Practicing morally imaginative storytelling means scrutinizing the values and messages encrypted in the fiction we produce—but it does not mean passing a “purity test.”
In Marty Di Bergi’s 1984 rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, the titular British heavy-metal band, faced with ebbing popularity and flagging album sales, embarks on a disaster-prone tour of North America in support of its latest release, the critically savaged Smell the Glove. During a stopover at Graceland to pay their respects to the King of Rock and Roll at his gravesite, lead vocalist David St. Hubbins comments, “Well, this is thoroughly depressing.”
To which bandmate and childhood best friend Nigel Tufnel responds, “It really puts perspective on things, though, doesn’t it?”
“Too much. There’s too much fucking perspective now.”
It’s a sentiment to which we can all relate, collectively endowed as we’ve become with a migrainous case of “2020 vision.” At the start of the pandemic, long before we had any sense of what we were in for let alone any perspective on it, I like many essayists felt the urge or need or even the responsibility to say something about it, despite knowing I had no useful or meaningful insight. I netted out with an acknowledgment that the months to come would present a rare Digital Age opportunity for quiet introspection and reflection—one in which we might expand our moral imagination of what’s possible, to invoke the exquisite wisdom of my mentor Al Gore, and perhaps envision a world on the other side appreciably more just, equitable, and sustainable than the one we had before the global shutdown.
Did we ever. Here in the United States, we are now wrestling with issues of economic inequality, structural racism, police brutality, environmental justice, and fair access to affordable housing and healthcare with an awareness and an urgency not seen in generations, and President Joe Biden—responding to the social movements of his times like FDR and LBJ before him—has proposed a host of progressive legislation that matches the visionary, transformative ambition of the New Deal and the Great Society.
With heartening moral imagination (certainly more than this democratic eco-socialist expected from him), Biden is attempting to turn the page on the Randian, neoliberal narrative of the past forty years and write a new chapter in the American story—one founded on an ethos of sympathetic coexistence, not extractive exploitation. With our continued grassroots support and, when necessary, pressure, he might even be the unlikely hero to pull it off, too—our Nixon in China.
As for me? I spent most of the pandemic thinking about narrativity myself. Doing nothing, after all, was a privilege of the privileged, with whom I am obliged to be counted. So, I used the time in self-quarantine to think and to write about the stories we tell, and I arrived at the resolute conclusion that we—the storytellers—need to do a lot better.
Last month, actress Charisma Carpenter publicly confirmed a longstanding open secret in Hollywood: Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator and Avengers writer/director Joss Whedon is an irredeemable asshole.
For years, fans of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which aired on the WB and UPN from 1997 to 2003, have had to reconcile their adoration for a show about a teenage girl who slays monsters with the criticism that often swirled around her creator.
On Wednesday, Ms. Carpenter released a statement in support of Mr. Fisher, in which she said Mr. Whedon harassed her while she was pregnant and fired her after she gave birth in 2003. . . .
“I would like to validate what the women of ‘Buffy’ are saying and support them in telling their story,” Marti Noxon, one of the show’s producers and longtime writers, said on Twitter. Jose Molina, a writer who worked on Mr. Whedon’s show “Firefly,” called him “casually cruel.”
If the copious fan-issued blog posts and video essays on this damning series of insider testimonials is an accurate barometer, Millennials have been particularly crestfallen over Whedon’s fall from grace. It’s only over the last few years, really, I’ve come to truly appreciate just how proprietary they feel about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That surprises me still, because I tend to think of Buffy as a Gen X artifact; after all, the modestly successful if long-derided (by even screenwriter Whedon himself) feature film was released five years before its TV sequel. (If you don’t remember—and I’ll bet you don’t—the movie’s shockingly impressive cast includes no less than pre-stardom Xers Hilary Swank and Ben Affleck.) I recall seeing this one-sheet on a subway platform during the summer between sophomore and junior years of high school—
Fran Rubel Kuzui’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1992)
—and thinking somebody had finally made a spiritual sequel to my formative influence: Joel Schumacher’s Gen X cult classic The Lost Boys. (Turned out, however, I was gonna have to do that myself.) I was sold! I marvel still at how the advertisement’s economical imagery conveys the movie’s entire premise and tone. So, yes—I was the one who went to see Buffy the Vampire Slayer in theaters. Guilty as charged.
