Over the course of the many insightful conversations generated by the recent post on Star Wars: The Last Jedi—sincerest thanks to all who shared their time and thoughts—the subject of artistic influence was discussed: what role it played in the creation of some of Gen X’s most cherished movie franchises of yore, and what part, if any, it has in our now-institutionalized praxis of remaking those films wholesale—of “turning Hollywood into a glorified fan-fiction factory where filmmakers get to make their own versions of their childhood favorites.”
Because where is the line drawn, exactly, between inspiration and imitation? If the narrative arts are a continuum in which every new entry owes, to a certain extent, a creative debt to a cinematic or literary antecedent, is originality even a thing?
If so, what is it, then? How is one to construe it concretely, beyond simply “knowing it when we see it”? And, as such, is there a way for us as artists to codify, or at very least comprehend, the concept of originality as something more than an ill-defined abstraction to perhaps consciously strive for it in our own work?
THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND INFLUENCES
Since it was Star Wars that provoked those questions, let me start with this: George Lucas is one of my eminent creative influences. When I was in high school in the early nineties, during that long respite between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, when Star Wars was more or less placed by its creator in carbon-freezing, I became aware that the same mind had conceived two of my favorite franchises, and went to great lengths to study Lucas’ career: how he learned the art of storytelling, where his ideas came from, how he managed to innovate the way in which blockbusters were created and marketed.
“Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” mastermind George Lucas, my first creative idol
In order to more fully appreciate what Lucas created in 1977 when he made Star Wars—a work of fiction so thrilling and inspired it seemed to emerge fully realized from his singular imagination—it behooves us to consider the varied influences he drew from. The 1936 Flash Gordon film serial Lucas watched as a child provided the inciting animus—a grand-scale space opera told as a series of high-adventure cliffhangers. (It also later informed the movie’s visual vocabulary, with its reliance on old-fashioned cinematic techniques like opening crawls and optical wipes.)
In a case of east meets west, Joseph Campbell’s study of comparative mythology The Hero with a Thousand Faces provided a general mythic and archetypal blueprint to endow Lucas’ sprawling alien-world fantasy with psychological familiarity, while Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress served as a direct model for the plot he eventually settled on (after at least three start-from-scratch rewrites). Lucas ultimately patterned the series’ three-part narrative arc after Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle (which later directly influenced his high-fantasy franchise-nonstarter Willow), because, prior to Star Wars, closed-ended “trilogies” weren’t really a thing in commercial cinema.
In addition to his cinematic and literary interests, Lucas is also a passionate scholar of world history (as evidenced by Indiana Jones, particularly the television series), and a direct line can be drawn from the X-wing assault on the Death Star to the aerial dogfights of World War II, to say nothing of the saga’s allusions to the Roman Republic, Nazi Germany, and the Vietnam War. As for where the Force and lightsabers and the twin suns of Tatooine came from… who knows? The sheer number of disparate interests that met, mated, and reproduced within the confines of Lucas’ brain can never be fully accounted for, even by the man himself.
Dan Aykroyd, co-writer and co-star of “Ghostbusters” (1984)
That, after all, is the alchemical way creativity works. While young George Lucas was immersing himself in the Republic serials, his Baby Boomer contemporary Dan Aykroyd was devouring the ghost comedies of the forties: The Ghost Breakers and Spook Busters and Hold That Ghost. Years later, when developing what became Ghostbusters (which, like Star Wars, began as an impractically ambitious narrative that underwent major reconceptualization on its way to the big screen), Aykroyd modernized the foundational premise of his formative influences through two chief implements: his training via the then-contemporary comedic sensibilities of the Second City and Saturday Night Live, and his personal fascination with the intensive scientific research that had been conducted into the field of parapsychology in the 1970s. As such, a timeworn subgenre that had once been made to serve Bob Hope and the Bowery Boys was revived anew for the Omni era.
Sometimes, even, the collocation of different influences isn’t incidental. Take, for instance, Batman, a creation consciously prompted by the commercial success of Superman, which assimilated elements of Douglas Fairbanks’ Zorro, The Three Musketeers, Sherlock Holmes, and even two separate 1930s pulp heroes, conspicuously named the Bat and the Black Bat:
“[Bob] Kane’s cold, commercial intelligence was all over Batman from the start. Where Superman felt like the happy result of trial, error, and patient refinement, Batman was clearly the product of applied craft, cleverly but rapidly assembled from an assortment of pop culture debris that together transcended the sum of its parts. . . . There was very little about Batman that could not be traced directly back to some recent predecessor, but what he had was soul and staying power” (Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human, [New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011], 17–18).
Given, then, what we know about the conception of Star Wars, Ghostbusters, and Batman, even summarily, can we really call any of those works, culturally defining though all of them have been, original? A question that brings us back to the earlier question of what, precisely, is originality?
Author Michael Chabon interviews Rush’s Geddy Lee on the PBS series “Speakeasy”
In a 2014 interview on the PBS series Speakeasy, author Michael Chabon discussed that very subject—the role inspiration plays in a young artist’s development—with Geddy Lee, lead vocalist and bass player for the legendary prog-rock band Rush:
“What’s originality? Well, originality is when you have so many influences that you can’t tell which—you can’t tell them anymore; you can’t see them anymore—they’ve all melded. And as your confidence rises in your craft, your personality steps in front of those influences and that’s—that forms your voice.”
I mean, shit—has anyone ever said it better than that?
A SEQUEL INSPIRED BY A REMAKE OF A RIP-OFF OF THE ORIGINAL
We’ve all heard, and probably even expressed, this lament: There’s no originality left in Hollywood. And when we understand originality as Lee defines it, we realize what produces that cultural void we all recognize isn’t so much the lack of new ideas—because those, like musical notes, are finite even if the combinations that can be arranged from them are endless—as it is the lack of new voices. When J. J. Abrams and now, Christ help us, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss—migrating from one George’s toy box to another’s—make a Star Wars movie, they’re effectively drawing influence from a single source only: Star Wars itself.
Same goes for Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters (2016), which reduced the enchanted offspring of Aykroyd’s élan vital to an algorithmically applied template—take a bunch of seasoned SNL players, outfit them with pseudoscientifically plausible spirit-trapping technologies and have them launch an unlikely business to skeptical reception in the Big Apple, let hilarity ensue—and then tried to paper over its utter lack of inspiration by swapping the team’s gender and expecting a pat on the back for its progressive spirit. With such an artistically bankrupt formula now our boilerplate mode of creativity, the whole of our popular culture is thusly reduced in depth to just one layer.
“Be a first-rate version of yourself rather than a second-rate version of another author. Innovate rather than imitate. The key to being a successful thriller novelist involves establishing an identity. . . . Our task is to move the genre a step forward so that other thriller writers must absorb what we’ve done if they themselves want to move the genre forward” (David Morrell, “Five Rules for Writing Thrillers,” http://davidmorrell.net/on-writing/writing-advice/).
In the creation of The Last Jedi, writer-director Rian Johnson has cited the direct aesthetic and narrative influence of Battlestar Galactica (2004), a remake of a short-lived television series from 1978 that was such a flagrant rip-off of the original Star Wars that Fox sued Universal for no less then thirty-four identifiable instances of plagiarism. Take a moment, will you, to truly appreciate what a breathtaking, cross-generational act of cultural self-cannibalization The Last Jedi therefore represents.
And then contrast that approach with what Joss Whedon attempted with his space-opera series Firefly (2002), which imagined what might’ve happened to the ethically tenuous Han Solo had the Rebellion been defeated in Return of the Jedi, then mixed that What if…? prompt in a mental blender with elements from Star Trek, Stagecoach, and Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize–winning historical novel The Killer Angels, before Whedon’s unique personality stepped in front of those influences, as Geddy Lee characterizes it, to produce something so idiosyncratic—so original—it transcended its commercial failure on network TV to achieve cult-status immortality (and eventually a big-screen follow-up).
Nathan Fillion as Captain Malcolm Reynolds in Joss Whedon’s outer-space Western “Firefly”
Or what about Jurassic Park, celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary this summer? When it came out in 1993, the culture was thrust into a state of dino-fever: The movie’s special effects were, of course, revolutionary, but just as captivating were its thematic and philosophical underpinnings, so memorably articulated by the story’s ethical and intellectual conscience, Jeff Goldblum’s flamboyant Dr. Malcolm.
Author Michael Crichton’s brilliant technothriller conceit—born from his fascination with dinosaurs and his scholarly interest in then-arcane disciplines like DNA cloning and chaos theory, and revisiting the setting of a malfunctioning theme park he’d previously exploited in Westworld—in the hands of Spielberg’s special cinematic wizardry produced a contemporary Frankenstein fable, the proverbs of which are still invoked in conversation to this day.
