What: Abduction Narratives Part Five Beyond Good V Evil

14^th century B.C. Greek king Menelaus laid siege to the city of Troy for ten years to revenge the abduction of Helen, a woman he had paid handsomely for.   Even today, we continue to assure ourselves through popular narratives that revenge feels good.  as I mentioned, Liam Neeson has made a career of it, just as Charles Bronson did a generation before.  Revenge as payment for the loss of a loved one is one of the true ur-narratives.  But revenge only feels good when the good guy wins.  Otherwise, it is nothing more than human lives as an accounting exercise.  And who is Good and who is Evil is, at best, relative, so whose justice is it?  The bottom line is revenge only leads to death and collateral damage, never justice.

As an experiment, I made a revenge film meant to lay bare the power relations in such narratives and how those feed into the culture more broadly as either validating or normative.  The film confronts the audience at every turn; a beautiful assault on their conscious.  They should feel repulsed and shaken out of their suspension of disbelief into the real horror of a young woman being abducted and forced into a conflict she had nothing to do with, all for their entertainment.  It is not a story of hope, of good triumphing over evil, or the virtues of revenge.

Holiday, is an aesthetic experiment created to explore revenge through several propositions put forth by Gilles Deleuze.  In an essay on the need to do away with judgment, he offered five conflicts of forces, of affects, that either encourage vitality or shut it down.  As a result, affect was favored over cause-and-effect in character development, plot, and in consideration of audience.  The five conflicts Deleuze's essay discusses are: 1) cruelty versus infinite torture, 2) intoxication versus the dream, 3) vitality versus organization, 4) the will to power versus a will to dominate, and 5) combat versus war.  The main characters in Holiday dramatize these five conflicts, not Good v. Evil.  And what is film storytelling but conflict dramatized via images and sound?

What: Abduction Narratives Part Four Good V Evil

Implicit in the Good vs Evil conflict is judgement about right and wrong.  We like these stories because we wish we were these "good" characters and life were this clearly defined.  And we especially like the Good v Evil conflict with sex trafficking stories because anyone with even a minimal sense of justice would agree that the abuse, sale and/or ownership of people is wrong and destructive -- evil or no.  This is the difference between judgment and discernment.

So I asked myself why not pick the genre that most depends on judgement to unhinge Good v. Evil?  What could possibly go wrong?

Of course the storytelling consequence of this unhinging -- only a slight blurring, really -- is devastating.  First, there can no longer be a clear protagonist and antagonist -- as is the case with Holiday.  Anne is as close to a protagonist as the story gets, but she's only semi-conscious for a third of the story.  Also, since the story tracks emotionally from Anne's POV, the audience is made to start liking Graham just like she does.  But audiences hate being fooled and they don't like developing empathy for the Evil character.

What I'm getting at is that without a conflict to move the film forward, the story mushes to a halt, leaving only unmotivated character actions moving us through plot points.  You need conflict to keep the audience pulled forward into the future -- without getting too Heideggerian -- to keep them interested.

There is conflict driving Holiday -- five of them in fact -- all interweaving throughout the story based on ideas put forth by 20th century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

I have no intention to create sympathy for abductors and rapist.  Quite the contrary.  What I'm calling for is discernment instead of judgement. If anything, what I'm telling a story about is a man and a woman who dream of being/doing something else.  We are watching both in a state of Deleuzian becoming.

In both cases, everything goes wrong.  One reacts with rage and violence, the other with cunning and violence.  Judgement in either case is hardly justice.  Judgement condemns us to infinite failure against an ideal standard.  Discernment, which acknowledges we possess both the life-affirming and destructive, asks the question, what are you doing?

What: Abduction Narratives Part Three Good V Evil

Any good story must have conflict of some sort driving the characters and plot forward, no matter how vague or subtle.  In the abduction genre knowing who is good and who is evil is essential and usually fairly straightforward since almost always, the victim represents "good".  Who is really "bad", may not be revealed until the end, of course, but the boundaries are always clarified by the ending.

Clearly Anne is, in essence, a "good" character and Graham is certainly a "bad" character.  Her choices seem innocent and harmless enough, and his seem calculating and deadly, so on a fundamental level there is a good v. evil conflict.

But do "good" girls get high and make out with a stranger on his boat?  Yeah, sure, occasionally.

