I have a respect for Steven D. Greydanus that I extend to few film critics. And I really like most of his Very, Very Little Movie Glossary. But seeing as, lo these many years ago, I wrote a script celebrating the Aragorn Complex, I have a couple of thoughts on the trend.
Mr. Greydanus defines the Aragorn Complex thus:
Contemporary Hollywood no longer believes in rock-ribbed, confident, heroic leaders, such as Charlton Heston’s Moses in The Ten Commandments. The Moses of DreamWorks’ excellent The Prince of Egypt — self-doubting, conflicted, reluctant — is much more in keeping with our more skeptical view of heroism and leadership.
The archetypal example, of course, is Peter Jackson’s Aragorn, whose virtue, complexity and all-around worthiness to lead the filmmakers telegraph by vastly punching up the themes of reluctance and self-doubt in Tolkien. (Moses in Exodus also initially resists God’s call, but the DreamWorks film goes way beyond Exodus in this regard.)
I would argue that the real tragedy here is not that “Hollywood” has stopped believing in such leaders as characters, but that “Hollywood” still does believe in them - as politicians. But I digress. (Not really.)
I’m not sure that an unwillingness, or even inability, to believe in such heroes necessarily bespeaks a “cultural poverty,” as Mr. Greydanus calls it in the comments. I admit that, if it does, it is a cultural poverty that I share. Or more precisely, I don’t find such heroes useful. A “rock-ribbed, confident, heroic leader” does me no good. He just leaves me hoping that if I’m ever in trouble, he’ll come along.
I am afraid. I believe that the world is a dark and broken place, and that man is a dark and broken creature. So in my fiction, I don’t want someone who is not broken to fix everything. I want someone to tell me that brokenness does not make heroism impossible. I want someone to tell me that even I still have a chance.
(Necessary caveat: Of course there are stories that pile on the doubts and the flaws until we are left with a hero who is not a hero at all. That’s not what I want, and I admit that drawing the distinction in individual cases is extremely difficult. All ll I want to do here is address the trend.)
And there is this: If we continue to deconstruct our heroes, to remind ourselves that they are not idols or demi-gods, perhaps we will be more likely to search for the source of their heroism as something outside themselves. Perhaps, if all of them are broken, we will more clearly want Someone who is not broken.
Or perhaps not. I realize that I am advocating the more dangerous road. But in a post named for Estel, I prefer to hope.
Not, in this case, an instrument of God. I take that as a given, and maybe someday I’ll actually get it right. (Nobody hold your breath.)
No, I’m thinking about the different instruments that different artists use: the paintbrush, the violin, or (in the case of an actor or singer) the body itself. In each case, the artist must study the instrument, learn everything about how and why it works, and then forget about it in order to focus on the art.
In the writer’s case, the instrument is the mind itself. Of course, I can’t really “forget” about the mind, but the same basic principle holds: I shouldn’t be thinking, “What do I think?” I should be thinking about the story. And there’s the danger.
When I’m writing, I shouldn’t be deciding what I believe. I should be unconsciously using what I believe. It should be the violin, not the music. But that means that before I start, my instrument needs to be properly tuned. Writing frightens me because, while I can lie to myself, I can’t lie in my work. And the question is not, “Do I measure up to what I believe?” (Answer: No.), but the far more terrifying, “Do I really believe it?”
I was a drama geek in high school and college, and I loved it. I am a trained soprano (lyric coloratura, to be technical), and I loved that, too. I haven’t acted or sung (except to myself, usually in the car) in a decade, and yet I don’t really miss either.
I get the occasional wistful feeling, especially when I sit in the audience at performances of the Ventura County Gilbert & Sullivan Repertoire Company, but I think that has more to do with the tendency of the G & S culture to create its own family, united by Patter Trio allusions and “How did you manage the ghosts in Ruddigore?” exchanges.
No, I have acted, but I’m not an actress, and I have sung, but I’m not a singer.
I am a writer. Unfortunately, I’m not proud of the way I know that.
Play me a Kiri te Kanawa recording, and I rejoice. Show me Meryl Streep inhabiting Julia Child, and I will laugh and marvel. But let Steven Moffat end “A Scandal in Belgravia” with five simple words (“When I say run, run.”), or let Neil Gaiman make his return to Doctor Who with an episode titled “Nightmare in Silver”, and I turn green.
I want to have written that.
