Week 4 Discussion (Part One)
Inciting incidents set stories in motion. They grab an audience’s attention, illuminating conflicts of character which drive a script forward. They offer differing viewpoints where within the framework of two main characters, both are often right. This conflict might be direct and literal, as in the inciting incident of Beef, where a road rage encounter leaves the audience asking who is really to blame. Is it the innocent mistake or reckless lack of attention made by Danny while backing his car out? Or the overreaction or justified response of Amy which triggers Danny to pursue her? The incitement might also be an unexpectedly violent event, where characters are forced to respond. The car explosion which opens Touch of Evil, provides the initial conflict which drives the film’s subsequent investigation, working towards an understanding of the explosion but unraveling a web of corruption.
Inciting incidents can also be determined by absence as much as presence. In The Leftovers, the sudden disappearance of individuals provides an eerie vacuum into which the story is poured, as the consequence of The Rapture unfolds. This singularly supernatural event propels individual storylines through traumatic loss, but also invites the audience into the story’s belief system and asks them how they would react. Similarly in Get Out, the audience, like Chris, are invited into Rose’s family home with an inciting incident which belies its true intention. Chris has reservations based on race, but should have reservations based on much more sinister intentions. The bloody consequence of invitation is only revealed later, and much too late for Chris. The incident is extremely consequential, especially for Rose’s family, and as the audience we learn of the truly gruesome nature of what goes on in the Armitage house at the same time as Chris.
There are also moments where inciting incidents follow scenes from the future. Breaking Bad’s pilot opens with a chaotic car chase through the desert, and a standoff with the cops. But we do not see the outcome of the police arriving. Instead the we are taken back three weeks and visually shown that the felon driving the Winnebago is actually a community-minded family man with a teaching job. That is, until the inciting incident of a collapse and diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer. This life-changing event sets in motion a violent, chaotic series of decisions which propel five seasons of the show. More non-linear is the love story told in reverse of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The inciting incident of Joel and Clementine’s meeting on the train motivates a torrid relationship, the memory of which ultimately disappears into itself as the story erases its own past. Here the encounter sets the story of their affair in motion, but also provides the material for it to be erased when they break up. It is the painful experience which Clementine, and then Joel, choose to forget. Both are right within the frameworks of their own characters, with the audience left to determine where their sympathies lie.
