In what manner does Gaspar Noé’s film Irreversible (2002) break classical narrative structure as defined

by Robert McKee?

Nicolas Sawyer

002320-097

John A. Ferguson High School

Film

May 2012

Word count: 3,979

 Sawyer 002320-097

Abstract

The unconventional narrative structure of Gaspar Noé’s film Irreversible (2002) ignores many of

the principles of classical narrative structure as defined by renowned screenwriting teacher, Robert

McKee. The effects of breaking these conventions ultimately create a film that allows the audience to

reflect on the violence depicted in the film in a positive light. When Noé breaks the law of diminishing

returns, for example, he offers insight into the loving character behind the protagonist’s violent actions.

With lengthy, high-paced sequences Noé desensitizes his audiences in order to open a different window

into what it means to live in a world of immorality. Robert McKee’s idea of the Inciting Incident (the

event in a film where the protagonist confronts its central conflict) is an idea that Noé innovates in order

to teach a hopeful lesson about the inevitability of suffering. And finally, Noé ignores the process of

increasing conflict intensity throughout Irreversible in order to put the most violent scenes in a context

that reminds the audience of the happier moments in life that make it worth living. In Irreversible

Gaspar Noé throws out storytelling basics; however, he still creates a compelling film that teaches

hopeful truths about what it means to be a human living in a world where violence is a reality.

Word Count: 213

ii
 Sawyer 002320-097

Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Introduction 1

Body 2

The Law of Diminishing Returns 2

Balancing Tension and Relaxation in Pace 4

The Inciting Incident: Internal and External Conflict 5

Increasing Conflict Throughout the Film 9

Conclusion 11

Works Cited 13

iii
Introduction

Films are like puzzles: in puzzles, as one traces patterns in the interactions between different

pieces, an underlying image eventually appears. In film, relationships and events within characters’ lives

progress until, at an end, a larger theme asserts itself out into the reality of the audience members’

lives. The key to unlocking this mystery hidden within film can be found in narrative structure. Over

time, the film industry has developed standards for different narrative structures that have found their

way into the flow of films that the industry produces each year. These standards have developed under

such names as Syd Field, Joseph Campbell, and Robert McKee. But filmmakers, like Gaspar Noé and

Christopher Nolan, are breaking these rules, coming up with innovative ways of portraying meaning on

the silver screen; it is almost as if they are making new ways to make puzzles.

To understand how Gaspar Noé breaks convention, the structure of his 2002 film Irreversible (a

story told in reverse) will be compared to the classical three act structure. Specifically, its story elements

and scene-by-scene descriptions will be broken down and compared to specific principles quoted from

Robert McKee in his culminating book, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of

Screenwriting. Within the world of screenwriting, there are a multitude of systems that describe classical

structure. The works of screenwriting teacher, Robert McKee, however, stand out among those of

screenwriting professionals as being the most specific and successful method. As of 2000, students of

Robert McKee’s screenwriting seminars have gone on to achieve 18 Academy Awards,107 Emmy

Awards, 19 Writer’s Guild of America Awards, 16 Directors Guild of America Awards, and hundreds of

other nominations (Steinorth).

To understand how the reversal of the story in Irreversible changes its meaning, it is important

to understand the terms fabula and syuzhet. These terms serve to distinguish the idea of a story from

the form that that story takes when it is represented in a film (Bordwell 3). This concept originated with

Aristotle, but was fully theorized first by Russian Formalists, like Viktor Shklovsky, a Soviet critic and
 Sawyer 002320-097

writer (Boje 78). Fabula is, as Bordwell describes, “a chronological, cause-and-effect chain of events

occurring within a given duration and a spatial field” (Bordwell 3); it describes the pure story as it is

imagined, entirely unadulterated. On the other hand, the syuzhet of a story is how the artist represents

and arranges the fabula in its particular medium (Bordwell 4). In terms of film specifically, every way

that a director decides to form the elements of a story, from characters to setting to editing, falls under

this category of the syuzhet story because it is in some way a representation of the pure fabula story.