But it was the TV series, I’ll concede, that took Buffy from creative misfire to cultural phenomenon, so it stands to reason it made such an indelible impression on Millennials. I submit that more than any content creator of his cohort—more so than even celebrated pop-referential screenwriters Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Williamson—Whedon is preeminently responsible for the mainstreaming of geek culture at the dawn of the Digital Age.
Buffy not only coincided with the coming out of geeks from the dusty recesses of specialty shops, it helped facilitate that very cultural shift: As John Hughes had done for Gen X a decade earlier, Whedon spoke directly to the socially and emotionally precarious experience of adolescent misfits, and his comic-book-informed sensibilities (before such influences were cool) endowed the Buffy series with a rich, sprawling mythology—and star-crossed romance (beautiful though it is, Christophe Beck’s Buffy/Angel love theme, “Close Your Eyes,” could hardly be described as optimistic)—over which fans could scrupulously obsess.
What’s more, all three cult serials Whedon sired were alienated underdogs in their own right: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a reboot of a campy B-movie on a fledgling, tween-centric “netlet” that no one took seriously; Angel, a second-class spinoff that was perennially on the brink of cancelation (and ultimately ended on an unresolved cliffhanger); and Firefly, his ambitious Star Wars–esque space opera that lasted exactly three months—or less than the average lifespan of an actual firefly. That these shows struggled for mainstream respect/popular acceptance only burnished Whedon’s credentials as the bard of geek-outsider angst…
My wife and I are celebrating twenty-five years together this winter. God, that’s three impeachments ago. To place it in even more sobering perspective, the January morning we’d met for our first date at the AMC on Third Avenue at 86th Street, I’d never in my life sent an e-mail. At best, I had peripheral awareness of the “World Wide Web”—whatever that was—and certainly no idea how to access it (not that I’d ever need to). I definitely didn’t have a cell phone—which, admittedly, would’ve come in handy, seeing how I was running late to meet her.
But we met that morning just the same; in those days—don’t ask me how, for this secret, like the whereabouts of Cleopatra’s tomb, is permanently lost to history—folks somehow met up at a prearranged location without real-time text updates. It’s true. We met many more times over the month that followed, in many more locales around the city: Theodore Roosevelt Park on the Upper West Side; Washington Square Park in the Village. (Public parks are a godsend for penniless students at commuter college.) It was cold as hell that winter, but I never cared; I was happy to sit outside in the bitter temperatures for hours—and we did—just to be with her. By February, we were officially inseparable—and have remained so ever since.
A lifetime has passed since then, one in which, hand in hand, we’ve graduated college, traveled to Europe on several occasions, moved across the country (on September 11, 2001 of all cosmic dates), weathered the deaths of a parent apiece, eloped in Vegas, cared for twenty-four different pets (mostly fosters), consciously practiced patience with and developed deeper appreciation for one another during this indefinite interval of self-quarantine (we haven’t seen our immediate family on the East Coast since Thanksgiving of 2019), and have perennially quoted lines from GoodFellas to one another… because, well, GoodFellas might be the only thing that’s aged as well as we have.
Goodfellas Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta at the Jackson Hole diner in Queens, the site of many of our dates in the college years
She’s certainly aged preternaturally well in her own right. She was the prettiest girl at school—no minor triumph, given that there were almost 20,000 students at Hunter College at the time—but she’s impossibly more beautiful today. When I glance in the mirror, however, I in no way recognize the kid that fell in love with her all those years ago. This is a good thing. I think—I hope—I’m a much better man today than I was then. Kinder; more compassionate; more sensitive; more patient. Certainly wiser. And hopefully more deserving of the love she’s given so freely and steadfastly. Indeed, hopefully that above all else.