In 2015, Gen X writer-director Colin Trevorrow (originally slated to helm Star Wars: Episode IX, incidentally) revisited the concept with Jurassic World, and endowed it with every Spielbergian flourish imaginable: cutting-edge dino-effects, a gruff-yet-charming Indiana Jones–esque hero, a pair of precocious children coping with the trauma of divorce… even a great white shark makes an amusing cameo. And the movie went on to make over a billion dollars, with yet another sequel on the way this summer and what Trevorrow describes with obligatory, All part of the grand plan, folks! Hollywood salesmanship as “the concluding chapter of our trilogy” scheduled for 2021. But for all its box-office haul and purported conceptual fecundity, did Jurassic World manage to inspire even a single meaningful conversation after its closing credits rolled?
Chris Pratt as Indiana… er, Owen Grady in “Jurassic World”
None that I read or heard. Because Jurassic World is built upon a lone inspirational foundation: Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. There are no layers to peel back, no hidden facets to be discovered. It provokes no thought or discussion because, like the equally entertaining-but-empty Force Awakens, it doesn’t do or say anything we haven’t already seen and heard. Say what you want about Spielberg and Lucas and George R. R. Martin—and all have been subjected to their fair share of criticism, much of it arguably deserved—but they’ve been first-rate versions of themselves. Can J. J. Abrams or Rian Johnson or Colin Trevorrow or David Benioff and D. B. Weiss really say the same?
INSPIRATIONS AND ASPIRATIONS
Imitation, to be sure, is a crucial stage of artistic development. Illustrators learn by tracing; aspiring musicians gain confidence by practicing popular riffs till they can play them expertly. (Even Rush, a band that produced twenty albums over a forty-year period, didn’t establish a distinct voice of their own until their fourth release, 2112.) My own adolescent attempts at fiction consisted of a beat-for-beat clone of Back to the Future called “Misfits of Time,” a shameless Die Hard knockoff set in the headquarters of the United States Mint titled “Money Isn’t Everything,” and, in direct tribute to Lucas himself, “Indiana Jones and the River Styx.” The first properly formatted screenplay I ever wrote—and tragicomically attempted to produce with state-of-the-art VHS-C technology—was a sequel to the vampire-punk classic The Lost Boys.
But as much as those concepts and characters inspired my nascent imagination, they didn’t belong to me. And as I was exposed in college to other modes of creative expression (the existential absurdism of Beckett and Stoppard, hardboiled fiction, blaxploitation cinema), I gained a deeper appreciation for the variety of worldviews out there—all equally truthful if aesthetically irreconcilable—and developed an eagerness to use the different tools and storytelling media to reflect the truths of my own experiences. Needless to say, many ambitiously flawed pieces of work were produced in the decade that followed!
Eventually, I learned my craft and cultivated my own voice, in which the Lucas influence has been reduced in prominence to a yet-crucial cornerstone; I can still account for it in much of my work today, even my forthcoming prison-break/zombie-outbreak mashup Escape from Rikers Island: Each chapter ends on an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire cliffhanger, while the story itself, counter to the conventions of popular zombie fiction, was very deliberately designed as a closed-ended hero’s journey.
But Lucas is, to be sure, only one source of inspiration on the project, which owes an acknowledgment—either creative, intellectual, or philosophical—to the period crime fiction of Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep), the contemporary crime fiction of Richard Price (Clockers), the exploitation cinema of John Carpenter (Assault on Precinct 13, Escape from New York), the TV dramas of David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood), and even the nonfiction of Herbert Asbury (The Gangs of New York) and Matt Taibbi (The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap). I’m sure there are others, too. Certainly my own upbringing in the Bronx had a lot to do with where the story is set and the types of characters who populate it.
An aerial view of the Rikers Island Jail Complex in New York City. Pictured here on June 4, 2005. Credit : INFphoto.com Ref.: infusny-01/31
That’s the thing I’ve come to love about EFRI—what’s made it the most satisfying creative endeavor of my career: For better or worse, it is a reflection of my personality, my interests, my sensibilities, my experiences. When I read it back, I don’t hear Lucas or Chandler or Price or Milch, though they’re all murmuring in the background there somewhere; rather, I hear myself. It sounds like me.
And I imagine Lucas must’ve felt the same thrill when he finally, after several unsuccessful attempts, “broke the back” of the fanciful notion he’d been entertaining that became what we now know as Star Wars. It was his. Not Alex Raymond’s, or Akira Kurosawa’s, or J. R. R. Tolkien’s; it was the brainchild of George Walton Lucas Jr. Star Wars was, in fact, his so unmistakably and so powerfully, it became ours—an indelible part of the cultural narrative of the twentieth century.
And yet, that Lucas’ vision resonated so profoundly isn’t what makes Star Wars such an enviable achievement. Rather, it’s that he diversified his influences, internalized them, developed an authentic voice all his own, and—this part’s key—summoned the courage, without any assurances of a receptive audience, to make it heard. If all artists took inspiration from that, and aspired to the same, our popular culture would yield a limitless bounty of originality.
Hello again! A couple of quick thoughts before diving into my own thoughts on this topic. To gain an idea of the problem with today’s reboots, here’s an admittedly long slog of a video explaining why Steven Moffat’s rendition of Sherlock Holmes is garbage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkoGBOs5ecM
And here is an equally long read evaluating Jurassic Park and why, despite its reverence for the material being adapted, fails in a number of notable ways.
http://www.aycyas.com/jurassicpark.htm
With regards to the video linked to above, there is a tendency I’ve noticed in the approach to adapting older properties from a position of contempt that ignores or dismisses the very reason why these properties have endured for so long in the first place: the creative teams got them right the first time. Yet the attitude of the likes of Kurtzman, Moffat, Abrams, Johnson, Bay, Emmerich, and so on, is that the originals are somehow “broken” or otherwise need “fixing” in order to be brought up to what they falsely perceive to be today’s “modern” standards of storytelling.
So, for example, we have Steven Moffat taking what was for its time a revolutionary female character in the form of Irene Adler—who defeats Sherlock Holmes in his first published story and forces him to re-evaluate his opinion of women and their abilities, to actually learn and grow as a person—and turning her into a Kung-Fu dominatrix who loses to his hero and falls in lust with him, because at no point must his Sherlock Holmes ever be made to look as though he is anything less than perfect and undefeated. It’s all about catering to the inflated ego of the writer-director, whose protagonist is the stand-in for himself. For all he claims to like the Arthur Conan Doyle stories, it’s obvious he really doesn’t because he feels the need to tinker with them to the point they no longer represent Doyles’ work, but his own. Does this, then, fall within the realm of inspiration, or simple disdain for something and an attempt to destroy it in order to replace it with his own shallow interpretation?
I don’t think it’s so much nostalgia that guides Hollywood’s constant returning to the wells of older properties than it is cynical business reasoning. The brands were popular thirty or forty or fifty years ago, or a hundred years ago, they made money, so we’ll resurrect them and milk them for every penny we can squeeze out of them until they run out of juice. And then, both ignorant and contemptuous of these properties (and the people who are fans thereof), they hire writers and directors who are equally as contemptuous and willfully ignorant, who then proceed to churn out the product ordered up by the suits in New York. That the jobs offer up an opportunity to destroy these properties they so despise is the proverbial icing on the cake.
Another thing I’d like to touch on is the lame attempt to rationalize this destruction by claiming it is deconstruction. It is anything but. To deconstruct something is to disassemble it, examine its parts, and put it back together again in such a way as to get audiences to think about the deconstructed thing in a way they haven’t before. For example, there’s a cartoon floating around the ‘net depicting Jerry the Mouse hitting Tom the Cat over the head with a heavy mallet, Jerry standing trial and going to prison for assault, and Tom shown wheelchair-bound suffering from brain damage and PTSD. By applying real-world consequences to a slapstick cartoon, we are meant to think about what would likely happen if we were to try such slapstick in real life.
By contrast, Abrams, Moffat, Johnson, and the others are engaging in demolition, as exemplified in the following cartoon posted on Facebook (you’ll probably need to log in to view it):
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2009872785897145&set=gm.1920082114683036&type=3&permPage=1&ifg=1
It’s far too forgiving toward Abrams, who in his own way is as guilty as Johnson of demolishing the properties he adapts. But the point here is to illustrate the difference between deconstruction, which is a positive act intended to enlighten audiences, and demolition, which serves no other purpose but to destroy its target in order to replace it with something far inferior to the original and therefore cannot stand up in comparison to that original.
Okay, that entirely-too-lengthy semi-digression done with, to address the point you made about the difference between inspiration and imitation, you are spot on that whereas film-makers such as Lucas and Carpenter are inspired by what has been done before (you can see how much the works of the versatile Howard Hawks are in Carpenter’s films), and use that in order to find their own voices to create something unique to them, too many of today’s writers and directors simply ape the most superficial aspects of the material they’re adapting, so caught up are they in trying to systematically destroy them in favor of their shallow, vapid imitations. They don’t care to delve even moderately into the original Star Trek, Star Wars, Holmes stories, etc., and so they have only a superficial understanding of the properties, thus rendering them incapable of adapting them in any meaningful way.
