the pilot's chair as the Nostromo detonates in a huge explosion.  In her exhaustion, she can only whisper to herself "I got you, you son of a bitch."

Sequence: Ripley kills alien

• She rises from the chair to set the shuttle on the rest of its course back to earth.  She then begins disrobing, preparing for the sleep on the journey back home.  As she's flipping a control panel of switches, a black, scaly hand suddenly slams down and tries to grab her.  The alien is on the shuttle.
• Ripley yells then stumbles back into her only possible safe space: the airtight, closed off space suit chamber.  She closes the door and withers in fear.  Peeking out, she sees the alien again climbing back into the dark crevice above the control panel.  Ripley improvises her last plan, beginning to slip into the space suit and quietly zip up.
• She puts on the helmet, then opens the lock.  Almost petrified with fear, she steps back over to another switch near the alien.  Singing to herself for comfort, she sits and steels herself for the rush.  She flips the switch, and the shuttle's external door flies open, sucking all the air and anything loose out into space.  The alien is surprised and jerked near the door, but then begins to move toward Ripley.  She grabs a grappling gun on her space suit and shoots the alien with it, knocking it out into space, but still tethered to her by the gun.  She throws the gun toward the door and hits the button to shut it.  The hatch closes with the gun stuck in it, and the alien starts crawling in toward the shuttle.  It swings around and begins climbing into an idle engine exhaust.  Finally, Ripley slams the throttle of the ship, blasting the rocket and sending the alien out into space once and for all.
• Before going into space sleep, Ripley dictates a record for the ship's log.  She recounts the alien life form discovered, and the other six crew members lost.  Finishing her dictation, she strokes the cat and smiles.

One of the great things about Alien, which others such as Roger Ebert have also commented on, is the movie's pacing.  There is a gradual overall rise in action -- horror sequences become longer, encounters with the alien become more frequent -- but it's all punctuated by moments of calm, times where the crew takes stock of its situation anew, and makes their new plan.  The movie takes its time building suspense, creating fear around the creature.  The planet exploration scenes take plenty of time, as the three explorers trek through the misty darkness, through the alien spacecraft, and finally in the egg chamber.  By the time the egg explodes and the alien jumps out, you are wound tight as a drum.  We feel the same when first Brett is taken, then Dallas.

Indeed, the feel of the movie is quite different from the start to the end.  The opening scenes strongly reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially the opening scene with tracking shots of an empty space ship, with no dialog for six minutes.  By the end, you think you're in some Arnold Schwarzenegger action film, as Ripley fights off the monster with a giant flamethrower amidst exploding pipes and alarm lights and sirens going off everywhere.  Of course, Alien handles these action sequences much more moderately and eloquently than your typical action movie fare.

Accompanying the shift in genre feel (if I may term it such) is the shift in story focus.  The story shifts protagonists as it progresses, transferring from the crew as a whole down to Ripley herself as the crew diminishes.  Ripley is in fact a relatively unimportant character early in the movie.  The most interesting crew member early in the film is probably Parker, whose fixation on money disputes divides the crew between him and Brett, and everyone else.  However, once the alien is on board and it is clear they have a problem (Act II), the crew as a single unit is in this together.  There are no individual interests at this point: they know they either all die or all (hopefully live).  There are no splinter groups; there are no people refusing to fight.

This dynamic changes as the antagonism between Ash and Ripley grows.  Ash seems to make every wrong choice, flub every chance for action, and yet refuses to accept blame or defer responsibility.  One begins to question if Ash is sincerely just this inept, or has secret motives to help the alien.  The latter is revealed to be the case when he turns out to be a robot plant, placed there by the company to ensure that the alien made it onto the spacecraft and survived.  (This is a great example of insight in a story, where a revelation illuminates prior actions, and makes the story make sense in a new light.)  Ripley commands the three-man crew, which doesn't last very long, until it truly is just her vs. the alien.