Conversely, do "bad" guys ever really develop empathy?  Ur, probably not since lacking empathy is a shared sociopathic trait of abductors in general -- I would hazard to guess -- but maybe if that character connected with someone, then lost her . . .

In any case undoubtedly Graham values himself over all others -- yet he's lost his mojo.  That doesn't make him "good" or likable.  But is he evil?

Then there is the Russian.

Is Death good or evil?

The Indian?  He thinks it's a celebration.

Keeping humans captive is nasty business and unfortunately has not been totally eliminated in the world.  Evil?  I don't know -- that begins to make judgements, instead of distinctions.  God fearing Christians kept Africans as property for centuries in this country with no moral conflict.  Abduction and slavery of people is "bad", but what if we shift away from Good and Evil?  Does that make slavery acceptable?  Are all things relative at that point?  Absolutely, not.

The "good" and "bad" categories in Holiday are merely feathered soft on the edges -- this is no relativist equivocation.  I'm not saying Anne is not a victim here.  What I am asking is, can we tell an abduction narrative without judging that the act is Evil?  A victim narrative not defined by the victimization.  Is that possible and still not condone the act as anything but harmful?

What: Abduction Narratives Part Two Genre Conflict

Audiences don't feel good when people are murdered in Holiday, perhaps because the deaths seem unjustified.

But the Russian is merely Death itself, real and non-judgmental.  The rubric that controls his character is that anyone he or his assassin interact with dies.  Death is an event we all will experience.

Graham murders out of frustration and rage at his loss, not revenge.

Anne is collateral damage in an ongoing battle between Graham and the Russian, a victim.  Her case certainly calls for justice.

However, unhinge as I did, ever so slightly who is good and who is evil and the power relations within the narrative deconstruct as the story rolls forward.  That process makes for some interesting, challenging storytelling.

Just a warning: this sort of genre twisting will generally limit your audience.  I had a very accomplished studio director ask me one time what kind of movies I wanted to make.  I said, "intelligent ones."  The director laughed at me -- and rightly so.  Set ups for dick jokes will win you far more audiences than a 90 minute visual jigsaw puzzle that might take more than one viewing to catch everything going on.

But here's what I know from my own history -- in past films I always stayed within genre boundaries and had many people like my films and I won awards for them and they got me no paid director gigs.  I'm now completing a feature where I intentionally unhinged the genre and people are noticing.  That doesn't mean I can make a living doing this sort of narrative, but maybe I'll still get to make one every once in a while.

What: Abduction Narratives Part One Genre Conflict

Among other things, Holiday is an abduction narrative.  Generally, the worst that can happen in these stories is death.  But this plot is informed by the Helen myth where rape is the limit of the threat because Anne is to be sold -- pure object commodification -- thus the goods need to have not suffered too greatly in transit.

Her journey is a dark, challenging one that spirals down into a hallucinogenic nightmare, then winds back out into Reality with real consequences -- an adolescent Alice through the looking glass in all its brutal adult horror.

The abduction of women as an opportunity to create a bit of entertainment is creepy, as in perverse creepy.  Yet the "loss of a loved one" revenge plot has always been a crowd fave.  Liam, Bronson, all those guys have made millions doing those stories -- all the way back to the Greeks.  The only way the modern genre works, however, is if the audience knows who was good and who was evil -- at heart -- by the end of the film (the Greeks were much more ambiguous about this distinction).  These stories reinforce the idea that revenge leads to justice.  I assert revenge only leads to death and chaos.

Good, honest, self-righteous justice is served when Liam murders 47 people to get to the bad guy's inner liar in order to save his daughter from being sold into the sex trade (well, a rather tarted-up version, I'd say -- I don't know for certain, but I think the reality is much uglier, much more like what we created in Holiday).  But the truth is all those "bad guys" Liam killed where just people.  Perhaps they were all hired by an evil mastermind because they were generally incompetent with firearms (or so it would seem), but in any case, they were people with families, moms, dads.  But their murder is justified, yes?

Culturally, this is dangerous.  Any injustice perceived is then righteous cause for revenge to the death.  We love these stories and I even enjoy a good revenge tale now and then as a guilty pleasure, but they validate acts of unspeakable violence by assurances of easily defined good and evil characters. 