All the best ideas to grace my life over the past quarter century have been hers, without so much as a lone exception. Long before I took up blogging, she’d encouraged me to do so. I was such an incorrigible Luddite, however; furthermore, I reasoned it would be a distraction from my “real” work: screenwriting. Now I wish I’d swapped screenwriting for blogging years earlier. The former—my bright idea—made me miserable; the latter has allowed me to better know myself unquantifiably. I am an exponentially better writer for this continuing project—the one she had the wisdom to suggest years before I could see the value in it myself. She didn’t hold that against me, though; she even set up my WordPress domain. Now you get to read all about the esoteric bullshit she alone used to entertain over dinner.
Despite everything, it seems I still have a few friends in Tinseltown. A development exec I know, aware of my blog’s polemical crusade against late-twentieth-century nostalgia as well as creatively and morally bankrupt storytelling, recently forwarded several e-mails containing informal pitches (from agented writers) he’d solicited for “reboots” of three classic IPs straight from the Gen X archives. They offer fascinating firsthand insight into the demoralizing vocation of Hollywood screenwriting.
It might surprise those outside the industry to learn only a small fraction of a given screenwriter’s time and effort is spent developing original stories, known as “spec scripts.” Few of those screenplays ever sell (certainly nowadays), and fewer still are produced; mostly, such projects are mere “calling cards”—writing samples designed to establish a scribe’s commercial sensibilities and creative credentials so he or she might be given the opportunity to vie for “open assignments.” In those instances, a prodco controls the film rights to an intellectual property (IP)—a novel, a comic book, an old TV series—and, accordingly, invites such candidates to come in and pitch a take on it.
For instance, my prison break–zombie outbreak mashup Escape from Rikers Island afforded me opportunities to pitch cinematic adaptations of the pseudo-documentary series Ancient Aliens and the Japanese manga MPD-Psycho, as well as a remake of the 1992 action thriller Trespass. If you’re higher up on the food chain—in, say, J. J. Abrams territory—that’s when you might get a shot at a gold-plated franchise like Star Wars or Mission: Impossible.
Nicolas Cage as an anxiety-riddled screenwriter struggling to adapt “The Orchid Thief” in “Adaptation”
Because for the most part, Hollywood isn’t looking for new ideas; they have enough branded IPs to keep them in business through infinity and beyond. What they’re looking for are skilled stenographers—writers-for-hire who can take a preexisting property and, juggling input from a thousand different chefs in the kitchen, turn it into a viable script for which a movie studio will be persuaded to invest millions of dollars. That’s the litmus test: Can you take an established IP and from it write a script that will motivate the studio to write a check?
The following proposals provide an insider’s glimpse into that singular development process. With my contact’s express permission, I have reproduced the relevant text from his e-mails verbatim, including all typographical errors and syntactical idiosyncrasies, but excluding the identities of the authors, their representation, the executive, and his production company.
The election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. earlier this month offered the very thing our movie franchises and television series have denied us for two decades: catharsis.
For a writer, it turns out I may suffer from a staggering lack of imagination.
I will confess to anxiously entertaining all the apocalyptic post–Election Day scenarios contemplated by even our most sober pundits and analysts: the disillusion-fueled outrage on the left should Trump eke out a narrow Electoral College win despite losing the popular vote to Biden; or, the armed militias activated by the president in the event of his loss. Like the set of a Snake Plissken movie, store windows on Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive were boarded up; correspondingly, I barricaded my own front and balcony doors as I watched, sick to my stomach, an endless caravan of MAGA-bannered pickup trucks roar past my home in the liberal bastion of Los Angeles the weekend before Election Day. I girded for the possibility (if not inevitability) of social breakdown, fully aware I would not be cast in the part of uber-competent dystopian hero—the Rick Grimes or Mad Max—in that story.
