A grieving psychiatrist struggles to find the truth in a foul-mouthed drunk’s claims he’s Cupid when faced with deeper truths about himself, his past, and the chance of love again.
Mike PedleySingularity
A grieving psychiatrist struggles to find the truth in a foul-mouthed drunk’s claims he’s Cupid when faced with deeper truths about himself, his past, and the chance of love again.
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“When his new client claims to be Cupid, a psychiatrist, grieving his wife’s death set’s out to prove to his patient he isn’t the mythological god of love.”
A logline should be a statement about a protagonist’s objective goal.? Why?? Because film is a visual medium and that means the protagonist’s goal needs to be defined in terms that can be visualized on screen.? Which means that an objective goal needs to be defined in terms of a physical object, event, person, place or process.
What’s the visual, the screen shot for “deeper truths about himself”?
Also the protagonist’s goal must be intentional.? That is, it must be something he consciously, purposefully, deliberately decides to do.? It cannot be an unintended consequence of trying to do something else.?Which surely is the case in this logline.
For the shrink doesn’t intentionally take on the drunk thinking “I gotta work with this drunk in order to face deeper truths about myself”.? No, he takes on the drunk with the conscious, intended purpose of curing him.? And in the process of trying to cure the drunk, he unintentionally discovers he needs to cure himself.? As it is written: “Physician heal thyself.”
Which is fine for fleshing out a plot.? ?The problem in terms of a logline is that the discovery relates to the shrink’s subjective needs, not his objective wants. And loglines are about objective wants, not subjective needs.
At the psychological level, this story seems similar to the movie “Equus” (1977)? adapted from Peter Schaeffer’s highly acclaimed, acutely insightful play.? The? setup for the plot is that a burned out shrink who dabbles in Greek history and mythology reluctantly agrees to treat a troubled teenage boy? who blinded six horses.? The shrink’s intentional objective goal is to discover why the boy committed the heinous acts, and cure him of the psychopathology that motivated him.
And sure enough, treating the boy has unforeseen, unintended consequences.? As he discovers deeper truths about the boy, the shrink unintentionally discovers deeper truths about himself.
He comes to realize that the troubled teen’s? psyche is imbued with what his own psyche is devoid of, in so desperate need of:? passion.? That when he stares into the teen’s eyes, Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, of drunken excess. of ecstasy is staring back him, accusing him, damning him for living a passion-less and loveless life.
And I presume that a similar epiphany is to be the unintended consequence of the shrink working with drunk. The drunk is an incarnation of what the shrink desperately lacks, urgently needs. Which is fine.? But, to repeat, plot epiphanies are by definition unintended consequences, not an intentional goals.? So while central to the working out of the plot, “facing deeper truths about himself” is extraneous to the logline.
A logline should be a concise statement of a protagonist’s intentional objective goal.
fwiw
What is the psychiatrist’s main goal? And what are the stakes? If it’s to find out whether or not his patient is the cupid, you’d need to establish how that impacts the MC. What’s the best that would happen should he succeed and what’s the worst thing that would happen should he fail? It reads as though the stakes are very low.
The second half of the logline – deeper truths, to love again… seems unrelated to the plot. You can cut that out altogether and free up some valuable logline real estate for more plot critical descriptions.
A good example you could study is K-PAX. A psychiatrist must prove to his patient that he isn’t an alien – or is he…