Of course, they’re too egotistical to admit even to themselves that they are shallow—they really believe they’re making great movies, and that the only possible explanation for backlash from disgruntled fans MUST be sexism, as demonstrated in Abrams’ Feig-esque comments reported the other day:
http://boundingintocomics.com/2018/02/17/j-j-abrams-continues-self-destruction-of-star-wars-franchise
And that is a large part of the problem, isn’t it? These clowns really are too dense to understand that they have no concept of how to tell a story or that their imitation without inspiration is just that. They’d rather remain in their bubbles closed off from reality, than acknowledge the damage they’ve done.
It’s easy to see the influences of Akira Kurasawa, John Ford, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Frederick Stephani and Ray Taylor (both of whom directed the Flash Gordon serials), in Lucas’ works. Darth Vader’s black armor is patterned after that worn by Samurai. The lightsabers are basically high-tech swords, inspired undoubtedly by the swashbuckling adventures of Errol Flynn on the big screen. Mos Eisley and the goings-on there are surely a play on the classic Old West frontier (backwater?) town.
In my screenwriting, I am myself influenced by the likes of John Carpenter, George A. Romero, Richard Donner, James Cameron in his early career before his head swelled to the size of the Titanic, Ishirō Honda, Robin Hardy, Terence Fisher, and through them and others, all the influences who inspired them. I take the parts of their works that can fit into my own, adapt them, and in the whole, find my own vision and voice.
Can the same really be said of Ruin Johnson, who, according to interviews, directed The Last Jedi from what has been described as being 90% the first draft he wrote sixteen months prior? https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/12/star-wars-last-jedi-rian-johnson-interview Can the same be said of Abrams, Kurtzman, Moffat, or any of the big egos writing for today’s popular media?
Absolutely not. And we can correctly guess this because it comes across in the final product.
Now, contrast this with Black Panther, which I saw over the weekend. The story is weak in a lot of places and the villain, who isn’t fully introduced to us until the second half, is less developed than he should be. And I think the final act is dominated by too much unconvincing CGI. But here we clearly see that there are actual characters in the story, the protagonist plagued by self-doubt and burdened by the knowledge he gains in the course of events within the narrative, such that it is used against him to engineer his downfall. And despite the flaws, you can tell in the overall movie just how much chemistry and fun was had among the cast. There was a real love for the material here, which made me like the movie a lot more than I would have if it had been directed by Zack Snyder. And yes, there’s some actual deconstruction going on in this story, ham-handed as it might be. And I saw some actual inspiration in the visuals with regards to the set designs and elements of the story itself (Urban Wakanda is clearly a blend of African tribal aesthetics and Art Deco). Oh, and see if you can spot the influence of a certain anime series in Killmonger’s military garb. Moohoohaha!
Anyway, enough of my rambling, ha ha! Thanks for writing this. I look forward to reading more from you.
You just wrote your own blog post, Michael! You should be publishing it on your own platform, not merely providing all this added-value content for me!
I have complex feelings about the original Jurassic Park myself, which I didn’t go into here. I think it is a good movie, but it falls short of greatness. I don’t think it’s one of Spielberg’s very best, despite the obvious enthusiasm and inspiration with which it was made.
I’m sort of iffy — and I can tell you are not — about whether contemporary directors harbor a scorn or contempt for the material they’re remaking. Sometimes that might be the case, I suppose. I don’t know if Abrams or Johnson had contempt for their subject matter — perhaps they did, I’ll concede — so much as a creatively misguided desire to make their own versions of their childhood favorites. And their interpretation of Star Wars isn’t yours, or mine, so I think they open themselves up to a vehement degree of criticism that they wouldn’t otherwise be subjected to, because we all feel passionately about Star Wars, you know? Regardless of what we may think of, say, Avatar, we judge James Cameron’s vision for what it is, and not what we think it should have been, because none of us went into that movie with any preconceived notions or expectations.
With regard to Hollywood’s practice of “returning to the well,” I’m going to copy-and-paste a response I just left to a comment made on the last post:
That little Facebook comic strip is priceless; it pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?
I, too, saw that Abrams comment the other day, and even considered incorporating it into this post before deciding it wasn’t germane to the thesis. Look, while I acknowledge there have unquestionably been offensively sexist/misogynistic reactions to these remakes (particularly Ghostbusters) amongst an infantile and laughably insecure segment of the fan base, I also believe both Feig and Abrams have on occasion invoked that as a sort of scapegoat for the creative shortcomings of their films. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and the new Ghostbusters that have absolutely nothing to do with the gender of the heroes. (I even lamented in “Won’t Get Fooled Again” that Daisy Ridley was done a real disservice by the subpar screenwriting of The Last Jedi. I like Rey; I wish Johnson hadn’t sidelined her role and diminished her agency.) I would happily support an all-female Ghostbusters, but such a project needs to be based on a premise and a script worthy of the effort, and certainly worthy of talent like Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones.
I haven’t yet seen Black Panther, but I hear only good things. I can’t really comment on it except to say that perhaps there are more opportunities for creativity in commercial filmmaking through previously untapped IPs, like Black Panther — and, for that matter, like Iron Man a decade ago — than there are in properties that have been reinterpreted to death, like Star Wars and Batman. Even though Black Panther is as old as Spider-Man, I’d be willing to bet general audiences were completely unfamiliar with him before his appearance in Civil War. That essentially makes him a new sensation, and that he reflects an underrepresented demographic is all the better.
Thanks, Michael! I appreciate your amazing, thoughtful contributions!
Sean
Yeah, I do have my own blog and even my own You Tube channel that I’ll be recording for tomorrow night discussing Black Panther. Looking at it initially, it’s a decent if flawed movie. Too much thrown into it and therefore not enough time to address everything adequately, and of all the characters I think Killmonger was the least fleshed out, and given two distinct motivations for his actions that have to compete and alternate, thus diminishing what could have been an outstanding movie villain. But overall I think the positives outweighed the negatives, and unlike Ghostbusters, CBS’ STD, and the Mouse Star Wars, it just comes across on the screen that this was an honest effort to make something great that simply fell short of its potential, whereas the others don’t even try to tell anything resembling a coherent story. And I think the credit for the success of Marvel’s cinematic outings over the past decade or so can be given to Kevin Feige, who clearly has a vision and a plan for where he wants all this to end up, not to mention a love for the material that shows in the final product.
Hey, I slugged in a hyperlink to your YouTube channel (the link to which I got off your Twitter profile), and you of course may feel free to provide us with a link to your blog, if you like!
I haven’t seen Black Panther or any of the Marvel movies after Avengers: Age of Ultron. For me, keeping up with that sprawling mega-franchise was becoming a full-time job, and everything after the first Avengers, which was fantastic, felt a little anticlimactic in my view. But I hear good things about Thor: Ragnarok and now this. If it comes on HBO at some point, I’ll check it out, but I just don’t have the drive to keep up with the MCU anymore.
That said, I admire the shit out of what Feige has managed to pull off with it. A few years ago, every studio jealously wanted their own “shared cinematic universe,” and they learned in short order — with the collapse of the DCEU and the nonstarter “Dark Universe” of Universal Monsters — that that shit is way harder to do successfully than Marvel made it appear. And you have to give Feige due credit, for exactly the reasons you highlight: He had a vision and a plan to get it realized. And more than that, he understands these characters and the universe they populate — he loves them, as you say (which is probably more than can be said for Kathleen Kennedy). No one was steering the ship over at DC Entertainment, and certainly Zack Snyder had no reverence for or institutional understanding of those characters, and the whole enterprise thusly and deservedly crashed and burned. Cinephiles and film historians will marvel — no pun intended — at the vast, interconnected media franchise Marvel pioneered for many decades to come…
Fantastic analysis. I always go back to Shakespeare on this one, who wrote only one original play. Everything else he wrote, no matter how famous, was based on previously hashed and rehashed poems, plays and other sources. He was the original fanboy fictioneer!
Great point, mydangblog! And in a weird way, even though it’s fictionalized and fantastical, Shakespeare in Love — which I haven’t seen in twenty years — is a dramatized affirmation of the role inspiration plays in artistic expression. The creative mind will draw consciously from literary antecedents, historical events, and individual experience; it will also be subconsciously influenced by a host of external forces and internal feelings it can neither recognize nor account for.
All artists are fanboys at heart. The great ones, and even the good ones, are those that venture from the comfortable confines of the imitation stage to produce something that reflects, in some way, their unique personality. And that’s scary, because we must strip naked, in a way, and expose ourselves to criticism when we do that. An artist who only produces covers (like Abrams) never really has to confront the risk of having his soul stomped… but he never knows the special thrill of birthing a new vision, either.
Another truly thought-provoking analysis of what constitutes creativity. Agree that it couldn’t be better said than the Geddy Lee idea of your personality amalgamating and ultimately “stepping in front of” all your sources of inspiration. Yes, you need that foundational mountain, and yes, you need to ascend the peak and have a view beyond.
There is the old theory that there are only about six or seven stories told throughout human history, on which every tale since is based. There’s a fair degree of truth in that, and as demonstrated through the centuries, it’s the ways in which these basic stories are adapted that are unique and refreshing in their own right.
