The Anatomy of Story (41 page)

The Western hero does not wear armor, but he wears the second great symbol of this symbol web, the six-gun. The six-gun represents mechanized force, a "sword" of justice that is highly magnified in power. Because of his code and the values of the warrior culture, the cowboy will never draw his gun first. And he must always enforce justice in a showdown in the street, where all can see.

Like the horror story, the Western always expresses binary values of good and evil, and these are signaled by the third major symbol of the web, the hat. The Western hero wears a white hat; the bad man wears black.

The fourth symbol of the form is the badge, which is in the shape of another symbol, the star. The Western hero is always the enforcer of right, often to his own detriment, since his violence usually ostracizes him. He may temporarily join the community in an official way if he becomes a lawman. He imposes the law not just upon the wilderness but also upon the wildness and passion within each person.

The final major symbol of the Western web is the fence. It is always a wooden fence, slight and fragile, and it represents the skin-deep control the new civilization has over the wilderness of nature and the wildness of human nature.

The Western symbol web is used to great effect in stories like
The Virginian, Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine
, and the most schematic and metaphorical of all Westerns,
Shane.

Shane

(novel by Jack Schaefer, screenplay by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and Jack Sher, 1953) Shane's
schematic quality makes it easy to see the Western symbols, but it calls so much attention to those symbols that the audience always has the sense that "I'm watching a classic Western." This is the great risk in using highly metaphorical symbols.

That being said,
Shane
takes the mythical Western form to its logical extreme. The story tracks a mysterious stranger who, when first seen, is already on a journey. He rides down from the mountain, makes one stop, and then returns to the mountain. The film is a subgenre I call the "traveling angel story," which is found not only in Westerns but also in detective stories (the Hercule Poirot stories), comedies (
Crocodile Dundee; Amelie; Chocolat; Good Morning, Vietnam),
and musicals
(Mary Poppins, The Music Man).
In the traveling angel story, the hero enters a community in trouble, helps the inhabitants fix things, and then moves on to help the next community. Here in its Western version, Shane is the traveling warrior angel who fights other warriors (cattlemen) to make it safe for the farmers and the villagers to build a home and a village.

Shane
also has a highly symbolic character web. There is the angel-like hero versus the satanic gunslinger; the family-man farmer (named Joseph) versus the grizzled, ruthless, unmarried cattleman; the ideal wife and mother (named Marian); and the child, a boy who worships the man who is good with a gun. These abstract characters are presented with almost no individual detail. For example, Shane has some ghost in his past involving the use of guns, but it's never explained. As a result, the characters are just very appealing metaphors.

All the standard Western symbols are here in their purest form. The gun is crucial to any Western. But in
Shane,
it's placed at the center of the theme. The film asks the question by which every man in the story is judged: Do you have the courage to use the gun? The cattlemen hate the farmers because they put up fences. The farmers fight the cattlemen so they can build a real town with laws and a church. Shane wears light buckskin; the evil gunslinger wears black. The farmers buy supplies with which

they can build their homes a( the general store. But the store has a door that opens into the saloon where the cattlemen drink and light and kill. Shane tries to build a new life of home and family when lie's in the general store, but he can't help being sucked into the saloon and back to his old life as a lone warrior who is great with a gun.

This isn't to say that
Shane
is a bad piece of storytelling. It has a certain power precisely because its symbol web is so clean, so well drawn. There is no padding here. But for that same reason, it feels like a schematic story, with a moral argument that is just this side of moral philosophy, as almost all religious stories are.

SYMBOL TECHNIQUE: REVERSING THE SYMBOL WEB

T
he great flaw of using a prefabricated metaphorical symbol web is that it is so self-conscious and predictable that the story becomes a blueprint for the audience, not a lived experience. But in this flaw lies a tremendous opportunity. You can use the audience's knowledge of the form and the symbol web to reverse it. In this technique, you use all the symbols in the web but twist them so that their meaning is very different from what the audience expects. This forces them to rethink all their expectations. You can do this with any story that has well-known symbols. When you are working in a specific genre like myth, horror, or Western, this technique is known as undercutting the genre.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller

(novel by Edmund Naughton, screenplay by Robert Altman &

Brian McKay, 1971) McCabe and Mrs. Miller
is a great film with a brilliant script. A big part of its brilliance lies in its strategy for reversing the classic Western symbols. This reversal of symbols is an outgrowth of the traditional Western theme. Instead of characters bringing civilization to the wilderness,
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
shows an entrepreneur who builds a town from out of the wilderness and who is destroyed by big business.

The reverse symbolism begins with the main character. McCabe is a gambler and dandy who makes a fortune by opening a whorehouse. He creates a community out of the western wilderness through the capital-

ism of sex. The second main character, the love of McCabe's life, is a madam who smokes opium.

The visual subworlds also reverse the classic symbols. The town is nor the rational grid of clapboard buildings on the flat, dry plain of the Southwest. It's a makeshift wood and tent town carved out of the lush, rainy forest of the Northwest. Instead of a bustling community under the benevolent gaze of the marshal, this town is fragmented and half-built, with listless, isolated individuals who stare suspiciously at any stranger.

