John Sayles uses backstory… it's true. I watched The Secret of Roan Inish and Limbo and I've also seen part of Lonestar and the man uses back story! Now, often time, like the question suggests, Sayles uses this back story to create present conflict… not always, but often. While watching Limbo and The Secret of Roan Inish I jotted down notes anytime that I saw Sayles use back story or present conflict particularly when the back story helped to create conflict within his piece.

Most of the time we think of conflict as being external… between opposing forces. While such conflict certainly exists in the work of John Sayles, far more often it is a character's internal conflict that Sayles explores. While both of the previously mentioned movies present several conflicts I will start off by saying that the major conflicts that the movies faced were the internal conflicts. In The Secret of Roan Inish, The overriding conflict theme is the disappearance of the small boy, Jamie, and the various ways that it affects the cast of characters and the different explanations or justifications that said characters give… to compensate for this loss. However, The main internal conflict faced is perhaps that of the grandmother's. It is when she faces that conflict that the story soon resolves itself. Of course, it was the efforts, conflicts, and actions of all the main characters that brought resolve to the story but I think that the real turning point is when the grandmother's character had a turning point.

In Limbo, the main conflict of the story is the daughter's at first I'll harbored emotions and feelings for her mother to whom she can not relate. This is best illustrated when the daughter says to the mother "you're the mistake!" As the story progresses, internal changes in the mother and the daughter… culminated by extreme circumstances, bring them to a level of understanding and compassion. Perhaps as the mother listened intently to her daughter's story (that the daughter made up as she went while pretending to read from an old diary) she began to after many years know who her daughter really was… and she had a glimpse of the depth of emotions and life that was inside of the daughter. This climaxed when the mother said "I would never do that, you know that right? That mother left her daughter… I would never leave you." Or something to that effect.

Now that I've touched on the main conflicts of the two movies that I watched, I would like to examine more directly the question at hand. John Sayles uses a combination of flashbacks, story telling, gossip and bitching, ease dropping, discovery, investigation, and questions in the form of cinematic sequences and character dialogue to create a back story. This back story gives the characters motivations, fears, uncertainties, emotions, and history which manifest within the story or more particularly the characters of his stories to create a conflict or conflicts.

Besides inner or inter character conflicts in John Sayles' movies, there are also plot conflicts. For instance, at the end of The Secret of Roan Inish, we wonder will Jamie join his human family? And of course by this point we have already been given the back story of the complex relationship between the human and seal sides of the family. There is a mutual respect but there is also a pain… the pain of a love caught between two conflicting worlds…

In Limbo we have a similar deal. Beyond the interpersonal conflict we have the conflict of man versus nature… survival. We are left to wonder what the next day will bring… if food will be caught, if the weather will hold up, and if our characters will be rescued from the depths of the Alaskan wilderness.

A more interesting aspect of conflict which Sayles creates using back story is the every day conflict. The conflicts that are the result of life being hard. Maybe I should refer to this as humanism? At any rate, I think that if in any area, it is this hard regular life area that John Sayles excels at as a writer director. This theme or aspect is present in both Limbo and The Secret of Roan Inish.

In The Secret of Roan Inish we have Fiona's father who is working to make ends meet and who doesn't have enough time or whatever to take proper care of Fiona. He is also probably suffering depression from the loss of his son Jamie and his wife. Everyone in the family is suffering some sort of… emptiness both from the loss of Jamie and the loss of their previous life style on the island of Roan Inish. Some people, like the young boy, deal with this problem by dreaming of returning to the island to live one day. There is also the conflict of the grandparents being evicted from their home.

This brings up a conflict that Sayles seems to explore a lot and that is class and wealth disparities. I'll talk about this in depth in the next paragraph (in the context of Limbo) but in The Secret of Roan Inish there is the conflict between the British and the Irish which is mostly told in back story but there is also the conflict of having to move to the city… to leave the land that you love in order to make money. Lastly there is the silent conflict between those who believe the myth of the selkie and those who don't want to. This is mostly illustrated by the speechless interactions between the cousin who is a darkie and the grandmother… there is… especially in the grandmother also an inner conflict when talking about the past and this is due to the bad memories or pain of loss of Jamie and a way of life as is revealed in the flashbacks and the stories of the family's past.

In the movie Limbo much of the regular life conflict (not the main conflict between the mother and daughter) can be summed up with the word dichotomy. Infact, I wrote the word dichotomy down once and then underlined it several times throughout the film as it was quite blatant. The movie starts off with a tourist video voice over and is then immediately contrasted with the sarcastic rants of the grey haired man with a beard who lost his fishing boat (I didn't catch his name, but you know who I'm talking about, right?). This contrasts the locals with the tourists. This locals vs tourists is later explored at the wedding party in the dialogue between the logger and the tourism tycoon. The struggle presented here is the need for the locals to use the natural resources in order to make a living and the need to protect the resources, at least the visible ones, so that the tourism industry isn't harmed. At this party, or in a scene that was intercut with this party, we find the before mentioned grey bearded man trying to get his boat back from a couple of lesbians. Back story is revealed here in their dialogue and a conflict of locals vs recent transplants is shown. The man says that they'll never get anyone to sail on his boat… implying a close knit community and later in the film when Joe pilots that boat the bearded man calls him a sellout.

Also in this film we see how "unforeseen circumstances", personality conflicts and accidents can change the way that a person lives their life and the conflicts that this creates. Joe had stopped being a fisherman… the only job he really loved doing, due to two friends dying on his boat 25 or so years earlier. As he begins to sail again he has to confront his old fears and his past. The mother's unforeseen circumstances involve her odd personality and bad choice in men. Not only had her many failed relationships made her unhappy but they had extreme effects on her daughter making her almost suicidal.

So, as you can see, John Sayles creates complex stories that don't focus on story to move plot so much as back story to move characters. Sure, plot does advance but I think that compared to most films, his in general are more character driven. It's not only the main character that gets developed but instead we end up knowing a lot about many of the characters due to their back stories, conflicts, interactions, and dispositions.

One last thing that I noticed, and this doesn't pertain to the question… but it does pertain to the class, is the use of Montage. I think that Sayles likes montage as much as he likes back story! I think that Sales is also good at writing dialogue…. It was interesting… if not awkward, to see a montage of dialogue in Limbo… we all had a laugh at this as we had been discussing montage the previous day when watching The Secret of Roan Inish. My friend asked me if there could be a montage of words in a film and I said that I didn't think that it was likely… then the next day what do we see? Hahaha.