The longing is particularly acute in the Gaiman example, since titles are usually the hardest things for me to write. There’s so much pressure on a title: genre, tone, theme, plot...it has to be everything. In half a dozen words or less. When that title popped up on iTunes, before I saw anything else, I felt a tiny thrill, a certainty that this episode, at least, was in good hands. The “written by” credit only explained what I already knew. So, being the mature person that I am, my interior dialogue immediately commenced: Boy (growl), it must be nice to be Neil Gaiman (snarl, hiss), with all that stinking talent and all (growl) - great, I can’t even come up with a synonym for ‘growl’...
This tends to continue, without synonyms, for an appreciable time, and with the resulting fodder for confession.
But if sin is an emptiness, a lack, then perhaps I can, at least, let it focus me on what I actually do lack. First, I need to clarify for myself that I am not Neil Gaiman. That is not the lack, because that is not what I was made to be. There’s already somebody doing a darn good job of being Neil Gaiman, after all. I need to focus on what Neil Gaiman has done that I can, and should, also do.
He has done the work.
That’s it. That’s what I can emulate. If I want to have written, I first have to write. I will never measure up, but if I am doing my work I will have less time to measure. And maybe I can turn envy into inspiration. Or simply into gratitude.
As for that G & S nostalgia, it’s turning into a neat screenplay. I even have a title.
Long-term relationships are hard. You have to give your heart away without knowing how things will end. Even if they end well, at some point along the way, the other party will frustrate you, or let you down, or be just plain Wrong. It’s a lot to go through with no assurance of a payoff.
I’m talking, of course, about my relationship to television.
Though the cost factor means I often wait for DVD or Netflix, I’m usually willing enough to see a movie. At the worst, I’ll only have wasted a couple of hours, and I frequently learn things from bad movies. “That didn’t work” is easy enough, but “Why didn’t that work?” can be a delightful and illuminating puzzle. Most importantly, at the end of a couple of hours, I will know. I will know whether it worked or not; I will know what happened to the characters; I will know what the movie is trying to say.
TV isn’t like that. TV demands trust. TV builds expectations that, as the years go on, become more and more difficult to satisfy. How many perfect finales have you seen (other than Blackadder Goes Forth)? And when a show fails, whether the failure be minor or catastrophic, it hurts more. You know these characters - you’ve lived with them for months or years - so the betrayal can feel very personal.
I’m going through this right now with Once Upon a Time. It has never been my great love, but I had mostly been enjoying it, and Robert Carlyle is worth watching even when what surrounds him is less than ideal. But now, the whole Tamara and Greg subplot leaves me absolutely cold, they made a serious misstep with “Lacey”, and no one - I mean no one - is as stupid as Regina was in “The Evil Queen”. I will slaughter whole villages to find Snow White, then I will kill Snow White, and once she is dead the people will love me. I hereby challenge the writers to find me one actual person to whom that makes actual sense.
Is it possible for the show to recover? Sure. I sat through Season Three of Lost and was ultimately glad I did. It’s also possible, though, that it will not recover. If it doesn’t, I will not be devastated, but I will be disappointed.
And yet...
There’s a new man in my life. His name is Sherlock. It’s taken me two years to find him, and I owe a very belated hat tip to Joseph Susanka of Summa This, Summa That. I held off because I was afraid he would be great, and that his greatness would demand my attention. My trust. Another tiny piece of my heart. The funny thing is, when I finally sat down to watch him, that’s exactly what I wanted him to do. The fear and the desire can’t be separated. So far, they have both been satisfied, and therefore they have both increased. And very soon, I will reach the end of Series Two, glare at Netflix, and shout, “What do you mean I have to wait until September?!?”
Here it is, Mssrs. Moffat, Gatiss, Cumberbatch and Freeman (and all the rest of you that I don’t have space to mention). Here’s a piece of my heart.
In his senior thesis, one of my college classmates disputed a small point made by St. Augustine by analyzing and applying Augustine’s major principles to the question. (Don’t ask me for details - it was fourteen years ago and he is smarter than I could ever imagine being.) For most of the year, he really enjoyed working on the thesis (and, in addition to being smart, he is such a genuinely lovely person that I didn’t hate him for that). But there were a couple of weeks when it wasn’t being as enjoyable, and he explained - I am paraphrasing badly - that, having lauded Augustine for pages and pages, and illustrated in detail what a great theologian he was, he had now got to the portion where he had to explain...or more like suggest, really, just put it out there...that in this one tiny instance, well, he would just have done it a bit...differently, is all.
Why do I bring this up? If I may descend precipitously from the City of God to the city of man, it’s because I feel rather the same way about this post.
