Having just seen Get Out! which I'll be discussing in an upcoming podcast - and which deals pretty brilliantly with the themes of race within a big genre movie, but pretty poorly with the concept of hypnosis-- I wanted to look at a movie that looks at hypnosis in a truly profound way. And in fact builds its structure around hypnotic concepts.
All movies are hypnotic, and the best screenplays actually hypnotize their readers on the page, allowing them to forget that they're reading (just like you do when you read a great book) and actually start to see, hear and feel every moment in the script on that little movie screen in their heads.
This means that all screenwriters are actually hypnotists-- some are just a heck of a lot better at it than others.
Which means that if you want to succeed as a writer, you're really going to benefit from understanding some basic hypnotic concepts. Because your job is to help your readers-- many of whom are not naturally creative people, and who quite frankly are bored to tears reading scripts-- to slip into a creative state, and be able to effortlessly and viscerally experience your movie as if it were real, without having to supply any of that creativity themselves.
If you've taken our Write Your Screenplay classes at Jacob Krueger Studio, you know this is the real purpose of formatting. Not laying out your script in a "grammatically correct" way, but laying it out in a way that induces that hypnotic trance for your reader, lowering the barrier between fantasy and reality, so that they can experience your story as if it were real.
And if you've taken our Write Your Screenplay Level 2 classes or Protrack, you also know that structure is actually a hypnotic concept. A way of building fictional moments in a way that takes the character, and the audience, on a real, transformative journey.
One of the truly interesting things about Inception is that its structure is actually based upon the principles of hypnosis. In fact, the organizing principles of the dream within a dream within a dream structure of the film almost perfectly mirror the classical hypnosis training you'd receive during a basic hypnosis certification class.
Why is this important to you as a writer? Because as writers we all need organizing principles around which to structure our character's journey...
