“As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations”—Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New York: Penguin Group, 2013), 16.
Traditionally, stories have been organized around universal dramatic principles first identified by Aristotle in Poetics, later codified by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and most recently customized for screenwriters in programs like Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! But in recent decades, narrativity has taken on a new, shapeless, very possibly endless permutation: the transmedia “mega-franchise”—that is, the intertextual and ever-expanding storyworlds of Marvel, Star Wars, The Conjuring, Harry Potter’s Wizarding World, et al.
In this month’s guest post, friend of the blog Dave Lerner returns to delineate the five creative objectives of storytelling—and how those have mutated, along with narrativity itself, in this era of branded-IP entertainment.
From the first cave paintings to the Homeric epics to the Globe Theatre to the multicamera sitcom, storytellers across the ages have told stories for reasons so obvious they often go unstated and unacknowledged.
Let’s take a look at the five creative goals that guide storytellers in any medium, whether it be a movie, novel, TV episode, comic book, or otherwise. Commercial considerations such as “profit” and “being hired to do so” are omitted here, as these are not creative goals.
Storytelling Goal #1: Entertainment
Elementary! The storyteller intends for their audience to have fun, to relax, to take their minds off their problems, to experience another world, another life, for a while. Pure escapism. While some may decry “mindless entertainment,” I would argue that it has a necessary place in life—and I’m not the only one who sees the virtues of escapist stories:
Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of “escape.” I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, “What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?” and gave the obvious answer: jailers.
C. S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
Storytelling Goal #2: Artistic Expression
Although the definition of “Art” has been and will be debated endlessly, for the purpose of this category I will use the second definition from Wiktionary:
The creative and emotional expression of mental imagery, such as visual, auditory, social, etc.
To further specify, art is more about the feelings the artist is expressing and the statement the artist is making than the emotions they are attempting to evoke in their audience.
Arguments about whether or not a given piece is “art,” or a given medium is “capable of creating art,” though valid in other contexts, will be disregarded here. I’ll assume if you say your piece is art, then it’s art. I am also ignoring the quality of the piece, the term “a work of art.” By my definition, a movie can be as much a piece of art as a painting, sculpture, symphony, literary novel, etc., though when it is, it’s usually called a “film” and not a “movie.”
Storytelling Goal #3: Education
The storyteller aspires to teach their audience something they did not know before. While documentaries and lectures are obvious examples, many read historical novels or hard science fiction for much the same purpose. When I was a child, I first learned that water expands when it freezes from a Shazam! comic book. Of course, a person may forget most of what they’d learned almost immediately afterwards, but the learning experience itself was enjoyable.
Even if the “facts” presented are deliberately inaccurate, as long the intent is for people to believe them, this category applies.
Storytelling Goal #4: Inspiration
Unlike Education, this rarely attempts to present an audience with facts they did not know. Rather, the storyteller is inviting the audience to look at things it already knows in a different light. Bible stories come to mind here, but any story described as “inspiring”—Charles Dickens’ frequently adapted A Christmas Carol—might fit. Many allegories qualify, as well. George Orwell’s Animal Farm doesn’t teach us anything about animals, but “some animals are more equal than others” may lead to new realizations about power and privilege.
Note that this category includes various forms of propaganda.
Storytelling Goal #5: Call to Action
Whereas Inspiration tries to get an audience to think about something in a different way, Call to Action exhorts them to do something. Most stories with stated morals, such as Aesop’s Fables, are Calls to Action. Don’t Look Up is a recent example of this—a “self-preventing prophecy”: It isn’t trying to predict the future so much as influence it. Some older post-holocaust movies, such as On the Beach, served as cautionary tales, as well.
Propaganda can fall in here in addition to Inspiration. In contrast with On the Beach and Don’t Look Up, for instance, much of our current dystopian fictions are “libertarian wish-fulfillment fantasies of a world where it’s every man for himself, there’s no problem that can’t be resolved with a firearm, and you never have to pay taxes again”—arguably a Call to Action of a different, less-noble aim.
Fiction can and usually does fall into more than one category. Your artistic piece might be inspirational. You might present new facts in order to get people to do something. And you almost always hope your story is entertaining on some level. And we can certainly debate which aspect of which piece belongs in which categories. Also worth noting: The categories themselves are morally neutral.
The dominant form of commercial narrativity is now the “mega-franchise,” which has inspired both the devotion of legions of fans as well as explicit contempt from auteur filmmakers including Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. The mega-franchise format certainly has controversial and/or problematic issues; one of the worst, yet mostly overlooked, is how it warps and corrupts the very reasons for creating a story.
While the precise definition of “mega-franchise” is subjective, for the purposes of this post it will mean any corporately managed multimedia initiative in which continuity, “point-and-clap” recognition, fan speculation, and foreshadowing of forthcoming entries are prioritized over character, plot, and the standalone entertainment value of any single offering. This includes the “cinematic universes” most successfully presented by Marvel and Star Wars and attempted by numerous other franchises, as well as long-form transmedia serials such as Lost, The Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones.
Now let’s look at how the storytelling goals defined above have been warped to serve the commercial demands of open-ended mega-franchises.
1. Entertainment
Okay, most of these movies, TV shows, etc., are basically entertaining. They provide spectacle, amazing special effects, action, humor, decent-enough characters, skilled actors, and numerous other reasons to watch. While one could argue that the entertainment value is diminished by the amount of background information they require on a basic level, they do entertain.