This distinction is important to understand when analyzing Irreversible because Gaspar Noé chose to

take the sequential fabula ordering of his story and reverse it so that the syuzhet story allows the

audience to reflect on its violent content. Throughout this analysis, Irreversible’s fabula and syuzhet

stories will be referred to.

Robert McKee’s system of storytelling serves to create the most compelling films out of a

syuzhet story. But his is not the only way. Gaspar Noé has organized the story elements within

Irreversible in a way that is contrary to the classical structure defined by Robert McKee to create a film

that allows the audience to reflect on the violently unpredictable world humanity finds itself in.

Body

The Law of Diminishing Returns

A principle that Robert McKee emphasizes for its importance in writing compelling movie is the

Law of Diminishing returns. The law states that “the more often we experience something, the less

effect it has” (244). McKee believes that repetition in film should be avoided because, the more often an

action is repeated, the less emotional impact it has on the audience. In Irreversible, Noé ignores this law

when he instructed the protagonist, Marcus, to yell and abuse, in a repetitive manner, every character

Marcus confronts throughout his search for the man named Le Tenia that raped his girlfriend, Alex.

2
 Sawyer 002320-097

The purpose of this repetition is to emphasize that the drive Marcus has for revenge against

Alex’s assailant borders on insanity. At 0:15:02, Marcus enters a BDSM (bondage and discipline

sadomasochism) club called Rectum, and begins demanding people tell him where Le Tenia is. He does

this until 0:22:10 – that is over seven straight minutes of repeated questions. In the next sequence,

Marcus goes into a bar and demands the patrons tell him where the club, Rectum, is. He then leaves the

bar and asks random bystanders where the club is until 0:27:07. In the next scene, Marcus verbally

abuses the taxi driver, demanding he drive them to the Rectum, even though the driver doesn’t know

where it is. In the next sequence, from 0:29:50 to 0:34:10, Pierre, Marcus, and the men they hired to

find Le Tenia shake down some prostitutes, asking around for someone by the name of Guillermo

Nunez. For 15 minutes, between 0:15:02 and 0:34:10 – approximately one-sixth of the length of the film

– the protagonist is either engaged in some physical or violent act as he demands that someone tell him

where someone or some place is (Irreversible).

Noé’s purpose for including this long sequence of repetitious questioning is to communicate

how an atrocity like Alex’s rape can make a happy-go-lucky character like Marcus go on a frantic

rampage. The repetition has this exhausting effect on an audience that Noé builds to portray a panicked

tension surrounding Marcus. With minimal relaxed periods during the beginning of the film, a

personality is built around this character that the audiences knows little about, however, the next half of

the film reveals deeper insight into how Marcus’s love for Alex drove him to such violent behavior. Noé

creates an animalistic character in Marcus that is bent on repetitive action by breaking McKee’s Law of

Diminishing Returns; however, Noé uses the latter half of the film to flashback to Marcus’s loving

relationship with Alex in order to put this violence in context with his desire for revenge.

3
 Sawyer 002320-097

Balancing Tension and Relaxation in Pace

McKee argues that the pace of a compelling film must alternate between tension and relaxation;

he states that the rhythm of life “beats between two contradictory desires”: the human desire for

peace, serenity, and calm, and the human desire for excitement, action, and danger (McKee 289). In

other words, every period of turmoil that dominates the screen in a film must be followed by a break or

resolution. In Irreversible, Noé ignores this rule by including an unusually long period of high-energy

conflict at the beginning of the film. The purpose of this technique is to induce a state of mental fatigue

in the audience.