What I never imagined—not once, even fleetingly—was that upon receiving official word of a Biden/Harris victory, cities across the country, and the world over, would spontaneously erupt into large-scale celebration worthy of an MGM musical. Ding-dong! The witch is dead! It was a perfectly conventional—and conventionally predictable—Hollywood ending, yet I never saw it coming.
The galaxy celebrates the death of Darth Vader
Despite all the warnings I’ve issued about the unconscious maleficent messaging in our commercial fiction—stories in which messianic saviors redeem our inept/corrupt public institutions (Star Wars and superhero sagas), armed men with badges act without even the smallest measure of accountability (action movies and police procedurals), and environmental destruction/societal collapse are not merely inevitable but preferable (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Walking Dead), because apocalypse absolves us from our burdensome civic responsibilities—this election season has exposed my own susceptibility to pop-cultural conditioning.
It wasn’t merely a spirit of doomism I nursed throughout October; it was an unchallenged assumption that the interminable Trump narrative would simply do what all our stories now do: hold us in a state of real-time presentism (“We’ll have to wait and see” and “I will keep you in suspense” are common refrains from the outgoing president) rather than arrive at definitive conclusion.
The erosion of cathartic narrativity is a subject I’ve admittedly addressed a lot here on the blog since I first published “Journey’s End” over five years ago, but it’s essential to understanding how the Trump presidency came to be, and why we all felt such an atavistic sense of relief when it reached an end on November 7.
Around the turn of the millennium, storytellers mostly abandoned the Aristotelian narrative arc—with its rising tension, climax, and catharsis—in favor of “storyless” fiction with either a satirical-deconstructionist agenda (Family Guy, Community) or to emulate the kind of open-ended worldbuilding previously the exclusive province of tabletop RPGs and videogames (Game of Thrones, Westworld).
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Christopher Vogler’s industry-standard screenwriting instructional The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, here’s an in-depth look at why the time-honored storytelling principles it propounds are existentially endangered in our postnarrative world… and why they’re needed now more than ever.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell identified the “monomyth”—the universal narrative patterns and Jungian psychological archetypes that provide the shape, structure, and emotional resonance of virtually every story in the Western literary canon.
As it’s more commonly known, this is the “Hero’s Journey,” in which the status quo is disrupted, sending our protagonist on a perilous adventure—physically or emotionally or both—through a funhouse-mirror distortion of their everyday reality (think Marty McFly in 1950s Hill Valley, Dorothy in Oz) in which they encounter Mentors, Shadows, Allies, and Tricksters throughout a series of escalating challenges, culminating in a climactic test from which they finally return to the Ordinary World, ideally a bit wiser for their trouble. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to a given episode of The Big Bang Theory, the Hero’s Journey is the foundational schema of storytelling.
The stages of the Hero’s Journey
The book’s influence on the visionary young filmmakers who came of age studying it was quantum: George Lucas consciously applied Campbell’s theory to the development of Star Wars (1977), as did George Miller to Mad Max (1979), arguably transforming a pair of idiosyncratic, relatively low-budget sci-fi projects into global phenomena that are still begetting sequels over forty years later. After serving Western culture for millennia, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, the Hero’s Journey became the blueprint for the Hollywood blockbuster.
In the 1990s, a story analyst at Disney by the name of Christopher Vogler wrote and circulated a seven-page internal memo titled “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” a screenwriter-friendly crib sheet that was notably used in the development of The Lion King (a classic Hero’s Journey if ever there was one), evolving a few years later into a full-length book of its own: The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of which was published this past summer. The nearly 500-page revised volume is partitioned into four sections:
MAPPING THE JOURNEY: Here Mr. Vogler characterizes the mythic archetypes of the Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Ally, and Trickster.
STAGES OF THE JOURNEY: Each monomythic “beat”—The Call to Adventure, Crossing the First Threshold, Approach to the Inmost Cave, etc.—is given thorough explanation and illustration.
