Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Savina

So, confession time: while I “knew” the story in the way it feels like everybody knows the story, I hadn’t read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde until a few months ago. And, yes, in broad strokes, what I knew about the story turned out to be true: a mild-mannered doctor working with chemicals that might as well be magic creates an evil alter ego for himself.

But if you “know” Jekyll and Hyde from other media the way I did, there’s a lot that doesn’t match up with the original. For a start, if your idea of Mr. Hyde comes from The Incredible Victorian Hulk as presented in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Van Helsing, surprise! The original 1886 novella presents him as shorter than Dr. Jekyll. Mr. Hyde is brutish in appearance and demeanor, but by no means superhuman.

Also, the story is very…well, Victorian, with all the virtues and foibles that implies. Our lead is not Dr. Henry Jekyll, but rather Gabriel John Utterson, a lawyer who has Jekyll as a client and becomes disturbed that the seemingly good doctor has insisted that Edward Hyde, an unknown man of ill repute, to be his sole beneficiary. Throughout the first half of the story, we watch through Utterson’s removed viewpoint as Jekyll behaves more erratically, the mysterious Hyde disappears after an accusation of murder, Jekyll returns to normal for a few months but then goes into self-imposed seclusion and eventually locks himself in his laboratory. When Utterson finally breaks into the laboratory, he finds not Jekyll but Hyde—dead, apparently by suicide, wearing Jekyll’s clothes. Utterson then proceeds to open a letter given to him by a mutual friend of his and Jekyll’s (a minor character named Lanyon, who just before this has died of shock after learning something dreadful about Jekyll, which is just so fucking Victorian it hurts).

And the entire second half of the novel—let me repeat that loudly, the entire second half of the novel—is Lanyon’s letter followed by Jekyll’s long written confession. It reveals that, yes, Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same. Jekyll possessed (unspecified) shameful vices, and concocted a cockamamie scheme to isolate his vices in a separate persona. While later adaptations made this seem like it stemmed from some noble sense of morality, in Stevenson’s original text, Jekyll’s motivations are blatantly selfish: he wanted Hyde to be able go off and indulge in those unspecified shameful vices without shame, letting Jekyll experience them without being the one committing them.

If this story structure didn’t predate cinema, one might accuse it of being willfully anti-cinematic. An 1887 stage adaptation restructured it into a more conventional three-act form, culminating with Hyde’s suicide. It also made Jekyll more sociable, more noble, while making Hyde more explicitly evil. And naturally, it added a romantic subplot, giving Jekyll a fiancée whose father is the man Hyde kills in a rage. This stage adaptation became the basis of at least three films, and is arguably more influential than the original novella to this day. (The 1997 musical Jekyll & Hyde, being adapted for a movie as I write this, has more in common structurally with this stage play than it does Stevenson’s original.)

So, what ideas does this give me for a story about a giant dragon-coyote?

Well, first off, in the original story, Utterson was the narrator, not Jekyll/Hyde. That’s interesting. Our Utterson analogue is probably the main character, although we don’t know if they’re the protagonist yet. Our Jekyll analogue might be the protagonist, but we’ll put a pin in that.

Also, Jekyll’s original ambiguity is interesting. Red Savina hasn’t felt evil to me as much as chaotic. Sure, that difference might be academic to anyone watching a giant paw dropping toward them, but it’s important thematically. Is my Jekyll intentionally trying to separate order and chaos? Maybe she has Jekyll’s classic selfish motives (“I’ve always wanted to smash things, and now I can with impunity! yay!”), but maybe there’s more to it than that. Edward Hyde is effectively the antagonist in Jekyll’s story, but that doesn’t mean Red Savina is the antagonist in this story.

Yet, if she isn’t the antagonist, then what is she? And who is the antagonist? We’ll put a pin in that, too.

If you remember our last episode, er, my last post, I quoted a definition of a story as “a character in a context with a problem.” Well, we have two and a half characters now: Red Savina, Savina’s alter ego, and the Utterson analogue. We’ll call that last one Gabriel for the moment; while that’s Utterson’s real first name, he’s called John throughout the novella, so Gabriel might be a good “final” name as a tip of the hat. What about the untransformed Savina? There’s no intrinsic reason this character can’t be male, but she feels female to me. We’ll call her Coyote X. We don’t know which of the two littles is the protagonist, but I’m leaning toward Gabriel. So we have Gabriel in a context with a problem.

A “context” is a combination of situation and setting, so what’s the setting? I’d like a more retro vibe, given the source. But! Giant monster movies need to have tall buildings to look puny against the might of the giant monster, and Victorian times weren’t exactly known for skyscrapers. So we need to advance to the 1930s or so.

This doesn’t have to be 1930s America or Great Britain or any other real country, necessarily—I mean, everybody’s furry, so we’ve got a pretty glaring difference right off the bat. So we don’t need to have everyone suffering from a Great Depression. At the same time, there might be something valuable to mine from the milieu of the late Progressive Era, with its sharp economic class distinctions: outrageous opulence, hardscrabble poverty, and fierce reformers trying to smash the system. (Any resemblance to modern political situations is surely a coincidence.)

Also: “Smash the system.” I’m not saying, I’m just saying. Hand me another pin.

Okay, but it’s “a character in a context with a problem,” not “multiple characters.” In the original Strange Case novella, Utterson is the main character but Henry Jekyll is the protagonist. Gabriel seems like my main character; is Coyote X my protagonist? Maybe, but that’s likely to make Gabriel as bland as, well, Utterson. And while us macrophiles might be rooting for Red Savina, the monster is never the protagonist of the movie. So I’m tentatively going with Gabriel as the protagonist, too. They’re the hero of this movie, and will have to face off against the movie’s antagonist.

While I have the setting, the other half of a context is Gabriel’s situation. The setting based on the Progressive Era makes things ripe for class conflict. Right now I only have two characters (taking Savina off the table for the moment), so Coyote X and Gabriel are likely of two different classes. If Red Savina engages in any deliberate system-smashing, that suggests Coyote X is someone for whom the system isn’t working—so Gabriel is someone who’s benefiting from it. Gabriel is upperclass, high society.

But what’s Gabriel’s problem?

“There’s a giant coyote smashing the city! Isn’t that enough?” Sorry, no: stopping Savina will become the overall story problem, but it’s not Gabriel’s personal problem. I need a character arc for Gabriel. I need an influence character.

What if that character is Coyote X? What if she’s the yin to Gabriel’s yang, the other half of the relationship story, the one who drives Gabriel’s character arc?

This feels more interesting to me. The stage adaptations gave Jekyll a fiancée who existed mostly to give him more things to feel tortured over. But what if the on-the-ground story belonged to someone involved with Jekyll? Not necessarily romantically, although let’s be honest, that carries more force than the original novella’s (yawn) friendly business relationship.

In fact, falling in love with Coyote X might be a problem. Coyote X hates the system; Gabriel benefits from it. This is a serious clash of ideology. I still only have two characters here; if I introduce a third character, now I have a potential love triangle.

Also, I have a lot of questions. What if Gabriel starts to suspect Coyote X is Red Savina? What if the third person here does? Who is that person? Coyote X is apparently a brilliant (if mad) scientist; how does that fit into things? How do X and Gabriel meet? What attracts them to one another? What do they fight over?

Okay, we’re running out of pins.

Next, I’ll talk about the famous-slash-infamous screenwriting handbook Save the Cat! and describe how it’s simultaneously immensely helpful and immensely frustrating, and get farther into my brainstorming for Red Savina without hitting undue spoiler territory. Also, June should see the first parts of the screenplay serialized. Paws crossed!