Beginning at 0:10:18, Pierre and Marcus are rushed away from the club, Rectum. At 0:11:34, the

camera revolves erratically around and upside-down as it travels across town to the entrance of the

club. The camera then enters the club, passing numerous dimly-lit half-naked men engaged in acts of

BDSM. At 0:15:02, Marcus and Pierre enter the club and Marcus tears through it demanding people tell

him where Le Tenia is. At 0:22:17 – after seven straight minutes of yelling and loud music – Marcus gets

into a fight with a man that ends with Pierre murdering him with a fire extinguisher. There is another

period of erratic camera movement of the Paris streets. At 0:25:03, Marcus drives his stolen taxi, cursing

the man he stole it from. He then gets out of the taxi, yells at bar patrons for information, and runs back.

At 0:25:55, Marcus argues with Pierre and then smashes the windshield of the taxi with a metal bar.

There is another erratic transition between sequences. At 0:27:07, Marcus yells at his taxi driver loudly

until, finally, he pepper sprays the driver and steals the car. There is another erratic transition. At

0:29:52, Marcus and Pierre argue loudly while two men follow them, demanding them for payment.

From 0:31:54 until 0:34:11, the four men fight over getting information from Guillermo Nunez until a

group of prostitutes chase them into a taxi. Between 0:10:18 and 0:34:11 – nearly twenty-four minutes

– the film depicts either some form of verbal or physical violence, or the camera tapes Paris streets

while violently shaking around (Irreversible).

4
 Sawyer 002320-097

By breaking away from McKee’s balance between calm and excitement, Noé uses continuous

high-energy action to wear his audience out to the point that the violent tension in his film begins to

lose its meaning; he desensitizes his audience to the inhumanity of his characters. In an interview, Noé

explain that “my aim was to make you feel out of your minds” (Gaspar Noé Interview - Gaspar Noé on

Irreversible). However, once this feeling is achieved by the first half of the film, Noé uses the latter half

of the film to instill the violent actions with meaning. By depicting Marcus caressing his girlfriend and

joking with his friends, Marcus, who appeared to be a flatly violent person, is put in the context of his

loving personality; out then comes a character that is not inherently violent, but merely a man who was

so crushed by Alex’s rape that he sought revenge. By breaking away from this principle of balancing calm

and excitement, Noé exhausts his audience in order to later communicate a greater theme about how

mankind is a product of fate.

The Inciting Incident: Internal and External Conflict

The term Inciting Incident describes the scene in a classically-structured film where the primary

external and internal conflict of the story is established (McKee 197). The Inciting Incident is meant to

affect the protagonist in a manner that is irreversible to the extent that he or she must take action in

order to put his or her life back into balance (196). The Inciting Incident in Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible is

the scene where Alex gets raped in the underground tunnel, as it drives Marcus’s search for the

assailant. In Irreversible, Noé breaks two separate conventions surrounding McKee’s Inciting Incident;

one pertains to the characters’ external world, and another pertains to the protagonist’s internal

response to the Inciting Incident. Noé breaks these conventions in order to depict Marcus and Pierre as

flat characters out of context so that, later in the film, their actions are ultimately given meaning within

a purpose-driven context.

5
 Sawyer 002320-097

The first Inciting Incident convention that Gaspar Noé breaks is the idea that “when an Inciting

Incident occurs it must be a dynamic, fully-developed event, not something static or vague” (McKee

189). In other words, a protagonist’s setting must be established before an Inciting Incident can occur so

that the audience understands what must be done to the outside world in order for the protagonist to

return it to equilibrium. In Irreversible, however, Gaspar Noé hides the background story surrounding

the Inciting Incident until later in the film.

Rather than develop the story for the Inciting Incident, Gaspar Noé spends the first half of the

film depicting Marcus’s responses to the Inciting Incident; from fade in to the point that Alex gets raped,

at 0:40:55, Marcus searches violently for a man named Le Tenia. Without a backstory, Marcus and Pierre

are characters acting to resolve a crisis in an unknown setting; the world that that characters come from

is nothing like the dark Paris streets or the BDSM club. Noé doesn’t start showing the audience what

these characters are truly like in their own environment until 00:54:04, when Marcus and Pierre show

up at the party. The significance of this structure is to initially place Marcus and Pierre in a context that

appears void of meaning because the characters lack an apparent driving force for their actions.