However, increasingly people watch these movies and TV shows less because they expect a satisfying entertainment experience in itself and more to “protect” their sunk-cost investment of time, money, and energy in a long-running franchise. These people may also be acting out of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) or completism, the way a comic-book collector might buy five copies of the same issue they do not intend to read merely because it has five variant covers.
2. Artistic Expression
Although one can make an artistic statement in any creative endeavor, doing so in a mega-franchise has its own unique challenges. In particular, the writers, directors, actors, and other talents have to obey the demands of the studio executives overseeing (and paying for) the project. Of course, this is true of any TV show or movie not self-financed, and many commercial content creators still find a way to express themselves artistically, even franchise filmmakers working under the pressure of high audience expectations, like George Miller (with Mad Max: Fury Road), George Lucas (The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles), and Robert Rodriguez (Once Upon a Time in Mexico).
Modern mega-franchises increasingly have stricter requirements, as creators are expected to conform to the demands of not just this entry but previous and future entries. But the major source of my contention in this particular category is with fans who insist that each entry is a “high work of art,” equal in merit to the greatest artistic achievements in human history. These fans cannot simply enjoy these movies and TV shows as “mere entertainment.” There is a distinction:
Art, at its best, mines the paradoxes that make humans human. It celebrates our ability to embrace ambiguity, and to experience this sustained, unresolved state as pleasurable, or at least significant.
Commercial entertainment, by contrast, has the opposite purpose. The word entertain—from the Latin for “to hold within”—literally means “maintain,” or “continue in a certain condition.” Its goal is to validate the status quo values by which we already live, reinforce consumerism, and—most of all—reassure us that there is certainty in this world. Not only do we find out whodunnit, but we get to experience a story in which there are definitive answers to big questions, villains to blame when things go wrong, and a method for administering justice. These plots depict a character we like (usually a young man), put him in danger, raise the stakes until we can’t take it anymore, and then give him the solution he needs to vanquish his enemy and win the day, at which point we can all breathe a sigh of relief. It’s the stereotypically male arc of arousal: crisis, climax, and sleep.
Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 137–38
To reiterate: Any piece of fiction can have a degree of artistic merit. But I do not believe that Avengers: Endgame or The Book of Boba Fett stand alongside Citizen Kane or M*A*S*H. Nor should fans claim they do in order to justify watching and enjoying them.
3. Education
Entries in a mega-franchise present many “facts”: origins, reasons for certain actions in previous installments, foreshadowing of the next offering, “clues” to discuss and debate. Now, while all fiction has plots and characters, the mega-franchise demands we remember trivial details from one to the next—that we basically study each piece. And if we miss any one, we miss information needed to fully understand and enjoy the next one. All of these “facts” apply only within a given metanarrative itself, and have no relevance outside of it. Mega-franchises exist mostly to comment only on themselves.
4. Inspiration
These pieces deliberately invite discussion and debate. What did that scene mean? How does the actions by this guy in this movie square with what he did in the last movie? Whose hand was that in the post-credit scene? But again, these examinations only apply within the context of the particular narrative continuum itself, with no relevance beyond it, or even to other mega-franchises.
5. Call to Action
This one’s obvious. Watch the next movie. Watch the TV spinoffs. Watch the stuff you’d missed so you have all the information you need to watch the new stuff. Watch the stuff you’ve already watched but you’ll now interpret differently. Discuss the events with likeminded people to increase insularity and to provide more incentive to keep up with the latest developments by watching the next installment. Buy the books so you have a more complete understanding of the background. Buy T-shirts and toys to prove that you are part of the cognoscenti. Again, none of this is intended to benefit you. The only intended benefit is to the franchise’s finances.
Now, I’m not saying the various franchises deliberately corrupted these five storytelling goals. The corruption grew organically, developed as each success built on previous success. But the corruption is there.
I’m also not saying you can’t enjoy Marvel or Star Wars or The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones or any of these franchises. This is not a Call to Action for you to boycott anything. If you enjoy them then you enjoy them. Rather, it’s intended as an Inspiration to get you to think about basic storytelling goals and consider the effects the various mega-franchises have on them. And, I hope, to provide some small measure of Entertainment.
Really enjoyed this article, and agree with everything. I’d add, maybe under ‘education’, a huge reason for storytelling in the pre-writing era was to preserve family and group history. This is even more true in pre-symbolic times, when early man didn’t have totems or remembrances of their history, just the verbal stories.
Thanks for sharing this!
Indeed, Jacqui! Storytelling most certainly emerged as a way of preserving a tribe’s history and values from generation to generation. I opened my preamble above with a quote from Rushkoff, but it’s worth providing the full citation here:
Accordingly, one of the issues I’ve raised repeatedly on this blog — in “Challenging Our Moral Imagination” and “Here Lies Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Patriarchal Propaganda” and “In the Multiverse of Madness” and as recently as last month’s book review of Blood, Sweat & Chrome — is that so much of our commercial fiction is (unconsciously) embedded with the values of neoliberal capitalism and Randian individualism, the defining narratives of our time. Mega-franchises, in particular, exist to reinforce status-quo consumerism, as Dave demonstrates under the Call to Action subheading in the second half of the preceding essay. I think it’s very much worth asking ourselves if that is a noble use of storytelling, one of civilization’s most durable and dependable tools, which is why I was so pleased to get Dave’s perspective for this month’s guest post.
Thanks for joining the discussion, Jacqui! Have a safe and happy Memorial Day!
