The King’s Man – Matthew Vaughn & Mark Millar

I write a lot on this site about structure. It’s very much my jam. In specific, I employ and teach the mechanics of a modified version of The Story Circle first popularized by Joseph Campbell and later modified by Dan Harmon. And I always stress to new writers that, paradoxically, even when you aren’t using this tool… you kind of are. It’s inescapable in that way.

For example, I start each Story Circle by establishing who a character is before the action starts. I do this by showing them at work (or school) and at home, and with someone they love in one of those situations, and with someone they hate in the other. This shows a broad range of who the character is at the start of the narrative: what their economic life is like, their family structure, their emotional limits. The audience can infer a lot based on lived experience: when you see Indiana Jones as a University Professor in the second scene of Raiders, that carries with it all the baggage that reader has with people of that profession. Then, as the narrative goes on, those assumptions will either be proven or disproven. But either way, we have our starting point.

But Raiders is actually a great example of using structure while also not using it. In that second scene in the movie, we see Indy at work. So one would presume that in the first scene we see him at home… right? Well no, we see him on an adventure, being chased by that boulder, famously. In fact we never see Indy at home in the first act, nor in the entire picture. But this isn’t a mistake by the filmmakers, they are telling us something. By leaving out the scene of home life, they are communicating that Indy has no home life, that his whole life bounces between being this man of adventure and this university professor.

By leaving out a part of the structure, we are efficiently communicating something about its absence. This is far, far more efficient than showing Indy at home in a sparse place, or having some college clumsily say that he doesn’t have a home life. This communicates meaning while somehow taking up no script time, no page real-estate. This is not a thing, it is the absence of a thing, and yet somehow it can communicate as well or better than had the thing been there.

And you must be thinking two things right now: can other things be inferred by leaving out other segments of the Story Circle, and, hey, wasn’t this supposed to be a review of the 2021 film The King’s Man by Matthew Vaughn?

Well, yes. And, yes.

The King’s Man is the third film in the Kingman series directed by Vaughn and based on the series of the same name by Mark Millar. By all rights, given that description, it should be absolute guilty-pleasure trash, redeemable only in its irredeemableness. And yet, not only is it quite good, it has something to say and it uses a corruption of the Story Circle in order to do it.

The film follows Orlando and Conrad Oxford, a father and son who both witness the brutal death of their wife and mother near the end of the Second Boer War (1902) who, with her dying breath, makes her husband promise that he will never let their son see war again.

This starts Orlando down a path of diplomacy, trying to set things right on the world stage and acting being the scenes in an attempt to stop wars before they start, and even going so far as to start the secret intelligence agency that will one day become the Kingsman Secret Service we see in later films. It also sets him on a path, as his son grows, of discouraging his going into war. Because the son also started his own Story Circle the day his mother died, one that inspired him to protect innocents from war.

This is the tension of the story, the conflict, the beginnings of the story’s Four Corner Opposition. Conrad wants to go into the ever-escalating conflict of what we know will be World War I while Orlando not only tries to prevent his son from entering it, he tries to stop the war from happening altogether. Thus both men are set on paths against each other, each entering the unfamiliar situation of being in conflict with the other, each trying to get what they want. Orlando and Conrad both try to get what they want at home, while Orlando also tries to get what he wants on the world stage while, I suppose, Conrad attempts in some way to join him on that stage.

They also both face great societal tension in the work, to the point that I would but “Society Writ Large” on the Four-Corner Opposition as an antagonistic force in and of itself. The Societies of the world play against Orlando, seeming as though they want to go to war despite his best efforts, as though it craves its own destruction heedless of Orlando’s efforts to save it. Conrad faces the pressure of society in the form of his peers, girls leaving white feathers for him to mark his cowardice in not going to war (and real life thing that happened, which is just sad and sick).

And Conrad does Get just what he wants. He sneaks off without his father’s permission, I think without even being yet of age (stealing the name of a friend), and enters the war effort. There he is brought straight to the front lines of the trenches and sees, first hand, that there is no heroic glamour in this. It is painted as hard and harsh and brutal.