Yes, agreed, Michael. I am an exponent of Save the Cat!, a storytelling methodology I’ve highlighted in many, many posts on this blog. On the subject of “cracking the code” of esoterica, I think Blake Snyder very accurately figured out exactly how many story models there in fact are: ten. I’ve studied and practiced his genre categories, and I’ll be damned if every story in the Joseph Campbell mode doesn’t adhere to one of them. That classification system is an indispensable tool, because it delineates the distinguishing conventions each “genre” is obliged to observe, yet demonstrates how each narrative model can be made to serve all manner of aesthetic and tonal approaches. It’s the reason why movies as stylistically diverse as Saving Private Ryan and Star Wars: A New Hope can share an identical DNA strand (they’re both “Epic Fleece”); same goes for Gone with the Wind and True Lies (“Epic Love”).
If there’s a more accurate or truthful system for classifying story types, I’ve yet to encounter it. Though, sadly, the folks who inherited STC! when Snyder passed away, suddenly and prematurely, don’t seem to understand those genre categories at all, and habitually misteach them. That breaks my heart.
Thank you, Leonide! So many of the notions that are part of the creative vernacular are really these ill-defined, barely understood abstractions: What is theme? What’s a character arc? What’s originality? For that matter: What is story? You know what I mean? We talk about these things, but few of us even share the same definition of them — if we have an articulated definition of them at all! So, when I come across an insight like Lee’s interpretation of originality, I think, Yes — that’s it. He’s taken an abstraction, extracted the essence, and given it definition, if not application. I find it very exciting when people “crack the code” of these kinds of very esoteric concepts, and I always think they’re worth sharing and pondering. So thank you for indulging me!
I wrote a post a long time ago about the “36 plots” and I noticed that Michael mentioned another version of the same that narrows it down to 7. I think there are universal themes, plot archetypes so to speak, that encapsulate what it is to be human – flawed, courageous, choosing, suffering, prevailing, and ultimately dying. It’s actually amazing that there are so many different stories out there and not surprising that they overlap.
This makes me think about what makes something original, and I agree with you that it’s something derived from inside the artist, influenced, yes, by the books, films, and artistic expressions of others, but truly something grounded in the personal experience of the psyche and heart. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think as a reader and viewer I can tell the difference between something that is organically grown and something that was developed by a committee around a table trying to make a buck.
The difference, for me, is whether I “feel” it. That might be tears or lingering musing or the “wow factor” (and I don’t mean explosions and car chases and weird face masks covering the mouth). Ha ha. Same with books – artists need to put themselves as human beings on the line and make their work matter.
Great post, Sean. I can feel that your book is getting close. 🙂
Same with me, Diana. I want to feel something when I read or watch a movie. And with the latter, that’s happening less and less.
As I said in my response to Diana, Cathleen, I think the reason we’re getting that authentic emotional experience so much less frequently from our fictions is because there’s a glut of stories that are either all technique and no heart (the reboots and sequels we’ve discussed here) or those written with passion (or at very least honest intent) but devoid of technique or discipline (which accounts for a large share, I would suspect, of the 800,000 self-published books last year, not to crap on self-publishing).
Speaking for myself, I have made a conscious choice recently to watch and read less, but to choose what I read/watch more judiciously, and to consume it more thoughtfully. I’ve accepted that there’s more material out there than I can ever get to in a thousand lifetimes, and rather than trying to keep up with the tidal wave of it all, I’ve opted to be selective. Which is not to say everything I read or watch I end up liking, but that’s okay, too. It’s not about only watching things I like; it’s about experiencing stories that sufficiently intrigue me, and sometimes that means reading something comforting, and other times something challenging. But it’s the variety, the grab bag of it all, that keeps me sharp.
Diana,
I hunted down your “36 Plots and Mad Max” post and included a hyperlink to it in your comment, because it’s such a great piece! I encourage everyone to pop over and read it!
I overheard recently — and I can’t remember where — someone say that all stories are a variation on one of two catalysts: someone comes to town, or someone leaves home. There’s probably truth to that.
As I said in my response to Michael’s reply to Leonide(!), a lot of people have tried to crack the code on this subject: Georges Polti (as you note in your article); Christopher Booker; hell, even your high-school English teacher no doubt taught you all conflict can be boiled down to four “types”: man versus man, man versus society, man versus nature, man versus himself.
For me, I think Blake Snyder’s ten story categories really concisely and effectively capture all the different models (at least insofar as they apply to the Aristotelian arc, which doesn’t account for postnarrativity). So, to look at Mad Max, which you specifically cite in your post, you would think that all four movies, which are aesthetically identical (they were all directed by the same filmmaker, after all), are of the same genre.
Not true, though. Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) are what Snyder would identify as Superhero stories (“Fantasy Superhero”), because they are about a “special someone” who doesn’t quite belong to the world he inhabits. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), however, are Golden Fleece (“Epic Fleece”), because they are “road” movies (quite literally, in fact, as indicated by their subtitles).
I’ve written about how other longstanding movie series, like Rambo and The Hunger Games, would routinely switch genres in order to combat creativity stagnancy. That, to me, is what makes the Save the Cat! classification system more than just a theoretical exercise; it is a true creative appliance.
All that said, tools, techniques, and even theory are cool, but they’re only there to help us create an authentic emotional experience, and we can’t do that unless we write honest stories, drawn from our own experiences, imparted with a piece of our souls. It sounds corny, I know, but as you say: You can feel it when a story comes from within the heart of the artist versus the product of a boardroom or corporate committee; the original Star Wars was the former, the new Star Wars the latter.
We all want to feel something when we submit — and, ideally, surrender — to a story. As my mentor David Freeman instructs, we want to be manipulated, we just don’t want to sense that manipulation — we don’t want to “see the strings.” To that end, you look at a character like Rose Tico in The Last Jedi, and, on the page, she has everything going for her with respect to eliciting our empathy: She’s an underdog; she’s a minority female (something this series hasn’t had very much of); she’s the victim of underserved misfortune (her planet was destroyed by the First Order); she’s a skilled mechanic, but that also means she partakes in none of the glory like front-line heroes Poe and Finn and Rey. We ought to love this character, right?
But we don’t. Why not? Because we sense how much we’re meant to empathize with her. We feel the behind-the-curtain manipulation at work, and we thusly disengage emotionally. And I think that goes to illustrate just how sensitive storytelling is — what a delicate balance between heart and craft we have to strike in order to get it right.
Thanks, as always, Diana, for joining me in a lively conversation. The book is close — it’s half a polish away — and we’ll see what happens over the next few months. Needless to say, the gears are in motion. I’m so grateful for your interest and support, my dear friend.
Sean
I love you line: “… that goes to illustrate just how sensitive storytelling is — what a delicate balance between heart and craft we have to strike in order to get it right.” So true and perhaps the reason why not everyone can do it. Because on top of that, to my thinking, it requires emotional vulnerability on the part of the artist. With a book, that’s the writer, in film it’s a much bigger group! Thanks for checking out 36 plots. It was a fun post to write. 🙂
And even the storytelling masters don’t always get that balance right. Many have (rightly) wondered how the same Lucas who created such a moving, universally relatable emotional experience with the classic Star Wars trilogy later delivered such a cold, emotionally disengaged series of prequels. I have my opinions on that — but, as you may’ve figured out by now, I have opinions on quite a lot of things — but for now I’ll just say that art in general is a delicate thing: sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. Furthermore, what you may respond to might leave me unaffected. We can (and should) employ craft in the creation of our stories, but it isn’t, in the end, a science; it’s a subjective, very personal thing.
Hi, Sean. I posted a response and reflection on this post. Just wanted to let you know in case you want to stop by. https://mythsofthemirror.com/2018/03/04/the-heart-and-craft-of-writing/
Bless your heart, Diana! So unbelievably kind of you to both internalize the piece and then share it with your readership. “Thank you” seems a woefully inadequate response, but… thank you!
I think it all comes down to this: We (rightly) intellectualize the craft part of writing, the studying and conscious application of technique, but the art part, the emotion we mine to create fully realized worlds and characters, operates (as it should) from a subconscious, even metaphysical place. That’s the instinctual aspect of writing, the place from which our fictions are ensouled. “And instinct is informed by everything that you’ve experienced,” says filmmaker John Carpenter. “Everything that you’ve felt from being young, learning about the equipment, learning about movies — it all goes into this big pot, and that’s where it comes out. You don’t intellectualize it — that’s what I love about it… you just know it. You fuck-up a lot, and you make mistakes, but it all comes out of this instinct. That’s what you’ve got to keep close to you.”
I truly love the extrapolations on my thesis you’ve expressed in “The HeArt and Craft of Writing,” Diana, and I can’t sufficiently articulate the heart I take from the intellectual “feedback loop” our little WordPress community provides. In a world of shouting voices, I am pleasantly reminded of how many people are genuinely interested in listening, discussing, and achieving enlightenment together.
The six golden rules of writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write. –Ernest Gaines
You said it, Dell. Stephen King advises the same. Writers should regularly expose themselves to all manner of stories (especially those outside one’s own genre), as well as a variety of forms: short fiction; nonfiction; essays; articles; poetry. Has anyone ever been too diverse?