That makes sense. I agree that that is an educational way to use stories, to teach the next generation the history of a people
Thank you for your kind words. I am glad that you liked it
Nice summary of various narrative goals. The main problem with these mega-franchises, at least for me, is staying too long at the party. Okay, I liked Spiderman as a kid. Seeing a movie that elevated the cartoon into something more was clever. But over and over and over again? Ugh. It’s time to move on.
I love Tolkien, without let or reservation. And I hope the new series they’re trying to get off the ground dies a swift, painful death. Other terrific books should get made into movies. My short list would include authors Diana Wynne Jones, Patricia McKillip, and Robin McKinley. I have no idea why Correia’s Monster Hunter hasn’t been made into a movie–it practically cries out for a film adaptation. And while you might disagree with my list, I doubt you’ll disagree with the sentiment. And I think a lot of movie-goers would be pleased if filmmakers would just find new material already. Please. : )
And I’ll throw this out, too, although you’ll probably disagree with it. I rarely buy new trade published books. I won’t buy a new children’s book for my grandchildren unless I’ve already read it. I rarely watch new movies. That’s how much I hate the woke agenda. Non-Christians don’t want me shoving my religion down their throats, and I’m tired of the LGBT talking points. Current agents, publishers, filmmakers, etc. are consistently alienating a large part of potential audiences.
When they get over that, I’ll consider spending money on their products again.
As far as I know, Cathleen, Tolkien’s estate refused to grant Amazon permission to incorporate plot points from the Lord of the Rings novels in its new series, The Rings of Power, so the show will mostly be drawing from copious backstory details in the appendices. While that certainly gives the producers uncommon license to experiment creatively, rather than merely depicting the same events already definitively covered in both Tolkien’s novels and Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, I do worry that without a narrative foundation upon which to build their series, the showrunners will succumb to the same tiresome instinct for storyless overplotting — i.e., having a lot of meaningless things just happen — that made Game of Thrones (both the books and the show) such a boring, pointless slog. We’ll see.
I suspect that part of the reason so much of the social-justice messaging in our popular fiction (particularly television) seems uncomfortably forced is because most of our commercial entertainment is symbolically liberal but fundamentally conservative. Canon-obsessed fanboys, for instance, flipped their shit when Eternals featured the MCU’s first openly gay superhero, or when Superman came out as bisexual in the pages of DC Comics last year, but for reasons I’ve covered elsewhere, a token nod to changing mores doesn’t alter the fact that superhero fiction — along with most of what Hollywood produces — is deeply encoded with conservative values, from neoliberal capitalism to Randian individualism to patriarchal hegemony to police/military worship. But every so often nowadays, the producers of our mega-franchises shoehorn an LGBTQ character into the narrative and consider themselves progressive for doing so, and all that does is piss off both the conservative fan base who sees it as a betrayal of the (badly dated) source material as well as the liberal fan base who (rightly) views it as meaningless lip service.
So, outside of movies like Jordan Peele’s Get Out, content creators haven’t for the most part really figured out how to integrate progressive themes into movies and TV shows, particularly ones rooted in 20th-century concepts and values (like Star Wars and the superheroes of Marvel and DC Comics). I will say that we’re never going to tell truly progressive stories until we stop telling the same old stories — Terminator and Transformers and Halloween and Ghostbusters and Star Wars and Star Trek, et al. — in favor of new narratives, relevant and sufficient to this new millennium. Until that happens, all we’re doing — are you paying attention, Matt Reeves? — is clumsily grafting progressive values onto morally and socially and culturally regressive franchises whose very existence (and continued popularity) only serves to celebrate outmoded folkways at the expense of challenging our moral imagination. They may consider themselves card-carrying liberals, but the filmmakers behind our most popular mega-franchises are some of the most deeply conservative voices in our culture at present. And until they come to terms with that, we’re going to get a lot more hackneyed “mixed messaging” in our commercial fiction.
Thanks for reading and commenting, Cathleen. Wishing you a safe, healthy, and happy Memorial Day!
SPC
I always get nervous when I see they’re making a movie or TV show from a book I like
People say that even if the movie is bad it doesn’t ruin the book. But even if the movie flops more people will have seen it than read the book. And images leave an indelible impression
I loved the Riddle Master series, but I don’t know if a movie or TV series can do it justice
I greatly admire Tana French‘s Dublin Murder Squad series of novels (of which there are six in total): They are expertly plotted, exquisitely written, emotionally complicated, thematically focused thrillers. These aren’t airport-newsstand potboilers; French writes literary crime fiction. Great whodunits — all six of them — my personal favorite being Faithful Place, the third book, something I noted in “Mirror/Mirror.”
Starz produced a TV series a few years ago called Dublin Murders that adapted the first two novels across a single season… and it was absolutely dreadful. It was miscast. It was bizarrely structured, opening with the inciting events of the first novel, In the Woods, only to pause that storyline halfway through to then squeeze in the entire plot of the second novel, The Likeness, an altogether unrelated mystery! The story of The Likeness is badly short-shrifted before the narrative then returns to resolve the murder mystery that began in In the Woods. Huh?
None of what made the French’s books such a pleasure — the suspenseful plotting, the rich characterization, the excellent dialogue and immersive prose — survived the translation to the small screen. None of it. Perhaps most shameful is that the loving geographical detail and authentic sense of Irish atmosphere she conjures is also entirely absent, because the fucking series shot in Belfast, not Dublin! Belfast in no way looks or feels like Dublin. It would be like shooting Law & Order: LA in San Francisco because, ya know, they’re both in the same state, so what’s the difference?
