Farce, The Blues Brothers, and Building Momentum-Based Tension in Your Manuscript
"They aren't going to catch us. We're on a mission from God."
Happy July! How the heck are you?!
Things have been incredible but wild for me lately, which feels like a good mix. I learned last week that my publisher has been approached by Ersen, a small Estonian press, to acquire print publication rights to my second novel, How to Keep a Husband for Ten Days. It’s mind-boggling that readers in a country I’ve never been to, who read a language I can’t speak, will be reading the story of Lina, Brown, and the apartment building they and their friends save very soon. (You can, too, here in English.)
Thank you to those of you who’ve subscribed to this Substack since my last post. I’m grateful the numbers went up at all, instead of down, after my last post was inspired by musical theater.
In this post, I want to break down the momentum-based tension that multiple sources of conflict can give a piece, using John Landis’s The Blues Brothers (1980) as an example. Though I’m going to be discussing the film through the lens of the comedic structure known as farce, adding bad guys and multiple plots can benefit novels and short stories in any genre, even if the bad guys are things like marital ennui and the subplots are things like your character trying to get a sandwich after accidentally taking more-than-a-microdose.
^Click this button if you have thoughts on other classic movies you’d like to see me break down, analyze, or otherwise assess for lessons they can teach us as writers. I’d love to read about them in the comments!
A Quick Overview of The Blues Brothers
If you’ve never seen The Blues Brothers,1 the film follows two adoptive brothers, “Joliet” Jake (John Belushi) and Elwood Blues (Dan Aykroyd), as they, after Jake’s early release from prison on good behavior, re-assemble their old rhythm and blues band and set up a gig or two in order to earn five grand (honestly, instead of with “filthy, stolen money”) to pay a steep county tax assessment that would otherwise shutter the Catholic orphanage where they grew up.2
The film originated from a sketch that Aykroyd and Belushi developed for the early years of Saturday Night Live, involves a ton of impressive guest appearances (Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, and John Candy to name a few), and is the kind of zany comedy that just speaks to me.
One way that it’s zany is in its use of farce, a form of comedy that finds its humor in exaggeration and wildly unrealistic circumstances.
The term is often associated with British and French stage plays from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which often contained physical comedy and wild misunderstandings. In one particular type, the bedroom farce, there were often romantic entanglements and a climactic scene in which a lot of different people ran in and out of bedroom doors along a hallway as they tried to head off their various lovers from seeing one another. (I’d argue that we get a take on the bedroom farce in The Blues Brothers’ climactic car chase, even if its strange bedfellows are purely figurative. More on this in a moment.)
The Blues Brothers is certainly farcical. I could (and probably will, at some point) write an entire post on the nigh magic realism of its comedy (cars flying through the air, a cigarette being whipped out of a woman’s mouth), but one thing I want to focus on here is the way in which the film introduces the titular characters’ many adversaries; the way those adversaries ramp up the film’s momentum and give it built-in tension, even before we’re out of the exposition; and the way their multiple storylines coalesce in, you guessed it, a rather farcical way.
The Breakdown.
How The Blues Brothers’ Adversaries Make It More Than a Hero’s Journey.
For all intents and purposes, The Blues Brothers could easily be analyzed as a Hero’s Journey. Apart from scenes introducing the brothers’ adversaries and one montage—in the frame of the brothers advertising a high-stakes, last-minute show at the Palace Hotel Ballroom—we only see scenes featuring Jake and Elwood. There’s a call to adventure (The Penguin [i.e., Mother Superior] telling the boys about the orphanage’s plight), supernatural aids (literally, as shown here), and mentors and helpers galore (see also: all the guest stars and cameos I mentioned earlier).
Because of The Blues Brothers’ steadily accumulating number of adversaries, though,3 this Hero’s Journey is ready to rock, with built-in momentum and tension moving through it, even in the exposition.
