Aaron Sorkin: Shakespeare and Scripture

"All hacks off the stage right now! That's a national security order."

There's a scene in Aaron Sorkin's masterpiece The West Wing where President Bartlet, while upset at the lack of panache in a priest's sermon, says this: "Words! Words when spoken out loud for the sake of performance are music. They have rhythm and timber and pitch and volume. These are the properties of music, and music has the ability to find us and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can't." While the line has little narrative importance in the episode, it very accurately spells out Aaron Sorkin's own personal philosophy when it comes to writing.

Sorkin, who was born in New York City and grew up loving dramatic theater, is often praised for his writing's ability to feel "musical." As Bartlet says, there is a certain rhythm or pitch to these words that elevate them above bog standard dialogue in any other television series or movie. So, what exactly makes them different? Well, first we'll have to examine Sorkin's influences. See, Sorkin doesn't write like other screenwriters because his main influences aren't films. He draws from his influences from his unimaginably rich knowledge of theater. There's a reason why he so often makes allusions to Gilbert and Sullivan in his works. Indeed, Sorkin started off as, primarily, a playwright: after graduating from Syracuse with a BFA in Musical Theater, he wrote A Few Good Men which premiered on Broadway when he was only 28. To say that theater has had a huge effect on his life would be an understatement.

As such, Sorkin's writing is primarily geared towards dialogue, which is usually a bad sign in screenwriting if your name isn't Quentin Tarantino. The old adage "show don't tell" simply does not apply to Sorkin, whose dialogue is the heart and soul of his work. Take, for example, The West Wing episode 17 People. When he was told by the execs that they needed to save money by limiting the number of actors, props, and locations, he decided to write a play. The entire episode is composed like a play, blocked like a play, and - like a play - relies almost entirely on its characters abilities to bounce off one another, masterfully accomplished between its three main players: Martin Sheen, John Spencer, and Richard Schiff. This episode is one of the best that The West Wing ever produced - which is saying quite a lot - and much of its critical success has to do with Sorkin getting to the basics, to the core of his strengths: his excellent character work.

The train of Sorkin's influence can even be traced back to Shakespeare as they both write in meter, even if Sorkin's is a little more free form than the Bard's. I always like to point to Mark Antony's soliloquy in Julius Caesar as a perfect example of the style of speech that influenced Sorkin. I remember reading Julius Caesar in high school and baffled by the way that these characters spoke, not to mention difficult to read. Shakespeare was frustrating to me, at least until I heard his words spoken out loud. My English teacher showed us this clip from Julius Caesar when it was adapted to film, and starring the great Marlon Brando as Mark Antony:



There's a great musicality to this, like this speech is made up entirely of a collection of poems that lead into one another. Take note the chorus-like repetition of, "Surely, he is an honorable man." There is parallel structure, cadence, and so many other poetic mechanics at play here, as befits the Bard's lauded status as the greatest poet of all time. And compare this speech to the opening monologue from Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom wherein Jeff Daniels' news anchor character Will McAvoy gives his opinion on America:



There's no shortage of similarities between these two soliloquies. The use of repetition, the way both Marlon Brando and Jeff Daniels pause and raise their voices at points, the silent crowd and what that speaks of the situation, the way that both speeches turn around near the end. When Mark Antony reveals a (supposed) moment of weakness as he is "overcome with grief" due to Caesar's death, it is the same exact kind of moment as when Will McAvoy begins talking about America "used to be" the greatest country in the world. Sorkin's speech patterns are a direct descendant of Shakespearean verse, down to the timing and the execution of it. There are very few actors in the world that can competently deliver Sorkin's lines, but the ones that do are ones that he uses over and over again, even being given the moniker "The Sorkin Players" by fans of his work.

Aaron Sorkin is a master of this musicality because he knows that characters are at the core of his work. Even in the brief moments before the rant that Will McAvoy gives, we see who he is. Sick and tired of petty media squabbles, frustrated with the state of his own country, angry and seemingly hallucinatory - he is simply through with everything. Yet we also see that he is smart, well-spoken, and, ultimately, idealistic. He wants to grasp for the greater heights that he knows that the world can achieve. He pushes back against some of these notions at first, but he nevertheless gives in to that instinct: the instinct to hope that we can be better than what we are now. All of that is communicated beautifully and succinctly with such effectiveness and depth that only a performer in concert with the elegance and exactness of Sorkin's words could.

As Bartlet said, music has the ability to lift us up in ways that literal meaning can't. Aaron Sorkin's words are music and they are relentless in their ability to give to the audience depth and understanding far beyond those of regular words. Sorkin is a critic, as well, pushing against those who do not know the power of words. There are similarities between the writing of Sorkin and the great speeches throughout American history, as well. Take, for example, Martin Luther King's famous "I Have A Dream" speech, perhaps one of the greatest speeches of all time. Both Sorkin and King draw from the same pool of influences, from Shakespeare and Scripture. They make allusions and paraphrase from great works that have come before them, using their words to elevate their own work, both doing so in service of something greater than them.

Aaron Sorkin once said that he only wishes people to be entertained when they see his work, nothing more and nothing less. They surely are, but there's far more to it than that. When we consume Sorkin's words, we don't just imbibe the literal meaning. Instead, we are found, moved, and lifted up in ways beyond Sorkin's initial imagination.