However, the way Marcus and Pierre’s setting drives their actions is later given meaning.

The second principle of the Inciting Incident that Gaspar Noé breaks in Irreversible is the idea

that “an [Inciting Incident] throws a character’s life out of balance, arousing in him the conscious and/or

unconscious desire that he feels will restore balance” (197). This is not the case in the protagonist’s life

in Irreversible because the internal balance in Marcus’s life that the Inciting Incident disrupts is not

developed until after he has reacted to it.

Marcus has two qualities that cause him to search for Alex’s assailant when he hears of her

rape: the fact that he is in love with her and the face that she is pregnant with his child. The audience

sees this first quality in the couple during the scene where they caress affectionately while lying in bed.

Ironically, this scene begins at 1:15:57 into the film, after the audience has already witnessed Marcus

6
 Sawyer 002320-097

finish his vengeful rampage at 0:08:29 (Irreversible). By showing how Marcus was in love with Alex later,

his earlier actions are ultimately understood as driven by his desire to avenge the man who raped her.

The second justification for Marcus’ actions that is made apparent later in the film is the fact that Alex

was pregnant with his child. During the same scene where they caress lovingly, Alex tells Marcus that

she has missed her period and might be pregnant (1:17:57), which is later made fact when she tests

positive on a pregnancy test (1:28:06) (Irreversible). The facts that Marcus loves Alex and that she is

pregnant with his child are two driving forces for Marcus’ violent acts; however, Marcus’s actions appear

vaguely driven and flat because these qualities are invisible to the audience until much later in the film.

Noé breaks these two conventions surrounding the idea of an Inciting Incident in order to depict

Marcus and Pierre as static characters in a static world. This is so that, later in the film, the audience

understands these characters’ actions retrospectively: when the audience sees Pierre, Marcus, and Alex

share friendly, intimate dialogue on the train ride to the party, the audience discovers the love that

drove Marcus to be so vengeful and Pierre to be so protective. The audience empathizes with these

characters in a way that couldn’t have been possible had it understood who Pierre and Marcus were

before watching them carry out their violent acts. By giving the audience the negative view of these

characters first and then their positive side at the end of the film, the audience is forced into

reevaluating its first impression before leaving the theater. However, if the fabula of the story had

followed the syuzhet in temporal order, the audience would have seen good characters that would later

have to be reevaluated as negative characters after seeing their aggressive behavior at the end of the

film. By ignoring this principle by McKee, Gaspar Noé gives his audience the chance to reflect on Marcus

and Pierre’s violent actions in a positive light.

Film critic, Roger Ebert, in a review of Irreversible, offers further insight into how a reverse

structure to Noé’s film fills it with meaning. He explains that “when Alex and Marcus caress and talk, we

realize what a slender thread all happiness depends”; by putting these scenes of Marcus and Alex in a

7
 Sawyer 002320-097

hopeful, positive light despite their inevitable demise. Ebert believes that, when Noé places these love

scenes after the Alex’s violent rape, he strives to communicate that there is no connection between the

loving happiness and life-destroying violence that the characters experience, but that all of the violence

was sadly inevitable and that Alex and Marcus live in a kind of “innocence of ignorance”; very simple and

badly-timed mistakes lead to Alex’s rape and Marcus’s rampage, nothing more. Noé highlights this

theme when he ends the film with the phrase: “Time destroys everything” in all capital letters filling a

black and white title slide. Ebert concludes that Irreversible “starts with violence, and asks us to sit there

for another hour and process our thoughts” and that, had Noé left the rape scene for the end, it would

have been a film bordering on pornographic. However, Ebert asserts, “Irreversible is not pornography”

(Ebert).

