Reprise: Emotional Logic Versus Rational Logic in Screenwriting

“J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg are savvy enough to know when it comes to story, what a moviegoer wants to see, what they enjoy experiencing as they watch a movie, and the feelings they have during those two hours are absolutely, fundamentally, and utterly more important than any sort of rational consideration.”

I was having a discussion with a writer yesterday about her script, what she perceived to be problematic logic issues, when I flashed on a Go Into The Story post I write back in 2011 upon the release of the movie Super 8. I went back and found the article. It raises an interesting point about the subject of screenplay logic, therefore, I figured it was worth a revisit.

The discussion arose upon the release of the movie Super 8, written and directed by J.J. Abrams, produced by Steven Spielberg. In effect, it is Abrams’ homage to one of his favorite storytellers Spielberg. You can see it in the original trailer for the movie:

Kids. Bicycles. Movies. Aliens. Action. Science Fiction. And… Heart.

What was all the fuss about? Here is my original 2011 post:

A few weeks back I posted this:

I have been emailed by a bunch of GITS readers asking my reaction to the movie Super 8. I want to make sure folks have a chance to see it before providing any analysis so they can screen it with a clean slate. In the interim, I propose we have a go at some of the logic ‘problems’ in the movie, at least as lobbed my way via email. So if you’ve seen the movie and you had any problems with the story logic, please join me in comments where I have started a list.

I will collect all the logic issues, then go through them with my own response.

There were quite a few responses, so I have aggregated all of them and will post in comments so as not to spoil the movie for those who have yet to see it.

And now let me resolve all those logic issues for you.

But wait. How can I handle all the logic issues without actually referring to them one by one here in this post?

Simple. Because I don’t need to. There is a blanket rationale which overrides any logic problem in the movie. And that rationale is this:

Emotional logic trumps rational logic.

J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg are savvy enough to know when it comes to story, what a moviegoer wants to see, what they enjoy experiencing as they watch a movie, and the feelings they have during those two hours are absolutely, fundamentally, and utterly more important than any sort of rational consideration.

Two points:

• This doesn’t work with every movie. For example, a heist film like Ocean’s 11 or con movie like The Spanish Prisoner puts a higher premium of the internal logic of the story. There the filmmakers must craft a plot within the perimeters of how that rational logic shapes the contours of the story universe. That is not the case with a movie like Super 8 which is a cross between science fiction, fantasy, and wish fulfillment. For this movie, emotional logic rules over rational logic because moviegoers go into the film experience desiring to experience the sci-fi, the fantasy, and the wish fulfillment.
• Once the story establishes the threshold of emotional logic, basically sinking that hook in the moviegoer, they are free to play that trump card as often as they like as long as they don’t overuse it. How does Super 8 do this? Since anybody who is interested in the movie has likely seen the trailer or commercials, I’m not giving away anything here to note that a major Plotline point is a train wreck.

But it’s not just a train wreck, it is the train wreck to end all train wrecks. Dozens of train cars exploding, careening, flying, hurtling, crashing, smashing, tumbling, rumbling, banging, booming, creating a hailstorm of metal parts and flaming shards, taking several minutes of screen time resulting in massive destruction.

Now several people noted logic issues re this plot point:

• How could one pick-up truck driving onto the tracks and crashing into the engine cause such a massive chain reaction of destruction?
• How could the driver of the truck possibly survive the collision and ensuing apocalypse?
• If the alien is able to break out of the train after the accident, why doesn’t it escape before?
• Why were the soldiers transporting the alien in the first place?
• Why was the train apparently unmanned?
• How is it none of the kids filming at the time of the destruction gets hurt?
• How is it Alice’s father’s car survives the rampage?
• And then the remarkable coincidence that the kids just happen to be filming their scene at the precise time the train happens to rumble by as well as the precise time the teacher in the pick-up truck just happens to cause the accident.

That’s a lot of issues, right? And while they may exist as concerns in our rational mind, there’s one simple fact that sets them aside:

We just got done watching the greatest single train accident sequence in the history of movies!!!

That experience — the emotional logic of that — trumps the rational logic. And now having created this enormous latitude of emotional logic, the filmmakers can go to that well again and again and again.

Now sure, there will be a segment of moviegoers who will diss the movie because they can’t get past the issues of rational logic.

But that’s not the movie’s target audience. And as filmmakers, Abrams and Spielberg would be downright dumb if they allowed the intellectual instincts of a small minority of the movie’s potential audience squash the primacy of emotional logic which they figured would be there in the target demo group.

In other words, the filmmakers made a calculated choice that a helluva a lot more moviegoers would enjoy giving themselves over to the emotional logic of the story universe in Super 8 than would not.

And they were right. Per Box Office Mojo, Super 8 has racked up $155M in worldwide box office receipts as of today, probably on its way to $200M. With a production budget reported to be $50M, the movie will have a very healthy ROI.

