20 Master Plots (18 page)

The examples of Poe and Euripides are atypical of the revenge plot. The protagonists in both cases claim the rights of justice, but in excess to their due. They're tragic, pathetic characters, but they don't have, nor do they deserve, our sympathies. Their revenges are outrages in themselves.

In 1974 Paramount released a film starring Charles Bronson that created an uproar of protest. Social and political leaders denounced the film as neo-Fascist; the Catholic church slapped the picture with a "C" rating (condemned). And yet people from every race, age, sex and economic class around the world lined up in droves to see it.

The film was
Death Wish,
film's version of the ultimate revenge fantasy, that of the ordinary man seeking revenge as a one-man vigilante committee. The film was remade twice more with virtually no change in the plot, and still it continued to make big money at the box office.

Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) is a successful, big-city architect. He's an upper-middle-class liberal with a beautiful wife and a beautiful home. Three out-and-out crazy punks upset his world when they break into his apartment, kill his wife and rape his daughter, who spends the rest of the film catatonic. The police can do nothing.

Furious with the incompetence of the police, Kersey takes matters into his own hands. He starts haunting the cesspools of New York, inviting muggers to take a shot at him. And when they take him up on his offer, he takes a shot at them—literally. The press dubs him the New York Vigilante. He is a media hero; crime in the city drops while he stalks the streets.

The police capture him but instead of arresting him tell him to leave town. (Sounds a lot like a stock Western plot: The hired sheriff cleans up the town, but the townspeople get fed up with all the violence associated with the clean-up and ask him to leave.) Kersey leaves New York for Los Angeles, where he takes up his crusade in
Death Wish II
when his Mexican maid and teenaged daughter are raped and killed. (Don't ask where the daughter came from.)

As an action melodrama, the
Death Wish
series manipulates our emotions expertly. We're fed up with crime in the streets; we hate the vermin that inhabit our cities, and we keep waiting for some knight in shining armor to emerge and clean up the town the way Marshalls Earp and Dillon did in their day. We're also frustrated with a system that either has too much red tape or is just incompetent.

Along comes Kersey. Give him a justified cause (he loses his family to scum), give him a gun, and let him loose to do his own thing. And then let us participate vicariously in his victories. When I saw
Death Wish
in the theater, the audience applauded and cheered when the bad guys got it. I also saw it in a video club in Moscow, and the Russians loved it. For a moment, Bronson's character was our defending champion. We immediately side with Kersey's anger and frustration; it's
our
anger and frustration. And as Kersey scours the streets,
we feel cleansed.
This is the heart of catharsis, of cleansing.

Critics were concerned the movie would spawn copycat vigilantes. It didn't happen, of course. It did, however, spawn copycat versions of the film worldwide, proving its appeal to a wide audience and the power and depth of the emotions we bring to it.

Interestingly enough, the author of the novel
Death Wish
wrote a sequel called
Death Sentence,
in which he proposed alternative solutions to vigilantism. To date no one has optioned the book for a film.

Paul Kersey and Hamlet are both bent on revenge. But the similarities stop there. Paul Kersey is a sketch of a man, a type. In the beginning of his story he detests violence, a typically liberal attitude, but by the end of the story he is addicted to it. He does change as a character, but the change is without any real depth or soul-searching. He just goes with the flow.

Hamlet struggles from the beginning of the play to the end. When the ghost of his father tells him he didn't die accidentally but was murdered by Hamlet's uncle, Claudius, Hamlet doesn't go storming off to dispense justice. He is a thinking person. Is the ghost real? Is it a demon sent to torment him? He doesn't know whether to believe the ghost. He needs proof.

Hamlet becomes depressed. He isn't a violent man, and the thought of running a sword through his uncle turns his stomach. Unlike manipulative plots like
Death Wish,
in which characters enter into the notion of revenge easily once given a provocation, Hamlet suffers tremendously. He doubts the ghost. He doubts himself. He wants to do the right thing, but he truly doesn't know what it is.

When a troupe of actors arrive, Hamlet comes up with a plan to find out if Claudius is guilty. He has the actors play out the scenario of his father's murder as the ghost related to him, and he watches Claudius for his reaction.

Claudius gives himself away. He's so unnerved that he must leave the performance. Hamlet now is certain the ghost is his dead father, and that Claudius had murdered him. The task of vengeance now falls squarely on him.

And yet when he comes upon Claudius while he's praying, Hamlet can't kill him. He rationalizes, believing if he kills Claudius while he's praying, Claudius will be in a state of grace.

Claudius is no fool. He thinks Hamlet is plotting to take the crown away from him and so hatches his own plan to kill Hamlet. But the plan backfires.

Hamlet wavers between sanity and madness, destroying the people around him. This has become a true disaster in the making, involving the entire court. He kills the old man Polonius (thinking he was killing Claudius), which causes his son, Laertes, to swear to avenge
his
father's death. Claudius seizes the opportunity and sets up a duel, betting on his nephew, but poisoning the tip of Laertes' sword so that even a scratch would be fatal to Hamlet. Then, to hedge his bets, Claudius also puts a cup of poison near Hamlet in case he should get thirsty during the duel.