“Memento” (2000), a film directed by Christopher Nolan, utilizes a technique similar to the one

Noé uses in Irreversible; both filmmakers hide their protagonists’ true intentions for violence until late in

the film. Memento begins with the protagonist, Leonard Shelby, murdering a man named Teddy that he

believes to have raped and killed his wife; it begs the driving question “Why did Leonard murder

Teddy?” The film then progresses backwards, telling the story of Leonard’s search for his wife’s

murderer up to that point. In the fabula resolution of the film, the audience comes to understand that

Leonard’s true intentions for murdering Teddy were not out of revenge for a murder, but to escape the

self-deception surrounding his wife’s death put in place by his anterograde amnesia and so his search

for the murderer is understood in a new light. Memento, like Irreversible, hides the true driving force

behind characters’ actions until the end, when a higher theme is revealed (Memento).

8
 Sawyer 002320-097

Increasing Conflict Throughout the Film

McKee asserts that, in terms of how the major sequences in a story progress, “a story must not

retreat to actions of lesser quality or magnitude” (McKee 209). In other words, to perpetuate interest in

a film’s conflict, each story sequence must grow in intensity. Irreversible does the complete opposite.

Each sequence’s conflict become decreasingly less extreme and forces of antagonism become weaker.

The reason Noé does this is to place Irreversible’s violent content in a context that allows the audience

to later reflect on it in a positive light.

The film begins with Marcus being carried on a stretcher after getting his arm broken in a fight

and Pierre being taken into custody for murder. In the following scene, Marcus pepper sprays a taxi

driver and steals his car. Then, Marcus threatens to hurt Guillermo Nunez for information. Afterwards,

he verbally abuses various people for information on where Alex’s assailant is. In the next scene, Marcus

wanders aimlessly, upon hearing about what happened to Alex. Note that the degrees of the Marcus’s

violent actions become steadily less severe over time and his drive to revenge Alex decreases. This trend

continues from this point on. Disregarding the scene where Alex gets raped, the film becomes

decreasingly less extreme in terms of the intensity conflicts: Marcus progresses around the party to

different rooms, partying flirtatiously as Pierre struggles to get them to see Alex. Marcus then gets into a

small disagreement with Alex. The three friends then commute to the party joking about Pierre and

Alex’s past love life. The following scene depicts Marcus and Alex chatting lovingly in their bedroom

after they wake up. And the final scene shows Alex at a park, lying down asleep. Throughout the film,

each scene’s conflict gets progressively less complex and the characters’ actions become less driven by

their wants.

At first, Marcus is driven, on an extrapersonal level of conflict (he affects an expanse of

individuals and strangers), to violently storm around Paris in revenge of Alex while Pierre begs him to

stop (McKee 147). The film maintains this extrapersonal level, but to a less serious degree, when the film

9
 Sawyer 002320-097

becomes about Marcus being too flirtatious at the party and Pierre pesters him to find Alex. The conflict

lowers to a personal level (the world of friends and family) when Pierre jokingly complains about Alex

and his past love life. By 1:15:29, all conflict disappears: in the following scenes Marcus and Alex talk

sweetly in their bedroom, and then later, Alex lies sleeping by herself (31).

McKee states that a film should have “more and more conflict as [protagonists] face greater and

greater forces of antagonism” through the course of a film (208). Noé’s film, however, does not follow

this principle. In fact, the film does the complete opposite: the conflicts that characters face, both

individually and collectively, get less severe. The purpose of this reverse pattern is to place the film’s

violence in context. By basing the second half of the film on the lives of the characters before Alex gets

raped, the audience is reminded of the carefree and fulfilling lives the characters had in the love that

they share for each other, as friends and as lovers; life is not all violence and lust. When Noé breaks

these conventions set up by McKee, he grants his audience the opportunity to be reminded of life’s

value.

