Issues in Story Telling: Unsympathetic Characters

This was supposed to be one of those great, underappreciated movies, right? Right? One of those movies that only the Academy can appreciate because all of the rest of us are ignorant, low class plebeians. Right?

Unfortunately, it's kind of true. Kind of. Because it is the kind of movie that only entitled white men can appreciate, and it's only because the Academy and other award agencies are mostly made up of entitled white men that this movie received any recognition.

This movie can be summed up in exactly one word: BAD.

The fact that it won the Oscar for best original screenplay is a travesty and can be summed up by the fact that it was written by a self-involved Boomer for other self-involved Boomers, i.e. entitled white men. I can't really argue Casey Affleck's best actor win because he was the only thing that made the movie at all watchable. I think it must take an amazing talent to bring such a lifeless, flat script to any kind of life at all. Or it could just be that the self-involved white male Boomers felt sympathy for the despicable character of Lee Chandler.

But Lee Chandler is an example of bad storytelling. The problem here is that we are, actually supposed to feel sympathy for Lee Chandler. Obviously, he has suffered some tragedy and doesn't know how to cope with it and it has driven him into isolation. On the surface, sure, he seems like a sympathetic character. But as the movie progresses and we find out what happened, we find that he's just an asshole full of self pity.

In a nutshell, it's like this:
Lee's brother dies and leaves his kid to Lee in his will. His teenage son. Yes, that's almost exactly how it happens, and I'm pretty sure you can't do that, but let's pretend there are no issues with that bit. Lee doesn't want the kid and is pretty much an asshole about the whole thing, including getting into bar fights with little to no provocation. Of course, the movie opens with Lee being an asshole before we find out about his brother, so the death of his brother has nothing to do with the asshole-ness.

Oh, wait, suffered a tragedy, right? Well, as the backstory gets filled in, we find that Lee was also a flaming asshole before that tragedy occurred and that the tragedy occurred because of his asshole-ness. Lee was the kind of guy who would come in while is wife was sick in bed with a fever and force himself on her after she'd said she didn't feel like having sex -- 104 degree fever, snot running out of her nose -- but Lee said he wasn't bothered by her being sick so it was okay and, so, she lets him do it.

I have a huge problem with that scene in the movie, but not because I disbelieve that she might have let him do it. It's the kind of thing where a woman might give in because it would take too much energy -- remember, she's sick! -- to say no, but they played it off as an "aw, shucks" moment. "Aw, you're just so cute when I tell you no and you won't listen. You know what, you go ahead and fuck me all you want, because me saying no really means yes." It's the kind of situation where an entitled white guy would totally expect to get his way for the sake of "white-guy-ness." It made me kind of sick, certainly disgusted. This is the guy you want me to have sympathy for?

But it gets better! Or, you know, worse, because they go on to show his asshole-ness in all its glory. Lee has a gathering of his white male friends over. They're in his... I don't know... his man cave? It's the basement room of his house and has a pool table and "man" stuff. There's probably like 10 of them, and they are all drunk and loud. Which is fine, I suppose, until we find out its 2:00am and they're keeping the whole house awake: his wife and his two young children. Lee and his buddies think it's funny when Lee's wife comes down and demands that they all leave. "She can't talk to us like that!" Even though they do. Eventually.

Lee is a self-involved, entitled white male asshole. He suffers a tragedy that he causes and, rather than use that situation for self-reflection or something beneficial, he continues to be a self-involved, entitled white male asshole. The death of his brother does nothing more than to give him greater opportunity to spread that asshole-ness around.

Then there's the kid: Patrick. He seems to take after his uncle (Lee) rather than his father, because he, also, is a self-involved little asshole who seems to be more annoyed at the inconvenience of his father's death than anything else. "Seriously, Dad, I'm busy trying to fuck my multiple girlfriends and your death is really getting in my way." He's a shit of a kid, and there is plenty of evidence in the movie that he's just a shit of a kid and not being one because his dad died. Like, evidently, he likes to start fights with his hockey teammates and is in trouble for that frequently. And I mentioned the multiple girlfriends, right? That he keeps hidden from each other because none of the girls in question would be cool with the way Patrick spreads the "wealth" around.

Look, it's okay to fill your stories with despicable characters, just look at Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, but you need to know they're despicable. Trying to write a complete asshole as a sympathetic character only serves to display your own asshole-ness, rather like Trump (#fakepresident) and his constant "woe is me" diatribe about how he's the one being persecuted rather than the one doing the persecution. Having your asshole actions pointed out is not, contrary to the belief of assholes, persecution.