Is there a screenwriter alive today who hasn’t learned from William Goldman? Who doesn’t have a well-thumbed copy of Adventures in the Screen Trade? Okay, probably there is, but grant me my hyperbole. It was Goldman who first showed me how screenwriting is done, and he remains one of my favorite and most reliable guides.
But every once in a while, he’s wrong.
In Adventures in the Screen Trade, Goldman defines a “comic-book movie.” He gives four markers, but I want to focus on the fourth, which he describes as “probably most important” and from which the other three largely stem: “The comic-book movie doesn’t have a great deal to do with life as it exists, as we know it to be. Rather, it deals with life as we would prefer it to be. Safer that way.”
That’s not the part where he’s wrong. I agree with that, and I think one could have a good time unpacking the implications and debating whether all movies based on comic books are comic-book movies.
Where Goldman is wrong is where he starts to illustrate his point with parallels. And he says this (keep in mind that the book was published in 1983):
The only prime-time entertainment series that is not a comic-book program is M*A*S*H. Not because of its outstanding quality, but because every scene in M*A*S*H, no matter how wildly farcical, is grounded in the madness of death. That is what gives it its tone, that is the heart of the piece. You can make M*A*S*H into My Mother the Car easily enough. Just keep those same wonderful actors and stick them in a giant army training camp here in the States. And the wounded are simply guys hurt in fights or drunken-driving accidents...And what you’ve got then is a bunch of goofy surgeons grousing because they’re stuck on the service and not out in the civilian world, making a fortune. It might be just as funny, and just as successful, and absolutely would be exactly like every other series on the air.
The first few times I read that, I nodded along. But two things happened. First, I watched a lot of M*A*S*H, and while I could appreciate its brilliance, I felt less drawn to it the more I watched it. I decided I was just being perverse - everyone said it was brilliant, so I was determined not to be impressed. But then the second thing happened. That alternate show that Goldman jokingly pitched above as a contrast? Well, take out the army base aspect, and Bill Lawrence put it on the air in 2001. It’s called Scrubs.
In case you haven’t encountered Scrubs, and don’t feel inclined to click over to Netflix immediately (which is...your decision...), it is the story of John Dorian (“J.D.”), who advances from brand-new intern to co-chief-resident of a large teaching hospital, Sacred Heart. It is a laugh-out-loud funny sitcom, bordering on the absurd and often stepping over that line.
When one is dealing with long-running TV shows, any thesis will be an over-generalization. There will always be episodes, subplots, even characters that break the mold. But with that caveat, here’s my thesis. Scrubs is not a comic-book program. And M*A*S*H is.
M*A*S*H is not really about “the madness of death.” It is about the madness of war. Everything that happens (over-generalization, remember) is because of the war. I think that’s the reason for my gradual disenchantment. I got tired of watching Hawkeye rant and complain about the war. I’m not in favor of war, and Hawkeye’s response is natural and believable and probably what I would have done in his place. What it is not is admirable. The only two characters I really love are Col. Potter, the soldier who hates war but understands that there are things worth fighting for and that duty is not a four-letter word, and Major Charles Emerson Winchester, who, however badly he goes about it, is still trying to be a civilized man in an uncivilized world.
There’s a Major Winchester episode in which he reports excitedly to one of his patients that, despite the extent of his injuries, the only permanent effect will be a slight loss of dexterity in one hand. It took all of Winchester’s considerable surgical skill to achieve that result, so he is justifiably pleased, and therefore stunned when the patient is angry. The trouble is, the patient is a concert pianist. For him, there’s no such thing as “slight.” At the end of the episode, Winchester orders some one-handed piano music, and he explains to the patient that he is still a pianist. He has a lovely speech about how he (Winchester) can read and reproduce the notes, but he can’t make music.
Summary of the episode: War can ruin your life, but you can still find hope through a snobby but thoughtful surgeon who is learning empathy.
Twenty-odd years later, on Scrubs, J.D.’s best friend, surgical intern Chris Turk, also encounters a pianist - a kid on a scholarship. But in surgery, Turk makes a mistake, and the kid won’t be able to play again. There is nothing to be done, except for Turk to own his mistake and try to live with it.
Summary of the episode: Even the best of us make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes can ruin someone’s life.
Now I ask you: Which of those is life “as we know it to be” and which is life “as we would prefer it to be”? Which is “safer”?
