The Joke

I believe creating scripts for drama is one of the more difficult things you can undertake. One reason is that a script is essentially build upon one joke, and you have to make everything relate to that joke. You have to keep this simplicity in mind while creating a complex world around it. Often a script fails because it looses aim of it's joke or repeats the joke over and over without any complexity. I use the term joke, because of its simplicity, but could also talk about dramatic irony, the inner mystery or

So what is a joke. Here are some examples.
Silence of the Lambs: Starling hopes she can make the lambs stop screaming by saving the girl from Buffalo Bill, but she can't.
Seventh Seal: The Knight has lost all faith, but in facing the most meaningless of all, Death, he finds a new faith.
Sixth Sense: Crowe, the main character, believes he is supposed to save the boy, when in fact its the boy, who can save him.
Last Tango in Paris: The Brando-character has lost all faith in love because of his dead wife's betrayal, and takes out his despair on a young woman in a nihilistic sexual relationship. The joke is that he rediscovers love, but too late - death has been invited into the relationship and the young woman kills him to his big surprise.

When I work on my own scripts, I always stay in notebook-mode, collecting ideas, writing a few lines, arranging the rough structure, until I have a firm hold on the joke. Only then can I progress to treatment or script. In my work as a consultant, I have seen too many times, writers and directors setting out to write their script without a solid idea of their joke. The result is always what I call an unfinished script, even if it gets produced.