The most unforgivable part of the movie is the ending. Lee's ex-wife -- His ex-wife who is married, now, to another man and has just had a child with him (I think? I can't remember now if she'd given birth by the end of the movie or not.). -- comes to him to tell him how she forgives him for causing the death of their children (the unspeakable tragedy) and that she's still in love with him...
What the fuck?!?!
I'm sorry, but this is the exact the same situation as her being in bed sick and telling him that she doesn't want to have sex. "Look, I know you burned up our house and killed our kids because you were busy being a drunk asshole, but, really, you've punished yourself too much and too long, and you need to move on; after all, I forgive you. Oh, and yeah, I'm still in love with you and never stopped loving you. Even though you killed our kids." In other words, "Aw, shucks, you're just a lovable white guy who shouldn't be held accountable for his actions, so stop punishing yourself."

To put it mildly, there was nothing I found redeeming about this movie. That anyone found the character of Lee Chandler to be sympathetic boggles my mind but, then, the entitledness of the Baby Boomers often boggles my mind. And, yes, the writer of the screenplay is solidly a Boomer. And a white male.

So I'm just going to put it out there: The protagonist in your story generally ought to be sympathetic in some way to the audience. Or you need to have the awareness that your characters aren't sympathetic and be using them to some other purpose. You should not, however, try to pawn off your asshole characters as somehow being worth our sympathy. That's just gross.

Unexpected Applause: "My Killbot Buddy"

I've made no secret of my general dislike of "starting in the middle of the action" as a way to begin stories. Usually, "starting in the middle of the action" is just a cover for a weak beginning (at least "weak" in the eyes of some TV producer (because it's TV where we find this most often used)) and, after starting as near to the climax as possible, we get the inevitable "48 hours earlier." I just hate that. Seriously. Ask my wife. Any show that uses that tactic as a regular opener holds no real credibility for me. [Only very occasionally does this work for me, like that episode of Firefly that opens with Mal naked and stranded. However, if you're about to show me your characters handcuffed to pipe in a room filling with water for the 7th time this season, please, just don't.]

There are ways of starting a story in media res that do work. For instance, A New Hope opens with a prologue scene of of the battle above Tatooine in which Leia is captured and the droids escape to the planet. The actual exposition of the story does not begin until we switch to the introduction of Luke. That kind of thing works. It gives us background while immediately hooking us. Imagine that story starting in the trash compactor, though, and, then, flashing back to the events leading up to that. That would be horrible. Harry Potter opens the same way, by the way, with a prologue of the baby being taken to the Dursleys; the exposition begins when we switch to about to have a birthday Harry. [I think I read somewhere that Rowling actually wrote that first bit as a prologue, but the publisher made her shift it to "chapter one."]

Another way to start a story in the middle of the action is to open with a character who doesn't know what's going on. For whatever reason. Part of the point of these types of stories is to go along with the character and figure out what's happening and why. Rusty Carl does a pretty great job of that in "My Killbot Buddy."

[And, man, that's one killer (no pun intended) cover Rusty whipped up. I think it's my favorite piece by him yet.] Not only does the protagonist wake up with no memory (for very good reason (which, yes, is important (because I hate the whole "oh, let's have our character have amnesia" thing))), but he wakes up as... old. He doesn't remember getting old, and, man, what a shock that would be. Oh, and, yeah, he's the most hated man in the world. How the heck did that happen?

And that's what we have to find out, what our character is trying to figure out. It's an interesting discovery and the story is wide open at the end. Which is not to say that the story doesn't end, because it does. But it ends in the way you would enter an airlock: one door shuts and another one opens. We're in the airlock with this story, so, when the other door opens, you can see that there is a whole world to be explored out there, but Carl doesn't take us through. What lies through that door is only what we can see with our minds.

But I do hope that he comes back to this and gives us more than a peek as to what's on the other side of that door.

This is a good strong "A" of a story, possibly my favorite by Carl, thus far. It has robots. Which is not why, but... well, it has robots.

The Religion of Writing: Part Six -- The Prosperity Doctrine (an IWSG post)

For thousands of years, we have had the belief that god, whatever god it happens to be, rewards the just and punishes the wicked. If something bad happens to you, you must have displeased god and are being punished. If something good happens to you, you are being rewarded, which shows that god favors you. Even more, if you are rich, through whatever means, god really, really likes you, so you must be one righteous dude and, therefore, you are justified in whatever behaviors you've been doing to get ahead even if they're wrong. God wouldn't be rewarding you unless you were doing what he wanted you to do, right?

There's something primal in that belief, no matter how ill-founded. It goes right along with that whole "beautiful angel"/"ugly demon" thing. We tend to forget that Lucifer, the head (and arguably worst) demon is also described as the most beautiful being in creation. [And we forget that whenever anyone in the Bible ever saw an Angel, the first response was always the wetting of the pants. Or loincloth. Or whatever. That was followed by the Angel saying, "Do not be afraid."] So it's very attractive to believe that rich people are somehow better than everyone else. If, that is, you are rich. European culture survived off of that belief for centuries. And, if you're not rich, you want to be rich so that you can finally be proven correct in your internal belief that you are, in fact, just as better than everyone else as the people that are already rich.

The prosperity doctrine started getting popular in the United States in the '50s, but it really took off with the charismatic movement and televangelists in the 1980s. The basic idea is that God wants you to have health, wealth, and happiness. The only problem is that, well, you have to pay for it. Now, there's all kinds of theological background and stuff I could go into here, but that would be a whole series of posts all by itself. So let's just put it like this: Just like with the whole Pentecostal thing of having to speak in tongues to get to go to heaven, the prosperity doctrine cherry picks just a few passages upon which to base the entire philosophy. [The central passage that's used is an Old Testament passage that they pull completely out of context.] What it boils down to is that people who are wealthy are "good" and everyone else is not. Which, of course, pushes the "nots" to try harder and give more, making the wealthy richer and "gooder" and everyone else "notter."

I'm pretty sure most of you out there would not say that having lots of money (success) makes a person somehow better than those that don't have lots of money, but that's not how we act. And, more importantly, that's not how they act. Rich people tend to act as if they are inherently better than other people. More valuable. More deserving. The money they have doesn't make them better; they have money because they are better. The cream, as they say, has risen to the top.

And we believe that in publishing, too, even when it's glaringly obvious that the cream does indeed not rise to the top. Unless we are now claiming that Twilight and its ugly step-sister Fifty Shades of Grey are the cream. If that's the case, well... actually, I'm not sure. If that's the cream, then there's no real hope for humanity.

The truth is, in most cases, the best books go completely unnoticed. There can be many reasons for this, none of which are important (and would take too long to list); the main thing is realizing that the statement, "the cream will always rise to the top" is a falsehood. Or, maybe, it's not, but, then, books aren't cream. The point is that the "best" things most often do not enjoy the most success.

Most of the people in the world that are the most "successful" are not people we would say are the best people. Sure, there are a few good ones, but most of them got there by taking advantage of other people or stepping on other people or cheating or lying or maybe even just dumb luck. And, no matter what people say, cheaters do not always lose. The most successful hamburger in the world is not one that I think anyone other than, maybe, Briane Pagel would say is the best. And it got there by just being the same anywhere you buy it. Which is no small feat, but it's hard to not find a "better" burger (although some might argue that its sameness does make it the best). And the best books... Well, the best books get run over by the ones that appeal to the masses. Like those hamburgers. They succeed not by being good but by being the same. Simple language. Simple, straight forward story. Plain.

Which is not to say that exceptions don't come along. Things like Harry Potter and Middle Earth succeed despite their "goodness" by being something new and different. Novel. (heh pun intended) But Rowling has proved to us that "good" does not equal success with her experiment in publishing under a pseudonym. The cream does not always rise to the top.

All of that to say that a lack of sales does not mean that your book is not good. And massive sales does not mean that it is. Books sell well for one of two reasons: 1. The author has put a lot of work into writing books and become known through being a steady and dependable writer. 2. Luck. The book just happened to be at the right place at the right time. So to speak.

But, still, we like to worship success here in the United States, so I'm sure we will continue to use such statements as "the cream will always rise to the top" and, even worse, continue to believe those statements.

What I want to say about it is that you shouldn't rate your "creaminess" on whether you're on top or not.

Today's post has been brought to you in part by Alex Cavanaugh and the IWSG. The rest was all me.

Tolkien's Failure (an IWSG post)

This is not one of those posts meant to make you feel better by allowing you to compare yourself to the failure of "stars" before they made it big. Actually, I hate those posts. I don't care how many times Rowling or Dr. Seuss or Stephen King or John Grisham were rejected before they met with success. If it makes you feel better when you get a rejection, well, good for you, but that's not what this post is about. Personally, I just don't find those kinds of stories all that inspiring, but, maybe, that's because I don't have an issue with persistence. Or maybe I just believe in the value of what I'm doing and don't care so much about the outside validation. That's probably closer to the truth. I do what I do because it's what I do, and I see the value in it, so I don't care as much whether other people do or not.