LOOKING BACK ON THE JOURNEY: Using the tools he teaches, Mr. Vogler provides comprehensive analyses of Titanic, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, The Shape of Water, and Lucas’ six-part Star Wars saga.
THE REST OF THE STORY: ADDITIONAL TOOLS FOR MASTERING THE CRAFT: The appendices are a series of essays on the history, nature, and cultural dynamics of the art and craft of storytelling. After 350 pages of practical technique, Mr. Vogler earns the privilege of indulging a bit of literary theory here, and his insights are fascinating. He devotes an entire chapter to the subject of catharsis, “comparing the emotional effect of a drama with the way the body rids itself of toxins and impurities” (Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 4th ed. [Studio City, California: Michael Wiese Productions, 2020], 420). Stories, in that sense, are medicinal; their alchemical compounds have healing properties—more on this point later.
Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey codifies mythic structure for contemporary storytellers, demonstrating its form, function, and versatility through more accessible terminology than Campbell’s densely academic nomenclature, and by drawing on examples from cinematic touchstones familiar to all: The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Titanic, etc. Like The Hero with a Thousand Faces before it, The Writer’s Journey has become, over the last quarter century, an essential catechism, affecting not merely its own generation of scribes (including yours truly), but the successive storytelling programs that stand on its shoulders, like Save the Cat!
Comparison of Vogler’s Hero’s Journey and Snyder’s “beat sheet”
But why is it essential? If Campbell and Vogler and Blake Snyder have simply put different labels on narrative principles we all intuitively comprehend from thousands of years of unconscious conditioning, why study them at all? Why not simply trust those precepts are already instinctive and immediately type FADE IN at the muse’s prompting?
Because just as a doctor requires an expert’s command of gross anatomy even if no two patients are exactly constitutionally alike, and an architect is expected to possess a mastery of structural engineering though every building is different, it behooves the storyteller—be them screenwriter, novelist, playwright, what have you—to consciously understand the fundamentals of the narrative arts:
The stages of the Hero’s Journey can be traced in all kinds of stories, not just those that feature “heroic” physical action and adventure. The protagonist of every story is the hero of a journey, even if the path leads only into his own mind or into the realm of relationships.
The way stations of the Hero’s Journey emerge naturally even when the writer in unaware of them, but some knowledge of this most ancient guide to storytelling is useful in identifying problems and telling better stories. Consider these twelve stages as a map of the Hero’s Journey, one of many ways to get from here to there, but one of the most flexible, durable, and dependable.
ibid., 7
I’ve read and reread previous versions of The Writer’s Journey endlessly, and I take new insight from it each time: An excellent primer for aspirants, it yields yet richer dividends for experienced writers—those that can readily appreciate it vis-à-vis their own work. Though this updated edition, which includes two brand-new essays in the appendices (“What’s the Big Deal?” and “It’s All About the Vibes, Man”), was certainly sufficient reason in its own right to revisit The Writer’s Journey, I had a more compelling motivation: I wanted to see for myself how Mr. Vogler makes a case for the type of conventional story arc he extols in the face of mounting evidence of its cultural irrelevance in our postnarrative era.
Less than three months out from arguably the most important presidential election in living memory, our democracy is in deep, deep shit.
Need we recap? Commuting Roger Stone. Gassing Lafayette Square. Suppressing the vote. Sabotaging the Postal Service. Floating the postponement—and actively undermining the credibility—of the November election. Sending federal agents to detain (read: abduct) protestors in Portland. And that’s just a topline best-of-Trump-2020 compilation.
This is America?
Let’s face it: The spirit of nihilism that animates MAGA was never about making America great again so much as it was burning the Republic to the ground. That’s what Trump’s supporters really voted for in 2016, and it’s the one big (if never quite explicit) campaign promise he might actually deliver on: reifying the very American carnage he once claimed exclusive qualification to redress. To wit: The nightly news plays like an apocalyptic bookend to the rousing founding-of-America story told in Hamilton.
Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos, and Lin-Manuel Miranda in “Hamilton”
While Lin-Manuel Miranda’s revolutionary masterpiece certainly challenges us to appreciate anew the value and purpose of democracy—a timely reminder if ever there was one—it somewhat less conspicuously does the same for an equally imperiled institution: narrative itself.
Hamilton has been described by its creator as “a story about America then, told by America now” (Edward Delman, “How Lin-Manuel Miranda Shapes History,”The Atlantic, September 29, 2015). But if the musical’s creative approach to its subject matter is unorthodox, its narrative structure is very much a conventional hero’s journey. (For my Save the Cat! scholars, it’s a “Real-Life Superhero” tale, and not, as some “experts” would have you believe, Golden Fleece.) The power in and of narrative is a central preoccupation of Hamilton; the show literally opens with a dramatic question posed to the audience:
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a
Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten
Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor,
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
Alexander Hamilton is a man who imagines—who writes—his way out of poverty, and, in turn, “rewrote the game,” by “Poppin’ a squat on conventional wisdom”—meaning, the institutionalized “divine right of kings” narrative.
Batman Forever and The Lost Boys director Joel Schumacher died on Monday, June 22, at the age of eighty after a yearlong battle with cancer. In an industry where branding is sacrosanct, his brand, as it were, was his steadfast refusal to be artistically pigeonholed: Hit-and-miss though his track record may be, he was a rare breed of filmmaker who worked in virtually every genre, from comedy (D.C. Cab; Bad Company) to drama (Cousins; Dying Young) to sci-fi/horror (Flatliners; Blood Creek) to crime thriller (Falling Down, 8mm) to legal thriller (The Client, A Time to Kill) to musical (The Phantom of the Opera). His filmography is as winding and unconventional as was his path to commercial success:
Schumacher was born in New York City in 1939 and studied design at Parsons and the Fashion Institute of Technology. . . .
When Schumacher eventually left fashion for Hollywood, he put his original trade to good use, designing costumes for various films throughout the Seventies. . . . He also started writing screenplays during this time, including the hit 1976 comedy Car Wash and the 1978 adaptation of the musical The Wiz.
In 1981, Schumacher made his directorial debut with, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a sci-fi comedy twist on Richard Matheson’s 1959 novel, The Shrinking Man, starring Lily Tomlin. Fitting the pattern that would define his career, the film was a financial success but a flop with critics. . . .
Schumacher’s true breakout came a few years later in 1985, when he wrote and directed St. Elmo’s Fire, the classic post-grad flick with the Brat Pack cast, including Rob Lowe, Demi Moore and Judd Nelson. Two years later, he wrote and directed The Lost Boys, a film about a group of teen vampires that marked the first film to star both Corey Feldman and Corey Haim, effectively launching the heartthrob duo known as “the Coreys.”
Though Schumacher did not write The Lost Boys (1987) as the Rolling Stone piece erroneously asserts (the screenplay is credited to Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam), neither his creative imprint on the project nor the cultural impact of the movie itself can in any way be overstated. Sure, teenage vampires may be a dime-a-dozen cottage industry now, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Twilight to The Vampire Diaries, but if you happened to grow up on any of those Millennial staples, it’s worth knowing that pubescent bloodsuckers had never really been done prior to The Lost Boys—no, that celebrated iteration of the vampire’s pop-cultural evolution is entirely owed to the pioneering vision of Joel Schumacher.
Late filmmaker Joel Schumacher; photo by Gabriella Meros/Shutterstock, 2003 (498867t)
When Richard Donner left the project to direct Lethal Weapon instead, the script Schumacher inherited was essentially “The Goonies… with vampires.” By aging up the characters from preteens to hormonal adolescents, Schumacher saw a creative opportunity to do something scarier—and sexier. A cult classic was thusly born, and though The Lost Boys itself never became a franchise (save a pair of direct-to-video sequels two decades later, and the less said about them, the better), its fingerprints are all over the subgenre it begat. We owe Schumacher a cultural debt for that.
