New Video: Irony

Remember how shocked you were when I put out a new podcast episode, after more than a year away?  Well get ready to be flabbergasted, because here’s a new video after more than two years!  When I launched my book in late 2016, I had an ambitious plan that I would have a new video every other week from then on and a podcast episode on all the off weeks.  Ha!  Turns out that videos are a lot of work.  But I'm very happy with the four I’ve made and I’ve wanted to do a new one on irony for a while.  And I’m mostly talking about a movie we haven’t already discussed to death on the blog!  Let me know what you think, please.

(I’ve also replaced the Moment of Humanity video with a cleaner version, since kids like the videos.  No more 40 Year Old Virgin opening shot!)

The Many Ironies of Casablanca

As I update the old checklists, I thought it would also be good to take some time along the way to look deeper into irony. As we did with Blazing Saddles, let’s run through fourteen ironies you can find in Casablanca:

Your story will be more meaningful if you present a fundamentally ironic concept (which will sometimes be encapsulated by an ironic title).

• The least patriotic American has to save the Allied cause. (The title is not ironic.)

There are three big ways to have ironic characterization: Your heroes will be more compelling if they have an ironic backstory…

• Rick the cynic used to be an idealist

…an ironic contrast between their exterior and interior…

• Rick the cynic is filled with tender heartache

…and a great flaw that’s the ironic flip side of a great strength.

• He’s too cold-blooded, but the flip side is that he’s very cool.

Structure centers around another great irony: Though your heroes might initially perceive this challenge as an unwelcome crisis, it will often prove to be a crisis that ironically provides just the opportunity your heroes need, directly or indirectly, to address their longstanding social problems and/or internal flaws.

• Rick finds heroic fulfillment by being placed in a deadly situation and having his heart ripped up again.

Each scene will be more meaningful if the hero encounters a turn of events that upsets some pre-established ironic presumptions about what would happen.

• Rick has made it clear he doesn’t care if Victor makes it out of Casablanca.

Likewise, the conclusion of each scene will be more meaningful if the character’s actions result in an ironic scene outcome, in which the events of the scene ironically flip the original intention, even if things turn out well for the hero.

• When Rick discovers that Victor is with Ilsa, he suddenly has to care.

There are several types of ironic dialogue: On the one hand, there’s intentionally ironic dialogue, such as sarcasm.

• Rick is insulted, but says, “I stay up late at night crying about it.”

On the other hand, there’s unintentionally ironic dialogue, such as when there’s an ironic contrast between word and deed…

•  Strasser thinks he’s very much in control, but we can see otherwise.

…or an ironic contrast between what the character says and what the audience knows.

• Ilsa says she’ll meet Rick at the train station, but we know that she won’t have the chance.

There are the pros and (potentially big) cons of having an ironic tone, which is the one type of irony that most stories shouldn’t have, although it can be a useful tool for certain very specific types of stories.

• It’s tempting to say this movie has an ironic tone, because it’s full of cool, jaded sarcasm, but that’s not the way I use the term. This movie does not take a sarcastic attitude towards storytelling itself (as Blazing Saddles does, for instance) so I would say that it doesn’t have an ironic tone.

Finally, there are the thematic ironies that every story should have: The story’s ironic thematic dilemma, in which the story’s overall dilemma comes down to a choice of good vs. good (or bad vs. bad)…

• Romantic love vs. love of country

…as well as several smaller ironic dilemmas along the way, in which your characters must consistently choose between goods, or between evils throughout your story.

• It’s important to fight for freedom, but do you have any right to endanger someone’s life by asking them to come to a resistance meeting?

This will culminate in an ironic final outcome, separate from the ironic concept and the thematic dilemma.

• Rick finds fulfillment by sending away the woman he loves.

Rulebook Casefile: 12 Ironies in Blazing Saddles

Hi guys, I talk a lot about irony here and in my book, but I’ve never specifically focused on all the ironies in one story before. I just re-ran the checklist for Blazing Saddles, so let’s go back and look at all the ironies in that movies. Here are the thirteen ironies I list in my book:

Your story will be more meaningful if you present a fundamentally ironic concept (which will sometimes be encapsulated by an ironic title).