>the story itself, counter to the conventions of popular zombie fiction
One other benefit of reading books and watching movies widely: You learn the cliches, learn to recognize them in other writing and your own. You can riff off of them, do a complete reversal on them, avoid them altogether, even use them to subvert your reader’s expectations. But only if you know that they’re out there
There’s a German zombie movie called RAMMBOCK: Berlin Undead, where there’s an interesting twist to the zombie virus shtick—the body can fight off the infection and survive, but only if the infected person remains calm. Adrenalin makes the infection spread faster. At just over an hour long, the film is well paced and the story and characters thoroughly enjoyable.
Well, after just quoting David Morrell about the importance of being well-versed in our particular genre, I must say I’m completely unaware of Rammbock! Love the concept, though — that’s a smart twist — and I’m eager to check it out. Thanks for the recommendation, Michael!
Well said, Dell. I concur. It’s particularly important to know the history of your own genre, so you have a sense of what’s been done, and how each subsequent iteration either built upon or subverted what came before. As David Morrell advises: “If you’re writing a particular kind of thriller, become an expert in that category until you could give a lecture about it. Imagine the embarrassment of proposing a plot idea to an editor, only to be told that it’s been done to death.” That doesn’t necessarily mean reading/watching everything, because that could be impractically time-consuming, but there are ways to familiarize oneself with the history of a given genre so you at least appreciate your position in that continuum.
Okay, I’m going to try to limit this comment. Really. It’s your own fault, Sean. If your posts weren’t so damn thoughtful, I wouldn’t have as much to say.
First off, from a fellow Rush fan, consider replaying “Circumstances” in your head, with major emphasis on “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.” It could even be the soundtrack for your post, from a much-younger Geddy Lee. 🙂
As a side note, one major layer that I think you omitted from Lucas’s work was WWI and II, and the homage isn’t difficult to find–I mean, he even called the Empire soldiers stormtroopers. (The original, in case anyone cares, were elite German troops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormtrooper.)
Concerning my own layers (since I know my own work even better than I know Tolkien, although the layers in his work make for fascinating study):
A fair amount of my work is anger-driven. I’ll get upset over a popular misconception (especially if it’s historical, because as an example, if you know history, the current political climate should scare the crap out of you). Or I’ll see or read a story done badly, and I’ll need to fix the idea for my own satisfaction.
My single contemporary story was a result of beta-reading someone else’s tale, and my comments went something like this: So this guy feels inadequate, then he gets away with killing his mother, but it’s okay because later he got laid and he’s happy now?! I’m usually much nicer in my comments, even if I think the tale’s irredeemably flawed, but I knew the writer, and I didn’t want him to put out a story this bad, even if it was papered over with a gloss of nice writing in a line-edit sense. (And in case you’re interested, he fixed the storyline, and it was a much better tale when it was done. So give him credit for being able to step back and improve his own work, a quality that’s rarer than it should be.)
But the anger over a poor story wasn’t all I put into my tale. I also incorporated regret over the inescapable sterility of dying in a hospital and my experiences of being an abuse survivor. Okay, maybe not a whole lot of layers there, but it was under a thousand words.
I read a lot of stuff that focuses on mishmash–as an example: “It’s Lord of the Rings meets Game of Thrones!” although that one has me scratching my head so much that my mind screams, “Pass.”
And that’s what’s wrong, IMO, with so much of what I see. It’s Hunger Games, with LGBT characters! Or to use one of your examples: it’s Ghostbusters–with bad-ass chicks! There’s not enough depth to the tale. And no matter how pretty the cinematography or writing, in the end it still feels like that old joke about Chinese food.
Rewriting Ghostbusters with gals is fine. But think how much more powerful it could have been if they’d set the thing in a slum somewhere, and one of the protag’s parents is being tormented my ghosts, and she’s got to figure this stuff out or her mother might go insane or be assaulted while running through the unsafe streets, screaming because she has to get away. That works in layers of what it’s like to be poor, along with the incredible amount of ambition that’s needed to escape that noose, and what it’s like to be right, but nobody will believe you. You could also easily make the main character a PoC. That could be a story worth telling, although you couldn’t call it Ghostbusters anymore, which is probably why they made a derivative version instead.
That took me longer to type than it did to think it up. And okay, I think I’m a good writer, but there are lots of good writers. Hence my frustration with Hollywood and shallow stories generally.
Stories worth telling don’t happen by mechanically mating two disparate ideas. In my opinion, coming up with these layers is a result of having life experiences and thinking on them deeply. Or if you want to shortcut the route some, you could consider supplementing this with stories of people who went through incredible challenges, like Harriet Tubman, Sacajawea, Helen Keller, or Clara Barton. Reading biographies of people like that was a large part of my childhood reading list. I added the themes of their life experience to my own, and it has made both my life and my writing richer. 🙂
Good points. With regards to your take on the Ghostbusters reboot:
If Feig had to do a Ghostbusters movie with an all-female set of leads, he could have told a passing-of-the-torch story handing the business off to a younger group of driven believers who now have this thing on their hands they dreamed about being part of since they were kids, but don’t know what to really do with it since the original franchise became so successful it drove itself largely out of business, and on top of that they are confronted with a paranormal resurgence of apocalyptic proportions. The primary source of tension would be in having to learn all over again how to deal with the supernatural since one of the most experienced and knowledgeable in the field is dead and the other three are too old to be of much physical use, and have presumably all moved on with their own lives anyway. So you have rising stakes and a hero’s journey at the same time, told through a comedic lens. Instead we got cookie-cutter concepts in place of real characters, and the Black woman was a walking stereotype. The plot, if indeed it can be called that, was riddled with holes and not at all memorable. I can’t even recall what it was, and the movie wasn’t released all that long ago.
Say what you will about the original film, but Ernie Hudson played Winston Zedmore as an ordinary guy, not stupid in the slightest (he holds his own in a philosophical discussion with Dan Ackroyd’s Ray about the Book of Revelation’s prediction of the dead rising from their graves), but a grounded character who sees the practical reactions to the scientists’ ramblings. What does Leslie Jones do? She acts like a moron for comic relief. Is that respectful or feminist? Hardly. Yet if we dare criticize the concept Jones played, we’re called racist or sexist or both. Instead of owning up to obvious mistakes, jerks like Feig tend to attack the critics using straw man dismissals. And then they continue to whine about how audiences treat them. Unbelievable.
I actually thought Ghostbusters II, which was far from a perfect movie (I’ve written about it extensively both here and here), did a credible job of putting the team back in the position of essentially having to relaunch their business from scratch. It gave us the pleasure of seeing them as underdog heroes again, which is extremely difficult to do in a sequel (Stallone struggled with this in the Rocky follow-ups before finally figuring it out with Rocky Balboa). Ghostbusters II has its issues, but damn it if it didn’t get that part exactly right.
It’s pretty apparent that the new Ghostbusters was a calculated (and long-gestating) effort to capitalize on a beloved (if dormant) brand; I don’t really believe, despite the casting, it had an overt feminist agenda. If anything, the casting was a gimmick, as I suggested in the essay above, to distract from the fact that the project itself was so uninspired. And then a bunch of very threatened manchildren jumped on the gender-swap as a reason to hate the movie before they’d seen it, whereas if they’d simply kept their stupid mouths shut and waited, they would have had the pleasure of seeing the movie self-destruct on its own creative demerits.
Yet, despite the corporate mandate to make that movie, I have no doubt Feig, Dippold, McCarthy, Wiig, McKinnon, and Jones, et al., went into the project with the best of creative intentions. But they didn’t sufficiently reconceptualize the IP, and they went for broad characterizations and comedy, whereas the original, as you point out, Michael, played it straight, even if the situations themselves were patently absurd (like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man tromping up Central Park West). They cocked it up, the movie bombed, end of story. This iteration of Ghostbusters, unlike the new Star Wars and Star Trek, is clearly DOA, so I don’t see much reason to dwell on it. It’s a pop-cultural footnote in the history of the cinematic reboot.
Okay, with regard to best intentions, I refer you to Samuel L. Jackson’s immortal dialog in a certain Quentin Tarantino film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOcvH4b0Opk (or) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg8-dii9Ma0
As for TLJ, here are three videos that delve into everything wrong with it and can be applied to much of what Hollywood is content to produce these days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2YcYsb_r8I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLHX9tvFASU&t=20s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og77pfVFJTs
One comment rightly pointed out that Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s was no different in cranking out movies in an assembly-line fashion, than it is today. The only difference is that nowadays the corporations toss hundreds of millions of dollars into fewer movies, as opposed to medium to low budgets into a lot of movies. But the thing about this crucial difference is that when you have a lower budget, you’re forced to get creative with the resources available to you, while we see the utterly narratively bankrupt results of what happens when you’re spending money equivalent to some countries’ entire annual operating budgets.
