"British lads hit each other with chair" as Theory of Fiction
A Close Reading
Good morning class, welcome to Narrative Writing 101. For your first assignment, watch this video:
At a mere 1 min 7 sec, this is one of the best narrative videos of all time. People have shot million-dollar movies with weaker plots than this clip. In fact, most films ever made have worse plots than this clip. Hollywood would kill to have stories this good.
Do these 67 seconds contain everything you need to know about narrative fiction writing? Probably not, but let’s take a look anyways.
THE KISS
Start with something unexpected. In the first two seconds, we know something interesting is going on because the two main lads give each other a kiss.
This sets the tone for the whole video, and contextualizes everything that comes after. None of what is about to happen is at all malicious. These lads clearly love each other. This isn’t drama, it’s farce and tragedy.
THE AMBIGUITY
Ambiguity keeps people engaged. If your audience doesn’t know how to read the situation, they will keep looking. And this video is full of ambiguity.
Of all the things you might expect these lads to do, kissing wouldn’t make the top 100. But the very first thing they do is kiss each other on the lips. They don’t kiss passionately, like lovers. They kiss casually, like an old married couple, like this is something they do all the time. What exactly is going on here?
I’m sure that viewers from Yorkshire can follow all this dialogue, but for everyone else, the lads’ thick northern accents are part of what makes the narrative work. It’s hard to tell what they’re saying, which makes for more ambiguity. If these lads were easier to understand, this wouldn’t be such great cinema.
The more you think about things, the more mysteries you find. We don’t know what events brought the lads to enact the spectacle we are about to see. We don’t know whose idea it was to orchestrate this stunt. We don’t even know where they got the chair.
Even the number of lads is ambiguous — we start with two lads right in front of us and one lad implied by the camera, but from that point on lads will occasionally dart into frame without warning. How many lads might be behind the camera? How many lads do you think appear on video? Go back and count, you might be surprised.
They kiss and tenderly cradle each other, and they are hitting each other with a chair. Ambiguity.
THE SUSPENSE
From the very start of the video, we know that someone is going to get hit with the chair. Immediately after the kiss, the blonde lad raises the chair to strike. But the first hit doesn’t happen until around halfway into the video.
The video draws out the suspense as long as possible with many pre-chair rituals.
In case it isn’t obvious that everyone is plastered, the main lad motions for a pause so he can finish a handle of something brown. Another threat to their safety is introduced — he shatters the bottle on the ground. The broken glass acts as a sort of Chekhov's gun that heightens the sense of risk. If a bottle is shattered in Act One, the audience knows that someone could fall on that glass in Act Two. And someone will.
The lads out of frame shout, “You need to hit it ‘ard. Hit it ‘ard. Hit it ‘ard so it breaks in one.” They adjust his stance. The main lad reminds his friend, “don’t hit me head don’t hit me head”, and so forth. The cameralad shouts, “come on, then!” Then there is the count. One! Two! Three!
Alfred Hitchcock had a theory about the nature of suspense. It went like this:
There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise,’ and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean.
We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boom!’ There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchists place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!”
In the first case, we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.
There is very little surprise in this video. We see the main events coming a mile away. But there’s a whole lot of suspense. In this case, the audience is longing to warn the lads on screen: “You shouldn’t be having a laugh. This chair fun is going to end poorly!” But it’s no use. The lads are having a laugh and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.
THE UNEXPECTED
From the first second of the video, you know things are going to end poorly. But nothing goes as you might expect. The first hits aren’t dramatic, they’re rubbish. A lad does fall on the broken glass — we even hear it! — but he doesn’t get cut, the glass is of no consequence. A second lad volunteers to be struck with the chair.
“Don’t hit me head” gets subverted. Everyone expects that this is foreshadowing, that one of the lads will get crowned. No one sees “the chair unfolds and hits you in the spine” coming.
You know what will happen: lads are gonna get hit with chair. It’s even promised in the title, you know this before going in. But that promise plays out in unexpected ways. Things have to go wrong for the story to work.
THE TEXTURE
This would be a worse video without the swig, without throwing the bottle, without tossing down the cigarette and then the other lad picks it up???
I can’t justify this with hard logic. I can only appeal to your intuition, and hope that it’s the same as mine: would the video be better or worse without the cigarette throw and retrieval? Would the video be better or worse if they got to the first hit sooner? I think it would be worse, a much less surprising and entertaining story.
The lesson here is to include as much incidental stuff as you can, not just the plot. The viewer needs to be surrounded by a richness of detail that mirrors the richest parts of life.
We don’t know why the one lad darts in to pick up the cigarette that the other lad has thrown to the ground. What does this tell us about that lad as a character? It’s hard to tell — ambiguous — but it seems like nothing good. What kind of lad rushes in immediately to finish a ground cig?
Texture also increases the sense of ambiguity, which is part of what keeps us looking. There are a lot of threads set up in the first few seconds — the kiss, the cig, the broken glass. It’s not clear which of these will be important later. That keeps the audience guessing.
MODIFIED RULE OF THREES
The main event of this film is clearly a lad getting hit by a chair. By a true count there are four hits with the chair, but depending on how you look at it, there are sort of three hits.
Chair lad hits the main lad three times — twice weakly in the legs, and then a final time, when he nails him in the spine.
Chair lad does three styles of hits — he has one move where he whacks you weakly in the legs (which is demonstrated twice), one move that gets laid across the back of grey shirt lad, and the final kind, where he nails the main lad in the spine.
The plain old rule of threes is a little boring by now; it works better if you add in something to keep it fresh. This is a modified rule of threes. If you count the number of times the main lad gets hit, there are three hits. If you count the different kinds of hits, there are three hits. But these are slightly different sets of three lad-getting-hit events. Part of what makes this video work is that there’s more than one kind of repetition.
THE PATHOS
A lesser director would have ended the video as soon as the chair descends for the final time, before they pick the injured lad up off the ground. But you can’t cut this video early, you need the emotional payoff, the pathos. The image of the main lad lying on the ground. The laughter. The inchoate drooling. The incredulous, “you got that on video?”
One final thought. If you were to ask people for an artistic comparison, many people would look at the final shot of the lad being cradled by his friend and say it reminds them of the Pietà. And yeah, that’s a fair enough comparison:
But I think the ending is an even better fit for Herbert James Draper’s 1898 painting, The Lament for Icarus:
Like the British lads, and unlike Michelangelo’s Jesus, Icarus is fairly swole. He has just suffered a rather unfortunate fall. Everyone is standing about half-naked. And the nymphs are dragging Icarus around by the underarms, just like the lad’s friends when they lift him up at the end:
