The Inciting Incident in Saving Mr. Banks

Do extremely difficult work.

That seems obvious, right? If you do something that’s valued but scarce because it’s difficult, you’re more likely to be in demand and to be compensated fairly for what you do.

The implication is stunning, though: When designing a project or developing a skill, seek out the most difficult parts to master and contribute. If it’s easy, it’s not for you.

–Seth Godin on “The Proven Way to Add Value” 

So let’s get down to the extremely difficult work of mastering story structure, beginning with the Inciting Incident.

The Inciting Incident is that event or choice without which we would not have a story. It is that which kick-starts the adventure.

In Story, Robert McKee defines the Inciting Incident as that which “radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life.” He continues:

“As a story begins, the protagonist is living a life that’s more or less in balance. He has successes and failures, ups and downs. Who doesn’t? But life is in relative control. Then, perhaps suddenly but in any case decisively, an event occurs that radically upsets its balance, swinging the value-charge of the protagonist’s reality either to the negative or to the positive.”

(Here are some further articulations of the definition of the Inciting Incident.)

Let’s make this more concrete by identifying the Inciting Incident in Saving Mr. Banks, written by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith (the entire script is available here).

P.L. Travers (played by Emma Thompson) is the protagonist of Saving Mr. Banks. We meet her, after a brief opening image of herself as a child in Australia, in her London home in the year 1961. Her agent arrives, thinking to see her off on a trip to California to meet with Walt Disney about selling the rights to her Mary Poppins books. Travers, however, has cancelled the car her agent has scheduled to take her to the airport. She is refusing to go, afraid what Disney will do to her beloved characters if she relinquishes the rights. But her agent explains that she has to go and at least consider Disney’s offer. For there is no more money coming in from her books. She will be broke if she doesn’t do something.

There is no waste of time setting up the conflict in this scene. But we haven’t yet gotten to the Inciting Incident itself. So in what sense is Travers’ life even in relative balance?

While it may not be in balance financially, it is in balance psychologically. As she, that is, would have it so. And in terms of the deal with Disney she has insisted upon, and gotten, “final say” in regard to the script. She is exercising the kind of iron control over the situation she is used to exercising in her affairs.

Yet her financial situation is upsetting the balance of her world. If she is going to avoid going broke, she will have to make a decision about whether to sign over the rights to Disney. She will have to relinquish a large degree of control. The Inciting Incident is her decision, at the end of this first scene, to go to Los Angeles for two weeks to meet and collaborate with Disney and his team. At the very end of the scene, when her agent tries to console her by saying, “It’s an exploratory trip. What do you say?” Travers replies: “I want to keep my house.” That line of dialogue expresses her decision to go and starts her off on her adventure.

Is her decision a swing to a negative or positive value? For Travers, it’s both. There is the positive prospect of making money, but also the negative prospect of Disney ruining her creation. But her line, “I want to keep my house,” tells us that the need to make money is driving her decision to go to LA, so overall the swing is to a positive value.

Observes McKee: “In most cases, the Inciting Incident is a single event that either happens directly to the protagonist or is caused by the protagonist.”

In the Inciting Incident of Saving Mr. Banks both things occur: dire financial straits “happen” to P.L. Travers but her decision to go to LA and meet with Disney is the cause of all that later occurs. If she had chosen to remain in London and keep the rights to Mary Poppins, there would have been no story.

The image above is reproduced courtesy of Walt Disney Studios.