The fault, in the M*A*S*H episode, is with the war. That’s really the point of M*A*S*H: war is bad. True. Absolutely true. But it gives M*A*S*H just a little, crucial bit of distance. We care about the characters, we are horrified by what they go through, but at the end of the day, we’re not in Korea getting shot at. That won’t happen to us. Plus, we get that warm glow of superiority for nodding along and agreeing that that’s true, absolutely true, War is Bad.
There is no war in Scrubs. There is just death. The true “madness of death”: death that can appear anywhere, to anyone, with no warning, no reason, and no remedy. And as J.D.’s mentor, Dr. Cox, tells him in the first episode, any “victory” they win is just buying time.
The point of Scrubs is that, sooner or later, everybody dies. Including each of us.
This being probably* my favorite Doctor Who ever, I was mulling a long post. It was going to tackle big things, like free will and predestination, and whether we die as we have lived, and whether the parallel-universe plotline of Season Two undercuts the terrible beauty of this ending.**
But Paul Cornell (who ought to know, seeing as he wrote the episode and all) has already said most of what I wanted to say. And, in proportion as he is a better writer than I am, he has said it more briefly: "Grace gets written into the world, in such a way that it turns out it's always been there, through sacrifice." Yes.
* There used to be no need for the qualifier, but then Neil Gaiman had to go and write The Doctor’s Wife.
** I’m still not sure on that last one. And any discussion inevitably raises the related question of whether the parallel-universe plotline of Season Four undercuts the shattering beauty of the end of Season Two. Thoughts, anyone?
The Triduum can be a gloriously immersive experience: physically and mentally overwhelming, but emotionally and spiritually rich. A time when the Mass becomes new again, when we weigh our own petty crosses and thank God that they are only splinters, and when, in the words of one of our catechism students, we remember that Christ “had to become a man so that He could die.”
This year I got the “overwhelming” part. And, I thought, not much else.
I went to the liturgies, knelt for the Tantum Ergo, stood (and stood) for the chanting of the Passion, and rose on Easter Sunday morning to...a grey and gloomy day that about summed up my mood. It wasn’t bad enough to complain about. It was just sort of there, like I had been just sort of there all weekend. I took some consolation from being in the Catholic Church, where you do get points for showing up, and resolved to work on the “emotionally and spiritually rich” part next year.
Then, during Easter week, I got one of those rare runs where you sit down to write and don’t feel like you’re writing - you’re typing, as fast and furiously as you can, and even then your characters are impatient that you’re slowing them down. It was a crazy little spy script, something I’d undertaken just for fun (and to get a couple of scenes out of my head by committing them to paper). But when I caught my breath and reviewed what I had written, I found:
A story that took place almost entirely from a Friday afternoon through a Sunday night
An ignoble death on the Friday and a sacrificial one on the Sunday
A wounded side, followed by...
A (semi-)voluntary descent into a reasonable temporal facsimile of hell
And just as I was congratulating myself on at least giving my fascination with the Stigmata a rest (two previous scripts, two wounded hands), I realized that I hadn’t, not entirely.
But those were all the little things, more or less foreseen in the plotting stage. What I hadn’t really worked out in plotting was what happened on Saturday. I had a checklist of sorts, but it amounted to “Here stuff happens to get us from Friday to Sunday.”
Well, those impatient characters took over and explained a few things to me. They told me that Saturday was about absence. Every line and every action were given their meaning by someone NOT being there. And then a minor character - sort of a subordinate antagonist, though really more of a trickster figure - told me that he was dying, that he wanted the Last Rites, and that he wanted his body discovered in a cathedral late on Saturday night.
Well, the writer momentarily asserted herself. I reminded this upstart extra that he hadn’t even existed in the outline version, that when he appeared he was purely a plot contrivance, that I didn’t want to spend time on deathbed reflections, and that This Was Not a Script About Religion, darn it. At least, not capital-R Religion. It was about truth (of course), fidelity (yes, I suppose), and the sacrifice of the self (all right, all right, I know). But for once, I was trying to be subtle about all that. Having a priest even walk through would be too obvious and fight the tone of the rest of the piece. And the cathedral thing was way, way too blatant.
To all of which, he responded that it was his death, and he was going to have the Last Rites and then rest in the cathedral.
The moral being, never argue with your characters, because who do you think you are, anyway?
All of this is not to say that the script is any good. But good or not, I’m grateful to it. I realized that I had “got something” out of the Triduum, and that there are certain things that really are ingrained in my subconscious. Even when I am trapped in the absence of Holy Saturday, I see it as the time that gets us from Friday to Sunday. I see it through the hope of the Resurrection.