And to your point, Dave, as successful as the novels have been, the TV show likely has enjoyed far greater reach. And most people I’ve spoken to who watched the show but never read the books didn’t think too highly of Dublin Murders. Why should they? It plays like a standard-issue police procedural, so who cares less? So, you know those viewers won’t be inspired to read the source material. And that’s a shame, because the novels are just truly terrific pieces of work.
Some characters and concepts are just meant to exist in the medium that birthed them. Few have the transmedia potential of, say, Batman or Dracula. Contemporary “prestige” TV is particularly problematic when it comes to adapting preexisting material, because today’s showrunners are, inexplicably and reflexively, inclined to view their series as “70-hour movies,” a problem I elaborated on in “Young Indiana Jones Turns 30.” Accordingly, their creative impulse is to re-sequence events (nonlinearity, baby!) and lard a simple narrative with needless supplemental embellishments: explicit backstories and additional plotlines, etc. In our postnarrative era, the discipline of storytelling is quickly becoming a lost skill set. French has it… but the television writers who adapted her work got in in their heads they could improve upon perfection.
Spoiler alert: They didn’t.
A comment I made on Building Earthsea: How Le Guin Laid a Shaky Foundation for Her World
(https://mythcreants.com/blog/building-earthsea-how-le-guin-laid-a-shaky-foundation-for-her-world/) that applies here:
>Our protagonist, Ged, is dark skinned, as are most of the characters we meet in the archipelago. Le Guin is explicit about this, so there’s little chance of readers being confused about what people look like, but she doesn’t make a big deal about it.
When the Sci Fi Channel (as it was known back then) did an adaptation, Ged and the other characters were white
Le Guin was NOT consulted about this change, and had no say whatsoever. Needless to say, she wasn’t thrilled https://slate.com/culture/2004/12/ursula-k-le-guin-on-the-tv-earthsea.html
I suppose it would surprise a lot of folks to learn that an author has no meaningful authority or influence over Hollywood adaptations of their work. When you sell the screen rights to your novel or comic, the filmmakers can pretty much then do whatever they please with it. And giving the original author a “consulting producer” credit on the film or TV series isn’t so much a token contractual concession as it is a strategic PR tool: by putting Le Guin’s name on Earthsea or George R. R. Martin’s on Game of Thrones or Bob Kane’s on Tim Burton’s Batman, etc., the producers are hoping to imply to the fan base that this is a fully authorized and approved adaptation of the source material, despite the fact that the original authors are seldom consulted — and invariably ignored.
Same, by the way, is true for screenwriters. If a screenwriter sells a spec script, the studio and producers can rewrite or reinterpret it any way they please. Joss Whedon was famously unhappy with the way his Buffy screenplay was interpreted; Shane Black has stated that The Last Boy Scout suffered for all the creative compromises to his original script. And these were A-list screenwriters at the height of their commercial sucess at that time! It doesn’t matter — the power structure in Hollywood is tilted in favor of the studios and prodcos, never the writers. Le Guin’s experience, though unfortunate, is par for the course.
But even a bad adaptation of a novel will drive book sales, so there’s that. (Not as much as a good adaptation, but still.) So, the advantage to seeing one’s book adapted by Hollywood is that it will generate greater awareness of the book itself. But you’re not going to have any say over the adaptation. A very good friend of mine, a TV showrunner, is currently adapting a recently released novel for Hulu, and though she is consulting the author — and the author has been very supportive of the production — the series is the showrunner’s story, to be presented in accordance with the showrunner’s creative intentions for the product. For better or worse.
As for Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series, Correia’s association w/ the “unsuccessful right-wing anti-diversity”* Sad Puppies may have rendered him toxic to Hollywood
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies
Have to say, I was completely unaware of either Larry Correia or Sad Puppies, so I just learned something here on my own blog! According to Wikipedia:
Interesting. It would seem that Correia, like many conservatives, fails to understand that most commercial fiction and filmmaking is deeply embedded with conservative, libertarian, and/or patriarchal values. Yes, the majority of authors and filmmakers self-identify as Democrats, liberals, and/or progressives, but Hollywood (much like the entire State of California, as it happens) is only symbolically liberal, but is functionally conservative. Have another look at that Rushkoff quote above explaining the difference between art and entertainment. Entertainment — which is what Hollywood produces — mostly exists to support, celebrate, and promote “an aspirational culture in which product purchases, job advancement, trophy spouses, and the accumulation of capital are the only prizes that matter” (Rushkoff, Team Human, 142).
When I look at most of the movies we consumed repeatedly and giddily as kids — The Secret of My Success and License to Drive and Top Gun and Escape from New York and Rocky IV and even, in many respects, Back to the Future — it’s hard not to see many of those Reagan-era aspirational values stamped all over them. Movies that actually dared to challenge status-quo consumerism — like John Carpenter’s They Live — were few and far between. (I think I’m going to do a reappraisal of Superman IV for its 35th anniversary this July where I talk about how, despite being widely considered the worst comic-book movie ever made, it actually has an uncommonly noble central message for a superhero movie.) I mean, I haven’t seen Top Gun: Maverick, but as audiences are packing into theaters to go see it, and mainstream critics stumbling over themselves to praise it, it doesn’t at all surprise me to read sober assessments of the film as self-righteously jingoistic, state-sponsored propaganda for the military–industrial complex.