The biggest and most surprising difficulty I find in diagramming the story is in identifying the exact inciting incident, normally a relatively automatic step.  The inciting incident is supposed to be the single event or moment that throws the protagonist's life out of order, that throws a conflict at them that must be resolved, that gives them an object of desire they must irrevocably pursue.  When exactly does this happen in Alien?  Is it when the ship wakes them up at the start?  When Kane gets attacked by the alien hatchling?  Or when the "chestburster" alien explodes out of his chest and escapes into the ship?

There could be arguments for any of the three.  The central plot, indeed the only plot thread of the film, is that of removing the alien.  The climax is undoubtedly the moment when the alien is shot into space once and for all.  So when exactly does this action to fight the alien initiate?  Their lives are first thrown out of order when they are woken up out in the middle of space, and have to investigate the distress signal.  This obviously leads directly to their conflict with the alien.  It could also be when the alien is brought on board attached to Kane.  A crucial moment is when the ship lifts off the planet with the alien on board.  The audience knows that up until then, they weren't really trapped.  Kane was obviously screwed, but they could have still gotten rid of the alien by simply throwing it and him out the door.

But I think all of this is information that builds to the chestburster scene, which is the true inciting incident.  Knowing that the alien has acid blood, knowing that its skin turns into a very hard silicon material, knowing that they are out in space again, and essentially knowing that they are on board with an alien creature they know nothing about, all make the moment when the young alien explodes out of Kane's stomach the pivotal moment: they were all somewhat disturbed about the alien beforehand, but now it cannot be ignored.  Now it is the problem facing them.  This inciting incident does come very late, time-wise, in the story, but the first thirty minutes of the film do not drag; Scott keeps the audience involved with a sense of growing dread, the poor group dynamics of the crew, and the putative plot thread of having to investigate the distress call.  I do not believe this early action counts as a subplot, but I could be argued down on that.  What are others' views?

If the main plot is that of killing or removing the alien, then what is the story's controlling idea?  This is not definite, but I think it must be something like "The rational, calm decision-maker prevails."  A contrast is drawn throughout the film between Ripley and the other leaders of the crew, Dallas, Kane, and Ash.  Ripley, in the face of hostility from the other crew members, refuses to allow Dallas, Lambert and Kane back onto the ship when Kane is stricken with the alien.  It is a violation of policy, and clearly unsafe for the other crew members to allow the alien life form back on board, but wouldn't most people bend that rule when faced with that situation, and your superior yelling at you to open the door?  She is overruled by the seemingly bumbling, inept Ash.  Everything Ash does seems to betray ineptitude and hubris on his part: opening the hatch, stopping Parker from killing the chestburster alien, and not freezing Kane when he is first brought on board.  He overrules Ripley because he feels his position as science officer, and perhaps as a male, gives him superiority to her.  (This is how he would be described before he is revealed to be a robot.)  Finally, the adventuresome Kane rashly leads a crew out onto the planet's surface, and can't help himself from looking up close at one of the alien's eggs, which is how he gets attacked.  Ripley's value system and decision-making contradicts all three of these, and it is what saves her.  

This film also demonstrates, for the first time in this blog I think, that the controlling idea is not to be thought of as the moral of the story.  Certainly Alien does not have a moral.  When Ripley escapes, she has not really triumphed over evil, or won vindication for herself.  She has simply been the only one to survive the encounter with this horrible space creature.  The controlling idea expresses why she was the one to live.  It informs every major incident along the way, every major decision taken by characters, and their consequences.  We can imagine the writers of Alien using this controlling idea statement to work out the story, building the plot turns around it to demonstrate its truth.  The controlling idea is not the moral, but it unifies the story, gives it a single direction.