The lame reaction to criticism: “Oh, you’re just [sexist/racist/homophobic] and that’s why you hate the movie!” is merely a rationalization after the fact, not necessarily borne of intentions on the part of the assembly line to do anything truly feminist or racially sensitive. If there was that intention, then why are all the female and non-white characters clearly grossly, inexcusably dangerously incompetent while managing to outshine and succeed anyway? So clearly none of these are feminist projects in any way, shape, or form. And unfortunately, because of the systemic flaws in writing and executing these concepts that aren’t actual characters, it did provide a lot of fodder for genuine sexists to bitch and moan out the arse about political correctness and social justice warriors taking over the industry. But those idiots were a small, over-hyped minority that conveniently allowed the assembly line to use the sexism charges after the fact, once the audiences began giving the movies negative reviews. It’s a cheat that allows the directors, the studios, and those who are nominally in charge a way out of taking any responsibility or learning any lessons from their mistakes.
I suspect the reason Sony’s reboot of Ghostbusters isn’t getting a continuation is that it failed so badly no one wants to be the one to try and revive it, whereas Disney has made enough at the box office and will recover enough from DVD, BluRay, and digital download sales to justify in the minds of executives the ongoing efforts to wring water from the proverbial stone. As long as the corporation makes money, we’ll keep seeing more churned out garbage. But the sharp drop-off in ticket sales in TLJ’s second week, and scuttlebutt about the expected failure of the Solo prequel, hint that perhaps we might see just such a failure as what happened to Ghostbusters and more slowly to the DCEU. It’ll certainly be interesting to watch.
You’re absolutely right: Hollywood has always been something of an “arranged marriage” between businessmen and artists. Business is driven by the profit motive, and art is subjective, so given those two X-factors, it’s a wonder anything of quality/value ever gets produced.
As cinephiles — as I suggested to Sterling Archer in the comments section of the last post — the trick is learning to celebrate the gift of George Lucas’ Star Wars that history delivered to us, and not dwell on the less-desirable consequences of it (like The Last Jedi). Because the moral to one of my favorite movies, The Dark Knight, is that every well-intended action results in unexpected ramifications, both positive and negative.
So, that’s how we deal with Hollywood’s disappointments as fans. And as artists, it behooves us to recognize Hollywood for what it is — a business, full of deeply flawed people, like any other business — and then decide if that’s an enterprise we wish to be a part of. I’ve been a working screenwriter for twenty years — I signed with my first manager in 1998 — and I made the (somewhat recent) decision to walk away from this business, for myriad reasons, and turn my time and energy toward writing novels. It’s been a much better fit for me — the happiest and most productive period of my professional life.
David Morrell, the creator of Rambo whom I cited in the piece above, once told me this: All we have it time — time and how we spend it. Is it worth spending our time lamenting the undeniable systemic dysfunction of Hollywood, or the lack of artistic courage/vision of directors like J. J. Abrams and Rian Johnson?
God knows I’ve spilled a lot of digital ink on this blog sorting through my very complex feelings about those issues. And the conclusion I’ve reached — which is what I was getting at in the introductory paragraph of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” — is that my finite resources (my time and energy) are better spent on my own creative pursuits. J. J. can go and make another thousand shitty Star Wars movies if he wants — what do I care? I think it’s a shame he wastes his capital on such things, but it’s his life and career to do with as he chooses; I can only affect the course of my own life and career.
We’re all fans of this stuff, and we feel passionately about it. But if this post has a key takeaway, I think, it’s to channel that intense passion into developing and writing the best possible works of art we have within us to create. If J. J. Abrams wants to be a second-rate Spielberg, then by all means let him! I’d rather be a first-rate Sean Carlin. And to paraphrase When Harry Met Sally…, when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life as the idealized version of yourself, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
Aw, you’re awfully gracious, Cathleen! I’m delighted you find the posts thoughtful and take the initiative to engage with them in kind. This particular piece was even directly inspired by the discussion that ensued in the wake of the last essay, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” These are the kinds of matters I spend a lot of time pondering, and it’s beyond encouraging to know there are others out there who take an interest in this stuff, too, and who indulge in a little intellectual discourse that invariably leaves me more enlightened yet about the topic du jour.
On that note, in fact, thank you for the comparison with “Circumstances”! I hadn’t made that connection myself, but it’s fair to say Rush has been one of the great influences of my life — their music has shaped both my worldview and my art in ways unquantifiable — and it’s not out of the realm of possibility to suggest “Circumstances” may’ve indirectly and unconsciously influenced this post, as I was discussing above with mydangblog. The intellectual and philosophical depth of Rush’s work is peerless; I’ve often considered exploring some of their recurring themes (like the “restless young man” motif) in a formal, book-length dissertation on their oeuvre.
You are absolutely right about the stormtroopers from Star Wars, which was in no way a case of coincidental naming! As a Boomer — as someone whose formative experiences were shaped by America’s middle-class postwar prosperity — Lucas has drawn on the events of World War I (in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles) and World War II (in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies, as well as the more recent Red Tails). As someone who was in high school when Young Indiana Jones first aired, I can attest that the series put the historical events of the Great War in a narrative context that gave me a deeper appreciation and understanding for them that, as a subpar student, I wasn’t getting from my textbooks and lectures. So I am grateful to Lucas for that.
That’s a very interesting account of the genesis of your contemporary story — the different circumstances and feelings that collided to inspire that particular piece of fiction. On the subject of giving feedback, I certainly appreciate the delicate position we find ourselves in when we read something that just isn’t working, an experience I wrote about in my piece on writers groups.
It’s the job of the artist — the reason why we’re dependent on artists, in fact — to be preternaturally emotionally sensitive, and to draw connections between seemingly unrelated occurrences; to find signals in the noise, as it were. So, in your case, you identified a very particular feeling of despair that emerges in different situations, recognized a pattern, and connected those things in your fiction. And, in doing so, artists provide readers with emotional orientation. Because emotion can feel like a maelstrom, and we count on good writers to lead us through those turbulent experiences intact.
Good fiction is the marriage of two seemingly unrelated or disparate ideas. Sometimes, though rarely, an idea starts with a subtle but effective conceptual twist on something familiar. The example that springs to mind — and boy oh boy am I dating myself here — is that old Michael J. Fox comedy The Secret of My Success (1987). Somebody looked at that and clearly said, “Well, can’t we do the same thing but with a woman?” And the Academy Award–nominated Working Girl (1988) was born.
But you’re right: It’s not enough to simply switch sexes; you’ve got to have something to say about that (which Working Girl, to its credit, did). I love the version of an all-female Ghostbusters you pitched above; it’s different enough and dares to be socially relevant. I would’ve loved to see the characters from the new series Good Girls as Ghostbusters! Comedy and contemporary social commentary needn’t be mutually exclusive agendas.
As for your closing point, you’re right: Good artists need to be in touch with the plights and experiences of real people, either living or historical. If all you know about or care about is Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter or the X-Men, you’re not going to have anything authentic to say about the human experience. And, right now, our pop culture is being held hostage by a bunch of manchildren whose understanding of reality is informed exclusively by the fantasies of their own youth.
Thanks for weighing in, Cathleen. Your wonderful comments and insights are most welcome here.
Sean
Thanks, Sean–and you were even gracious enough not to mention that I totally overlooked the mention of dogfights in your original article.
And I loved Working Girl. 🙂
Well, I did neglect to mention stormtoopers, which is such a clear allusion to the First World War that I don’t know how it slipped my attention when I wrote the essay! But again, all that goes to show what a richly layered piece of work Star Wars is. As foreign as its alien-world landscape was to us in 1977, Lucas wisely endowed his fantasy with subtle, real-world reference points to keep us from feeling psychologically disoriented. That’s something I didn’t really directly address in the post, but it’s yet another underappreciated feat he pulled off with what was, at the time, a very risky creative venture. (I think 2112 is also one of the grand sci-fi stories of the seventies, a subject I’m sure you and I could discuss a great, geeky length!)
I love Working Girl, too. Stylistically, it’s such an ’80s time capsule — as is The Secret of My Success — but it’s just a delightful little movie full of old-school movie-star performances. Melanie Griffith was at the top of her game in that film. And as much as I love all the culturally defining action movies of Harrison Ford — from Star Wars to Indiana Jones to Blade Runner to The Fugitive to the Jack Ryan series — it was so nice when he would occasionally take a break from that stuff to do something like Working Girl or Witness, which showed off a more romantic, dramatic, and/or comedic side of his abilities. He didn’t do that kind of material often, but when he did, it made an impression.
Honestly, I think it’s best to just keep our mouths shut when it comes to matters of race, especially if you’re of European descent, other than to make it clear that you’re against racist slurs. Anything else will just get you in trouble.
The hip thing to do these days is to hide behind the shield of identity politics whenever someone criticizes a particular act. It allows the one who screwed up to avoid having to deal with the consequences.
In addition to my reply to Cathleen directly beneath this one, Michael, I would simply add this in response to your position: If you hear something stupid — and God knows both the fans and the filmmakers are guilty of uttering remarks that qualify as such — my advice is to just let that stupidity speak for itself. Don’t get drawn into the game like Abrams did.
I’m inclined to agree, Cathleen: That’s a Pandora’s box of trouble that exposes us to misinterpretation and misunderstanding, and potentially draws us into unwinnable (and ultimately pointless) conflict.