Sure, I'd like it if other people value my work, because, you know, it would be nice to actually make a living, well, even half a living, from writing, but I don't derive my worth from what other people think of my work.

I think it's vital that we don't derive our meaning from other people's opinion of what we do. After all, there's Van Gogh. Completely not appreciated in his own lifetime. We just don't, can't know how our work will be perceived later on.

Which brings me to Tolkien...

It might seem surprising, but Tolkien considered himself a failure in his literary life. Yeah, that's difficult for me to imagine, too, but it's true. But, then, it all comes from how we define our success, which is something I've mentioned before. The importance of knowing what it is you want when you start all this writing business. If you don't know what it is exactly that you want, you are sure to meet with failure, because you're going to layer over the world's idea of success over your life rather than your own.
Which isn't actually what Tolkien did, but, still...

So what happened with Tolkien?

The main thing to realize with Tolkien is that neither The Hobbit nor The Lord of the Rings was what he considered his real literary work. In many ways, those books were accidents. No, Tolkien's real work was The Silmarillion and his history of Middle Earth, work which never saw publication during his lifetime. So, despite the wide success and popularity of his two most famous works, he never believed he'd been successful because of the repeated rejection by publishers of his "real" work.

To put this slightly more into context: When Tolkien originally wrote The Hobbit, it had nothing to do with Middle Earth. At all. It was a bedtime story for his kids. He didn't ever really mean to publish it. Only by the insistence of his friend, C. S. Lewis, and the accidental discovery of the manuscript by the publisher's son did it end up being published at all. Tolkien didn't take it all that seriously, and, like I said, it wasn't related to Middle Earth, which had already been his writing project for 20 years by the time The Hobbit was published.

The Hobbit was successful enough that the publisher wanted a sequel. Tolkien tried to give them The Silmarillion, but they turned it down. No, they wanted more hobbits. Tolkien sat down and began to work on that sequel: An Unexpected Journey, the book that eventually became The Lord of the Rings. See, as he was writing it, he realized that the stuff with the rings was the stuff from the end of The Silmarillion, and it was at that point that it all became a part of Middle Earth. It was an accident, and Tolkien had to go back and revise The Hobbit to make it part of  the narrative. Because, you know, it wasn't.

So, see, George Lucas is not the only one to go back and change things after the fact. That ring Bilbo found really was just, initially, a trinket. Something Tolkien threw in to enable Bilbo to escape from Gollum. He had to go back to the already published manuscript and make the ring important. Make into the One Ring.

Of course, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings became more and more popular. This is despite the overwhelmingly negative reviews when the books were published. Well, not so much with Hobbit, everyone loved The Hobbit when it was released, but, initially, the critics and reviewers hated LotR. But people did not, and they became great best sellers.

But it didn't matter to Tolkien, because, despite their success, he still couldn't get anyone to publish Silmarillion. He spent the rest of his life working on it and the other histories of Middle Earth, and no one would agree to publish it. To himself, he was an artistic failure. It would be rather like painting a great, intricate painting and not being able to get anyone to look at it, to study it, but, one day, sitting down with a kid and making a doodle for him and having everyone go crazy for the doodle. Tolkien was saying, "Look at this! Look at this!" and pointing at Silmarillion, but everyone was busy waving his doodle around saying, "But we like this!" And that is how things stood when he died.

It was only after his death that his son succeeded in getting The Silmarillion published.

So what is it I'm getting at here? Well, a couple of things, actually.
1. I think the thing that more people really need to do before they start writing is figuring out what they want to get out of it. I mean, what they really want to get out of it. Is the actual goal popularity? Is the actual goal to get rich? Is the goal immortality? Is the writing a path to something else or is the writing the goal? If more people knew this ahead of time, they might be more satisfied with their journeys.

Here is where Tolkien knew what he was doing. He knew what his goal was, and he didn't achieve that, so the success of his published works didn't matter so much to him, because those things were not his goal. He did actually fail to achieve his true goal.

2. Be malleable or flexible. Be able to acknowledge the things you do actually succeed at. Recognize your triumphs and adjust your goals to fit with where you are succeeding.

This is where Tolkien did not know what he was doing. His purpose was so single-minded and he was so unwilling to adapt that he was never happy, and he could not acknowledge the success of his two books. His creation, his Middle Earth, is brilliance. The scope of what he did is beyond what anyone else has ever done, and I'm not sure it's something that can be done again. Well, perhaps Asimov achieved something of the same thing with his robot and Foundation books. At any rate, so focused was Tolkien on the foundation, on The Silmarillion, that he could not see how The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings rested on that foundation and how much they relied on his entire body of work. They were a part of that whole; I think he just chose to ignore that.

