“Every story is an escape story.”

I’ve taped that slogan to the wall of my work station.

It clarifies my character’s trajectory.

It helps my story “come true” because it acknowledges a fact of our human condition:

We are all escaping something.

That notion hijacked my brain after a decade of professionally assessing and writing film scripts. I found myself emotionally invested in characters who were trapped. And it remains the case in every good story I encounter.

Here’s what I continue to discover:

All the best protagonists are trapped within the gravity field of an idea, a relationship, or any situation that makes life not worth living. Naturally, they’re going to escape. Or die trying.

Three great escapes:

The Great Escape—Steve McQueen is a prisoner of Stalag Luft III. Of course, he escapes.

A Room with a View—Lucy Honeychurch, on holiday in Italy with her chaperone, tries to escape the company of man to whom she is unsuitably attracted.

In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart is a prisoner of his self-pity. If he doesn’t put his broken heart behind him, audiences will demand their money back.

Three stories, three kinds of prison—a concrete jail, a relationship, a belief system.

Three kinds of escape dominate most story plots.

#1. Escaping a prison or place

Prison stories depict characters whose goal is a physical escape. O Brother Where Art Thou, for example. And the futuristic Escape from New York. And the current The Maze Runner.

Escape or die trying!—it’s box office gold.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy yearns to escape Kansas for a place “where troubles melt like lemon drops.” Once she lands in Oz, the story is all about finding a way back home.

In Casablanca, which is essentially a love story, almost every character is preoccupied with escaping the Nazis by flying to Lisbon and onward to freedom in America.

The escape to greater freedom—it’s a condition of our human condition.

A more subtle and more common escape theme in fiction is…

#2. Escaping a Relationship

Love affair, job, family—these are relationships from which it’s never easy to walk away. A prison break is nothing compared to escaping some relationships.

Fatal Attraction depicts a happily married man who risks a one-night-stand. Big mistake. His partner in infidelity assumes a relationship from which our protagonist struggles to extricate himself. He’s lucky to escape with his life.

In the Booker Prize winning novel, Hotel du Lac, a bride on the way to her wedding instructs the taxi driver to “Keep going! Don’t stop. Pass the church! Whatever you do, keep driving!” She escapes the wrong man and goes into hiding. Close call!

Once again, in Casablanca, Bogey has escaped to the ends of the earth in hopes of never crossing paths with the woman who broke his heart. Who hasn’t felt the need to escape a relationship? Yikes! Let’s not even go there.

But the most subtle and most significant escape theme concerns…

#3. Escaping Oneself

From On the Waterfront, to Moonstruck, to Good Will Hunting, to Silver Linings Playbook, the protagonists are on a trajectory toward escaping their own self-destructive attitudes and beliefs. Casablanca! Again. The protagonist is engaged in all three escapes.

The hero’s redemption (and ultimate victory) hinges on their transcending their self-concern. And it rarely happens unless the writer brings the hero to the point of despair.

It’s another fact of life—and fiction:

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”  ~ William S. Burroughs

Why do we need to escape ourselves?

Because we are all liars. By necessity.

“We tell ourselves stories that can’t possibly be true, but believing those stories allows us to function. We know we’re not telling ourselves the whole truth but it works, so we embrace it.” ~ author, Seth Godin

The delusions that underpin our human condition—and our equally human yearning for the truth—drama depends on it.

It’s as if fiction exists to remind us that we are born to escape.

Born to escape.

If it’s true that we’re born to escape, it’s one of the juiciest facts of life. It may explain why we read and more importantly (for writers), why we are driven to write fiction in the first place.

This week, check it out for yourself—the films you watch and the novels you read—see if it’s not true that:

EVERY STORY IS AN ESCAPE STORY.

If you’re writing a story and creating a protagonist—can you identify the prison they’re trapped within? What kind of escape is he or she engaged in?

Any thoughts? Share them in the “Comments” below.

I was deep in a digital funk yesterday. 

I’d created a Word document, which, after closing, I couldn’t reopen.  The file extension was beyond the ability of my Word program to open.  How the heck does that happen?  