Then there is us, the people taking in this story, with a good knowledge of Story Circle, and we’re going “got it.” This is employing one of my favorite techniques with the Circle: when you get what you want, but what you wanted was dumb and now you learn that. Because following Gets What They Want on the Circle is Pays a Heavy Price for It, but that doesn’t always mean one thing for another. Sometimes that means you wanted something dumb, and your punishment is: well, you got it, idiot.

And I rather like that sort of story, because it reminds me a lot of myself. I am, at the end of the day, my own worst enemy. My own ambition is often the thing that is my undoing.

Conrad sees a man out in the No Man’s Land between the trenches, calling for help. Against the orders of his superiors, he charges out into enemy fire to save the man. He gets to him, but now both are trapped, and they commiserate on the situation they’re in. Conrad comments that “his father tried to warn him, but he wouldn’t listen, and he didn’t realize how right he was” and the part of your brain that’s familiar with Story Structure goes “aaaah, got it. He’s changed his point-of-view on the war after going through it, so now he will Return, Having Changed to his father having learned his lesson, completing his story arc Circle and helping his father complete his.

And in some sense, yes. But in another, Vaughn is very cleverly using our knowledge of how story’s work against us here, and it is brilliant.

The man Conrad saved reveals himself to be an English spy who was deep in enemy territory and got secret plans for them. He reveals them, in a shady-looking envelope with a skull on it and the flag of the enemy. He gives them to Conrad and makes him promise that, if he doesn’t make it, he’ll deliver the plans and end the war. Now Conrad is in his father’s shoes, mirroring his father at the start, both men being given a duty by a good person dying needlessly in war.

Okay, you say! Now things are really lighting up in your Story Circle brain, whether you study Narrative Structure or just consume it and have absorbed it through osmosis. Conrad is not only going back to his father a changed man, he’s going back with secret plans that will help him turn the tide of the conflict! This is amazing, this is great, it’s all coming full circle. Yes.

So Conrad makes his way back to a friendly trench, but not the one he left from. They don’t know him, and they recognize he’s using a fake name, and when he holds up the plans with the skull and the enemy flag on them, they shoot him dead.

And we hard cut to Orlando, who has been reading all of this in a letter sent by the military, heartbroken, crying endlessly. Because we haven’t been following Conrad’s Story Circle along Getting what he wanted, Paying for it, and Returning Having Changed. We have instead been following Orlando’s, who doesn’t get what he wanted, who just Pays.

And here it’s important to remember that in many narratives the “Pay a Heavy Price” moment is also known as “The Mentor Dies.” It’s based on this idea that the old must give way to make way for the new. That in order to complete their journey into a hero, the protagonist must work without a safety net. They must step up and be the adult in the room, and to do that, the adult has to go. The “Pay a Heavy Price” moment is when Ben Kenobi dies in Star Wars, it’s when Uncle Ben dies in Spider-Man, it’s when Sean Connery dies in Highlander.

By subverting this and making it the son who dies and not the father, making it so that the son doesn’t return with the war plans having changed but dies and leaves the father to mourn, by upending this traditional use of the Story Circle, Matthew Vaughn is making a point about the true cost and tragedy of war: fathers bury their sons, when it should be the other way around.

If the Story Circle is how we make sense of life and narrative and if, in it, the old pass to make way for the new, then war is the great perversion of that, Vaughn is saying by skipping Orlando’s “Get” and having this tragedy be his “Pay” moment. This, he’s saying, is the true cost of war. Fathers burying their sons, an upheaval of the natural order of things.

And when I watched this for the first time, it wrecked me. I just plain did not see it coming, especially with how effortlessly Vaughn teases what might have been the end of Conrad’s arc, had he lived. I was hit hard by this movie, and the message was not lost on me at all. This movie should be shown in schools. It has a harrowing message about conflict that people need to learn, tons of real-world history delivered in a way that’s digestible and interesting, and is smart storytelling.

The third movie in the Kingsman series had no expectation of being good, but god damn, this is smart, astonishing writing that’s been sadly overlooked.

This is what one can achieve by going off-script with the Story Circle. Just as going off-script in the Introduction phase gave us insight into Indy’s home life (or lack therof), going off-script with the Pay a Heavy Price phase results in a savagely emotional blow from The King’s Man that reveals the intent behind its narrative.

You can go off the Story Circle, but when you do, you are saying something, and the things you say have meaning.