Exploring the Duality of a Screenplay Narrative

Abstract

Aristotle’s Poetics outlines some of the key principles in the creation and performance of dramatic texts. The book is regarded a seminal title, appearing as reference to the ‘origins’ of drama in many screenwriting books (Seger, 1994; McKee, 1999; Vogler, 1999; Moritz, 2001; Field, 2003; Egri, 2004 et al.), and highly thought of in the canon of academic theory. Although Poetics is viewed in a highbrow light, close inspection of the text (discounting editors’ translation notes that appear in all published versions) reveals that, arguably, it is nothing but a simple ‘how to’ guide. It mainly contains rules, practices and suggestions of how drama is ‘supposed’ to work, and when considering screenwriting in particular, gives little variation in style and approach to the texts that reference him in the first place. In an interview for BBC Radio 4’s Front Row series (Stock, 19 March 2003), Richard Walters, Professor and Co-Chair of Screenwriting at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),¹ argues that Aristotle is the most influential person in cinema to date. He recalls being told by his own Professor: ‘this is it; [Poetics] is the real screenwriting book’. Frictions may exist between Aristotle’s work as seminal academic writing or a ‘how to’ guide appropriated by mass culture, but either way, it provides both historical and practical value to today’s study of screenwriting.