Two hour’s work down the e-drain.

With a debilitating feeling of being hard-done-by, I donned my trenchcoat and went for a walk in the fog. 

A speech about “The Advantages of Adversity”, that’s what I’d lost.  How ironic!  All my first thoughts, my raw material, memories, facts, connections, a web of meaning—all vanished in the e-ether.  

Fresh air usually revives me, but on this especially funky day, every step marched me deeper into despair.  I’m going on a retreat, I thought.  Deep country, unplugged, that’s what I need. Since I’m a digital idiot, this kind of funk overtakes me not infrequently.  Uphill I trudged under a canopy of spruce into the foothills of Mordor, trudge, trudge, trudge… 

I enjoy climbing.  Peaked cap pulled down so that I can’t see the slope, I perceive the road as level.  It’s a little mental trick that never fails to thrill me. 

Unable to reference the incline, there is no hill, no hill working against me.  My organizm is working harder to walk, yes, but there is no hill trying to defeat me, no antagonism, no psychology of struggle, just the indisputable facts of physics.  It never fails, I feel quite unlike myself, as if I were on Jupiter under the influence of a more powerful gravity field. 

Moving about on strange planets takes me out of myself.

Suddenly, a thought out of nowhere: “The rewrite will be better.” 

Rewrites are always better. 

What just happened?  I knew immediately what had happened because I’ve been exploring it on this blog for years—our belief systems.  Good things happen when our “B.S.” outlives its usefulness.  My belief system (victim mentality) had been left behind at the bottom of the hill. 

I didn’t need it on Jupiter.

Wow—self-pity was weighing on me like an evil spell, which is what belief systems are.  They are strategies, structures, rules, biases, attitudes, fears, all the necessary limits by which we negotiate this gloriously superficial life on planet Earth.  When I shed the B.S., I became available to the truth:

My rewrite will be better.

Fictional protagonists, same thing. 

The best fictional characters are cursed with belief systems that are not so easily jettisoned.  The degree to which they hold fast determines the intensity of the drama.  Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.  Listen to him: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” 

That’s the screenwriter telling us what every reader needs to know at the outset of a story—what’s the hero’s belief system? 

With that pitiful attitude, Bogey’s trajectory is set.  Events will conspire to undo his belief system.  Bogey will eat his words or we’ll demand our money back. 

Sure enough, the love of his life (Ingrid Bergman) shows up and ushers Bogey to the depths of self-loathing.  Remember the scene where she pulls a gun on him to get the letters of transit to America.  He says, “Go ahead, shoot. You’ll be doing me a favour.” 

He doesn’t care if he lives or dies.  Now he can jettison his belief system.  What good is a belief system if you’re on death’s doormat?  Ilsa notices him waking up, lightening up.  Now she’s in his arms.  Look at Bogey, he looks a little lost, but now it’s all flooding back, the noble guy he was at the start of the war.  You can see it in his eyes.  He’s catching a glimpse of the truth, who he really is. 

He’s rewriting his script.

The rewrite will be better! 

As we know, Bogey sticks his neck out as far as a neck can go.  He shoots Major Strasser, sacrifices his one true love, orders her to escape Casablanca with her husband so together they might bolster the Resistance against Hitler. 

And, look… there goes Bogart in his trenchcoat, walking into the fog, a living martyr.

Time for me now to man-up and rewrite this speech. 

(Btw… what the heck is a “docx” file?  Is it, like, some kind of curse?)

By David L. Roll

Seventy years ago this month, Americans came to know Casablanca as more than a steamy city on the northwest coast of Africa. On 23 January 1943, the film Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, a tale of doomed love and taking the moral high ground, was released to packed movie houses. The next day, a Sunday, President Franklin Roosevelt ended two weeks of secret World War II meetings in Casablanca with Prime Minister Winston Churchill by announcing at a noon press conference, in a sunlit villa garden fragrant with mimosa and begonia, that “peace can come to the world,” only through the “unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy and Japan.”

