Good screenwriters are masters of frames. Evoking mental imagery to influence the way viewers perceive characters, situations, and events is part of the craft. Consider The Sixth Sense and its main character, Dr. Malcom Crowe: think of how differently the facts of the story appeared at the end of the film. M. Night Shyamalan skillfully made you filter reality through the wrong lenses throughout the entire movie.
Through frames we perceive, we understand and evaluate things, and our feelings develop accordingly.
But when it comes to screenwriting, mental frames are not just a matter of craft (how to lead and how to mislead your audience). They are also a matter of politics.
The great linguist, George Lakoff, argues that our “political mind” is structured around key frames and articulated cognitive schemata — or, if you prefer, metaphors associated with a core of defining values. For example, according to Lakoff, in the US, Democrats think within the frame of the “nurturing parent”: the Nation as a family, and the President and Government as parents who raise their children, the citizens, with an emphasis on the importance of empathy. Republicans, meanwhile, operate within the “strict father” frame: conditioning the children to survive in a competitive world and endowing them with the necessary discipline — the main concern of the President/Government/father.
Words evoke frames. Stories evoke frames.
Thus, whether you agree or not with Lakoff’s theory, it is certainly interesting to consider whether a movie enhances one frame or another, and how movies frame political issues. Do Clint Eastwood’s characters evoke the Strict Father frame? In the Hunger Games, how do the Strict Father frame and the Nurturing Parent frame oppose each other through the characters of Katniss Everdeen and President Snow?
If you want to dive deeper into the topic, listen to this episode of Alexandra Pilar’s screenwriting podcast, On The Page. Her guests, writers Michael Zannettis and Chelsea O’Connor, draw from Lakoff’s thought while discussing movies and political framing. They also promote a podcast they’ve created to discuss politics and frames (from a democratic perspective), using example from movies.
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