The thing is, Tolkien's goal has actually been achieved; he just wasn't around to see it happen. The Silmarillion has been published along with so so so much more of his work. It's actually quite incredible what Middle Earth has become. It's too bad he wasn't around to see it happen, but... But.
That's kind of the thing, he did what he wanted to do and what he believed in, and, even though it took people a while to recognize it, they did recognize it. I think he would be dumbfounded to find how... pervasive... Middle Earth has become on a cultural level. Which is what he wanted. He wanted to create a mythology that would speak to people, and he stuck to it, and, in the end, succeeded. Beyond anything he might have imagined, I'm sure.

But, see, he knew what he wanted, knew what his goal was, and he stuck to that thing. I think the real achievement is being able to look at your work and know that you have done what you wanted to do. Which is why you have to know why you're writing. And, you know, if you are writing for fame and fortune, not because you want to write, maybe find some other way to get there, because writing isn't a great way to go about it.

Douglas' Last Salmon

If you ever want to know exactly how popular something is, step into a middle school classroom and ask them if they know what X is (X being the thing you want to know is popular or not). Well, maybe a high school class would be better, I'm not sure as I haven't spent any time in a high school classroom in a while. I am, however, in middle school classes several days a week. It is always interesting to find out what they have and (mostly) have not heard of. It's kind of bubble popping at times.

Things the middle schoolers I work with know about:

• Star Wars -- They've all heard about it and know the gist of the story, but a surprising number have never seen it (interestingly enough, this is not true of the kids my daughter's age, who have almost all seen it (and love it (all of them))).
• Harry Potter -- They all know what Harry Potter is, but, mostly, they have not read the books. Most of them have not seen all of the movies, either.
• Lord of the Rings -- Ask them who Tolkien is, and you'll get blank looks, but say "Lord of the Rings" and the response is "oh! I love Lord of the Rings!"
• Hunger Games -- They're all over that. All of them.
• Twilight -- Mostly, they despise it. They all know what it is, and a few like it, but the voices of those that hate it drown out any people that might speak up in its favor.
• Dr. Who -- Of popular things, this has the most ardent adherents. If they've seen it, they love it. If they haven't seen it, they want to.
• Buffy, the Vampire Slayer -- Who?
• Joss Whedon -- Who?
• The Avengers -- Oh, that was awesome!

There are a couple of book series that a lot of them really like that I need to write down the names of so that I can check them out. Not surprisingly, though, they have no clue about some of the classics, books I think of as fundamental. Even things like Frankenstein and Jekyll & Hyde and Dracula that you would think middle schoolers would know about will cause blank looks and comments like, "I think my dad mentioned that once." They've heard of Dickens, but that's about it.

Yeah, it can be difficult to have a discussion about literature when the students don't know anything about it.

The thing about all of this is that it can really be humbling in a certain sense. It reminds me that some of the things, some of the names, I think of as essential are, from any realistic standpoint, almost unheard of to the rest of the world. Names like Neil Gaiman. Although, now, I have several of them interested in The Graveyard Book. And names like Douglas Adams. A few had heard of Hitchhikers', but Douglas Adams was another of those vacant look names.

But it's not just them. It's everyone. It takes a lot to break into cultural awareness, and, really, people like Gaiman and Adams and Martin stop shy of being names that any random person off the street is likely to know.

All of that being said, I just finished The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams. I really enjoyed the book, but, honestly, if you're not a fan of Adams, you don't need to and probably shouldn't read this book. That means that most people have no business giving it a second glance. That's kind of a weird feeling knowing that.

On top of everything else, it's not even a complete work. Salmon was the last project Adams was working on when he died, and he hadn't even decided what kind of story it was yet. What that means is that he'd started it as his next Dirk Gently novel, but, as he wrote it, he decided it was really a Hitchhiker book, and he's never gotten around to figuring out what he was going to do with it. The parts with Gently flow well and are interesting, but they have these other bits thrown it that make you feel like you're reading more than one work, which, in fact, you are.

But it's not really the Salmon stuff that's so great about this book. It's full of essays, articles, and speeches he gave, and that stuff is immensely interesting. The book is worth it for that stuff. IF you are a fan of Adams. If you're not, I have a hard time thinking you'd care.

The one thing it did do is make me want to go find my Dirk Gently novels and finally get around to reading them. I'm gonna have to do that soon... if I can ever get caught up on this teetering pile of books by my bed.

Now to get back to expanding the horizons of these kids...