• A white old west town is saved by a black sheriff. (An ironic title is the only type of irony this movie doesn’t have)

There are three big ways to have ironic characterization: Your heroes will be more compelling if they have an ironic backstory…

• The black sheriff is a condemned track layer.

…an ironic contrast between their exterior and interior…

• Taking himself hostage reveals his internal contradictions

…and a great flaw that’s the ironic flip side of a great strength.

• He’s self-destructively defiant, which almost gets him killed, but the flip side of that is that he’s charming and funny, which saves his life many times.

Our examination of structure will center around another great irony: Though your heroes might initially perceive this challenge as an unwelcome crisis, it will often prove to be a crisis that ironically provides just the opportunity your heroes need, directly or indirectly, to address their longstanding social problems and/or internal flaws.

• Bart finds heroic fulfillment by being placed in a deadly situation

Each scene will be more meaningful if the hero encounters a turn of events that upsets some pre-established ironic presumptions about what would happen.

• He clearly expects a hero’s welcome when he rides into town, but does not receive one, to put it mildly. 

Likewise, the conclusion of each scene will be more meaningful if the character’s actions result in an ironic scene outcome, in which the events of the scene ironically flip the original intention, even if things turn out well for the hero.

• Bart winds up a hostage in his own jail.

We’ll look at several types of ironic dialogue: On the one hand, we’ll look at intentionally ironic dialogue, such as sarcasm.

• No shortage of sarcasm: “Dare I even say, president?” “Dare! Dare!”

On the other hand, we’ll explore unintentionally ironic dialogue, such as when there’s an ironic contrast between word and deed…

• The governor keeps talking about how important he is, but he has no power.

…or an ironic contrast between what the character says and what the audience knows.

• Before Bart meets Mongo, he says that Mongo can’t be as menacing as people say, but we’ve met him and we know better.

We’ll discuss the pros and (potentially big) cons of having an ironic tone, which is the one type of irony that most stories shouldn’t have, although it can be a useful tool for certain very specific types of stories.

• The ending of this movie adopts an ironic tone, and gets away with it. They ride off into the sunset, then get tired of riding and switch to a car.

Finally, we’ll look at the thematic ironies that every story should have: The story’s ironic thematic dilemma, in which the story’s overall dilemma comes down to a choice of good vs. good (or bad vs. bad)

• Good vs. good: Individualism vs. solidarity, standing up to people vs. winning them over.

…as well as several smaller ironic dilemmas along the way, in which your characters must consistently choose between goods, or between evils throughout your story.

• Bad vs. bad: Anger vs. subservience 

This will culminate in an ironic final outcome, separate from the ironic concept and the thematic dilemma.

• He saves the town but is too discontent to stay.

Best Movies of 2016 #6: Birth of a Nation

What I Liked About It: You won’t find a more intense emotional journey than this movie (although our next movie is a close second). Better than any other film, this movie captures the intense outrage of life in slavery.

The Problem: As others have pointed out, the biggest problem with this movie is that they don’t show Nat Turner killing any kids, which is to say, while it does an amazing job capturing the horror of Turner’s situation, it refuses to grapple with the true horror of Turner’s actions in response.

You’ll recall that I had problems with 12 Years a Slave. I thought that movie had the ideal source material for creating an intense bond between the hero and the audience, because, as a free man sold into slavery of the worst kind for a limited amount of time, it had a situation that we could all could totally identify with, and yet I felt that movie was too cold and alienating to let us fully emotionally bond with the hero. This movie has the opposite problem: It commits to the task of forcing our full and total emotional identification, but in this case we have a slave whose story is not an ideal candidate for that.

One can try to argue that Nat Turner’s actions were justified, even when he killed kids, if one wants, but you can’t deny that he was a weird guy. We get brief flashes of Turner’s hallucinations, but not enough. It shows us his logical motivations, but glosses over the fact that one of his major motivations was a solar eclipse. If the movie had wanted to deal more forthrightly with the reality of Turner’s life and actions, it would have needed to forgo some of that intense identification and let us be a little alienated, wondering at the real man’s unknowable tinge of madness.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Horror Feels More Real When It Has Ironies. They say that Trump is too hard to parody because it’s impossible to exaggerate how evil or stupid he is. This too is the problem writers face when portraying slavery. One way to do this is to establish that this owner is “one of the good ones” and then show how inhumanly horrific slavery is at its “best”. Few scenes will stay with you like the one where a slave refuses to eat, so the overseer casually knocks his teeth out to better forcefeed him, all while the “good” owner watches, guilt-ridden, but silent. It’s that look of “What choice do I have? He won’t eat!” that finally drives home the horror, and makes the ending feel inevitable.

