[spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] Me and Earl and the Dying Girl: Two Levels of Sturcture By Jacob Krueger [/spb_text_block] [divider type="thin" text="Go to top" full_width="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [blank_spacer height="30px" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] [spb_text_block title="TRANSCRIPT" pb_margin_bottom="no" pb_border_bottom="no" width="1/1" el_position="first last"] Hello, I'm Jacob Krueger and this is the Write Your Screenplay Podcast.  As you know on this podcast, rather than looking at movies in terms of two thumbs up or two thumbs down, loved it or hated it, we look at them in terms of what we can learn from them as screenwriters. We look at good movies, we look at bad movies, we look at movies that we loved and we looked at movies that we hated. This week, we're going to be looking at Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. If you haven't seen this movie yet, please be aware that this podcast does contain spoilers, which will change your experience of the movie. And it's interesting that these spoilers will change your experience of the movie because this should be an impossible movie to spoil. The title of the movie is Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. The logline of the movie tells you it's about a friendship between a teenage boy and a girl with cancer. And even the main character himself tells you, at the beginning of the movie, that he made a movie so bad that somebody died from watching it. Every single thing about how this movie was constructed is basically telling you that this girl is going to die. And there's an interesting thing that happens to an audience when they know they're watching a movie that's going to hurt them: they start to put a little cocoon around themselves to protect themselves from getting hurt. Whether you loved or hated Me and Earl and the Dying Girl-- whether you were part of the crowd that was ready to stand up and cheer at the Sundance premiere (after which the film was immediately snagged up after a fierce bidding war) or whether you're one of the more skeptical audience members who have accused the film of being cliché in its depiction of Earl and of its self-aware film references-- one thing that you have to admit about Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is that, for all its humor and all its fun, ultimately the movie is devastating. It’s not easy to devastate an audience. Especially when they come to a movie called Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. It’s not easy to actually move them to a point of personal exposure with a film like this, because of the protective wall that the audience is naturally going to put up between themselves and the film. So, I want to talk today about how you get an audience to take down their walls. In lesser hands, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a Lifetime movie.  In lesser hands, it's just another movie in a long line of melodramatic tearjerkers: the kind of movie that makes you cry but doesn't really change your life. The kind of movie that makes you cry in a safe way. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl does not make you cry in a safe way. And the reason for this is that it sucks you into seeing the world through the character's eyes, forcing you to lower your guard and expose your own vulnerability.   As I’ve mentioned, the film has taken a lot of criticism for this. It's been argued that Rachel (the girl who is dying of cancer) exists for no other reason than to force the main character, Greg, to change. It's been argued that Greg is a total narcissist who is so completely unaware of anybody other than himself in the world. But I completely disagree. For me, what is wonderful about this movie and what is successful about this movie is exactly the way it pulls you into Greg’s perspective, as narcissistic and self-involved, and downright teenage as it might be. The most obvious way it does this is by lying to you.