"I won't panic."

Looking at a great scene of character transformation

I have been thinking a lot about a moment that happens deep in a story that might be called the transition, or the dark night of the soul, or any term that denotes that the protagonist has found him/her/themself alone, in solitude, in a place of emotional exhaustion or surrender after trying to solve the problems that stand between them and their goal and running out of ideas. Or it comes at a moment as depicted in this scene from The Godfather where circumstances force a character to see who they really are and come to terms with their destiny. This is my favorite movie scene ever—I never tire of rewatching it. Have a look and then I’ll continue.

Wow. Never gets old. Although it has—I used the scene in class this week and most of the students had never seen The Godfather. So, the set up. The protagonist in this sequence is Michael Corleone (played by a heartstoppingly gorgeous Al Pacino), the youngest son of the Corleone crime family and the only one not in the family business—not when the scene begins. He is the college boy war hero who has been designated as the great hope for the future, the Corleone who might become a U.S. Senator and bring the family out of the shadows into legitimate prominence in America. The scene opens on a night after there has been an assassination attempt on Don Corleone by one of the other five families and he is in the hospital recovering. Michael arrives alone by taxi to visit him and climbs up the dark steps through an arch surrounded by Christmas lights and enters what turns out to be an empty building. Right from the start the hospital is a hellish landscape of yellow green corridors with no helpful signposts. What is this? Where is he? If places like purgatory and limbo occur to us, Coppola prompted those associations with the color scheme and the lighting.

Michael alternates trotting and walking as he searches. He is drawn down a particular hall by a sound, a broken record emitting one of the eeriest sounds ever in a movie, a distorted voice repeating the word “tonight, tonight, tonight…” Get it? Michael does. This is not good. No one is there. He takes off again, and in a stunningly ambiguous and beautiful moment he runs up the stairs into a split second of complete blackness. We can’t see him and he can’t see, he is feeling his way. He slows as he turns down another hallway and registers the empty chairs at the end of the hall where guards would be expected to be sitting outside his father’s room. He is on full alert now, his power is centered, he is alive with intelligence and a sense of purpose. He stops outside his father’s door, marked with #2, a premonition that the don would soon elevate someone else—how about this kid, Michael?—to be the de facto head of the family.

The door opens slowly and the godfather, played by Marlon Brando, appears lying still as a corpse in the small bed. (It’s a shock to see how simple hospitals were for the rich.) A nurse comes in and scolds Michael for being there. He explains who he is and asks what is going on. His tone is tentative and bewildered. He calls home and tells his brother Sonny what is going on and Sonny says he’ll send reinforcements. We can hear him tell Michael not to panic, and then we hear Michael’s assured reply: “I won’t panic.” What a brilliant line reading. Michael is in charge now. He tells the nurse they are going to move the don and she objects. Then comes my favorite speech. “You know my father. Men are coming here to kill him. You understand? Now help me please.” The full range of Michael as we have know him and as we are coming to know him condensed into four lines, each one spoken with a different inflection so that we move through Michael’s growing confidence with him. Family boy, mafia son, college man, soldier, communicator. Coming of age before our eyes.

The rest of the scene is equally stunning and littered with visual symbols. (The dark blob taking up half the screen as Michael leans over his father, Michael in half face, the don’s tears of love and grief as he realizes what Michael’s sacrifice means.)

The above clip cuts off before the end of the scene, so I am posting another clip that carries us through the transition. Watch how Michael guides Enzo, watch Michael light Enzo’s cigarette, watch Michael notice his own steady hand. He has gone through a classical change and comes out himself but with new knowledge and purpose.

In literature often transitional scenes happen in movement, such as on a train (the genius scene in Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour where a train ride among the masses shows a character she’s not cut out to be a nun) or in a car or going through a tunnel, but there are plenty of places where a character can be put alone at a pivotal moment. My students came up with a wide variety the other night. The key elements of a scene where a character goes through a major transition are:

1. they are alone

2. they experience aloneness at an existential level, often symbolized by darkness or blindness

3. which forces them to see/face themselves

4. and causes them to develop a new plan/world view/choice

This dark place is a beat to be considered when composing a story. Capturing such a material realm and the inner bleakness to match is far more powerful than watching a character rationally thinking their way through a problem. Dramatization, scene, symbol, they are our friends. There are ingenious ways to complicate this moment, such as Michael running up the stairs rather than down, as might be expected. (Isn’t hell down?) I am ever grateful to Francis Ford Coppola for making this very important story component clear. It applies in life as well. Sometimes I ask myself, am I alone in the hospital? What can I do? It gets me moving.

If you are building a writing notebook why not brainstorm a list of locations where a transitional scene could occur, and keep a list of such scenes as you remember or come across them?

Til next time. Thanks for your interest.