Rulebook Casefile: Ironic Sequence of Events in Do the Right Thing

So we’ve established that Do the Right Thing has a very unique structure: Like most stories, it is about a large problem, but instead of watching a hero solve that problem, we’re watching the crisis slowly build, spotting a progression of factors that no one character can see.

Even so, only on subsequent viewings do we realize that almost every scene has contributed to the final crisis, often in very ironic ways.  Here, as I see it, are all the contributing factors, and where they come in the timeline:

1. 9:50 The heat (which causes Sal to say “I’m going to kill someone today” at the beginning)
2. 18:43 Buggin’ Out clearly has a history of free-floating agitation (see his nickname)
3. 18:43 Buggin’ Out feels that Sal has been cheap with the amount of cheese on his pizza.  Sal doesn’t give an inch.
4. 18:43 Sal contemptuously dismisses Buggin’s request to put African American pictures on the wall.
5. 18:43 Sal has a bat under the counter and in the Wall of Fame scene we see that he’s quick to take it out.
6. 21:43 Buggin’ tells Mookie to “Stay black.”
7. 23:00 Da Mayor tells Mookie to “Do the right thing,” which seems to gnaw at him throughout the movie.
8. 26:27 After turning off the fire hydrant (and seeing that the locals have humiliated an Italian-American driver) the Italian-American cop says he’ll bust heads if he has to come back.
9. 33:20 We see in Raheem’s boombox duel with the Puerto Ricans that being forced to turn down your radio is a defeat, a personal humiliation, a threat to manhood
10. 35:05 Buggin’ has his white Air Jordans run over by a white bicyclist, who bought a brownstone on the block.  And the guy is wearing a Larry Bird jersey (Lee hints in the commentary that the characters would have taken this jersey as a brazen display of white pride). 
11. 39:19 Cops glare hatefully at the cornermen, who glare hatefully back.
12. 39:19 The cornermen are increasingly angry that all of the businesses are owned by non-blacks.
13. 51:35 Raheem gives Mookie his personal philosophy of love and hate, ending with “If I love you, I love you, but if I hate you…”
14. 53:32 Sal doesn’t say please when he asks Raheem to turn down his radio the first time.
15. 59:20 Pino yells at Smiley (just after Sal tells Pino that he won’t move) and the neighborhood overhears and heckles back. 
16. 103:45 Everybody mocks Buggin’s attempts to recruit them, so he starts to calm down, and just starts to clean his Jordans, but Mookie says that his Jordons are dogged, causing Buggin’ to get angry all over again.
17. 115:19 Mookie doesn’t like Sal’s friendship with Jade. 
18. 127:30 Smiley is a mentally challenged person walking around unsupervised, and unlike most challenged people in movies, he isn’t serene all the time, so he’s agitating everyone. 
19. 127:30 Buggin’ Out happens to run into Radio Raheem and their free-floating animostities combine on a semi-randomly selected target.  Then Smiley adds his anger to theirs.
20. 129:08 Ahmad, Ella, Punchy and Cee convince Sal to re-open the pizzeria after it’s closed.
21. 130:00 When Raheem, Buggin’, and Smiley show up to demand pictures on the wall, Sal doesn’t just yell about Raheem’s music, he calls it “jungle music.”  Obviously, this is followed by the big one, where Sal smashes Raheem’s radio with his bat.
22. 133:46 When the resulting fight spills onto the sidewalk, a kid yells “Fight!”  and everybody comes running.
23. 140:00 The crowd reveals that they are angry over previous police murders (the characters shout out the names of real-life police victims Eleanor Bumpers, Michael Stewart, et al.)