Kiefer Sutherland’s David (second from left) leads a gang of teenage vampires in “The Lost Boys”
And I owe him a personal debt. Over any other formative influence, The Lost Boys is directly and demonstrably responsible for my decision to study filmmaking in college and then to pursue a screenwriting career in Hollywood. More than simply my professional trajectory, in point of fact, my very creative sensibilities were indelibly forged by that film: The untold scripts and novels I’ve written over the past quarter century have almost exclusively been tales of the supernatural with a strong sense of both humor and setting—the very qualities The Lost Boys embodies so masterfully and memorably. All of that can be traced to the summer of 1994.
The very day I published my previous post, George Floyd was murdered by four Minneapolis police officers, sparking a series of nationwide—even worldwide—protests against police brutality and systemic racism.
Like many other industries, entertainment companies have issued statements of support for the protests against racism and police brutality now filling America’s streets. But there’s something Hollywood can do to put its money where its social media posts are: immediately halt production on cop shows and movies and rethink the stories it tells about policing in America.
For a century, Hollywood has been collaborating with police departments, telling stories that whitewash police shootings and valorizing an action-hero style of policing over the harder, less dramatic work of building relationships with the communities cops are meant to serve and protect. There’s a reason for that beyond a reactionary streak hiding below the industry’s surface liberalism. Purely from a dramatic perspective, crime makes a story seem consequential, investigating crime generates action, and solving crime provides for a morally and emotionally satisfying conclusion.
The result is an addiction to stories that portray police departments as more effective than they actually are; crime as more prevalent than it actually is; and police use of force as consistently justified. There are always gaps between reality and fiction, but given what policing in America has too often become, Hollywood’s version of it looks less like fantasy and more like complicity. . . .
. . . If the entertainment industry truly believes change can no longer wait, it should start with its own storytelling.
It would be altogether impossible to quantify the hours my best friends and I—all Irish boys from the Bronx—spent in our youth delighting to the madcap mayhem of cop movies like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, and how Beverly Hills Cop inspired us to fast-talk our way into all sorts of places we weren’t supposed to be, like the time outside the Cloisters we opportunistically insinuated ourselves into a school field trip—not from our junior high, that’s for damn sure—and got a tour of the museum and a free lunch for our efforts, or when, disguised as Boy Scouts, we sold candy under false pretenses in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria.
For the past three decades, we’ve kept spouses and colleagues in stitches with those anecdotes, and yet it’s only dawned on me over the last three weeks the reason we got away with any of that shit was owed far less to our cleverness than our color. Those juvenile adventures, energized by movies that trafficked in a worldview whereby (mostly) white men with badges were free to act without even the smallest measure of accountability, were an ethnic privilege I’ve spent my entire life taking for granted. I am the exact same age—less than one month younger—as the police officer directly culpable for the death of George Floyd.
Given this blog’s ongoing conversation about moral imagination in storytelling—and the responsibility of writers to interrogate the narratives we have long cherished—I thought it was worth chronicling how the police have been portrayed in our popular entertainment over the last century, how those portrayals have influenced public perception and supported real-world systemic dysfunction, and how storytellers can be part of the necessary reform by rehabilitating our own reliance on lazy, even dangerous, tropes—particularly that of the “hero detective.”
Gary Cooper in “High Noon” (1952)
For the first half of the twentieth century, the Western was the genre through which we mythologized the American project, and the gunfighter (typically a nomadic cowboy, a lawman, an outlaw, or any combination thereof) was the archetypal hero of such stories, whose spirit of rugged, can-do individualism and courageous code of honor made him the perfect—and often but not always reluctant—agent of “frontier justice.” We’re a country founded on rebellion, after all, and we love our rebels—or antiheroes, as we call them in fiction.