Alien really does belong in the canon of great sci-fi films that can be enjoyed by the wider culture (not true of all science fiction).  This film, in my mind, also illuminates a connection between science fiction and Westerns, which is the hostility of space itself.  In Westerns, the unsettled land between towns always represents danger.  It is a hot, barren desert, offering no protection, no nourishment, and on top of that, plenty of things that could hurt you, like rattlesnakes, scorpions, and bandits.  Any time a character troops out into the desert, they are putting themselves at risk.  What if you get robbed?  What if your horse dies, or breaks its leg?  What if you drop your canteen and it breaks on the ground?  Once out in the desert, a character has no one to turn to but himself for protection.  Similarly, the Nostromo is ten months away from earth in deep space.  It was diverted from its course, so now is not even on a normal shipping route traveled by humans.  The crew is so remote from help that radio contact with other humans is not even possible.  They are trapped in the cold, dark void of space, with no one but themselves to deal with the alien.

Such isolation helps focus the story down to just the characters themselves.  With minimal tools to work with, and only their brains in their heads and each other, they must figure a way to beat this alien.  This is why the story of Alien works so well.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)

One Scorsese follows another.  This early Scorsese movie, which I'd also never heard of, definitely seems to stick out from the rest of his oeuvre.  It's something of a feel-good movie, about a character who simply wants to get by in a normal, middle-class, law-abiding way, and deals with relationship drama in a way different from any other Scorsese movies I can think of.  The plot concerns a woman, Alice, whose domineering, uncaring husband dies in an accident, which sends her into a scramble for money after years of being a housewife.  The best plan she can come up with is to move with her son to Monterey, California, and pursue her childhood dream of singing professionally.  However, the trip west becomes a much greater challenge than she anticipated, and the rotating dismal jobs and men she meets along the way test her very self-worth.

I have not seen Mean Streets, the only major Scorsese feature which predates this film, but a lot of the Scorsese trademarks are evident in this early film.  The handheld camera style is in some places almost ridiculously pronounced, to the point where you could visualize the cameraman shifting his weight, or navigating around furniture making a path through a room while trying to keep a camera focused on the actors.  The music soundtrack was great, and added much to the film.  (I especially liked the road-trip montage set to "Daniel.")  Alice also performs entire songs in smoky bars throughout the movie, and I just have to say if that's really Ellen Burstyn singing, damn, she's talented.

Act I

Sequence: Inciting Incident--Alice's husband dies, forcing her to find money and raise Tommy on her own

• A young Alice walks on the grounds of the farm she grew up on.  Bored, she dreams to herself of one day escaping and being a singer.  As she's singing, her mom calls her back to the house, saying she'll "beat the living daylights" out of her if she doesn't come quick.
• 27 years later, Alice is a housewife with a husband who doesn't really respect or love her, a sassy son who doesn't really honor her, and no one who appreciates her.  However, while her relationship with her husband is cold, she and her son share a friendly, teasing relationship, and also take refuge in each other from her husband.  She makes a dinner which is taken with little to no praise or thankfulness.  That night in bed, her husband rebuffs her when she tries to talk to him.  She turns over and cries to herself, and her husband superficially tries to comfort her, putting his arm over her without saying anything.
• The next day, Alice is chatting with a friend and trying on a dress. After joking that she feels she could live "without a man around the house," the phone rings, and she gets the news that her husband has just died in a truck crash.  She is speechless and devastated.

Sequence: Leaving Socorro

• After the funeral, a friend of hers asks if she wants her to stay and help around the house.  Alice replies that if she is going to have to learn how to be the only parent, she might as well start learning now.  Her son, Tommy, asks her doubfully what they are going to do for money.  Alice's best idea is to try to be a singer, the only job she's ever held.
• Alice sits down at the piano to see what she still remembers.  Her touch is great, a fine-tuned lounge style, and she has a bedroomy singing voice.  Her talent is a dim ray of promise for her, but the road she's choosing is very hard.  Tommy, watching her play outside the window, knows this, and kicks the dirt as he walks away.
• At a yard sale, Alice gets rid of most of her possessions including lots of personal treasures, some of which she has to give away for free.  She has a teary goodbye with her best friend, then pulls out and starts down the road with her son and all her things packed up in their car.  At the end of the block, he asks "Are we there yet?"