And that extends to the filmmakers, too, not merely the vocal online faultfinders: For instance, J. J. Abrams is on record as having recently dismissed fan criticism of The Last Jedi by saying, “Their problem isn’t Star Wars, their problem is being threatened” by the elevated role of female characters.
With a comment like that, Abrams has allowed himself to be drawn into an (idiotic) debate in which he employs the same simplistic, wrongheaded “logic” of some of his most ardent, single-issue detractors. It makes him seem defensive and petty. And to what end? Did his rebuke magically enlighten even one legitimately misogynistic armchair critic? Of course not. All it did was manage to piss off the many levelheaded fans who find shortcomings with his interpretation of Star Wars that have absolutely nothing to do with the gender of its characters.
Of course, it’s not enough to sit back and just mindlessly watch/read something. You have to study it. You have to ask yourself questions
What do you like about the story? Is that something you can incorporate into your own writing, while still keeping your own style? What do you dislike? How could you have fixed that?
What rules of writing do they follow? Do following those rules make the story predictable? What rules do they break? Do breaking those rules make the story work better or worse?
What Save the Cat! genre is it? How closely does it follow the genre conventions? Does following (or not following) the conventions help or hurt the story?
Do the main characters have David Freeman’s five governing characteristics? If so, what are they?
The list goes on. In fact, I’d like to invite others to add to it (assuming Sean agrees)
Good point, Dell: For an artist, the consumption of entertainment can’t merely be a passive act. You have to engage with it. You have to use the conceptual tools at your disposal — your understanding of structure and genre and characterization — to analyze what works and what doesn’t in a given piece of writing. There are two effective ways, in my view, to cultivate such skills.
The first is participating in a structured writers group, which may or may not be an opportunity available to you depending on where you live. (Though there are online forums for that sort of thing, but I think the social interaction — learning to pitch your ideas and evaluate the nonverbal response you’re getting through the body language of your audience — is critical, and you can’t get that through digital communication.)
The second is watching films (and, if possible, reading their scripts) and deconstructing them. And we’re not talking thousands of movies here. You can teach yourself the mechanics of story by selecting a dozen really good movies from different eras and genres and committing yourself to thoroughly analyzing them. Look to what Blake Snyder did in Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies for guidance: He broke down fifty films — one from each subgenre — until he understood how all of them ticked. That’s how you do it. But it takes time, and it takes dedication. And it certainly takes an understanding of a codified methodology like Save the Cat! If you’re going to be a great writer, you have to develop an analytical mind — an eye for what works, what doesn’t, and why.
One other trick:
Take a story, reread/rewatch it, several times in a row, until you all but have it memorized. Then deconstruct it. You’ll get a feel for the beats, foreshadowing, character arcs, plot twists, etc.
I find audiobooks to be great for this. But then, I spend several hours each day driving, so timewise, audiobooks work best for me
That’s another great point you raise, Dell: It has to be a story you’re so intimately familiar with, you could effectively “tell it around the campfire.” One of the reasons I can speak with such authority about Star Wars and Indiana Jones is because I watched and re-watched those movies dozens (if not perhaps hundreds) of times when I was a kid, so I absorbed everything about them. I don’t have that kind of time anymore, alas — I don’t have endless hours to devote to re-watching a given movie — but I don’t really need to do that anymore, because I’ve trained my mind to be able to deconstruct a movie on the fly, and the movies I used to train myself were, for the most part, the ones I grew up on, like Back to the Future and Jaws and Mad Max and Richard Donner’s Superman, hence the reason I cite those (admittedly dated) examples so often in my analyses on this blog.
Audiobooks are indeed an excellent way to deconstruct stories — and not just novels! In fact, Save the Cat! author Blake Snyder taught himself structure by listening to movies on his commute from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles every day. He would dub the audio from his VHS tapes onto an audiocassette that he could then play back in his car; without the story’s visuals to distract him, he became hyperaware of the narrative beats. He even discovered the “Midpoint” beat by recognizing that around the time the tape’s A-side would come to an end, the story would suddenly take a dramatic turn, and that’s when he came to realize that “Act Two,” as we’ve always identified it, is actually comprised of two parts itself! Pretty cool!
To anyone reading this, I would suggest you get the audiobooks of half a dozen of your favorite novels and listen to them over and over again across the span of six to twelve months till you know them by heart; the exercise will ultimately expose to you the machinations behind the magic.
Wonderful post, Sean. It reminds me of what I used to love about movies. They’re fun, energizing, entertaining, educational even. They made me feel the impossible wasn’t. Now, too often, they’re spoiled by barely-disguised agendas and politics. Sigh. I really appreciate that you stick to the core of the movie.
Lovely sentiment, Jacqui: “[Movies] made me feel the impossible wasn’t.” Growing up on the Lucas/Spielberg movies of the ’70s and ’80s — Star Wars and Back to the Future and Close Encounters and all the wonderful cinematic fantasy that came out of that particular era — I think my generation was absolutely conditioned to Dream Big, you know? That was something germane to the Baby Boomer DNA, having come of age in the postwar prosperity of the 1950s, and I think their can-do optimism was reflected in their artistic worldviews. That was the gift the Boomers gave Generation X.
Somewhat tragically, I would say, rather than using that gift as a launching pad, Gen X fashioned it into a security blanket. I suspect our greatest cultural contribution to popular storytelling might very well end up being ourselves: We’ll serve as a cautionary tale for future generation against the fetishization of old bedtime stories. It is what it is.
Thanks for sticking with me through another “deep dive” post, Jacqui! Best to you for a productive week ahead!
I love all your posts, but I’ll be honest. I didn’t read the comments, so forgive any redundancies on my part. Geddy Lee said it best, no doubt. When an artist meshes all his/her influences together, and his sound comes forward, that’s voice. Voice takes a long time to develop.
Having said that, we are faced with the problem of art vs. business. Movie studios, record companies, and book publishers are in the business to make money. Just like any business. Everyone has a mortgage to pay. Their product is art. Probably something that never should’ve become a product for sale. Because at the end of the day, the businesses are chasing what sells, and that has nothing to do with originality.
For decades, when a television show hit up on a major network every other network scrambled for the next hit medical, police procedural, comedy show. Publishing is especially guilty of chasing the trend.
I doubt you’ll find true originality ever again in major motion pictures. The cost to produce a film is too high, and viewers have too many choices now. They’ll spend their thirteen dollars elsewhere because they’re tired of being spoon fed the exact same story. Movie studios will continue to spin their wheels wondering where the audience went, and why don’t they still love Star Wars like they did in 1980?
For this 1980 viewer of Star Wars, I don’t care anymore because I was 11 when I sat in that theater. Give me something new. Inspiring. Entertaining. And not spectacle. I don’t care about your fancy special effects either. Hint…James Cameron.
On that note…..thanks for letting me take up space at your blog, Sean!
Hey, Stacey!
Elsewhere in the comments of this post, we discussed the fact that Hollywood — the creative industrial complex, as George Lucas calls it — has always been something of an “arranged marriage” between businessmen and artists, with all the conflicting agendas that entails. (And that’s certainly true of fiction and music publishers, too.) And yet within that restrictive framework — sometimes in spite of it, sometimes even because of it — a lot of truly great art has nonetheless been produced. Star Wars, though no easy feat to bring to the big screen, was made in a studio system that has traditionally been inhospitable to big, new, expensive cinematic visions.
The movie business is in something of a metamorphic phase right now; I seriously doubt theatrical exhibition will even be a viable thing within the next decade (save perhaps special-event screenings in major cities). Artists looking to express themselves, rather than serve up the next course of corporate nostalgia (I’m talkin’ to you, J. J. Abrams), are migrating to other platforms — like streaming services — and, consequently, are creating a new kind of narrative style that isn’t quite feature films or television, but something else entirely, something a little more, shall we say, novelistic. It’s something that’s still evolving, and it’ll go through growing pains, and sure as hell content creators will find themselves up against corporate obstructions, as always. But to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: Art finds a way. When different media become outmoded or corrupted, artists find new and innovative ways to tell their stories. The movie business can (and will) succumb to the inevitability of extinction, but storytelling — originality — will thrive regardless. Every time the pendulum swings in the direction of the industrial part of the creative industrial complex, creatives get creative, and figure out a way to wrest back control.
On the subject of inspired creativity, Stacey’s new novel, A Second Chance House, was released this very week by the Wild Rose Press! It’s a contemporary work of romance/women’s fiction; here’s the Amazon link. Congratulations, Stacey! Best of luck with the book!
Sean
My goodness, you overwhelm me. Thank you for the plug. Totally appreciate it.
To your point, I agree. Artists always find a way to get their message across. The art of storytelling is as old as time. It’s in human DNA to tell stories, and for that I’m thankful. I think I’m saddened to see movies change to fit a mold they don’t seem to fit anymore. I loved the whole movie experience, but now I’m mostly disappointed with the same old song and dance. If you’ll forgive the cliche.
Thank you for always making us think. I love your blog.
