Preface: Re-teaching myself the new filmmaking pipeline, now with AI (netflix please notice me). co-written with Claude. NOW WITH AUDIO.

There are actually quite a few assumptions we can dig into, I thought about leaving the rest out and just keep the first three. But the truth is, this book has been so influential to so many different people for so long, despite the fact the author has never had a successful filmmaking career, at the same time he lied about him having a PhD, it's worth examining all the assumptions we have here, as it is so representative of a typical western Hollywood storytelling narrative. We don't want to see these as the rules you have to follow, or principles you have to follow. These are one way to write a story, not the only way. So let's look further into what his way of telling stories meant.

Let's move on to assumption four: conflict as the universal dramatic principle. Perhaps McKee's most frequently quoted principle is that conflict is the essence of drama — that without conflict there is no story. This seems so obviously true that most people who read it simply nod and move on. But the claim is much more culturally specific than it appears. McKee means something quite specific by conflict: the opposition between a protagonist's desire and the forces — whether human, institutional, natural, or internal — that prevent its fulfillment. Conflict is adversarial. It is structured as opposition, resistance, obstacle. The world pushes back against the protagonist's desire and the story is the account of that pushing back and the protagonist's response to it. This adversarial model of dramatic action has deep roots in Western culture — in the Greek agonistic tradition that we discussed earlier in this conversation, where drama literally emerged from competition, from the contest of opposing forces, from the fundamental assumption that meaningful action involves struggle against resistance.

But many non-Western dramatic and narrative traditions are not primarily adversarial in their structure. Japanese Noh theater — one of the oldest surviving theatrical traditions in the world — is not structured around conflict in McKee's sense. Its dramatic interest lies not in a protagonist struggling against opposing forces but in the revelation of a spiritual or emotional truth through highly formalized movement, music, and poetry. The dramatic event is not a conflict but an unveiling — a gradual revelation of what is already present, hidden beneath the surface. Chekhov — a Russian realist playwright in 19th century— was famously resistant to conventional dramatic conflict. His plays are full of characters who want things they cannot have, but the dramatic interest lies not in the struggle for those things but in the texture of life as it passes in the absence of their fulfillment. What Chekhov dramatizes is not conflict but something more like the weight of unlived life — and it is one of the most powerful dramatic registers in the European tradition, one that McKee's system has profound difficulty accommodating. When McKee discusses Chekhov — which he does relatively rarely — he tends to locate hidden conflict in the plays that Chekhov himself would not have recognized. The system requires conflict, so conflict must be found. The cultural assumption is: adversarial conflict is the universal engine of dramatic interest. The reality is: adversarial conflict is one mode of dramatic organization, powerful and well-suited to certain kinds of stories, but not universal — and its universalization in McKee's system reflects the dominance of a particular Western dramatic tradition and the commercial Hollywood culture that inherited it.

McKee's system requires that every properly structured story culminate in a climax — a decisive moment in which the story's central conflict is resolved, definitively and irrevocably, in a way that reveals the story's meaning. The climax is not just the highest point of tension. It is the moment of maximum meaning — the point at which the story declares what it is about and what the world is like. First, it encodes the value of decisiveness itself. The climax must be decisive — ambiguity is a problem, irresolution is a problem, the refusal to commit to a clear meaning is a problem. This preference for decisiveness over ambiguity reflects a specific cultural value — the Western philosophical tradition's preference for clear resolution, definite meaning, and the elimination of uncertainty. Many narrative traditions are comfortable with, or actively prefer, unresolved endings — endings that open outward rather than closing down, that leave the audience with questions rather than answers, that refuse to declare what the world is like. Japanese literature and film are full of such endings. Much of the greatest European literary fiction of the 20th century — Kafka, Borges, Beckett, whom we discussed — deliberately refuses the decisive climax. The refusal is itself the meaning.

The climax requirement encodes the value of change. McKee's system requires that the protagonist be genuinely changed by the story's events — that their journey through the narrative arc produce a fundamental shift in their character, values, or understanding of the world. A story in which the protagonist ends where they began — unchanged by everything they have experienced — is, in McKee's framework, a failed story. But many narrative traditions are not organized around the value of individual change. In many traditional narrative forms — fairy tales, myths, certain genres of epic — the protagonist's unchanging quality is precisely the point. The hero who remains true to their values in the face of every temptation and obstacle, who returns home unchanged, who demonstrates the stability of virtue rather than its development — this is a perfectly coherent narrative value that McKee's system cannot accommodate without distortion.

Third, the climax requirement encodes a specific relationship between narrative and meaning. In McKee's system, the climax is the moment the story declares its meaning — what the world is like, what the experience of being human in this particular situation teaches us. This assumes that stories have declarable meanings that can be stated at the moment of maximum dramatic intensity. But many of the greatest works of dramatic literature resist this assumption entirely. What is the meaning declared by the climax of Beckett's Waiting for Godot? What is the meaning declared by the ending of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard? These works are powerful precisely because they refuse to declare meanings — because they create experiences that resist summarization, that leave the audience with something they feel but cannot easily state. McKee's system would classify these as improperly structured stories. Which is, at minimum, a significant critical failure — and at most a demonstration of the limits of the system's cultural assumptions.

