For me, THEME is the most important element of a books, film, play, poem, or any other art work.
And yet, from the beginning of drama, dramatists have struggled to adequately define it. So I don’t exactly relish trying to do it, myself!
But as you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been linking to a whole slew of helpful previous posts in my new posts, so that you can easily go deeper into whatever element of your book or script you’re working on.
And last week I tried to link to THEME—and realized I hadn’t moved over my post about it! Which is no use to you at all. So here goes:
Theme is what the story is about.
On a deeper level than the plot details. The big meaning. Usually a moral meaning.
Hmm. See why I don’t want to define it? What in the world does that mean?
Well, how about defining by example?
Okay, I’ve heard, often, “Huck Finn is about the inhumanity of racism.”
A vastly important topic, now more than ever— but it’s not much of a guide to the details of the story.
Here’s another example. I was a theater major, studied and performed a whole ton of Shakespeare, and I heard a lot that the theme of Romeo and Juliet is “Great love defies even death.” Except that never made any sense to me. In the end, they’re dead, right? So how exactly is the love defying death? Risking death and losing, maybe. Inspiring people to be better people because of their deaths, maybe.
How about this? “A man is never truly alone who has friends” is a great statement of the theme of It’s a Wonderful Life. (And stated overtly in the end of that movie.)
The trouble is, I personally think it’s closer to the soul of that movie to say: “It’s the little, ordinary actions we do every day that add up to true heroism.”
So defining theme has always seemed like a slippery process to me. Different people can pull vastly different interpretations of the theme of a story from the same story. And even if you can cleverly distill the meaning of a story into one sentence… admit it, you’re not really covering everything that the story is about, are you?
I think it’s much more useful to think of theme as layers of meaning.
To look at theme not as one sentence, but a whole set of morals and lessons and ruminations and propositions.
And that’s where it gets really fun to start working with theme: when it’s not just some pedantic sentence, but a whole world of interrelated meanings that resonate on levels that you’re not even aware of sometimes, but that stay with you and bring you back to certain stories over and over and over again. (Think of some of the dreams you have, where there will be double and triple puns, visual and verbal. And by the way, if you’re a writer, and you’re not keeping a dream journal, you’re working too hard! Why not let your subconscious do the work?)
There are all kinds of ways to work theme into a story.
PLOT AS THEME
The most obvious is the PLOT. Every plot is also a statement of theme.
Let’s see how that works in some classic movies.
- It’s a Wonderful Life is a great, great example of plot reflecting theme. George Bailey’s desire in the beginning of the film is to be a hero, to do big, important things. Throughout the story, that desire seems to be thwarted at every turn by the ordinariness of his life. And yet, every single encounter George Bailey has is an example of a small, ordinary goodness, a right choice that George makes, that in the end, when we and he see the town as it would have been if he had never existed, lets us understand that it is those little things that make for true heroism.
- Presumed Innocent is an interesting book for plot reflecting theme. I love how that book (and the very good film made of it) depicts the horrifying randomness of the legal system: that justice can turn on the assignment of a judge, on the outcome of a political race, on the loyalties of a witness – or on the very, very clever defendant himself. To me, it’s a brilliant exploration of what justice really is, or isn’t, or can never be. And all the more horrifying to contemplate right now, when the fate of democracy may rest on a couple of court cases against the same powerful criminal— judged by appointees of that criminal.
- And here's a brilliant example of a plot TWIST conveying theme: with Hannibal Lecter’s escape, The Silence of the Lambs drives home the point that we can win a battle with evil, but never the entire war.
THEMATIC DIALOGUE
DIALOGUE is another way to convey theme.
A great example to look at is The Matrix. The Matrix is all about waking up, about what reality is, and about protagonist Neo as the potential savior of the world, which has been enslaved by a virtual reality program. And about escaping. And about going down the rabbit hole.
In Sequence 1 of The Matrix, the scene in which we first meet Neo, filmmakers The Wachowskis throw in all of those thematic references:
We first see Neo asleep at his computer. He’s been running a search on a man named Morpheus. The words 'Wake up, Neo” appear on his screen and he wakes up. The computer then tells him that: 'The Matrix has you...' and to 'Follow the white rabbit...'
Neo presses the 'esc' (escape) key to try to figure out what’s going on.
Then when the next characters come in, wanting a disc Neo has hacked for them, look at the lines that Choi says:
“Hallelujah. You're my savior, man. My own personal Jesus Christ,” and “This never happened, you don't exist,” and “You need to unplug, man” – all references to the themes of the movie. And Neo himself asks, “You ever have that feeling where you don't know if you're awake or still dreaming?”
All of that in maybe a four-minute scene, and it blatantly spells out the entire story. And yet it works on the surface level as well; an audience isn’t stopping to think, "Oh, there’s a theme, and there’s a theme, and yet another theme."
(If there’s anything I learned from screenwriting it’s that you can JUST SAY IT. And it generally works better if you just do.)