This is why I implore more writers of commercial fiction to challenge their moral imagination. We need more popular stories — not art-house stuff that will only ever appeal to a limited audience — to promote noble values, like Abbott Elementary (about public service) and Turning Red (about big emotions) and Ted Lasso (about compassionate masculinity). Our commercial entertainment can have mass appeal without pandering to the lowest common denominator and/or unconsciously regurgitating the institutionalized folkways of the era. What we need is a new kind of storytelling that aspires to the commercial accessibility of entertainment with the intellectual nobility of art. Such storytelling feels increasingly out of reach, however, in an entertainment landscape dominated by self-perpetuating mega-franchises on one end of the spectrum and self-serious “prestige” TV on the other.
All of this is to say that Correia has nothing to worry about: His liberal/progressive colleagues are probably, on balance, doing a far better job at promoting conservative values — and reaching a far wider audience of young men who self-identify as liberal — than he ever could. Relax, Larry, and let a few progressively themed sci-fi novels win a Hugo now and then. Most of the shit audiences are consuming is laced with conservative values, so you can rest easy, pal — all’s right with the world.
Following up on this discussion, New York Times film critic A. O. Scott published a piece this morning titled “Are the Movies Liberal?” Here’s an excerpt:
Couldn’t have said it better.
Sean
In a comment in There He Was… and in He Walked you said the following:
>A good editor asks: What are the author’s creative intentions for the material, and how do I best help her realize those intentions to their fullest creative potential? In other words: You aren’t there to rewrite the material in your voice, but rather to help the author tell the best story possible in her voice. You’re gut-checking her, not rewriting her.
You did that w/ me here
You had some good ideas, some of which I incorporated, but you never FORCED me to add something that didn’t fit, no matter how good it was
In my reply I said “A good editor doesn’t dress you in their clothes. But they’ll help you choose which of your own clothes you should wear, and make sure your shirt has no stains and your fly is zipped” and you did that here. I still look like me, but I’m my best version of me
You’ve mentioned the bad experiences you had in Hollywood w/ people who had no understanding of the craft, yet wanted to foist their ideas on you no matter whether they fit or were even any good
My editor here had an amazing grasp of the craft, plenty of good ideas, yet let me write my own stuff
In the end, my name is on this piece and I am proud of it. You helped me improve it, w/o but still let it be mine
I really enjoyed working w/ you, and I look forward to doing it again
Dave,
Your gratitude is entirely unnecessary… but greatly appreciated nonetheless, sir! I’m grateful — that you had something to say, thought of this blog as the forum to say it, and then worked with me so graciously to develop the idea into a post.
You know, I’ve been married a very long time, and I have occasionally been asked — by both younger couples trying to decide if they should take the “next step” (move in together, get engaged, etc.), or sometimes by contemporaries finding their soulmate at midlife — what the secret to a long-term marriage (or romantic relationship) is. I don’t pretend to be an expert on those matters; I mostly just got very lucky, then learned over time to appreciate how lucky I got. But… if there’s a piece of wisdom I like to pass along to newer couples, it’s this: You’re going to disagree, you’re going to fight, you’re going to drive one another to the brink of homicide on occasion. All of that will happen: It’s inevitable and even natural.
But even in your most heated moments, never lose sight of this fact: You and your spouse are on the same team. You’re partners. No one has your back in this life like that one person. My wife and I, by that token, are both coequal members of Team Carlin. And if you keep that in mind — that the person making you insane in that fleeting moment only wants the best for you, because what’s good for you is good for the team — you’ll never make the mistake of treating him/her like an adversary. Like the enemy. You know? Yes, there will be disagreements — sometimes irreconcilable — but everyone is operating in the best interest of the team itself. (The Judd Apatow comedy This Is 40 is one of the most emotionally candid and accurate depictions of marriage I’ve ever seen — and my wife agrees!)
I think the same logic can be applied to any kind of partnership. Writers and editors are in a creative partnership, working together in the best interest of the material itself. Sometimes there are disagreements, but as long as there is trust and mutual respect, a productive resolution can always be reached.
Screenwriters and their managers are also in a creative partnership. Much more so than an agent, who is mostly just there to close a deal, managers serve to guide careers; they are there to understand the creative sensibilities and professional ambitions of the client, and help that screenwriter to be the best possible verion of himself. (Please forgive the gender-biased pronoun.) Ultimately, my manager and I developed a catastrophic trust deficit — he didn’t trust my instincts, nor I his — and when that was gone, any sense of mutual respect went with it. I should’ve severed by association with him the moment I realized my manager had no interest in helping me be the best version of myself, but for reasons I’ve covered exhaustively, I didn’t.
Trust takes time. When we develop a trusting bond with someone — be it a spouse, a friend, a talent agent, a doctor, a mechanic, a barber — we tend to value those relationships and nurture them over decades. The people in our lives whom we trust and respect are, when you boil it down, the ones who want us to be the best possible versions of ourselves. Accordingly, I try to repay that trust and reciprocate that respect by helping the people in my life — my friends, my colleagues (like yourself, Dave), the environmental activists I mentor for the Climate Reality Project — to be the best possible versions of themselves. And I talked a bit in “You Can’t Go Home Again” about the Dark Night of the Soul I experienced when I realized some old friends have no interest in being their best selves, so poisonously addicted have they become to sanctimony. And learning how to deal with people like that has been one of the defining challenges of my personal life this past year.