Sequence: Landing in Phoenix

• Travelling is hard.  Especially long drives through the hot southwest with very little money to go on.  Looking around, with Tommy fighting off car sickness, Alice wonders to herself, "Is the whole state shit?"  At least they can listen to "Daniel" on AM radio.
• The first stop along the way is Phoenix.  Tommy asks her in the hotel room if she loved Dad.  Alice gives a non-answering answer like "Oh, how can you ask that?" and tries to prove to Tommy that she is indeed unhappy.
• Alice buys herself a new dress and gets a new hairdo for her job search in Phoenix.  Only having Tommy to bounce her ideas off of, he begins badgering her again with questions of "When are we getting to Monterey," "What if the car breaks down," and "What if you don't get a job?"  Alice finally reaches her breaking point and reprimands him for his whining and pushing her too hard.  She soon feels guilty for yelling at Tommy, and apologizes, but he doesn't really forgive her, or seem to have his confidence in her restored.

Sequence: Getting a job

• The next day, Alice goes out to look for a job as a bar singer, but meeting with rejection.  In one place, the bashful bartender says they aren't hiring, but he would take her if he could.  Another bar owner asks her to turn around so he can see her, to which she replies "I don't sing out of my ass."
• Finally, she gets a tryout in one bar after having a perhaps-a-little-bit-embellished breakdown when asking the manager, Mr. Jacobs, for a job.  He says they don't have a piano, but he'll listen to her at a piano bar down the street.  She plays to the room there, and commands applause from the patrons.  Mr. Jacobs gives her the job on the terms of going in half for the piano out of her first paychecks.
• She celebrates with Tommy that night, who then slightly punctures her jubilation by asking what he's going to do all the time in the hotel room while she's working.

Act II

Sequence: Starting relationship with Ben

• One night while performing to a large and lively crowd in the bar, Alice gets hit on by a local named Ben.  After she tells him to go away several times, she is finally charmed by him and his determination and he sits with her.  Taking her back to her hotel room, she tells him she can't realistically be with him, saying he's too young.  Tommy watches from the window.
• Ben persists and she finally falls for him.  She starts sees him frequently, sleeps with him, and comes home to Tommy much later.  Finally, one morning, he brings the topic of her boyfriend out into the open, asking when she was going to introduce him to her.  He seems skeptical and resistant to the idea of a man being around.

Sequence: Terminating relationship with Ben; leaving Phoenix

• They are interrupted by a knock at the door.  Alice answers, and it turns out to be Ben's wife Rita.  Rita, who looks to be about 18, is not there to confront Alice, but only to demurely ask her to maybe stop seeing Ben, as Ben has been missing work since he started seeing Alice and their young child has an ear infection, and they can't pay for the medicine.  Alice, realizing the mess she has walked into, assures Rita she won't see Ben any more.
• All of a sudden, Ben bangs on the door and yells to Rita to come out.  Alice, scared by his temper, does not open the door for him, so he breaks in the glass pane with his bare fist and lets himself in.  He throws Rita down on the ground for interfering with him and Alice, and threatens to cut her with a switchblade.  Rita flees out of the room, and Ben turns to Alice, who is petrified.  He warns her not to mess with her, saying he's like a scorpion, he'll kill her.

Sequence: New demoralizing job in Tucson

• After Ben leaves, Alice and Tommy pack and flee the wrecked hotel room.  Although she's escaping a destructive man in Phoenix, she can't escape her son, who doesn't relent in dogging her with a profane joke in the car.
• They next settle in Tucson, and check into another cheap motel.  Alice comes home from a day of job searching at a low point: she has found work, but as a waitress, the last-resort job of countless aspiring singers and single mothers, she realizes.  Tommy continues to doubt that she will have money to support him, and that she will even get him to Monterey by the time school starts, as she had promised.
• Alice's new job sucks right from the get-go.  The job is hectic and non-stop, she gets sexually harassed by the customers, and the head waitress joins in the jokes to bully her around and make her feel even more uncomfortable.  Alice can't get a break from her son at home, but does at least patch things over and they get into a cute food fight while eating pizza.