Caveat: If your name isn’t Abrams, Spielberg, or the like, and you are an aspiring or novice screenwriter, your scripts will be held to a higher degree of scrutiny per its story logic. So you have to be careful. While your script’s target audience may be tween girls, ten year-old boys, horror enthusiasts, or whatever type of fans, the readers of your scripts will all be adults. If you need them to buy into your story’s emotional logic, you must get them in touch with their inner tween, ten year-old, horror fan, and so on in order to buy into your vision for the story.

Finally in a bit of synchronicity, it just so happens The Bitter Script Reader’s post today was about this very subject of emotional logic, specifically in reference to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

…the film reached the classic scene where school dean Ed Rooney breaks into Ferris’s house and has a confrontation with Ferris’s dog… and it hit me! This is the first time we’re seeing Ferris’s dog and it’s more than an hour into the film! You’d think conventional screenwriting wisdom would have dictated a scene earlier in the movie establishing the pooch’s presence before Ferris left, and yet… no.

This struck me because it wasn’t that long ago I saw the divide among fans of Super 8. There were those who nitpicked every last detail of the film as proof it was crap, while plenty of other viewers who were touched by the movie basically adopted the “la la la… not listening” approach to the holes. I didn’t think it was a perfect film, myself. I even admit there are some details that don’t quite fit… but some of the critiques crossed the line into really anal nitpicking. It was almost as if these viewers were looking for a fight with the film and were blasting it for not having any faith in their ability to connect the dots off-screen.

— —

It comes down to this: if you think Ferris Bueller is a stupid film, you probably hate the fact Ferris’s dog isn’t established sooner. If everything else in that movie works for you, what does it matter if the dog shows up out of nowhere? If Super 8 worked for you emotionally, do you really need to find out why the alien was being moved?

For all the logic ‘problems’ in Super 8 folks noted previously and an opportunity to weigh in on the subject, see you in comments.

UPDATE: From a recent event at the DGA, J.J. Abrams and James Cameron talked with the night’s honoree Steven Spielberg in a wide-ranging conversation about filmmaking. This excerpt:

Applauding Spielberg’s passion and childlike enthusiasm for the open wonder of possibility, Cameron and Abrams listened intently as Spielberg explained how he balanced the “magic of the moment with the necessary architecture of each scene.” Spielberg was vividly forthright in discussing everything from dealing with a disastrous first day of shooting on Jaws, thanks to an inebriated Robert Shaw, to the creative genesis of Close Encounters which led to the discovery that the key to accessibility in science fiction is personal, human relationships: “Create characters you really want to be with.” [emphasis added]

Seems applicable to this discussion as I think it supports my basic contention at least how Spielberg and Abrams approached Super 8. The more deeply a moviegoer is immersed in the story’s characters, the more latitude you have as a filmmaker to do just about anything, including bending the ‘rules’ of rational logic.

You may not remember, but people had a LOT of logic problems with the movie. Here is the entire list of observations people sent to me via email, the blog, or Twitter which I aggregated in the comments section of the original post [these are actual quotes from respondents]:

• The kids just happen to be shooting their film at the train station when the train from the base just happens to be going by at the same exact time the teacher just happens to drive onto the tracks creating the huge accident. [This is more of a possible coincidence issue].
• The teacher at the kids’ school just happens to be the guy who knew the alien from research years ago. [Again more of a coincidence issue].
• How does the teacher possibly survive that accident?
• If the alien is able to break out of the train after the accident, why doesn’t it escape before?
• Where does all the dirt go from the huge hole in the ground the alien dug?
• When Alice (Elle Fanning) is racing away on her bike from her father and her father crashes his car, the alien just so happens to be around to snatch Alice. [Again more of coincidence thing].
• The alien, who has been capturing human victims in order to feed on them, is suddenly persuaded to allow Joe to live when Joe delivers the line, “Bad things happen… but you can keep living.”
• It just so happens that Joe reunites with his father and Alice reunites with her father at the precise moment the alien finishes building its spaceship and leaves to go find its ‘family.’ [Again coincidence factor, not logic].
• Biggest complaint my friends had was that the train accident evidently violated the laws of physics (a head-on collison with a truck shouldn’t have caused that much damage, especially since the truck didn’t seem to have that much momentum behind it). I assumed that the alien and/or alien’s cubes influenced things somehow, though my rationale for that is a little shaky. The kids do say that that kind of crash is “very rare,” so maybe that was the excuse.
• Also, why on earth were the soldiers moving the alien in the first place? And why on an apparently unmanned train?
• The truck’s driver being the school science teacher was far too coincidental and not set up at all as it should have been.
• The magnetic scene was also stretching believability and logic. It could pull the locket from Joe’s pocket but not tug at their belt buckles?
• Why such a powerful creature who seems perfectly adapted to a underground living would develop technology to the point of space exploration.
• The inconsistency in the monster’s actions: In one scene, the creature smashes up a gas station and a police car with all the care of a toddler toppling his building blocks. Then, in another scene, we’re shown that all the engines on a used car lot were taken right out of their automobiles — with no damage to the shell of the car at all. Yeah, suddenly the violent, thrashing monster decided to gingerly remove engines from the cars and then carefully closed the hood to make his crime less obvious.
• After the train crash why did the military arrive on foot? Were they just jogging through this random small town on the train’s cross country path?
• Why do they need to move the alien across country and on top of it… transport it on the exact same train as his cubes?
• The military collects all the cubes and puts them back in these specialized crates and they don’t notices exactly 1 missing?
• The creature is brutal and unswerving to begin with and then very gently removes the engines from cars?
• So some reason during the suburban warfare, the soldiers say that they’ve lost control of their weapons… why? And if this is so, why hasn’t the monster already controlled various weapons to escape?
• Beyond the convenience of the school science teacher being the same scientist in that facility… he has all his work in a trailer out back? The military hasn’t come looking for him or noticed that he took a lot of research… including probably the only copy of those particular 8mm films of the monster?
• Why would the sheriff go and arrest Elle’s father for staying home drunk? Wouldn’t he go to jail for wrongful imprisonment? Why isn’t he hung up on the actual person who caused his wife’s death? Or was it actually her fault that caused the accident?
• If the monster does ‘share’ feelings with each of the people it touches, why didn’t it feel remorse of all the people he’s captured or even just for Elle? She couldn’t have possibly wanted to cause the monster harm and she has a sad story just like Joe…
• Joe was able to hold onto his locket when the magnet water tower was picking up cars and yanking kitchen stoves through glass windows?
• The monster was pulling electrical cables down for his device but the town seemed to still get sufficient power.
• After getting all these cubes together, the military evacuates the town and goes after the monster… but the trucks with the cubes goes back into the town?
• This military is going crazy barging in wherever but they can’t seem to locate a singular vehicle from that tire track? They don’t investigate probably the only film store that can develop 8mm film after finding 8mm film at the crime scene…
• I’m assuming the monster was building a super electromagnet out of the water tower to get his cubes organized… but if the military already collected them all why were they behind held at the location? Why weren’t they sent to their original destination like they were on the train?
• A large plot hole was how easily the kids and the stoner got his car out of the military base after the evacuation. One minute, they’re sneaking through the car lot so as not to be seen, and we see that they’re behind a chain-link fence with guards, then there’s a “sleight of hand cut” and they’re on the road, free as can be. This is a problem because it undercuts the gravity of the military evacuating the town and rounding them up. At first the evacuation seems like a significant development in the film and a serious obstacle, then they just breezily overcome it, so it’s not really an obstacle at all.
• Why was the military randomly shooting up the town and why we’re they caught in their own crossfire?
• The main action of movie takes place in early April, 1979 (Walter Cronkite references Three Mile Island on the TV). Rubik’s Cubes, to which the white, alien cubes are compared, were not introduced into US markets until 1980. For all the attention given to creating an authentic 1979 feel, this anachronism was pretty disappointing.
• The monster/alien seemed to easily destroy any and every military person & civilian in his path the entire movie. after he breaks loose of his train car prison he spends the whole movie building this “machine” to get the pieces of his ship back. BUT, when he does originally break loose, all the pieces of his ship are scattered everywhere. Instead of just ripping those GI’s to bits, getting his spaceship pieces and getting the hell out of there, he decides to run away. i understand that there wouldn’t really have been a movie if that had happened, but it doesn’t make sense that it didn’t.

I got it in 2011. I get it now. There are lots of rational logic issues in Super 8. However from a storytelling standpoint, we have to bear in mind this story’s genre: It is a science fiction thriller. It is about children finding themselves in an extraordinary circumstance. Ultimately, it is about a young boy grieving the loss of his mother. I would argue that is why this story takes place — for the Protagonist Joe to be able to say goodbye to her… which means that at its very foundation, Super 8 is an emotional narrative. That was Abrams’ touchstone throughout the making of the movie. Thus, it makes sense that whenever pressed with a choice, he opted for emotional logic over rational logic.

This should not be surprising. When Abrams was handed to keys to the Star Wars franchise and asked to jump-start it with what became Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens, I wrote an article on how he began the process of cracking that story. With everyone involved in that initial foray into SW:VII including Kathleen Kennedy and Mike Arndt, this is how Abrams started off the discussion:

“Why don’t we start by everybody just writing down what do you want to feel when we create this story, whatever it’s going to be.”

What you want to feel.

In an interview I featured on the blog, Black List founder Franklin Leonard was asked what was the single biggest mistake screenwriters made. His response:

“Focusing way too much on plot — and then this happens and then this happens — and not enough on how does this make the audience feel. We don’t go to the movies for plot. We don’t go to the movies for information. We go to the movies to feel something, whether it’s to laugh or to cry, or to feel awe or to feel scared. If you don’t deliver those emotional sensations, no one is remembering your movie.” [emphasis added]

Again, I am not suggesting you forget rational logic. Indeed, if you are writing a drama like Michael Clayton or an historical drama like TV mini-series Chernobyl, you will need to pay attention to rational logic.

But I agree with Franklin Leonard. I read far too many scripts which have sound plots, but thin emotions. And believe me, if you want your script to make an impression on a Hollywood development executive, script reader, manager, or agent, you need to engender an emotional response on their part to the material. If you need to bend rational logic in favor of emotional logic… do it.

After all, if it works for Spielberg and Abrams…