So that’s almost everything right?  Even the seemingly happy moments, like the fire hydrant scene, ironically contribute the final tragedy.  But in fact there’s another, much smaller list of elements that don’t contribute to the crisis:

1. Everything with Senor Love Daddy, who is the ultimate in chill.
2. Vito’s friendliness with Mookie doesn’t contribute one way or another.
3. The anger of the teens at Da Mayor.
4. The scene where Raheem’s batteries die and he gets more from the Korean grocers.
5. Da Mayor rescues the kid from getting hit by an ice cream truck leads to peace between Da Mayor and Mother Sister.
6. Everything with Tina and Hector (Mookie’s child) including the sex scene.

It’s crucial that these moments are included.  Unlike most stories, which assure us that we are following the linear progression of one problem, so that every scene “counts”, this sort of story must do the opposite: if we suspect that every element of this story is part on clockwork machine, the movie would feel grim and preachy: “Behold The Folly of Man!”

By interspersing the 23 elements that contribute with 6 that don’t, Lee keeps our eye off the ball, allowing us to just relax and enjoy this vibrant world, without having to feel that we’re riding a fixed escalator of racial tension.  We sense that something bad is coming, but we don’t know how or where it will arrive.  In fact, we cling to our hope that moderating influences like Da Mayor or Vito will ensure that things can’t get too bed.  This way, when everything finally goes to hell, it feels much more tragic that it would have Lee had merely set us up in order to knock us down. 

In the end, many elements contribute ironically, some elements contribute directly, and a few elements contribute not at all. That’s the most powerful way to tell this story, because that’s the way the world works.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Differentiating the Many Types of Irony

When stories seem meaningless, it is usually because they lack irony. When stories are especially powerful, you can be certain the author has packed it full of many different types of irony. Learning to recognize and control irony in your story is the most important skill a writer can have.

I previously attempted to list the many different types of irony a writer can use here, but I’ve offered up many more since that, so here’s a new list, in the order of the seven skills that organize the checklist:

1. Your story will be more meaningful if you present a fundamentally Ironic Concept (which will sometimes be encapsulated by an Ironic Title.)
2. There are three big ways to have ironic characterization: A character’s past will be more meaningful if it features an Ironic Backstory, their present should feature both An Ironic Contrast Between Each Character’s Exterior and Interior, and A Great Flaw That’s the Ironic Flip Side of a Great Strength.
3. One’s overall structure should not necessarily be ironic, because you want your structure to resonate in a straightforward way, but the theory of structure that I’ve put forward does center around a great irony: Though the hero might initially perceive this challenge as an unwelcome crisis, it will often prove to be A Crisis That Ironically Provides Just the Opportunity that the Hero Needs, directly or indirectly, to address his or her longstanding social problem and/or internal flaw.
4. Each scene will be more meaningful if the hero encounters a turn of events that upsets some pre-established Ironic Presumptions. Likewise, the conclusion of each scene will be more meaningful if the characters’ actions result in an Ironic Scene Outcome, in which the events of the scene ironically flip the original intention.
5. There are several types of ironic dialogue: On the one hand, there’s Intentionally Ironic Dialogue, such as sarcasm. On the other hand, there’s unintentionally ironic dialogue, such as when there’s An Ironic Contrast Between Word and Deed or An Ironic Contrast Between What the Character Says (or Does) and What We Know.
6. The one type of irony that most stories shouldn’t have is an Ironic Tone, although it can be a useful tool for certain very specific types of stories.
7. Finally, we’ll look at three more ironies that every story should have: The story’s Ironic Thematic Dilemma, in which the movie’s overall dilemma comes down to a choice of good vs. good (or bad vs. bad) as well as several Smaller Ironic Dilemmas along the way, in which your characters must consistently choose between goods, or between evils throughout your story. This will culminates in an Ironic Final Outcome, separate from the ironic concept and the thematic dilemma.

If you can control your audience’s expectations, then you can upset them, and that’s how meaning is created.

Next time, we’ll look at a brand-new checklist question…

Irony in Dialogue, Part 3: Ironic Contrast Between Word and Deed

This post and the last one break up and expand on this old post in order to make it clear where each concept lands on the upcoming list of ironies.

