McKee At His Best

Soap Opera characters have no inner or extra-personal conflicts. They suffer when they don't get what they want, but because they're either good people or bad, they rarely face true inner dilemmas. Society never intervenes in their air-conditioned worlds. If, for example, a murder should bring a detective, a representative of society, into the story, you can be certain that within a week this cop will have an intimate and personal relationship with every other character in the Soap.

Suppose a story contains three tragic scenes contiguously. What would be the effect? In the first, we shed tears; in the second, we sniffle; in the third, we laugh... loudly. Not because the third scene isn't sad - it may be the saddest of all three - but, because the previous two have drained us of all grief, and we find it insensitive, if not ludicrous, of the storyteller to expect us to cry yet again. The repetition of "serious" emotion is, in fact, a favourite comic device.

McKee's Satirical Genius

If the protagonist has no unconscious desire, then his conscious objective becomes the Spine. The Spine of any Bond film, for example, can be phrased as : To defeat the arch-villain. James has no unconscious desires; he wants and only wants to save the world. As the story's unifying force, Bond's pursuit of his conscious goal cannot change. If he were to declare, "To hell with Dr. No. I'm bored with the spy business. I'm going south to work on my back-swing and lower my handicap," the film falls apart.