What: Character Rubrics Part Two

Graham -- One of the controlling rubrics for Graham is that he ages as the story progresses.  He uses clothing, accessories, and changing his hair color to alter his appearance.  He is a man becoming middle-age with a dead-end job he can't find a way out of.  This tragic fate collapses his world.

Imagine Graham as a modern day Paris (from the Greek Helen myth), living into middle age, doing the one thing he knows how to do well -- abduct women -- but since he fell in love with the tattooed woman (present day Helen), he has lost his mojo and he wants to cut his losses.  Each moment and challenge makes him feel older.

At the very beginning, we see him presenting himself as mid 30's:

Then a little older:

Even older:

And for his last, oldest look, a disguise.  A mustache and baby powder in the hair for some grey.  I told him I wanted him to look like a Mexican Willy Loman:

Graham's choices to age in appearance over the course of 48 hours offers a compressed mirror of the responses of someone that age -- denial, resistance, acceptance.  As he moves through those responses his anger and frustration about what he's doing for a living and how it is falling apart around him leads to a murderous rage.

Creating these changes in his character helped develop an emotional arc from beginning to end.  The Russian's desire for revenge of the abduction of Helen, the tattooed woman, is Death as vengeance, judgement with impunity, clearly defining his actions in any scene.  And Bhatia desires a past he never was allowed to experience due to his lowly upbringing.  Now he will possess that dream at any price.

None of the male characters, Bhatia, Graham, or the Russian get what they want in the end.  Bhatia doesn't get the girl.  Graham doesn't get the cash.  And the Russian doesn't get Graham.  They are all trapped in the black hole of nostalgia.  Only Anne's character gets what she wants -- freedom.  Her character develops becoming in the moment with her only two weapons -- patience and speed.

What: Character Rubrics Part One

You need to create character rubrics to guide you in your story telling.

These are not character histories, familial relations, etc.  This is not a character profile (although you will need something in mind along those lines in order to do proper casting).  These are guidelines to help you with character choices you will make in the outlining stage, on set, and in the editing room -- all the way to the end.

Rubrics generate character tendencies -- traits, but only in a very generalized way.  They will influence not what each character does or says, but how they say it, what they lie about, etc.  They have to be defined enough to be useful, yet malleable.  This is nothing new to film making -- Mike Nichols did this all his career.  You create a character rubric, then place it in a context for possibility and play out the choices you made.

Since I only had one experienced actor, it was important that I know who all the characters were and what's driving them at any point in the story.  This allowed me to be totally present to the moment for the actors playing those roles.  I could then give direction and feed lines, if necessary, while I was shooting.

Here are some rubrics I used that have to do with the theme of middle-aged male lunacy.  Mr. Bhati, The Russian, and Graham all want (different than what they need) a new life (and/or a new wife, as it were) for different reasons.

Among other things, Holiday is a story about men hitting middle age.  It is an age where one first senses Death somewhere out there -- not all that real, but a presence pushing in.  A thought that had never been given much consideration before.  This moment informed the creation of rubrics for the three main male characters.

Mr. Bhatia -- wants to own a young beautiful wife.  This is full onset of middle-aged craziness fueled by a world viewed from the point of view of a lack.  You can't get a young woman like Anne to fall in love with you, but you can purchase one and keep her in an ivory tower lost in the chaos of Mumbai.  Having fought his way up from the slums to corporate overlord, his character will always lie, cheat, and fight to get a better deal, regardless of the consequences for those around him.

The Russian -- wants to be with a young beautiful woman who is gone.  Nostalgia fuels his destructive rage against Graham.

The Russian is Death -- someone Graham has been cheating for a long time.  Graham can feel him closing in -- and once he sees the Russian's gunman, he knows it is only a matter of time.  Of course the abduction of Anne is all a ruse, a Trojan horse to lure Graham to meet Death face to face.

This is Death -- not riding on a pale horse, but in the back of a black limo.  The rubric used with the Russian: anyone he or his gunman come into contact with -- in person or by phone -- must die (at the marina Graham sees the gunman, but the gunman doesn't see him -- ironically, the gunman, due to his contact with the Russian/Death must die, as well).

Neither Graham nor Anne are seen by Death or his assassin so in the end they escape and Death is left stranded, impotent for the moment.

But he'll meet up with them again one day.