Last time, we talked about dramatic irony, a form of unintentionally ironic dialogue in which there is a contrast between what one character says and what we (and possibly other characters) know. Another type of unintentionally ironic dialogue is an Ironic Contrast Between Word and Deed.

If you want to reveal emotional baggage, then find an active and ironic way to do so, instead of having your characters reveal their own baggage to others. Characters should never speak perceptively about their own feelings, especially to people they don’t trust. In real life, we don’t us really understand our own feelings anyway, and even when we think we understand them, we will almost always lie about them if asked.

• “Do you like that boy?” “No!”
• “Are you still in love with your ex-wife?” “No!”
• “Do you feel appreciated by your grown children?” “Of course I do, what a silly question!”

Yes, you want to reveal your characters’ complex emotions, but the one thing you’re not allowed to do is to have them explain those complex emotions to their friends (or, for that matter, their enemies!) Your characters shouldn’t do that because we don’t do that in real life.

So how do we reveal our feelings? When our mouths lie about our feelings, our bodies and our actions betray us. Make your characters reveal emotion through behavior. It’s unlikely that a character would baldly state, “I want to stay a kid forever.” Instead, have the character ask, “Why won’t you treat me like a grown-up?” while wearing Spider-Man pajamas, or cutting the crusts off his sandwich, or sticking her gum under the table.

Unity of word and action is unironic. If word and action match, then you, as author, aren’t showing any powers of observation. The audience need not even pay attention to the visuals you’re creating, because the character is simply telling us what’s going on. If the audience is simply told to believe what your characters say, then there’s no way to interact with your story.

Your audience wants to play sleuth. They want to make their own observations about your characters, instead of being forced to listen to and accept the characters’ observations about themselves. Stories thrive on tension, both external and internal, but the most important source of all should be the tension between what people say and what they mean.

Next time, I’ll attempt an overview all of the ironies I’ve covered on this blog…

Irony in Dialogue, Part 2: Dramatic Irony (aka, A Gap Between What They Say and What We Know)

Yesterday, we looked at the limited usefulness of intentionally ironic dialogue. There are, however, a few types of unintentional ironic dialogue that are more useful for writers.

The first is An Ironic Contrast Between What the Character Says (or Does) and What We Know. (This is sometimes referred to as “dramatic irony”, but I find that term overly imprecise, given how many types of irony we’re throwing around.)

Sometimes this happens because we know something that no character onscreen does. The first episode of the fifth season of “24” had a very funny line when the first lady tried to reassure her husband by saying “We just have to make it through today and we’ll be fine.” Longtime “24” fans knew that a lot of crises could fit into one day.

Or it can be even more ironic if we know share the knowledge with one scene partner, but not the others.
Look at the first three seasons of “Lost”. In each episode, we saw a character’s painful memories flood over them through a series of flashbacks, which were ironically juxtaposed against a painful dilemma that that same character now had to face on the island. But only we knew how those emotions affected their ultimate decisions, because they never shared their conflicted feelings with their fellow islanders.

Crucially, the irony was never made explicit. Hurley never sat down with Jack and said, “You know what happened today reminded me of something that happened several years ago, and I think that now I have a better understanding of what this all means, if you’ll hear me out…” We saw how his past experiences influenced with his current actions, and the episode was more meaningful for us because those actions ironically contrasted with the current events, but Hurley wasn’t necessarily able to process the meaning of that irony himself…and if he did, he kept it to himself.

Next time, we’ll look at one final type of unintentionally ironic dialogue...

Irony in Dialogue, Part 1: Intentional Irony

There are many types of ironic dialogue, some are intentional and others are unintentional.

Sarcastic dialogue uses intentionally disingenuous phrasing to highlight the hypocrisy of a situation. We’ve all known lots of sarcastic people, so this type of dialogue is certainly true-to-life and it can therefore be a strong element of a character’s voice, but it’s important to remember that this sort of intentional irony is not going to create the same amount of meaning as unintentional irony.

The audience prefers to see what the characters can’t see: We want to be one small step removed from the story, seeing some things they miss. By contrast, we want the characters themselves to be in it, not outside of it. Well-written sarcastic characters think they can see the irony of their situation, but we see that they don’t really get it. George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life is a wonderfully sarcastic character, but he is unaware of the larger ironies of his life until Clarence the angel points them out.