But I do love working with other environmental activists and other creative writers, Dave — it’s such a pleasure to engage in a productive, mutually respectful working relationship with a colleague who shares my own passions — and so for the opportunity to work on “The Last Walking Infinity Throne Corrupts Infinitely,” I thank you, sir. I’m pleased you found the experience as pleasant and productive. Let’s do it again sometime!
SPC
What a great list of story-telling goals, Sean. I love that.
I can understand the film industry’s need to make money. Most movies are extremely expensive to produce, and their investors want their payback. Creativity is a risk, and though we are THRILLED to find that exceptional film, we aren’t going to stop watching the mediocre stuff in between (for the most part).
And herein lies one of the advantages of writing books. We don’t have to sacrifice story-telling goals to make back our investment since the investment is rarely more than our time. Granted, time is a valuable commodity, but we can stick to our goals if we want to and tell the story we want to tell.
Thank you, Diana, but I cannot take credit for this particular post. Old friend of the blog Dave Lerner pitched the concept; I loved it; he wrote it; I posted it. Dave did all the heavy lifting!
Having operated as both a work-for-hire screenwriter in Hollywood and now an independent novelist, I can say I much prefer the boundless creative freedom enjoyed by the latter to the endless creative compromises endured by the former. The challenge we face as authors, of course, is that even a bestselling book isn’t going to have the reach of an even modestly successful movie or TV show, a point I made above in regard to Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series. Last I heard, the average person reads less than one book a month. Now, I was never much of a math student, but I’m pretty sure “less than one” is equal to zero. As a culture, I just don’t think we have the attention span anymore that a novel requires. Even folks who make their living reading manuscripts — like agents and editors — do so these days with one eye on the iPhone, so how an author is ever meant to get anyone’s sustained attention anymore is an increasingly daunting challenge.
But at least we get to write what we want to write, the way we think it should be written! I certainly got to a place in my own career where commercial success became appreciably less important to me than creative autonomy. I wouldn’t trade the latter for the former.
Thank you, Diana, for stopping by and supporting the blog! Here’s to your health, creativity, and productivity!
Sean
Thank you
Although there are many books out there that are obviously just “cash-grabs” you’re right that most of us have the advantage of writing what we want
And if you are just writing something w/ an eye on cash, it probably won’t be as good as something by someone who WANTS to write that sort of thing. Whereas if you write your passion, it probably will be better written, and have a better chance of success, by whatever your definition of success
There’s certainly nothing wrong with commercial success: desiring it; pursuing it; even attaining it. Shakespeare and Dickens and Hemingway and Tana French all enjoyed commercially successful writing careers, and our culture is objectively better off for their creative contributions.
The challenge today is that so much of our commercial entertainment is corporately owned and managed, hence the corruption of the five storytelling goals. The chief objective of our mega-franchises is to suspend us in a state of “commercial adolescence,” which it does by training us to view stories as puzzles to solve. To wit: Check out this idiotic article on Mashable — “‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ has a lot of explaining to do” — in which the author demands the new series answer such pointless questions as Where did the nickname “Ben” come from?; How come Obi-Wan seemed to age so fast?; and my personal favorite: How is Force-ghosting done? The answer to that last question, of course, is the same as the one to How does Superman defy gravity? Because it’s fucking make-believe! Truly, Dave, articles like “‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ has a lot of explaining to do” perfectly demonstrate — and unequivocally verify — the thesis of “The Last Walking Infinity Throne Corrupts Infinitely.”
The “mega-franchise” model is the newfangled entertainment apparatus on which Hollywood is betting its future rests. Accordingly, storytellers who attain some level of success in Hollywood are trained to tell stories in this mode. To say nothing of the fact that many Millennial screenwriters and filmmakers came of age on the mega-franchise model — much the way Xers did on its prototype: the “program-length toy commercials” of the ’80s like He-Man and The Transformers — and genuinely consider it to be a perfectly noble (even artistically sophisticated) form of narrativity. So, it isn’t just storytelling that’s susceptible to corruption; so are the storytellers. (Hence the reason my soul was saved by my own professional failure.)
Generation X swore it wouldn’t “sell out to the Man” the way the Boomers did. We never had the chance: While we were busy watching the syndicated after-school cartoons of the ’80s, Hollywood systematically rewired our brains; we were obedient “hostage buyers” to corporate products before we even realized it. Accordingly, we took the neoliberal-capitalist values we learned from those cartoons, embedded them into our modern superhero universes, and then got the Millennials and Gen Z addicted to that. And it’s going to take writers of profound moral imagination to offer alternative narratives to the status quo–affirming folkways of the corporate mega-franchise. That, to my view, is the key creative challenge of our times.
Diana, I’ve shared similar sentiments here on Sean’s blog several times before. As much as I (we) might wish that storytelling in film was more original, creative, thoughtful, etc., as far as I understand it, storytelling has never been the primary driving force in the film industry. The industry has been the driving force, i.e., being a business and turning maximum profit. That is Business 101. They just happen to make that profit telling stories. And like any product for sale, as long as people are buying it, they’ll keep making it. The premise of Singin’ in the Rain comes to mind: “Everyone is making ‘talkies’ now; if we don’t get ahead of this (as silent film makers), we’ll go under!”