Sequence: Alice grows comfortable at work; Tommy falls into trouble

• Tommy takes up guitar lessons from a hippie in Tucson so he can have something to do during the day, and cautiously befriends one of the other students, a tough, streetwise older girl named Audrey.  Audrey asks Tommy if he wants to try a drug called "Ripple," and he declines.  He asks where her mom was, anyway, if not at home, and she casually guesses she's turning tricks at the motel or on the street.
• One day at the restaurant, Alice is getting hit on by a man who is being eerily persistent like Ben.  She keeps trying to ward him off, but Tommy, who is spending the day at the restaurant too, starts causing trouble, and when the man volunteers to take him out to his ranch, she finally accepts and allows him, David, into her and Tommy's life.  
• David turns out to be a more trustworthy, goodhearted man, though she is still cautious about moving things forward with him.  Tommy can't get enough of him and all the fun opportunities his ranch provide like horseback riding, and David is a very patient suitor (also demonstrably unmarried).
• One day at work, Alice and her coworkers are almost driven to her breaking point by all the pressures, when the head waitress, Flo, rebuts Mel with a profane but hilarious remark that Alice remembered her dad used to say.  The sudden foulmouthed joke breaks the ice between them, and Alice, Flo, and Vera, the frail third waitress, form a close bond together.

Sequence: Alice falls in love with David

• Now feeling supported by her coworkers, Alice bakes one day in the sun with Flo and talks about life.  Flo gives her advice about waiting tables, raising a son, and showing her cleavage to get more tip money.
• Tommy meanwhile is starting to be influenced by Audrey.  When he says he needs guitar strings but can't buy them as they are so expensive, she takes him and shows him how to steal them.
• While helping David to mend his fences at the ranch one day, Alice finally gives in and they kiss.  She opens up to him about her struggles, and her dreams, and how she gave up her childhood dream to sing when she married and devoted herself to her husband and son.

Sequence: Tommy gets out of control; David violates him and Alice leaves

• David can't take Tommy on a promised fishing trip one day when his truck has an oil leak, so the unruly youth spends the day in the restaurant again.  Back at David's house, they throw a birthday party for him, but he doesn't appreciate any of his gifts very much.  Finally, David gets fed up with the kid's rebelliousness, throws his record across the room, and hits Tommy to the ground.  Alice is infuriated at him for having laid hands on her son, and takes Tommy and leaves David, not needing one more macho man ruining her life.

Act III

Sequence: Tommy gets in trouble

• Tommy however doesn't let up on the car ride home, and she finally stops the car and tells him to get out and walk home.  Tommy goes to Audrey's house and gets drunk with wine.  Alice panics as night falls, and unsuccessfully searches for her missing son.  Finally she gets a call from the police station that they have Tommy waiting there to be picked up.  He had been caught stealing, and was luckily being let off by the store owners.  The desk person also hands her Tommy's clothes in a bag, saying they were soiled when he'd been sick in them from too much wine.

Sequence: Alice resolves conflicts

• Alice oversleeps for work the next morning and wakes up sick with a cold.  She goes to work, but can't take it.  Flo sees her desperate coworker, and despite the filled dining room, takes Alice around back to take a break and talk it out.  Alice breaks down, lamenting she just doesn't think she can take care of herself and her son on her own any more.  She has no control of her son, and not only can she not actually get him to Monterey in time for school to start, she now can't even keep him out of trouble.  She also loves David, but doesn't want to accept another man like her husband or Ben into her life.
• Reassured, Alice and Flo return and return the restaurant to calm.  David then comes in to confront Alice, and tell her he'd like to see her again.  Alice tries to blow him off, but he finally forces the matter in front of the whole restaurant.  She tells him that what he wants is important to her, but he also has to accept what she, too, wants, and for the time being, that includes being a singer in Monterey.  At this, he asks, "Well, what's stopping you?  Hell, I'll drive you there.  I don't give a damn about that ranch."  With this concession/revalation, she embraces him and takes him back.
• Alice and Tommy walk along the strip near their motel one day at sundown.  She apologizes that she may not get Tommy to Monterey, and he replies that he doesn't care, it was her idea in the first place.  Realizing this, and with her son now appreciating her, and seeing an end to her tough situation, she hugs him close and decides to stay in Tucson.

