Pathway

The screenwriter's voice suggests how the story could be told, but the pathway describes the trajectory of how the audience will move through the story. Regardless of genre, each story takes their protagonist(s) along a specific pathway. Film experts such as Foster Hirsch and Sheri Chinen Biesen identify film noir as a genre. Historically, noir film captured the inflated sense of urban fatalism and moral desolation that the single male ego felt after World War II. When approaching a story through the noir pathway, the screenwriter must figure out how to create and sustain a sense of deepening distrust, despair and hopelessness without relying too much on the antagonist, because sometimes the protagonist will win but still be destroyed by the bigger powers at work. Human versus technology feels most similar to a traditional hero-versus-villain scenario, except that in this case the protagonist is battling against a machine.