In a recent podcast, the custodians of Save the Cat! offered a very thin and unconvincing assessment of Birdman’s genre classification, the essence of which was this: “Look—Michael Keaton’s got a Life Problem! He goes about fixing it the Wrong Way! Clearly this is a Rite of Passage!”
In a serendipitously timed blog post, I argued that Birdman is, in fact, a Fool Triumphant, and even held it up for comparison, like two perfectly aligned sketches on tracing paper backlit against a lamp, with a recent (and accurate) example of RoP, Jon Favreau’s Chef, as proof that those stories don’t share fundamental commonality with respect to their genre conventions.
Because that’s ultimately what distinguishes the codified narrative models of the late Blake Snyder from one another: their conventional criteria—the requirements each particular genre is expected to deliver upon. A golf cart and a city bus both have wheels and seats and a motor (i.e., a similar fundamental underlying structure), but you’d never mistake one for the other; you’d never expect one to perform the function of the other.
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