And I don’t think directors and producers and actors, etc., are under any illusion that every film they make has the potential to be great or memorable. Actors act to make money. Directors direct to make money. And if more money can be made turning out mediocre products more often, then that is what they’ll do (and that is what good business demands they do).
Until when and if consumers stop consuming what is being put out, there is no reason to change the business model. If enough people are into the reboots or the endless Easter eggs or the sprawling franchises, then it makes sense to keep making them.
Being creative usually requires time and risk; and those are, by nature, often antithetical to making maximum profit (at least the combination is; a lengthy delay alone can work to drive sales up, as I assume is the hope with Avatar II).
Personally, I did stop consumer “whatever is out there” a while ago. I haven’t owned a television in over 20 years, just because I found I had too much else to do in life, and it was too easy to consumer “whatever” with a TV. If there’s something I want to watch, I can still watch it online; I just have to be more intentional. And it cut out one bill. I also don’t go to movies out of boredom and just see “something.” In that way, moviegoing still feels like a special treat.
As for great storytellers, I do believe more exist as book authors. And most won’t ever be “businesses turning a high profit.” In some ways, I feel like the movie industry doesn’t need to be creative. They can let other people be creative in the shadows, and then sift through that “time and risk” once it’s published with a mind toward potential profit and franchisability. But I’m hard-pressed to think of an author who remained as creative once they entered the world of profit-first, because “the next installment” becomes a demand rather than a natural part of the creative process (at least as I see it).
I’ll sum up by saying, your own stories have always been highly creative, unique, entertaining and thought-provoking. And I hope you make it big someday. If anyone could straddle both worlds and have a creative well deep enough to sustain the demands of the business/profit end—it’s you!
Thanks for this wonderful comment, Erik.
In response to your first point, to quote George Lucas: “There is a word out there called the creative industrial complex, which means the industrial part rules everything.” I think that notion — of Hollywood as a creative–industrial complex — accounts for everything you so eloquently expressed above, sir.
None of this is to say, by the way, that commercial entertainment can’t be meaningful! Films can absolutely intend to be profitable and have mass appeal without necessarily sacrificing or compromising creativity. The late filmmaker Joel Schumacher (Batman Forever) was always very upfront about the fact that he was an entertainer, and that he was there to provide entertainment, and try to deliver on the feelings of satisfaction and happiness that good entertainment evoke. As he said about his 1987 movie The Lost Boys — a movie profoundly meaningful to and influential for me — in a 2004 making-of featurette:
I have also, Erik, become much more selective about what I consume — the shows I watch, the books I read — and have pretty much forsworn all the must-see franchises to which I’d unconsciously become a reluctant, even self-hating hostage buyer. I agree with Dave: If a mega-franchise like Marvel or Star Wars genuinely adds value to your life, then that’s all the reason in the world to justify one’s continued interest in/commitment to it. That’s the metric I use: Does this still add value to my life? But if it doesn’t, then I won’t hesitate to let it go, no matter how meaningful it once may’ve been to me. That’s the discipline to being a fan in a media landscape of endless must-see content: remembering you didn’t sign up to be a lifetime subscriber. You can opt-out anytime you want.
For those interested in learning more about D. Wallace Peach’s fantasy fiction, please visit Myths of the Mirror.
I had actually mostly stopped watching TV because, during a particularly difficult time, I was having MAJOR concentration issues
Things have gotten better,but I’ve found that, by and large, I don’t really miss it, nor do I miss movies. And nowadays since EVERY show has a “season arc” and a “series arc”, you can’t really just watch ONE episode of a sit-com
While I know that there are some good shows out there, I’m just not ready to commit
>I’m hard-pressed to think of an author who remained as creative once they entered the world of profit-first,
I STOPPED reading one of my favorite humorous fantasy series when a book was obviously just there to sell the next book; no attention paid to plot or characters, just everyone running down the clock. It actually had the opposite effect on me
While long-form television series can absolutely be enjoyable and even satisfying — the supremely entertaining 24 comes to mind, even though it should go without saying by now I harbor a great many moral reservations about the show — I absolutely reached a point in the last handful of years where I grew tired of TV, which once upon a time had only requested my intermittent attention, but now demands my habitual obedience. And when every single show became a “70-hour movie,” I was pretty much like, “Yeah, fuck all of this.”
One of the great pleasures of old-school TV was that every episode gave you a satisfying experience unto itself. When I was a boy, we used to have Sunday dinner at my grandmother’s in Paramus, and if traffic on the George Washington Bridge was heavy, we didn’t necessarily make it back to the Bronx in time for Knight Rider. But I could catch the next week’s show without missing a beat, and when the network reran episodes over summer break, I’d get a second chance to see the ones I’d missed.
In high school, I was responsible for walking the family dog at night; if I got back from that and wasn’t necessarily ready to go to bed, I could tune into the 11:00 p.m. showing of Cheers on WPIX and enjoy a quiet half hour of private decompression. There was certainly a sense of continuity to Cheers — there were plotlines, like Rebecca’s relationship with Robin Colcord, that played out over multiple episodes/seasons — but each episode offered a satisfying, self-contained, cathartic experience. It gave the day a sense of closure, you know? And if I happened to catch the next night’s episode, great — but it wasn’t required. Like the bar itself, you were welcome to come and go as you pleased.