Another film that uses this technique is The Lovely Bones (2009), by director Peter Jackson. The

central conflict of the film follows the murder of thirteen year-old Susie Salmon and her murderer and

neighbor, George Harvey. The Inciting Incident of the film, Susie’s death, begs the question: “Will

George Harvey get caught?” After the resolution of the film, when Susie’s body disappears down a

sinkhole forever and George Harvey is off the hook, Peter Jackson includes a scene where Susie’s ghost

gets the chance to kiss the boy she had a crush on at the time of her death. In order to remind the

audience of life’s sweet, little moments that make living worthwhile in a world where murder is a reality,

Peter Jackson includes a conflict smaller than the central conflict after the central conflict is resolved in

order to put it all into context. The importance attributed to whether or not Susie kisses this boy pales in

comparison to how important it is that her murderer suffer retribution; however, Jackson uses this

scene to remind us that Susie was not just a murder victim, she was a little girl with hopes and dreams

10
 Sawyer 002320-097

for love in life. In Irreversible, the scenes of sweet caressing between Marcus and his Alex remind us that

they are not just victims in a hateful world, but that they are people with hopes and dreams of their

own. By placing scenes of lesser conflict after the resolution of the central conflict, these two films allow

their audiences to reflect on their characters’ lives as a whole, instead of dwelling on negative outcomes

of the films’ resolutions.

Conclusion

Gaspar Noé breaks the conventions found in Robert McKee’s book Story in order to create a film

that looks at life in a different way. By wearing out the audience with a high-strung pace, Noé takes a

dangerous step towards losing his audience; however, it was a necessary step to truly show how

violence affects the lives of countless people. By going against widely accepted notions surrounding

what a film’s pace should be like, Noé exhibits how the only separation between a protective person like

Pierre and a murderer is a matter of twenty-four tense minutes. Gaspar Noé’s innovation of McKee’s

Inciting Incident proves that, while certain plot points are necessary, there are some lessons that can

only be taught by rearranging the plot points’ order. And finally, Noé disregards the idea that conflict

should increase in intensity throughout a film to put the film’s violence in context with the petty

arguments came before it. He does all this to leave his audience with a positive window to look through,

in light of the film’s violence.

Irreversible is a film that ignores the rules set in place by a world-renown expert on classical film

structure; but that doesn’t stop it from being a compelling movie. By ignoring conventions surrounding

pace, rhythm, conflict, and key plot points, Irreversible immerses the audience in an hour and a half long

experience that drives it to reflect on a murder and a rape in a hopeful way. When Noé write his film in

reverse, he created a film with as close to a happy ending as possible considering the fabula he had to

11
 Sawyer 002320-097

work with. The film ends, and we are reminded of the beauty in our world as Marcus and Alex cuddle

under a mist of affection, reveling in a love that cannot be touched by time or man.

12
 Sawyer 002320-097

List of Sources

Written Sources

-McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York:

Regan, 1997.

- Boje, David M. Storytelling Organizations. London: SAGE, 2008.

-Bordwell, David. "Principles of Narration." Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison, WI:

University of Wisconsin, 1985.

Electronic Sources

-Egbert, Robert. "Irreversible." Rogerebert.com :: Movie Reviews, Essays and the Movie Answer

Man from Film Critic Roger Ebert. Sun Times, 14 Mar. 2003. 17 Sept. 2011.

<http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20030314/REVIEWS/303

140303/1023>.

-"Gaspar Noé Interview - Gaspar Noé on Irreversible" Www.iofilm.co.uk. Ed. Brian Pendreigh.

Iofilm. Web. 23 Nov. 2011.

<http://www.iofilm.co.uk/feats/interviews/g/gaspar_Noé.shtml>.

-Irréversible. Dir. Noé Gaspar. Les Cinémas De La Zone et al., 2002.

-Memento. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Newmarket Capital Group et al., 2001.

-Steinorth, Christina. "Screenwriting Marathon Robert McKee and His Story Seminar."

ArtsEditor: Independent Arts Reporting, Reviewing, and Relevant Discourse. ArtsEditor,

Apr. 2000. Web. 11 Nov. 2011.

<http://www.artseditor.com/html/april00/apr00_story.shtml>.

-The Lovely Bones. Dir. Peter Jackson. DreamWorks SKG et al., 2009.

13