The key symbolic action of the Western is the showdown, and this too is reversed. The classic showdown happens in the middle of the main street where the whole town can see. The cowboy hero waits for the bad man to draw first, still beats him, and reaffirms right action and law and order for the growing community. In
McCabe and Mrs. Miller,
the hero, who is anything but a lawman, is chased all over town by three killers during a blinding snowstorm. None of the townspeople see or care about McCabe's right action or whether the town's leader lives or dies. They are off dousing the flames of a church that no one attends.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller
flips the symbolic objects of classic Westerns as well. The law does not exist. The church sits empty. In the showdown, one of the killers hides behind a building and picks off McCabe with a shotgun. McCabe, who only appears to be dead, shoots the killer between the eyes using a hidden derringer (in classic Westerns, the weapon of women!). Instead of the chaps and white, wide-brimmed hat of the cowboy, McCabe wears an eastern suit and a bowler.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller,
with its strategy of undercutting a genre, gives us some of the best techniques for making old metaphorical symbols new. It is an education in great storytelling and a landmark of American film.

Examples of Symbol Web

The best way to learn the techniques of symbol web is to see them in use. As we look at different stories, you will notice these techniques apply equally well in a wide array of story forms.

Excalibur

(novel
Le Morte d'Arthur
by Thomas Malory, screenplay by

Rospo Pallenberg and John Moorman, 1981)
If the Western is the national myth of the United States, you could argue that the King Arthur story is the national myth of England. Its power and appeal are so vast that this one tale informs thousands of stories throughout Western storytelling. For that reason alone, we as modern-day storytellers should know how its crucial symbols work. As always, we begin with the character symbols.

King Arthur is not just a man and not just a king. He is the modern centaur, the metal horseman. As such, he is the first superman, the Man of Steel, the male taken to the extreme. He is the ultimate embodiment of warrior culture. He represents courage, strength, right action, and establishing justice through combat in front of others. Ironically, as masculinity taken to the extreme, he lives by a code of chivalry that places woman high on a pedestal of absolute purity. This turns the entire female gender into a symbol, divided into the Christian binary opposites of Madonna and whore.

King Arthur also symbolizes the modern leader in conflict. He creates a perfect community in Camelot, based on purity of character, only to lose it when his wife falls in love with his finest and purest knight. The conflict between duty and love is one of the great moral oppositions in storytelling, and King Arthur embodies it as well as any character ever has.

Arthur's ally is Merlin, the mentor-magician
par excellence.
He is a throwback character to the pre-Christian worldview of magic, so he represents knowledge of the deeper forces of nature. He is the ultimate craftsman-artist of nature and human nature, and of human nature as an outgrowth of nature. His spells and advice always begin with a deep understanding of the needs and cravings of the unique person before him.

Arthur's opponents possess a symbolic quality that hundreds of writers have borrowed over the years. His son is Mordred, the evil child whose very name represents death. Mordred's ally is his mother, Morgana (also known as Morgan le Fay), an evil sorceress.

The knights are supermen like Arthur. They stand above the common man not just in their abilities as warriors but also in their purity and greatness of character. They must live by the chivalric code, and they seek the Holy Grail, by which they can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. In their journeys, the knights act as Good Samaritans, helping all in need and by their right action proving their purity of heart.

Excalibur
and other versions of the King Arthur story are filled with symbolic worlds and objects. The premier symbolic place is Camelot, the Utopian community where members suppress their human craving for individual glory in exchange for the tranquillity and happiness of the whole. This symbolic place is further symbolized by the Round Table. The Round Table is the republic of the great, where all the knights have an equal place at the table, alongside their king.

Excalibur
is named after the other major symbolic object of the King Arthur story, the sword. Excalibur is the male symbol of right action, and only the rightful king, whose heart is pure, can draw it from the stone and wield it to form the ideal community.

The symbols of King Arthur infuse our culture and are found in stories such as
Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Hope and Glory, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Fisher King,
and thousands of American Westerns. If you want to use King Arthur symbols, be sure to twist their meaning so they become original to your story.

The Usual Suspects

(by Christopher McQuarrie, 1995) The Usual Suspects
tells a unique story in which the main character creates his own symbolic character using the techniques that we've been talking about, while the story is happening. Appropriately named Verbal, he is apparently a small-time crook and ally but is actually the hero, a master criminal (the main opponent), and a storyteller. In telling the customs interrogator what happened, he constructs a terrifying, ruthless character named Keyser Soze. He attaches to this character the symbol of the devil, in such a way that Keyser Soze gains mythical power to the point that just the mention of his name strikes terror in the heart. At the end of the story, the audience learns that Verbal
is
Keyser Soze, and he is a master criminal in part
because
he is a master storyteller.
The Usual Suspects
is great storytelling and symbol making at the highest level.

Star Wars

(by George Lucas, 1977)
One of the main reasons
Star Wars
has been so popular is that it is founded on the technique of symbolic theme. This apparently simple fantasy adventure story has a strong theme that is concentrated in the symbol of the light saber. In this technologically advanced world where people travel at light speed, both heroes and opponents fight with a saber. Obviously, this is not realistic. But it is realistic enough in
this
world to be an object that can take on thematic power. The light saber symbolizes the samurai code of training and conduct that can be used for good or evil. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this symbolic object and the theme it represents to the worldwide success of
Star Wars.