The Academy Award-winning movie, of course, became a classic.

Title screen of Casablanca, the Academy-Award winning classic directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid. Image in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Similarly, Roosevelt’s supremely confident proclamation reverberated throughout the world and shortly entered the history books. Choosing just a few words, the president for the first time sought to firmly establish Allied war aims and determine the framework of the peace.

But both the emotional power of the film and the president’s lofty words blurred if not obscured some inconvenient facts. American audiences must have been persuaded that their government, like Bogart’s Rick, would do the right thing by turning its back on the Nazi collaborators (the French puppet government, the Vichy regime) and casting its lot to fight alongside Charles de Gaulle’s Free French. In fact, the Roosevelt administration did not act to cut its ties with Vichy, continued to rely on Nazi sympathizers to run the Moroccan government, and did not officially recognize de Gaulle until October 1944. Like the political and military realities confronting the Obama administration today in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Iran, the situation on the ground in North Africa in 1943 was murky, complicated and ambiguous. It did not lend itself to the high-minded moral clarity that Hollywood screenwriters enjoy.

So too the policy of unconditional surrender announced by the US president at Casablanca, and endorsed by the British prime minister, masked some stark realities. Unless and until the Soviet Union decided once and for all to reject German peace-feelers and its Red Army had achieved sufficient size and strength to break the back of Germany’s military machine, “unconditional surrender” could be nothing more than a hollow slogan. Though the president’s confident rhetoric was ostensibly aimed at lifting the morale of the populations of the United States and Great Britain, it was in fact directed at the man who was conspicuously absent from the Casablanca conference—Joseph Stalin. Roosevelt was aware that many would argue that the unconditional surrender policy would prolong the war by encouraging the Nazis to fight to the last man and woman, but he believed that this danger was outweighed by the need to allay Soviet suspicions that the Americans and British would conspire to negotiate a separate armistice with Germany. Roosevelt saw his policy as another way to convince Stalin of his goodwill, a political and psychological substitute for a second front—a phrase that would keep the Soviets in the war, killing German soldiers by the bushel.

President Roosevelt, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill at his side, reading the “unconditional surrender” announcement to the assembled war correspondents. Casablanca, French Morocco, Jan 1943. Image courtesy the Library of Congress.

The policy announced by Roosevelt at Casablanca not only failed to acknowledge the essential role of the Soviets, it also did not have the impact on surrender and peace that he intended. Italy would soon surrender under “conditional” terms. Japan would eventually surrender on condition that her Emperor would be retained. And FDR’s dream that he would turn the page on balance-of-power diplomacy in central Europe and broker the postwar peace would be shattered by the man who could not attend the Casablanca conference in January 1943 because he was busy directing the crucial struggle at Stalingrad.

In the years since Casablanca, experience has shown that presidents would do well to emulate Roosevelt by defining war goals and outlining a framework for peace before engaging the enemy (or at least at an early stage of the conflict). Indeed, the failures of presidents Truman, Johnson, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush to do so in Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan seriously soiled their legacies.

Still, the lessons of Casablanca run much deeper and are far more nuanced than the articulation of war aims and peace terms. Casablanca—the movie and the conference—teaches us that human conflict, particularly armed conflict, usually does not end on predictable terms and in conformance with unilateral decrees. Often family, clan, or tribal affiliations trump national loyalties making it difficult if not impossible to distinguish between friends and enemies, neutrals and belligerents. Religious and cultural differences befuddle American peacekeepers. These problems test the mettle of the Obama administration today in places like Benghazi, Waziristan, Damascus, and Teheran.

In Casablanca, Rick was led to believe that he had come to that city because of the healthful waters. Told by Captain Renault that he was in the desert, Rick responded, “I was misinformed.” When it comes to waging wars and structuring peace, US presidents and policymakers should humbly revisit the lessons of Casablanca.

David L. Roll is a partner at Steptoe & Johnson, LLP and founder/director of the Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation, a public interest organization that provides pro bono legal services to social entrepreneurs around the world. His latest book is The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler.

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