Then there are times when characters engage in Blatant Talk About Irony. This should almost always be avoided. Irony should be the air your characters breathe, but they should not be aware of it, just as we are not conscious of each breath. Whenever characters talk about how ironic something is, the audience groans.

Here’s a particularly atrocious example of the above: Bette Davis followed up her big comeback, All About Eve, with a very similar role, but this time the results were disastrous: In The Star, she played a washed-up ex-starlet who tried to settle for a down-to-earth longshoreman played by Sterling Hayden. Eventually, the grubbiness of her new life causes her to snap, and she smashes a store display to steal of a bottle of super-expensive perfume on display. This results in one of the worst scenes ever written…

• The Scene: When Hayden comes home, Davis confesses her impetuous crime and hands the unused perfume bottle over to him. He sternly lectures her, but when she breaks down crying he has no choice but to comfort her. He finally opens the bottle himself and says that she might as well try some on, but they’re surprised to discover that they can’t smell anything: the display bottle was just a prop. This causes Hayden to wisely opine: “You thought it was the world’s most expensive perfume, but it was just colored water. [Dramatic Pause…] That’s just like your life.”

No, no it isn’t. When irony is openly discussed, it withers on the vine. If your audience hears it, they won’t feel it. Next, we’ll move on to our first type of unintentionally ironic dialogue…

The Big Idea, Addendum: The Ironic Conclusion

Yesterday we looked at the need for an Ironic Concept. When identifying your ironic concept, it’s tempting to look to the ending and show how the story is ultimately ironic in the end, but you can’t wait that long to tap into the power of irony. The ironic concept should be evident by the halfway point, and then the finale needs to be ironic in a fresh way. Let’s data-mine our checklists:

• Casablanca: He shows his love by sending her away.
• Sunset Boulevard: He gets that pool he always wanted
• In a Lonely Place: He didn’t do it, but loses her anyway.
• Alien: She blows up the ship only to discover that he’s on the escape pod.
• The Shining: The son must kill his father to save his family.
• Blue Velvet: He defeats evil by absorbing it.
• Silence of the Lambs: One killer is stopped but the worse one gets away in the process.
• Groundhog Day: He finally figures out how to get out of there: by wanting to stay.
• Donnie Brasco: He finally gets to go home but feels like he’s more lost than ever.
• The Bourne Identity: He discovers that he was home the whole time: with Marie. (In his commentary, Liman says that he saw the movie as having a Wizard of Oz structure)
• Sideways: Miles finds that the way to get the girl is the have the courage to do nothing, waiting for her to re-approach instead of drunk dialing her.
• How to Train Your Dragon: The village is once again overrun with dragons, but in a good way.
• Iron Man: His partner turns out to be the villain.
• An Education: She realizes that was she feared was exactly what she needed.
• Bridesmaids: Her archenemy helps her get her guy.

There are, of course, many more ironies in between as well. In the next three posts, we’ll look at the pros and cons of Ironic Dialogue...

The Big Idea, Addendum: More Thoughts on the Ironic Concept

As I organized the book, one thing that become clear was how often I came back to the subject of irony. “Oh, by the way, this element has to be ironic. And that one. And this other one.” I soon realized that I had to figure out how many separate ironies I was dealing with and how they interacted. Let’s spend the next several posts doing that.

I first addressed the need to have an ironic concept here and then followed it up here but both concern themselves more with things that aren’t ironic, rather than things that are. One problem I have with ironies, and with all advice that’s practically universal, is that it’s hard to pick out specific examples, and they wouldn’t be very useful anyway, because exemplary cases aren’t the point: I’m talking about how this should be everywhere, but without being the center of attention.

