Monkey Man: Expressionism in Action Movies

This week we're going to be studying Monkey Man, the new Dev Patel movie. With a screenplay by Paul Angunawela and John Collee, story by Dev Patel.  This is a special film for me because one of our students, Joseph J.U. Taylor, has a wonderful small role in the piece. We're really proud of you, Joseph. I do want to warn you that there will be some moderate spoilers in the first half of the movie. We're definitely going to spoil the sea change (the midpoint of the film), but I'll give you a heads up before we get into where it all goes. Our focus today is on the epic scope of Monkey Man and how it uses the power of action movies to deliver something much more profound than your typical popcorn movie. We’ll be discussing the difference between naturalism and expressionism in all kinds of movies. We’ll be discussing a profoundly important element of 7 Act Structure called The Sea Change and how it functions in Monkey Man And we'll also be examining a small but significant moment that demonstrates how to create a sense of reality and fully realized characters, even within such a heightened, action-packed, expressionistic piece. Many people have described Monkey Man as essentially John Wick in India. It's a giant, bloody, revenge fantasy told through almost non-stop action sequences.  In many ways, that is what Monkey Man is. It’s like so many Quentin Tarantino movies. It's like Kill Bill, with its larger than life action sequences that are almost expressionistic in their nature. So, what exactly is expressionism? And how does it differ from realism and naturalism in film? Realism means that the film is playing out almost exactly the way things do in real-time. A weird thing happens if you actually hang out in realism in films, which is that realism doesn't feel real.  Movies move faster than real life. They have to because they only have an hour and a half, maybe two hours, to tell a story that, if you were just gonna retell it beat by beat, would feel like forever. Most movies actually don't take place in realism. They take place in naturalism.  In other words, they take place in a heightened, faster, more extreme reality that feels like it's real, but it's actually happening at a high-pitched pace.  In reality, half of our language is:  "Hey, how you doing?”  “Good, good. How you doing?"  Half of our language is not even connected.  Half of our language isn't doing anything.  There's no want, there's no need. Half the time we're not even making choices.  "I really should… but I don't want to… but I'm not ready to… but I want to…  I should..."  That's realism.  We're in these states of limbo most of our lives, in which every now and then we have those punctuating moments like, "bang, this matters." So if we really were to write in the world of realism, we would have all those boring moments and end up with a diffuse storytelling in which it's hard to actually capture the journey in the short period of time we have. Of course, in TV we have even less time. Even though we have more episodes, the episodes are even shorter. So both movies and TV tend to happen in the world of naturalism.  What naturalism means is that the volume is turned up.