The power of schism: Unconventional narrative structure in No Country for Old Men

Abstract

Whilst screenwriting handbooks have popularized and disseminated practical approaches to writing the screenplay and, to a certain extent, demystified and perhaps even democratized the process of screenplay creation and development, they have also solidified a restrictive doxa which delegitimizes unconventional structural approaches and, in doing so, solidifies a homogenized story product which tends to replicate different variations of the same dominant ideology. In this article I argue for a change in focus within screenwriting theory and the development process, towards an understanding of the meaning produced by the conventional model and the meanings that can be produced by alternative models, and away from the replication of the conventional, through an analysis of a particularly unconventional structural schism in the Coen brothers’ .