But Hamlet's mother drinks from the cup and dies.

Laertes wounds Hamlet, poisoning him.

Hamlet runs Laertes through. But before he dies, he tells Hamlet that Claudius was responsible for poisoning the sword.

Hamlet runs Claudius through, and then, in the true tradition of the revenge tragedy, Hamlet dies.

End of story, a total wipeout. (You can see that Shakespeare was still influenced by the Greek version of the revenge tragedy, such as
Medea.)

Although revenge tragedies are still as bloody as they were during the Greek era, the hero now survives the ordeal. The point of the old revenge tragedies is that there's a heavy price to pay for revenge. Innocent people get swept up in it and die, and the hero almost always pays the price for revenge with her own death. There was never any satisfaction at having accomplished vengeance.

Today, however, the hero seems to bask in self-righteousness. She feels justified and liberated by the act of vengeance. She walks away at the end, somehow a better person, and if there's a price to pay, it's small in comparison to the suffering the old heroes went through.

Revenge is an emotionally powerful (and one might say dangerous) plot to work with. You manipulate powerful emotions in your reader by creating a situation that cries for justice. We respond at a deep level when someone violates us or anyone else who doesn't deserve violation. In many cases, victims are like Everyman. It's as if you say to the reader, "If it could happen to this person, it could happen to you, too." Chilling. And to protect ourselves from that kind of outrage (murder, rape, mayhem, etc.) we demand swift and complete justice. You put yourself in a strong moral position as you write this plot. You say what is proper and what is improper behavior. Be careful. What you recommend may be wild justice, but that too may have its price.

Now let's say you want to write a story about a bookkeeper who cheats on the books. As readers, we may not feel offended by the crime. The call for revenge wouldn't seem justified. What would you do, turn him in to the I.R.S.? You certainly wouldn't cut off his head. Limit your revenge story to a grievous crime— one that does major physical or mental damage to your hero. Even in
The Sting,
Redford is avenging the death of his close friend.

This brings us back to the discussion about motivation and intent. Revenge is the intent of your hero. But what is your hero's motivation for wanting to get revenge? Be careful how you develop this aspect of your protagonist. Do you want the reader to remain sympathetic, or do you want to show how seeking revenge distorts the values of the character? Understand both the cause (the crime) and the effect (how the crime affects the victim or someone close to the victim who wants revenge).

This plot examines the dark side of human nature. Don't lose your character amidst the turmoil of the action.

CHECKLIST

Keep in mind the following points as you develop this plot:

1. Your protagonist seeks retaliation against the antagonist for a real or imagined injury.

2. Most (but not all) revenge plots focus more on the act of the revenge than on a meaningful examination of the character's motives.

3. The hero's justice is "wild," vigilante justice that usually goes outside the limits of the law.

4. Revenge plots tend to manipulate the feelings of the reader by avenging the injustices of the world by a man or woman of action who is forced to act by events when the institutions that normally deal with these problems prove inadequate.

5. Your hero should have moral justification for vengeance.

6. Your hero's vengeance may equal but may not exceed the offense perpetrated against the hero (the punishment must fit the crime).

7. Your hero first should try to deal with the offense in traditional ways, such as relying on the police—an effort that usually fails.

8. The first dramatic phase establishes the hero's normal life; then the antagonist interferes with it by committing a crime. Make the audience understand the full impact of the crime against the hero, and what it costs both physically and emotionally.

Your hero then gets no satisfaction by going through official channels and realizes he must pursue his own cause if he wants to avenge the crime.

9. The second dramatic phase includes your hero making plans for revenge and then pursuing the antagonist.

Your antagonist may elude the hero's vengeance either by chance or design. This act usually pits the two opposing characters against each other.

10. The last dramatic phase includes the confrontation between your hero and antagonist. Often the hero's plans go awry, forcing him to improvise. Either the hero succeeds or fails in his attempts. In contemporary revenge plots, the hero usually doesn't pay much of an emotional price for the revenge. This allows the action to become cathartic for the audience.

W
hat child doesn't love riddles? What adult doesn't like the puzzle to solve, the brain teaser to ponder, the conundrum to untangle? They delight us because they challenge and entertain us.

A riddle is a deliberately enigmatic or ambiguous question. The answer requires understanding the subtleties of meaning within the words themselves, which are clues to another meaning. "What's black and white and red all over?" goes one well-known children's riddle. Answer: "A newspaper." Why? Because we take the word
red
to mean
read
and
all over
to mean
everywhere.
The words of the riddle suggest a hidden meaning, and you must search the words for clues that provide the solution, in addition to some insight on your part. The object of the riddle, which is its subject, is usually described in an enigmatic way:

What runs all day and lies under the bed at night?

A dog.

That's an acceptable answer, but it doesn't satisfy. Why not? Because it lacks the element of surprise and cleverness. The answer is prosaic,
obvious.

What runs all day and lies under the bed at night?

A shoe.

Maybe not a great riddle, but the answer is more satisfying than "a dog." The riddle implies something alive (because it runs