McKee's three-act structure — setup, confrontation, resolution — assumes a specific model of time and causality: linear, progressive, cumulative. Events happen in sequence, each causing the next, building toward a decisive climax that gives meaning to everything that preceded it. Time moves forward. The story moves toward its endpoint. The ending illuminates the beginning.This linear model of narrative time is deeply embedded in Western culture — in the Judeo-Christian narrative of history as a linear progression from creation through fall through redemption, in the Enlightenment narrative of progress from ignorance to knowledge, in the capitalist narrative of development from initial investment through struggle to eventual return. But many narrative traditions operate on fundamentally different models of time. Circular time — in which endings return to beginnings, in which the story's meaning lies not in its progression toward a destination but in the revelation of what has always been present — is characteristic of many non-Western narrative traditions and of much of the world's mythology. Cyclical narrative structures — in which the same events or patterns recur across generations, in which the story's meaning lies in the repetition and variation rather than in progressive development — appear in many indigenous narrative traditions and in much of the world's oral literature. Spiral narrative structures — in which the story returns repeatedly to the same events or images from different perspectives, each return adding new layers of understanding — appear in traditions as different as Japanese mono no aware and Latin American magical realism. McKee's three-act linear structure cannot accommodate these temporal models without forcing them into a framework they were not designed for. A narrative that circles back to its beginning is not, in McKee's system, a properly structured story — it is a story that has not progressed, that has failed to build toward a climax, that has not fulfilled its obligation to move forward.

One of the most interesting and least discussed cultural assumptions in McKee's system is the one embedded in his theory of character. McKee argues that true character — the deep self that the story reveals — is only revealed under pressure. The greater the pressure, the more deeply we see into the character. Comfortable circumstances reveal nothing. Crisis reveals everything. A character who has never been tested has no revealed character in the dramatic sense. This is dramatically useful and psychologically interesting. The story's function is to put the protagonist under maximum pressure to reveal their true character. A protagonist who achieves their goals without struggle has not been revealed — and has not, in McKee's system, really been in a story at all.

This assumption privileges a very specific kind of character — the individual who persists under pressure, who demonstrates agency and will in the face of adversity, who is defined by what they do when things are hard. It marginalizes or excludes characters who are defined by other qualities — by their capacity for stillness, for acceptance, for relationship, for wisdom that does not manifest as action under pressure. It also encodes a very specific theory of what human beings fundamentally are. In McKee's system, human beings are essentially defined by their desires and their capacity to pursue those desires in the face of opposition. This is the Western liberal subject — the autonomous individual whose identity is constituted by their agency. In Confucian tradition, human beings are fundamentally constituted by their relationships and roles — the person is not an autonomous individual but a node in a network of obligations and responsibilities. In Buddhist tradition, the autonomous individual self that Western culture treats as the basic unit of reality is itself an illusion — the source of suffering rather than the basis of meaningful action. In many indigenous traditions, the human being is fundamentally embedded in and constituted by their relationships to land, community, and ancestors — not an individual agent but a participant in a web of being that extends in all directions.

All of these specific cultural assumptions converge on a single overarching one: that the stories produced by the Western dramatic tradition — and its Hollywood commercial heir — are universal, while stories produced by other traditions are particular, exotic, or improperly structured. This assumption manifests in subtle ways throughout McKee's system. When he gives examples of great storytelling, they are overwhelmingly drawn from Hollywood cinema and European dramatic literature. When he discusses world cinema, it is typically to identify moments where foreign films demonstrate the universal principles of story — which is to say, the moments where they conform to McKee's framework.

The cultural assumptions embedded in McKee's system have real practical consequences for who gets to tell stories and which stories get told. Development executives trained on McKee's system — and virtually all Hollywood development executives have been shaped by it, directly or indirectly — apply its framework to every script they read. Scripts that do not have a clearly defined protagonist with a clearly defined want are sent back for revision. Scripts that do not build to a decisive climax are identified as structurally flawed. Scripts whose thematic interest lies in ambiguity rather than declaration are described as not knowing what they are about. This means that stories emerging from non-Western narrative traditions — or from writers whose sensibility has been shaped by those traditions — are systematically disadvantaged in the Hollywood development process. Not because they are less good, but because they are less legible within the dominant framework.

It also means that the enormous diversity of human storytelling — the circular, cyclical, relational, community-centered, ambiguity-embracing, desire-releasing traditions of the majority of the world's cultures — is filtered out at the development stage, before it ever reaches an audience. The stories that get made are the stories that fit the framework. The framework shapes what gets made. What gets made shapes what audiences come to expect. What audiences come to expect shapes what gets made. The loop closes and reinforces itself. McKee did not create this dynamic. It predates him and would exist without him. But his system is the most explicit and widely disseminated codification of the framework that drives it — which makes examining his cultural assumptions not just an intellectual exercise but a genuinely consequential critical act. More on this in the next post. ☀️