V

		may be taken for granted as the usual way of doing business in this country, but it is not necessarily how one acts in Sweden, Singapore, or Mali. Certainly, there is something inherently visual, dramatic, and ultimately liberating in identifying with someone who gets things done like Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991), but one easily forgets that, in reality, one is much more likely to be the victim of such a rampage than its author. Furthermore, for other cultures, the wild individualism portrayed in American films is totally at odds with the way these societies handle conflict. Not only does it go against local customs and mores, it is potentially damaging to them insofar as it provides a thrill that may be difficult to contain after the show is over. For Ruiz then, the American screenplay paradigm is a dangerous, even a "predatory theory," for it makes manifest "a system of ideas which devours and enslaves any other ideas that might restrain its activity." 70 In other words, left behind are different kinds of characters, concerns, behaviors, and goals, an entire world we could discover again.

		XII

		Finally the model also tells us that a narrative has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And that the story, as already quoted from Sargent, "seems to tell itself, rather than to be told, [that it should be] more like a happening than a narrative of past events."71 This basic narrative choice thus aligns classical screenwriting alongside what Plato and Aristotle called mimesis (when the poet speaks through the characters) in opposition to diegesis (when the poet speaks in his or her name). It also forms the distinction between story and discourse. In the former, the French linguist Emile Benveniste tells us: "Truly, there is no longer a 'narrator.' The events are chronologically recorded as they appear on the horizon of the story. No one speaks. The events seem to tell themselves."72 The words used by Benveniste, one cannot fail to notice, are almost an exact match for Sargent's. In this mode of writing, the plot also often overdetermines the freedom of the characters and the latitude of their actions. In discourse, on the contrary, a real or implied narrator is present, someone whose mediation cannot be ignored. In contrast to the standard model, such an approach can produce alternative narratives which, paradoxically, release the autonomy of the characters and the scope of their actions.