Oh, thank you, Stacey, for the kind words! You know, I do put a lot of time and care into this blog, because I genuinely love it — apart from my fiction — and I value the people it’s put my in touch with. My writers group is a thing of the past, but this forum has filled a need in my life — albeit in a different way — for scholarly debate amongst creative colleagues. I think it’s fair to say I’ve learned as much, if not more, from this blog as some of the folks (like yourself) who’ve followed it and contributed to the discussions it’s prompted. It’s a diary, in a way, of my intellectual evolution.
And for the Second Chance House plug, I’m more than happy to support you… in whatever meager way I can! I’ve said this elsewhere on the blog, so forgive the repetition, but I’ve found that authors tend to be a more supportive group of colleagues than screenwriters (given the gladiatorial nature of Hollywood); we tend to take a non-zero-sum worldview: Your success is my success. For that reason, I can say all of us in this little pool of online friends are invested in the commercial prosperity of your new novel! Let’s everybody show our support by buying a copy and leaving a review!
Sean
Excellent post. Thanks for putting so much time into this. I found it thanks to Diana Peach. I sincerely don’t believe that artistic originality is dead, as long as we use our own heart and soul – our own voice – in our writing.
Thank you, Pam, for reading the piece and appreciating the time that went into it! I tell myself every month I’m just going to do a short post, but it inevitably evolves — seemingly of its own accord — into a deep-dive analysis of the chosen thesis! On the subject of creative influences and developing one’s own authentic voice, the essayists I admire tend to be long-form writers, and I guess I’ve just comfortably adopted that style for myself as this blog has developed its identity over the past four years. I get a different type of satisfaction from my essay-writing than I do my fiction, and I treasure the interaction blogging invites.
To that end, one need only take cursory stock of Diana’s blog readership — like yourself, for instance — to know that creativity is alive and well. For me, the vocation — the calling, really — of writing is all about having something to say, and cultivating the mastery of craft one needs to say it effectively, even forcibly. I’ve spilled a lot of “ink” on this blog discussing technique and discipline, and I thought it was high time to address the more abstract aspects of creativity: inspiration, influence, originality. Heart and soul, if you like.
The extent to which originality can be achieved is limited only by the unpredictable influences that inspire a given artist, and the unique perspective through which that artist, informed by his influences, interprets the world around him. It is about heart and soul, the very things that make us human, that endow us with individuality. And in an era in which we derive awe from the algorithmic intelligence and language-processing capabilities of virtual assistants (like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant), the role of the artist is to be both an agent and a champion of unpredictability. Siri may speak… but she doesn’t have voice. Originality, therefore, is simply a matter of embracing what makes us human and harnessing that to ensoul our work.
Well, first off, Sean, congratulations on reaching the point with your blog where I can no longer keep up with reading each and every comment afterward (much as I’d love to have the time to do so; I should never have perused).
It’s funny: most people who know of my writing associate me entirely with non-fiction / memoir. The truth is that I write in other genres, as well (though in the background for now). Still, considering only my main personal-story-driven writing, one might think the observations you discuss here don’t apply. I mean, after all, it truly is unique if I lived it, right? Well, yes … and no. No one else can have exactly the same experience-and-perception as anyone else. And yet I’m aware of the “murmurings” of others from unseen corners as I write. There are other authors whose styles have certainly contributed to the melting pot. And I even have a very small and specific target audience of real people when I write. That is, I write for them—in vocabulary, wit/humor, style and examples—and then just trust that other people will read it and relate as well. And I necessarily count that small and specific target audience as influences, as well.
Still, when I read back my own writing, as you aptly put it, it feels like me and no one else.
Now … when is this proof-infused EFRI pudding hitting the table?
Yeah, this piece got quite a response, huh? You never know what’s gonna resonate. Funny enough, this post was directly inspired my last one (particularly the ensuing discussions in the user comments), just as the next one takes off from where this leaves off. So I guess the thing about inspiration, Erik, is that if you develop enough of a repertoire — be it fiction, essays, what have you — even your own work can influence you! It certainly influences — and refines — one’s thought process. That’s the reason I’ve come to view my blog as an intellectual incubator — a place not where comprehension and deliberation end, but rather where they start. Art and philosophy really are a continuum, and the development of any artist/philosopher is to find and understand his place in that.
Just as a fiction writer needs to develop a sense for which concepts are worth developing into full-length stories and which aren’t, a writer whose bread-and-butter is nonfiction — observational essays and personal anecdotes — needs to learn to recognize episodes in his own life that are sufficiently interesting, and from which he might extract some greater universal truth. That’s a lot harder to do than good essayists — like yourself — make it look. That’s certainly something I’ve tried to do more of here lately, as I’ve gradually moved away from strictly analytical pieces on craft in favor of essays like “Home for Christmas,” “Different Stages,” and “Goodbye, Mr. Bott.”
But the trick to writing good personal nonfiction pieces is developing an eye for worthwhile anecdotes, developing the skill to give them narrative shape, and developing the candor to reveal personally unflattering details. That’s something I thought you did exceptionally well in The Best Advice So Far. And that’s something I’ve aimed to do in the forthcoming post, in which I look back at a very particular period of my own adolescent maturation, try to take new insight from it, and then offer up what I’ve found as (hopefully) a general truism — that is, to turn a specific experience into something universally relatable. That’s what my old mentor David Freeman used to say: The specific is universal. And I think the more your work feels like you and no one else, the more readers will see themselves in the unique stories you tell.
EFRI is coming along, thanks for asking, but if blogging is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. It’s one of the reasons I like to practice both long- and short-form writing: Each one offers a very different type of gratification.
Thanks for reading the piece itself if not the many wonderful comments beneath it! I ask a lot from my readers with respect to their time and attention; these “deep dive” posts are demanding, I’m fully aware, and I’m so grateful for everyone who takes the time to engage with them. Writing these essays is its own reward, but the comments are certainly a cherry on top!
SPC
Some of my favorite essay/short story writers—from Mark Twain to David Sedaris—have the ability to take “nothing” and make it an outrageously entertaining / memorable / moving piece.
I still vividly remember and often talk about a friend of mine from college (with whom I’ve long since lost touch) who wrote a short story about articles of clothes hanging in a closet—and I cried. He wrote another about two Cheerios that fell out of the box, and it was uproariously funny.
I’ve always thought of myself as someone who could write about a shoe and make it worthwhile, as well. While part of a successful essay (fiction or non-fiction) is choosing the right story, part of it is wit, part craft, part vulnerability (as you also noted), and a few other ingredients added in for good measure.
(And, OK, so maybe I’m reading the comments. I’m just not commenting on them, because … well, Pandora and that darned box of hers.)
I never forgot the great anecdote you posted about moving that 700-lbs. piano into your new apartment! I was on the edge of my seat as I read it, absolutely confident there was no possible outcome to that story that didn’t involve the spectacular destruction of that beloved piano! That’s a great example of what we’re talking about, because it was personal, it was suspenseful, it had a universal takeaway, and you were willing to show your own learning curve — to admit that your preconceived notions hadn’t, in fact, been justified.
That’s the thing about storytelling: The stakes don’t have to be HUGE so long as they mean something to a person — be it a fictional character or the writer himself — with whom we empathize. If you make your plight our plight, we’ll care about how the story turns out in the end. It takes skill to be able to do that on command — a mastery of craft — and that’s one of the reasons I value blogging: It gives us a safeguarded forum to experiment, to practice, and to improve.
Yes, yes, and yes. (And one more for good measure, in case I missed anything: YES.)
I appreciate your positivity!
If You Steal From One Author, It’s Plagiarism; If You Steal From Many, It’s Research
Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/09/20/plagiarism/
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/
Indeed, Dave. Many great quotations from that second link you provided are variations of aphorisms I’ve heard elsewhere. Part of the reason it behooves artists to have as many varied interests as possible — to read and experience a wide variety of things — is that it endows our work with a complexity, an originality, it wouldn’t otherwise have. In addition to the many other reasons to stop producing Star Wars movies, certainly one of them is that the current custodians of the franchise only take inspiration from Star Wars itself, thereby reducing the depth of our popular culture to a single layer.
I recall a few years ago, when the first season of True Detective had captured the cultural imagination, creator Nic Pizzolatto faced accusations of plagiarism when lines of dialogue he had written for Matthew McConaughey were found to have both content and phrasing similarities with philosophical ideas expressed in Thomas Ligotti’s nonfiction book The Conspiracy against the Human Race. Rather than censuring Pizzolatto for this, we should have celebrated it. Say what you will about later seasons of TD (and that could certainly be the subject of its own blog post), but part of what made that first installment so captivating was that it was such a singular mélange of diverse influences, from existentialism (Ligotti, Nietzsche), to crime fiction (starting with the old pulp magazine from which the show takes its name all the way through contemporary TV shows like The Wire), to “weird” fiction (Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft, Laird Barron), to Southern Gothic (Flannery O’Connor, et al.). Pizzolatto took all of that (and probably more), put it in a blender, and let his unique personality and worldview shape it into a narrative distinctly his own. That even he’s had trouble replicating what he accomplished with that initial storyline is a testament to what a unique mashup it was; it seems he “left it all on the field,” creatively speaking, with that one.