But with the rise of organized crime during Prohibition and the ensuing poverty of the Depression, the relative moral simplicity of the open range gave way to the ethical complexity of the enclosed alleyways of our teeming metropolises. The hardboiled fiction of Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler presented “a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the finger man for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing; a world where you may witness a holdup in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the holdup men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge” (Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay,” The Simple Art of Murder [New York: Vintage Books, August 1988], 17).
Accordingly, new kind of (anti)hero was needed, one uniquely suited to such labyrinthine urban intrigue:
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
ibid., 18
This distinctly American gumshoe differed appreciably from the preternaturally eidetic detectives of the Old World, like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot: “Outwardly composed, but inwardly disheveled—like some bruised, tarnished variation on the folkloric All-American hero—his life, like that of most screen sleuths, is essentially a solitary one, as befits a hired snooper parrying the resentment of those in whose lives he necessarily interferes” (Al Clark, Raymond Chandler in Hollywood [Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1996], 13). Unlike their European forebears, hardboiled detectives such as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe (both notably played by Humphrey Bogart) did not serve as hired consultants for the local police, but rather worked around them, far too “insubordinate” for institutional law enforcement. This uniquely American iteration of the detective was decidedly, even proudly, an outsider—a rebel; an antihero.
Editor’s note: “Some Assembly Required” was written and scheduled to post prior to COVID-19’s formal classification as a global pandemic and the ensuing social disruption it has caused here in the United States and around the world; in light of that, a thesis about storytelling craft seems to me somewhat inconsequential and irrelevant.
More broadly, however, the essay makes a case for slowing down, something we’re all doing out of admittedly unwelcome necessity at present, and learning to value the intellectual dividends of thoughtful rumination over the emotional gratification of kneejerk reaction; as such, I submit “Some Assembly Required”as planned—along with my best wishes to all for steadfast health and spirits through this crisis.
Castle Grayskull. The Cobra Terror Drome. The Batcave. I didn’t have every 1980s action-figure playset, but, man, how I cherished the ones I got. In those days of innocence, there was no visceral thrill quite like waking up to an oversized box under the Christmas tree, tearing off the wrapping to find this:
I had one just like it!
Or this:
Optimus Prime was both an action figure AND a playset! Didn’t have him, alas…
Or this:
The seven-foot G.I. Joe aircraft carrier! DEFINITELY didn’t have this one…
Oh, the possibilities! Getting one of those glorious playsets was like being handed the keys to a magical kingdom of one’s very own. After having been inspired by the adventures of G.I. Joe and the Transformers and the Ghostbusters at the movies, on their cartoon series, and in comics, now you had your very own “backlot” to stage your personal daydreams. It was grand.
Getting a new playset as a kid and a starting a new writing project as an adult share arguably the same three developmental phases. The first is what I call Think about What You Might like for Christmas. This is the stage when you experiment noncommittally with ideas, get a sense of what excites you, what takes hold of your imagination—maybe talk it over with friends—and then envision what it will look like. Selling yourself on a new story idea, deciding it’s worth the intensive time and energy required to bring it to fruition, is much the same as furnishing your parents with a carefully considered wish list: You’re cashing in your biannual Golden Ticket on this. It’s a period of escalating anticipation, and of promise. The “thing” isn’t real yet—it’s still a nebulous notion, not a tangible commodity—but it will be…
Stage two is Some Assembly Required: This is the recognition that your personal paracosm doesn’t come ready-to-play out of the box. You’ll need to snap the pieces in place, apply the decals; you need to give the forum structure first. To use another analogy: You don’t start decorating a Christmas tree that’s been arranged askance in its stand. (More on Some Assembly Required in a minute.)
Stage three: It’s Playtime! You’ve done the hard, preparatory work of building your imaginary realm, and now you get to experience the pure joy of writing—to have fun, in other words, with your new toys.
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