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badge at the feet of the townspeople who have betrayed him, signaling the loss of the value of community and the meaning of law. Kane and Amy leave in disgust, with scorn for the townspeople. Fortunately for the viewer, Kane still has the solace of Amy and maintains his own integrity, as well as the sympathy of the audience.
B. Basic Plot Structure in
High Noon
and
Jaws
(Applying the Amsterdam-Bruner Model)
    An initial steady state grounded in the legitimate ordinariness of things
.
    Both movies begin with the anticipatory “calm before the storm”: the normative “steady state.”
Jaws
opens with images of the carefree vacationers frolicking innocently (and vulnerably) at a firelit beach party; it is a luminous, moonlit summer evening on Amity Island, a vacationer’s paradise. In
High Noon
the steady state is equally idyllic. The older, beloved, and heroic marshal is finally receiving his just deserts and moral reward; having driven the evil outlaws from the community, he is marrying the incandescently gorgeous Amy. Amid the well-wishes of the community, the marshal hangs up his guns, retires his badge in anticipation of the arrival of his replacement, and prepares to depart on his honeymoon.
    That gets disrupted by a trouble consisting of circumstances attributable to human agency or susceptible to change by human intervention
.
    The trouble in both movies arrives early, the initiating action (the inciting incident) launching the trajectory of the plot. 29 In
Jaws
, it takes the form of a man-eating rogue shark. In
High Noon
, trouble arrives with the announcement that members of the Miller gang are gathering and that Frank Miller, the villain, has been released from prison. This is a somewhat more sophisticated introduction of the trouble. The arrival is signaled through action (the members of the gang gather on the outskirts of town), revisited through imagery (train tracks, clocks ticking down to Frank Miller’s arrival at high noon), and even signaled through an explicit musical presentation and foregrounding of the theme (the core story-song), all maintaining the tension of the conflict between the outlaw gang (the villain) and Marshal Kane (the protagonist) throughout the progressive movements and the internal psychological complications of the narrative.
    Whether nonhuman or human, the trouble must be susceptible to change by human intervention, creating the
struggle
with the malevolent forces of antagonism and evil in such a way that the audience can side with the protagonist and participate in the deepening conflict. In the movies—just as we will see in legal storytelling—it is important to make the first act short, clarifyingthe theme and clearly breaking the anterior steady state to reveal the nature of the trouble and the identity of the antagonist.
    In turn evoking efforts at redress or transformation, which [lead to a struggle, in which the efforts] succeed or fail
.
    In theater, it is commonly observed that the middle of the story is the most difficult part to construct. The progressive
complications
caused by the antagonist (or forces of antagonism) intensify while the protagonist attempts to reestablish the stability of the anterior steady state or press on toward a new and redefined narrative order. The two movements can be separate: for example, the trouble gets progressively uglier, deeper, or harder to overcome or builds to a cataclysmic climax before the hero finally intervenes. There are other possible patterns: for example, the hero (or other forces) can appear to intervene and superficially and momentarily still the trouble. This, however, is merely a false and premature ending; the victories are illusory, often part of the villain’s plan until the villain arises renewed, reinvigorated for battle. At this point the “true” confrontation or struggle between good and evil begins.
    In
Jaws
the sequence of events after the arrival of the trouble is extremely