Full story breakdown of The Matrix in Stealing Hollywood
Another great example of working a THEMATIC IMAGE SYSTEM is the first scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark:
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Raiders of the Lost Ark story breakdown
VISUAL IMAGE SYSTEMS
Obviously, the examples from Raiders I used above show how to work a theme visually.
In film, every movie has a production designer: one artist (and these people are genius level, let me tell you) who is responsible, in consultation with the director and with the help of sometimes a whole army of production artists), for the entire look of the film — every color, costume, prop, set choice.
With a book, guess who’s the production designer?
You are.
So don’t you think you’d better learn a little about it?
- Let’s take the movie Alien. I could go on all day about what a perfect movie the first Alien is structurally, but it’s a perfect example of brilliant production design as well. The visual image systems are staggering. Take a look at those sets (created by Swiss surrealist HR Giger). What do you see? Sexual imagery everywhere. Insect imagery, a classic for horror movies. Machine imagery. Anatomical imagery: the spaceships have very human-looking spines (vertebrae and all), intestinal-looking piping, vulvic doors. And the gorgeous perversity of the design is that the look of the film combines the sexual and the insectoid, the anatomical with the mechanical, throws in some reptilian, serpentine, sea-monsterish under-the-sea-effects — to create a hellish vision that is as much a character in the film as any of the character characters.
Oh, and did I mention the labyrinth imagery? One of my all-time favorite archetypes is the Minotaur. The Alien series plays heavily on this archetype with this classic a monster in a maze.
Those are very specific choices and combinations. The sexual imagery and water imagery open us up on a subconscious level and make us vulnerable to the horrors of insects, machines, and death. The combination imagery also gives us a clear visual picture of a future world in which machines and humans have evolved together into a new species. It’s unique, gorgeous, and powerfully effective.
Terminator (the first) is a brilliant use of machine/insect imagery as well.
- Nobody does image systems better than Thomas Harris. The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon are serial killer novels, but Harris elevates that overworked genre to art, in no small part due to his image systems. In Silence, Harris borrows heavily from myth and especially fairy tales. Again, you’ve got the labyrinth/Minotaur. You’ve got a monster in a cage, a troll holding a girl in a pit (and that girl is a princess, remember: her mother is American royalty, a senator). You’ve got a twist on the “lowly peasant boy rescues the princess with the help of supernatural allies” fairy tale: Clarice is the lowly peasant who enlists the help of (one might also say apprentices to) Lecter’s wizardlike perceptions to rescue the princess. You have another twisted wizard in his cave who is trying his own spells to achieve a version of transformation.
You have the insect imagery here too, with the moths, the spiders and mice in the storage unit, and the entomologists with their insect collections in the museum, the theme of change, larva to butterfly.
Silence of the Lambs full story breakdown
- In Red Dragon Harris works the animal imagery to powerful effect. The killer is not a mere man, he’s a mythical beast. When he’s born, he’s compared to a bat because of his cleft palate. He kills on a moon cycle, like a werewolf. He uses his grandmother’s false teeth, like a vampire. And let’s not forget: he’s trying to turn into a dragon!
Now, a lot of authors will just throw in random scary images. How boring and meaningless! What makes what Harris does so effective is that he has an intricate, but extremely specific and limited image system going in his books. And he combines fantastical visual and thematic imagery with very realistic and accurate police procedure.
I know, all of these examples are horror, sorry, it’s my thing!
- But look at The Wizard of Oz (just the brilliant contrast of the black and white world of Kansas and the Technicolor world of Oz says volumes).
Full story breakdown of The Wizard of Oz in Stealing Hollywood
- Look at what Barbara Kingsolver does in Prodigal Summer, where images of fecundity and the, well, prodigiousness of nature overflow off the pages, revealing characters and conflicts and themes.
- Look at what the filmmakers do with water in Chinatown, and also, try watching that movie sometime with the classic play Oedipus Rex in mind… the very specific parallels will blow you away.
Full story breakdown of Chinatown in Part III of Stealing Hollywood.
So how do you create a Visual and Thematic Image System in your own books or scripts?
First, I think it’s important to get attuned to how your favorite storytellers use theme and thematic imagery to convey the meaning of your favorite books, films and plays.
So as always, I suggest making a MASTER LIST - of books and films with striking and resonant imagery.
Make a list of books and films that to you have particularly striking visual and thematic image systems.
List some of those themes and images.
Now— what themes and images from that list are YOU working with in your own book or script? Or that you could be working with to enhance your own story?
Let that list inspire another one:
What are some of your own favorite images to work with?
This exercise should go a long way toward inspiring you to think more deeply about the themes and visual systems of your story.
COLLAGE BOOK:
I’ve already posted about one of my core techniques for authors and screenwriters: creating a collage book of thematic images, characters, locations, etc.
I’ll go more into specific techniques I use and teach in the next post!
As always, I’d love to hear some of your examples!
—Alex
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All material © Alexandra Sokoloff, Screenwriting Tricks for Authors
Thanks, this is a really useful reminder of the usefulness of recurring visual images
Great post, Alex!
Very, very helpful.