The adversaries in this film may seem like a random assortment, a motley crew. We have the Illinois State Police, Jake’s parole officer (played affably by John Candy), neo-N*zis, a hairdresser/assassin, and a country band called The Good Ol’ Boys that tours the Midwest in matching outfits and their own Winnebago.
For all their randomness, each adversary sprouts out of the Blues Brothers’ adventure, or rather is a consequence of their misadventures. As they set out on their quest to make honest money to save their childhood home, the brothers make enemies out of:
the state police when Elwood flees a traffic stop, then leads them on a merry and destructive chase through a mega-mall;
the neo-N*zis when they (rightfully so!) drive through the march they have after winning their court case; and
The Good Ol’ Boys when they steal their set.
The hairdresser/assassin, well, no spoilers here (it’s too good to spoil), aside from an old adventure coming back to bite Joliet Jake in the butt.
Rhythm and Blues.
I almost didn’t get in the weeds with this post, but then I thought better of it.4 Learning not just which bad guys are after the heroes of the film but also in what sequence and with what kind of momentum should hopefully drive my points home.
Point the First: The Adversaries Intermingle.
The following numerical sequence signifies the appearances (in chronological order) of the main characters’ enemies. When no dashes separate the numbers, the adversaries all appear in a scene together. For help reading it, the adversaries are numbered as:
Illinois State Police
Hairdresser/assassin
Jake’s parole officer
Illinois N*zis
The Good Ol’ Boys
1-2-3-123-4-2-2-4-5-51-5-13-513-2-134134
I realize a ton of creative writers are not numbers people, but don’t freak out or treat the above numerical sequence like a calculus problem.
Instead, pretend you’re back in grade school. What patterns do you see in this sequence? I spot some repetition (1, 2, and 3 being introduced separately, then immediately sharing a scene outside Elwood’s halfway house apartment). I also spot mirror images, which in poetry we might call a chiasmus, as in the case of 4-2-2-4: Jake and Elwood driving the N*zi punks off the bridge during their march > the hairdresser studying a manual for a flamethrower while painting her nails a vengeful shade of red > the hairdresser using said flamethrower (unsuccessfully) outside a Howard Johnson > the N*zis falling for Elwood’s falsified license renewal and storming Wrigley Field to get revenge on the Blues Brothers.
One strength of this sequence comes from the way Dan Aykroyd and John Landis’s script asks, “What happens if these adversaries aren’t working alone, but in tandem?”
Take, for instance, that 5-51-5 series in the middle of the sequence. After The Blues Brothers play Bob’s Country Bunker, effectively stealing the limelight (and the ticket money) from another band, the Illinois State Police (adversary no. 1) and The Good Ol’ Boys (adversary no. 5) run right into each other (literally) in their pursuit of Jake and Elwood. It’s played for laughs, but it also forms a sort of alliance between these otherwise strangers.
Another strength comes from the veritable farce that is the movie’s third act.
Allied or not (pleased to say literally no one wants to touch “those bums,” the Illinois Nazis), all five adversaries convene on the Blues Brothers, at their sold-out show at the Palace Hotel Ballroom (513-2) and in the chase scene that follows (134134). This final part of the numerical sequence is definite farce, given the way various enemies weave their way onto and off the screen, with one falling back only for another to gain on The Blues Brothers, Mario Kart style. There are wacky entrances and exits, parole officers stopping to watch the concert and enjoy an Orange Whip, a showdown with a female assassin in the sewers beneath the hotel, and just before the brothers reach their goal, a N*zi’s confession of queer romantic love for his boss as their station wagon plummets from an unfinished on ramp to the unforgiving streets below.
Though this numeric sequence was probably not intentional, keep in mind that pretty much all stories have some sort of pattern to them—even a simple beginning, middle, and end comprises a pattern—and we can use the ones we identify in cases like this to inform our own work.
At the very least, you might take this observation about The Blues Brothers, then examine the various plot lines and conflicts in your work.
How might your conflicts shuffle, intermingle, perhaps intertwine for added spice? At the most, if you’ve been struggling with how to fit several plots together, this might be a good rubric to follow, almost like a narrative sewing sampler.
