My Favorite Trope
Hey, everyone!
I hope you had a great week and that you were able to carve out some time for creativity and doing the things you love.
I had a handful of general meetings and incoming submissions to read. Next week I have four pitches for the new series, one for a feature OWA. This weekend is all about getting them back in my bones.
One bright spot of the week so far was trading columns with Ben Blacker and his Re:Writing newsletter. My Part 2 went up on his home turf yesterday. I hope you click the link below to check it out and give him a sub!
Network Notes, Part 2 - by Ben Blacker and Mickey Fisher — benblacker.substack.com Guest Column from Mickey Fisher and The Extant Storytech R&D Report
Julie is in a production of DAMN YANKEES in Long Beach right now and because we're down to one car I've driven her there a couple of times.
On one of those trips we were listening to NPR and there were two major tearjerker stories on back to back shows. As I wiped my eyes and dried my hands on the steering wheel I realized, "It's the PLEDGE DRIVE. They're manipulating me emotionally so I'll GIVE THEM MONEY." Respect.
One of those stories featured a trope that gets me every time.
That got me wondering... "What's my all-time favorite trope?"
If you're not familiar, tropes are basically just recurring themes or devices. Every medium has them, every genre has them. "The chosen one." "One last job." "The meet cute." And so on.
It took me all of two seconds to figure it out:
My all-time favorite trope is the St. Crispin's Day Speech.
Basically, it's the speech that a character gives late in the movie (or the episode) when they're facing impossible odds and everyone around them is on the verge of giving up hope. The name comes from Shakespeare's HENRY V and a speech Henry gives just before The Battle of Agincourt, which is taking place on St. Crispin's Day.
Henry and his men are vastly outnumbered by the French, and he overhears his cousin wishing that they had more of the layabouts back in England to join them. Henry realizes he has to turn the tide and build the men's morale, so he gives them a rousing speech that appeals to their sense of honor, patriotism and camaraderie. This is where we get the phrase, "Band of brothers." I fell in love with this speech when I first saw it in Kenneth Branagh's terrific HENRY V adaptation:
If you didn't know that one I bet you know Bill Pullman's speech from INDEPENDENCE DAY.
There's a fantastic oral history about the creation of this speech. In it, Dean Devlin talks about being inspired to do a take on St. Crispin's Day:
Oral History of the President’s Speech in ‘Independence Day’ | Complex — www.complex.com As ‘Independence Day Resurgence’ continues filming in the desert, re-live the most patriotic and motivational speech in cinematic history.
I think my favorite of these speeches is from ANY GIVEN SUNDAY. First of all, it's written by John Logan, who is hands down one of the best writers for TV and film today. Second, it's delivered by Al Pacino.
But I love it because it does the thing that the very best St. Crispin's Day speeches do. It reaches down into something deeper than the battle, or the football game, or the chess match, or whatever. These speeches don't just exist to motivate the characters. They exist to move you as an audience member and put you in an emotional state so that you are primed for the roller coaster ride ahead. To do that they have to engage you by speaking about something deeply human. If they were just about football, or war, or chess, they would fall short. We wouldn't white knuckle our armrests or high five our friends after the big play.
If you do it right there's a bit of sleight-of-hand and the audience doesn't know you're working on them, just like I didn't know what NPR was doing to me. All the audience knows is that they're freaking amped by the end.
Logan's speech is about life itself. It's about living and dying for "one more inch." Over twenty years later, I still think about this speech when I'm up against a wall.
One of the common denominators that you'll see in speeches like this is repetition of a phrase or an idea that builds in intensity, almost like a ritual drum beat. Henry plants a rhetorical flag on the name St. Crispin's day and uses that idea to rally his men, every mention of it driving home the idea that they will remember this day and hold their heads high.
For ANY GIVEN SUNDAY it's "one inch."
For FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS it's "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose."
I used to joke that I cried once per act watching the FNL series. Part of it is that I come from a Friday night lights kind of town. I still listen to The Ironton Fighting Tigers on iHeart Radio every Friday night in the fall. It's in my DNA. But it was also thanks to Coach Taylor's inspirational speeches every week.
I think this trope works on me because one of the most heartbreaking things I can imagine is the loss of all hope. I'm always moved by the idea that even in our darkest moments, as long as one person can keep that flicker alive, they can set fire to the hearts of people around them and together they can achieve the impossible.
We need all of that we can get right now.