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The Language of SymbolsCynthia's Column October 2003 This past summer we were blessed with a brilliantly crafted example of how symbols can help us tell a story. Seabiscuit is based on the non-fiction book by Laura Hillenbrand about the legendary racehorse. The screenplay and film by writer/director Gary Ross, moves beyond the facts to give us a true story with the power of legend. The book is verbal. The film, visual. The Book tells us the facts. The Movie shows us the story of Seabiscuit. As in all great films, this one is ambitious. It gives us several stories, so closely interwoven that they seem simple. First is the story of four underdogs who triumph. Losers who become winners. Charles Howard, (played by Jeff Bridges) is the automobile magnate who has lost his son and wife, things that money can't replace. At the end of Act One he is a walking mask of grief. Tom Smith, (Chris Cooper) is an aging cowboy who has outlived the West. Having spent a lifetime learning horses, he is now a man without a calling, hopping freight cars and living by his campfire in the desert. Red Pollard, (Tobey Maguire) is a young jockey who has lost his family in the great homelessness of the Depression. A boy so angry that he can't stop fighting, even though he's the only one he's hurting. The fourth underdog, is of course, the title character, Seabiscuit, a horse who has the breeding and the heart but was not blessed with the physical traits of his antecedents. Smaller than the other racehorses, with a walking gait that makes him look lame, he has been so poorly handled that when our guys come across him, he is a raging, damaged loser. So this is the first story. The A story, as it is called in screenwriting. Beneath that the second thematic story is a Father/Son story. Howard is a man who has lost a son. And Pollard is a boy who has lost his father, literally. So we watch to see if these two will not just find each other, but bond as Father and Son. Howard's son was more interested in reading than playing outside. Pollard's only possessions are a dirty pillowcase full of the books from his childhood. Given to him by his Dad the last time he saw him, they symbolize both Home and Father. The central, visual, symbolic image of Howard's son's death is a pieta. The father holding his dead child's body in his arms, grieving, keening, a silent and devastating image. In real life, Howard's son was fifteen when he died. But the image of Jeff Bridges holding a boy's body as big as his own is harder to orchestrate. A smaller body of a boy of eight or nine creates a more powerful visual image. Find the visually powerful image and let it guide you. This is not a history class. The symbolic story is more important than the factual one. We are trying to create emotional impact. Further developing this thematic story, Ross created a scene in mid-movie where these two characters bond as Father and Son. The angry, bitter kid Pollard is forced by a toothache to ask his boss, Howard, to lend him ten dollars. How many men in America can remember a time when they had to go to their own Dads, and hating to, ask for money? Probably each and every one of them. And what does Howard do? He says, "Sure." Pulls out his money and gives the kid a bill. He smiles warmly, puts his hand on the boy's shoulder and says, "It's okay."And the kid glances down at the bill in his hand and sees that instead of a ten, he has given him a twenty. At that moment the kid gets it. He blinks back tears as he says, "Thank you."And at this moment, they become Father and Son. The symbol that takes us there? A twenty dollar bill. owarHH Does it matter that in real life Howard had more than one son? No. In our culture there is power in the idea of an "only begotten son."If a man loses one son and has others, the need for a son is not as strong. He has sons. If a man with only one child, loses that boy, he is a deeply wounded man with a primal need to replace that lost son. This is the story Ross is choosing to tell us. And it is more powerfully told, by the editing out of the movie the other grown sons Howard actually had. This is how we work in adapting books. In dramatizing true stories. In two or even three hours you can't tell everything. You are forced to cut and edit. So you choose those things that strengthen your themes and support your story. And you cut everything else. The third thematic story is the Horse versus the Automobile story. In human history there was a period of a few thousand years where Man and Horse were inseparable. The Horse not only carried us through battle, but plowed our fields and pulled our wagon trains westward. Without horses the history of Western Civilization would have been quite different. This story begins as the Horse is replaced by the Automobile. In fact Charles Howard made his fortune selling cars. Ross shows us this in elegant shorthand, again, as the old cowboy Smith rides across the range and is stopped by a barbed wire fence. And in the distance a race car tears up a dirt road. We get the picture clearly. The Times they are a'changing. When success in automobiles affords Howard the wealth to buy a ranch, his first act is to empty the barn of horses and park racecars in the stalls. When his son is killed in a car accident, nothing needs to be said about Howard feeling betrayed by the machine he's spent his life promoting. The barn doors simply slide closed on those gleaming fenders and a huge padlock seals their tomb. Later when Howard is healed by rediscovering the Horse and buying Seabiscuit, the padlock is unlocked, the barn doors slide open and the racecars roll away. To be replaced by hay and tack and Horse! In our history, the Horse was truly man's best friend. The animal that directly contributed the most to our survival and progress. And when the Industrial Age dawned at the turn of the Twentieth Century, we abandoned our old friend and never looked back. Maybe some part of our collective unconscious has always felt a little bad about that. Maybe we miss Ol' Dobbin on some level we are not even aware of. Maybe we even identify with him, as so many human workers have been replaced by machines as well. Certainly from Black Beauty to The Black Stallion, the last hundred years has had its share of horse classics. Seabiscuit is the latest story to bring us home to our old friend. The fourth thematic agenda of Seabiscuit is to be a lens for viewing the Great Depression. The historical perspective of the story. In the film, David McCullough, a renowned writer himself, voices the story of this difficult time in American history, when millions of us went from affluence to poverty overnight. In film our aim is "Show, don't tell."Find the images that reveal the story rather than resorting to explanation or description. When the boy, Pollard, is first brought home to the Howard's luxurious ranch house, and sits down to supper at "the father's table," a bowl of soup is put before him and he's afraid to eat it. He's a boy, as hungry as they come. But he's also a jockey, and nearly too big at five foot seven. He has to keep himself at 115 pounds or risk losing his livelihood. He looks at that steaming bowl of rich, red tomato soup, and nearly faint from the aroma, says he isn't hungry. Howard kindly tells him "I'd rather have you strong than thin."And when the boy lifts that spoonful of soup to eat, we are taken to soup kitchens all over America where that bowl of soup was literally saving thousands of lives."It was called Relief," McCullough's kind-spoken voice-over tells us."It meant that somebody cared. That for the first time in a long time, you weren't alone." And the symbol that gives us all of this? A bowl of tomato soup. The fifth and final symbolic story is the identity between the boy and the horse. I won't give away any more of the story than I have already, (and I hope you see this film with an enriched perspective,) but Ross creates parallels between these two that give the story added heart. Seeing Seabiscuit raging against his handlers as the boy is drunkenly fighting five guys at once. Or simply seeing their bandaged, splinted legs side by side. No words are necessary. We get the picture. And that's my point exactly. When you find the symbols and images that capture the essence of the story you are trying to tell, they will do half the work for you. A film, even at two and a half hours long, can only accomplish this kind of complexity and depth, if the writer is adept at the use of symbols. One powerful, symbolic image can speak volumes. Cynthia Whitcomb is president of Willamette Writers, and has had 29 of her screenplays produced. She is author of The Writers' Guide to Writing Your Screenplay and The Writers' Guide to Selling Your Screenplay. She teaches screenwriting classes at Portland State University.and through Willamette Writers. |