Point the Second: Adversaries Building In Tension and Momentum, from the Exposition Onward.
There’s also something of the Golden Spiral about the rhythm with which the Blues Brothers’ adversaries are woven into the film’s narrative. Though they start slow—with six expositional scenes before the Illinois State Police first pull Elwood over, then four before the parole officer and hairdresser/assassin are introduced and developed, and another four before the boys run down the Illinois Nazis—the frequency of the adversaries’ appearances ramps up along with the rising action, until there is only a scene here and there between their appearances.
This makes narrative sense, as multiple conflicts are heating up and the overall story has gained momentum, but one thing I want to point out is the built-in tension these characters lend the film during its exposition.
The Blues Brothers are still assembling their band and performing their first gig well into the film’s second act, and because so many supporting characters are being introduced, you have to have something moving the story along. Sure, the bad guys themselves still have to be introduced and have their own exposition, but because their presence automatically represents conflict, they bring built-in tension to their earliest scenes, even as we’re learning their names and what they want most in the world.
To do this well in your own work, keep in mind what the adversaries in this film all have in common: a) they are all strangers Jake and Elwood ran into along the way and b) one of their greatest desires (their only desire in the world of the film, really) is to apprehend or otherwise take revenge on them.
With this in mind, adding more conflict to bump up the tension and momentum in your work can be a good idea, so long as it’s executed well.
Instead of adding conflicts in spaghetti-at-the-wall style, consider how they can work together to create a series of unified threads that, like a marionette’s strings, maneuver the story arc forward from many different angles.
To sum up, what can we as fiction writers learn from this movie?
Short answer: What can’t you learn from The Blues Brothers? It’s a master class in narrative momentum!
Longer answer: There are several things you can learn from this movie even if you aren’t writing comedy.
First, challenge yourself by plumbing your storyline for all adversarial angles. If your main character is a jerk to the barista at a coffee shop, how might that change the story arc you already had planned for them?
Introduce various adversaries from earlier points in your work to build in tension from the beginning. And don’t feel that you have to introduce them in ascending order of power. Arguably, the Illinois State Police, with their extensive dispatch network, are a bigger threat to Jake and Elwood’s quest than neo-N*zis or a country band, and yet they’re introduced only a handful of scenes into the movie.
Think also of all the nemeses and rivals in your existing piece. Are they working together or as separate entities? If separate entities, how might they all work together to go after your main character(s)?
Consider also using that sequential and rhythmic road map up above (the numerical sequences) if you need or want to play around with your existing structure. Who knows? It might just breathe some life and momentum into your story or novel that you didn’t know was needed.
Internet Magpie Time!
Think of me as that friend who sends you a millionty one Reels, articles, and Tic-Tacs, but in a more curated three-at-a-time kind of fashion. Here are a few things I’ve enjoyed of late:
Throwback to e.e. cummings’ delicious “i like my body when it is with your body” (literal oldie but a goodie)
I’m really struggling to clean my house in light of all the business of summer, but the app Sweepy (free, with in-app purchases; no affiliate link here) is helping me keep on task. (Great for neurodivergent brains, by the way!)
Will Musgrove’s flash fiction piece “We and Us” in Wigleaf feels like an honest exploration of unexpected grief.
I hope you enjoyed this post. I know I’m biased because it’s one of my favorite movies, but I feel there’s a ton we can learn from The Blues Brothers, including this fun runner of magic realism produced through stunts. Maybe I’ll do another post on them at some point in future. Till next time, please take care of yourself, drink enough water (maybe with a lovely cucumber infusion?), and read your books in the shade of a beautiful plane tree. You deserve it.
Jessica xx
Then what are you doing with your one wild and precious life? I’m just kidding. Kind of.
Forget saving cats. That’s amateur hour.
What Joseph Campbell might call “challenges and temptations.”
Look, I didn’t rewatch one of my favorite films on July Fourth, taking notes on each scene, not to nerd out about narrative structure!