Same with Young Indy: If I was home on a Saturday night, I’d watch it, and I never had trouble following a given episode because each one had a beginning, middle, and end. It never occurred to me to think, Gee, wouldn’t it make more sense for Lucas to use the televisional format to create a season-long adventure for Indy? Never. I had an open invitation to tune in, not a mandatory obligation; it was TV, not fucking jury duty. (Here’s betting the inevitable post–Harrison Ford Indy TV series I recently prophesized opts for serialized story arcs over episodic adventures.)
None of this is to suggest that narrative experimentation should be eschewed or discouraged — quite the opposite! Feature films and broadcast TV, the dominant entertainment forms of the latter half of the 20th century, are synthesizing and metamorphosing in our new era of on-demand streaming content; new technologies and presentational modes have always inspired creative innovations to content itself. And part of me even admires what Marvel has pulled off — and sustained — with the ever-expanding MCU. But the MCU ouroboros, the empty-promise puzzle-boxing of Westworld and La Brea, and the point-and-clap priorities of prequels and legacy sequels like Obi-Wan Kenobi have nothing to do with creative experimentation, and everything to do with commercial calculation. Rapaciously profit-driven mega-franchises have turned storytelling into an endless Easter-egg hunt, and the sheer amount of money, time, and attention they demand of us now is both unfair and unsustainable. Such is why I’ve moved on from them and never looked back. I don’t miss any of it, either, Dave.
Dave, great post. It’s clear and well organized; and it does feel separate from yet totally integrated with Sean’s blog here, which is no mean feat. The title was certainly curiosity inducing as well.
Few people will ever realize how much time it takes to write and publish a solid blog post, much less to do it within externally “dictated” parameters. I hope it was not only challenging but fun. It was fun for me.
Thanks for that, Erik! Dave has been consistently supportive of this blog for as long as I can remember, like yourself, routinely offering thoughtful contributions in the comments, including links to pertinent articles he’s encountered. A number of my blog posts — like “Young Indiana Jones Turns 30″ — are expansions of ideas first expressed in a reply to one of his comments, in fact, so I owe him a debt of thanks for his reliably valuable engagement.
With “The Last Walking Infinity Throne Corrupts Infinitely,” we arguably came full circle: The thesis of this essay emerged from a comment he’d intended to leave on “In the Multiverse of Madness” before he realized it would better make for a blog post of its own! I was delighted to be able to host him here for the month, as I felt this post is consistent with the blog’s brand yet offers a different perspective than my own.
And to your second point, Erik, bestselling horror author Joe Hill once said the following:
I second that, for sure.
Thanks for popping by, pal!
Thank you so much for those kind words.
It WAS challenging and fun for me, and educational as well. I mean, I’d had the rough idea a while ago, but I hadn’t fully formulated it until I’d started writing
And a MAJOR part of that fun was that Sean was a pleasure as an editor. He’d said elsewhere how miserable he was w/ people telling him what to write and how to write, and not actually caring about the final product. I suspect he learned a lot about what NOT to do there, because my experience was the exact opposite. If the people he’d encountered had been as good to him as he was to me, he might have never left
There is a quote attributed to E.M. Forster that perfectly encapsulates why I keep this blog: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” You may think you know how you feel about something when it’s merely a notion swirling in the soup of your cerebrum, but the reification process of expressing those thoughts in a structured argument forces us to think more deeply about them, and, ultimately, to better understand them. So, if that’s the experience you had with “Infinity Throne,” Dave, then you’ve honored this blog with your contribution.
And thanks for the kind words about my editorial approach! I genuinely enjoy editing someone else’s work; I enjoy the process of helping another writer produce the best version of what they’re going for. Screenwriting is so uniquely challenging because it takes what is ordinarily a solitary process (writing) and turns it into a collaborative exercise (filmmaking). Sometimes — not often, though — it’s the collaborative nature of screenwriting that makes it fun, but it also invites a lot of interference from people jockeying for creative authority over the project, especially at the professional level, as demonstrated in my recent book reviews of Blood, Sweat & Chrome and Rebel without a Crew.
Sometimes I’ll read the acknowledgments section at the end of a book, where the author carries on about how steadfastly supportive her agent was and how her editor’s belief in the material got her through the difficult days of writing it, and all I can think is, “Holy shit — how do I get one of those relationships!” Ha-ha! That is not an experience I’ve ever had! I suppose, then, when I’m asked to offer notes on someone’s work, I try to pay the writer — and the material — the respect I would like to be paid when I’m on the receiving end of a critique. And maybe it helps that I’ve worked with so many crappy advisers in the course of my career; we tend to learn more from our bad experiences than our good ones. So, if all of that has made me a more compassionate and effective editor, it was worth it.
What an interesting post. Lerner points out several reasons why I tend to shy away from franchise stories and will head for standalones.
Thanks so much for reading and commenting, Priscilla! Indeed, Dave wrote a terrific post, and I was delighted to be able to publish it here.
One of the recurring themes on this blog is the way in which narrativity has been corrupted by corporate “mega-franchises” that leverage nostalgia to nourish consumerism, and how it can be reclaimed as a powerful force for positive sociocultural and -political change. If you’re interested in a deep-dive exploration of that subject — how sprawling transmedia franchises like Star Wars and Marvel make us “hostage buyers” of their products — I recommend the blog’s two-part post “In the Multiverse of Madness: How Media Mega-Franchises Make Us Their Obedient Servants,” parts 1 and 2.
Thanks so much for joining the conversation, Priscilla! Always happy to connect with a fellow horror novelist!
Thank you for your kind words
I used to enjoy many of these franchises, but now I too prefer complete stories