Last night I sat down and watched one of my favorite recently released movies. It’s “Get Out” and it’s actually up for an Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director. I’m going to give you a spoiler alert right now. If you haven’t seen this movie and want to you should stop reading right now. We are about to deconstruct this amazing movie and that means you’re about to know everything that happens!
In my two previous blogs I noted that every movie has the same ten parts, and once you know them you can identify exactly where the movie is going next! As it turns out successful movies (and novels) follow what is referred to as the “Universal Story”, or the “Hero’s Journey”, which moves the lead character through all ten stages of the story. This means that when you strip away all the thematic and dramatic elements, Finding Dory is the same story as Back to the Future which is the same story as The Last Jedi. At the core of each of these movies is “The Universal Story”, which is the story of you and me.
By way of review, here are the ten stages and the order they come in:
The Hero is shown living in his NORMAL WORLD unaware of changes about to come.
The Hero receives a CALL TO ADVENTURE with an “Inciting Event” that first introduces the problem.
At first the Hero REFUSES THE CALL to adventure.
The Hero is forced to accept the call to adventure and goes through the DOORWAY OF NO RETURN into the Unknown World.
The Hero begins moving along the ROAD OF TRIALS as he tries unsuccessfully to solve the problem.
Right in the middle of the movie there is a MIRROR MOMENT which requires the hero to change his way of thinking and change his plan for attacking the problem.
The Hero tries and tries but eventually begins to lose hope, believing ALL IS LOST.
Having found one last ounce of hope, the Hero enters the FINAL BATTLE.
The Hero moves us through the DENOUMENT where all ends of the story are tied together.
Finally, the Hero begins living in a NEW NORMAL WORLD, better than he was before.
Last time I illustrated each of these stages using the movie “Frozen”. Now, let’s do the same thing using a completely different movie genre. This time we’ll use “Get Out” which is a Horror movie wrapped up in a Thriller, Disguised as a Suspense.
“The important thing to remember about the Doorway of No Return is not when it occurs but what it signifies. It’s that moment when the hero moves away from the world he knows into the unknown world ... and there is no going back!”
When the movie begins we see our hero Chris in his NORMAL WORLD. He has a girlfriend named Rose who brings bagels and coffee over to his apartment in the morning. She’s white and he’s black, and they are getting ready to go see her parents for the first time. We quickly realize his CALL TO ADVENTURE has already begun. This is a trip they have been planning. He’s worried though that her parents won’t approve of him and tries to talk her out of it. This is him REFUSING THE CALL. He tries to tell her that it is probably not a good idea, but she persists, and they head out on this adventure anyway. The moment they pull up in front of her parents’ massive house he enters through the DOORWAY OF NO RETURN. He moves from a world he is very familiar with to one that is more unknown to him than he will ever imagine!
Chris’ entry through the “Doorway of No Return” happens 14 minutes into the movie. It marks the end of the first act in the story. As I’ve noted previously, in the Hero’s Journey this scene most often occurs approximately one quarter of the way through the story. That is not a hard and fast rule as we see here. Only thirteen percent of the movie (not the customary twenty-five percent) has rolled by when Chris shows up at her parents’ house. Remember from my last blog that Anna’s “Doorway of No Return” in “Frozen” occurred AFTER the twenty-five percent mark. The important thing to remember about the Doorway of No Return is not when it occurs but what it signifies. It's that moment when the hero moves away from the world he knows into the unknown world ... and there is no going back!
Act Two begins and Chris follows the ROAD OF TRIALS as he suffers through so much awkwardness in meeting her family and friends:
he meets her family and discovers all of them are racists
he meets the gardener and the cook and they continue to give him strange looks
her mother hypnotizes him without his permission.
a bunch of white people begin showing up for the weekend party
he gets “interviewed” by all of the white guests though at the time he doesn’t realize it
Remember that “Get Out” is a 104-minute movie. The exact midpoint of the movie is the 52-minute mark. Just two minutes earlier, at the 50-minute mark, something unusual happens that begins his MIRROR MOMENT (the "mirror moment" is always right in the middle of the story). It’s at that very moment that he talks with his friend Rod who works for TSA. Chris updates him on all of the weirdness and Rod tells him he thinks Chris has been hypnotized to be a slave. And you can see it in Chris’ face when he hears that. The light bulb in his head turns on. This makes sense to him.
So, what does Chris do? He was passively rolling with the punches just to get along with his girlfriend’s family. Now he has a new plan which involves aggressively trying to figure this thing out and fight the pull he continues to feel towards something dark and sinister. That’s what the mid-point mirror moment does. It changes the hero’s behavior from one of being reactive in the first half of the second act to being proactive in the second half of the second act. And, as a result of the midpoint mirror moment Chris does several things:
he calls the housekeeper Georgina the “B” word twice (he has no more empathy for her)
he takes a picture of the other black man (who had been kidnapped)
he sends the photo to Rod because he thinks he know that guy from the past
he tells his girlfriend Rose he just needs to leave because he feels totally messed up since the hypnotisim
Interestingly enough, 13 minutes after his “mirror moment” Chris actually is looking in the mirror when he gets a call from Rod saying the other African American man was kidnapped. This confirms his mirror moment and he tells Rose “we gotta go now”. At the 70-minute mark, with just over a quarter of the movie remaining, Chris is captured and the third and final act begins.
At first it seems like ALL IS LOST because Chris is tied to a chair and waiting to have a brain transplant with a white man who wants the body of an African American man. But our hero doesn’t give up and the moment he puts the chair stuffing in his ears to drown out the hypnotizing spoon and teacup the FINAL BATTLE begins. Chris kills everyone in the family before they can kill him, including his so-called girlfriend Rose who took several shots at him with a rifle. The DENOUMENT begins when we see his friend Rod pull up in his TSA cruiser and rescue a wounded Chris. As they pull away Chris is now back with his friend Rod (who says “I told you not to go in that house!”) but it is a NEW NORMAL WORLD he lives in. He will go back to his friends and his job as a photographer, but his new world doesn’t involve the girl friend who set him up and then tried to kill him.
And there you have it. Another perfect example of the Universal Story or Hero’s Journey. Every good story, in print or on film, regardless of the theme or genre, follows this same pattern. It works because it is the story of everyone. The Hero’s Journey resonates deeply within all of us.