Something I have become aware of since moving to New York a couple of years ago is how big of a deal the feminist movement really was, and especially how big it seems to women who were involved in it then, and those who still are today.  I have always taken it for granted that women should have the same opportunities as men, and the house I grew up in reflected this, my mom being a career woman who probably attained a higher company rank than my dad, at least until she left her career.  But in Georgia, where the perspectives on this are still surprisingly pretty backward, it simply isn't discussed that much.  But the feminist movement of the '60s and '70s means a lot to a lot of people, and this film is a powerful document of that cultural revolution.

However, the gender-neutral Controlling Idea of the story, as best as I can tell, is something like "Your life will be in control when you learn to take charge of it for yourself."  The feminist implication comes from the context of the society the story takes place in.  Alice always doubts her own ability to govern her life for herself until she's pushed to the limit, and finally tells David (and Tommy) that things are going to be the way she wants and that's that.  She struggles with the roles she feels society has given her -- wife, mother, employee, and admits to Flo that she doesn't know if she can live without a man in her life.  Consciously, her object of desire is to provide for herself and her son.  However, her subconscious need to establish control over her own life, discovering her own power and independence, forms the spine of the story.

The central plot of the story is this, her quest for financial stability/independence.  Along the way, several subplots crop up.  First is her relationship with Ben, which is later mirrored by her romance with David.  They are actually chillingly similar in the ways they start, and so when David rolls around, we don't know for a long time whether he has good intentions, perhaps not fully until he subordinates himself to her at the climax.  Tommy's juvenile delinquence amplifies her loss of control, as he acts according to the examples set for him, and in the absence of a firm hand of parenting from her mother.  He reacts strongly against David's sudden and strong discipline of him, and Alice's act of leaving him as a result only serves to delegitimize that discipline even more.  

Her self-doubt is neatly resolved at the same time that David accepts her back, and she accepts him.  She has come to hate the idea of being dominated by a man, but also doubts that she would be able to live without a man, putting her in a position of seemingly having to choose between independence and the protection of a man.  By always seeking the leadership of a male and not truly believing in herself, she winds up with bad men who seek to dominate women, either passively or cruelly.  David challenges her to tell him what she wants, and it is not until she gives a positive answer that he follows her.  By making a stand for herself, she attracts the kind of man who respects that in a woman, and wants to help her achieve her goals.  Similarly, Tommy senses throughout that Alice has no direction of her own, no conviction of her own abilities, so he worries and doubts them even more.  When she finally does show a belief in herself, he now believes in her too, and willingly agrees to stay in Tucson with David.

The division of the acts is as follows: Act I ends on an up note, with Alice getting a job singing after what an admittedly relatively easy search.  This might just be possible after all, we think.  She's got the chops, the looks... what else does she need?  However, she gets into the disastrous relationship with the wild man Ben, and moves on to the next city.  There she can only get a job as a waitress (loss of ideal job), loses control of her son, and goes through an up and down relationship with David.  At the end of the second act, she leaves him, showing some decision on her part but a much stronger loss of companionship of someone she had come to love.  Act II ends down.  Finally we reach the crisis, where her dead-end job doesn't even seem like enough to even live on.  How is she ever going to escape this situation, we wonder.  When she claims her independence, she finds she can have her cake and eat it too, ending the movie on a resounding positive.

By the way, the reason I include the posters in these analyses is that they do help define the movie and its genre.  A movie's ad campaign, title, and theatrical poster all "position" the movie in the mind of the audience, so that the viewers come to the movie knowing what to expect, at least in terms of genre.  Doesn't the poster of this one tell you a good deal about it before you even read my discussion of it?  You already know that love will be probably the central plot.  (Although having said that, I think it actually turns out to be more of an ancillary value, in this case, with Alice's independence being the foremost story value.)