In many such cases where I wanted to prove that something was true across all types of movies, I’ve found myself, more and more, data-mining the 15 checklists. So let’s see how each of the movies we’ve looked at has an Ironic Concept:

• Casablanca: The least patriotic American has to save the Allied cause.
• Sunset Boulevard: The nation’s most glamorous people are psychotic lowlifes.
• In a Lonely Place: A writer adapting a crime book finds himself living it.
• Alien: They go to answer a distress signal sent by a creature that wants to kill them.
• The Shining: A recovering alcoholic rededicates himself to his family, then finds that himself compelled to kill them.
• Blue Velvet: An idealistic amateur detective discovers he’s just as creepy as those he investigates.
• Silence of the Lambs: The only way to catch one serial killer is to work with another.
• Groundhog Day: A man who just wants to get his least favorite day over has to live it again and again.
• Donnie Brasco: An undercover FBI agent finds his pitiful targets more sympathetic than his bosses.
• The Bourne Identity: A spy with a conscience becomes the latest target of his own agency.
• Sideways: A man celebrates his upcoming wedding by looking for love.
• How to Train Your Dragon: A dragon killer in training succeeds by befriending a dragon.
• Iron Man: Arms dealer is targeted by his own clients, declares war on arms dealing.
• An Education: A bored girl rejects the idea of getting “an education”, but learns another meaning of that phrase in the process.
• Bridesmaids: A group of friends planning a happy day go to war against each other.

So, yeah, all of them. But this is not to be confused with an Ironic Finale, which we’ll look at next time…

Best of 2013 #2, Part 2: Concerns About 12 Years a Slave

In the case of 12 Years a Slave, I foolishly did the one thing that always sabotages a movie for me: I read the book shortly before I saw it. I naturally tend to adapt the screenplay in my head whenever I read a book, and the actual movie inevitably frustrates me because they didn’t make the choices I would have made.

As I said yesterday, I feel that this movie has to be seen in the context of McQueen’s previous two features, which seem to show that he’s far more interested in suffering than in struggle. Of course, in many ways, the result was exactly what we needed this movie to be, for two reasons:

• Both because every other movie featuring slavery has failed to capture the depth of that suffering, and...
• Because it’s true to the experience of the vast majority of slaves, who never got to choose between suffering and struggle, because the first was so mandatory and second seemed utterly impossible.

So this movie was trapped by its historical role: since no one else had yet risen to the task, it had to be the movie about slavery, and it wasn’t allowed to be a movie about slavery...but I wish it could have been, because many amazing and painful peculiarities of Solomon Northrop’s struggle were frustratingly left out in the interest of telling a more universal story.

Despite being an avid reader of slave narratives, when I first heard about this movie, I had never encountered Northrop’s story. I was not only happy to discover this existence of this amazing story, but I was instantly impressed by what a perfect choice it was for adaptation, because the story has inherent qualities that made it so much more valuable that other slave stories.

The most obvious reason, of course, is that it has an ostensibly happy ending, making the whole thing much more bearable for an audience, but it goes much deeper than that.

It’s hard to write a slave story with irony. There’s no chagrin in being a slave, there’s no self-recrimination…What is happening to you is so totally outside your control that you can’t possible reproach yourself about any part of it, and it’s so totally evil that you can’t have any conflicted feelings about it. But strong fictional characters usually benefit from having doubt, guilt and recriminations. We want characters to be proven wrong so they can correct their false statements of philosophy and false goals….but slaves are just way too unambiguously in the right.

But as soon as I heard about this story, I thought “Ah-ha! That’s how you do a story about slavery!” For this one slave, the condition would be ironic, because he would be unable to keep from saying, “I don’t belong here, I’m not a real slave, I’m not like these others!”, but every time he thought that he would feel horribly guilty: After all, did anyone belong here? Are the others “real slaves” any more than he?

The arc of such a movie instantly presented itself to me: Finally, after eleven years or so, he comes to accept the truth that he is no better than these people and he is truly one of them, and only then is he torn away from them and told by lawyers that he is better after all, which now seems like an obscene notion to him. What a harrowing emotional journey! What brilliant irony!

Shortly after hearing about the movie, I tracked down and read Mr. Northrup’s amazing book, and I discovered that this sort of irony is not a big element there, but of course it wouldn’t be, since, like all pre-war slave narratives, it’s primarily a work of advocacy, and including a big psychological component would not serve that advocacy. I still felt that it would be perfectly logical and inevitable to include that element in any adaptation.

The other potential problem for adaptation that the book presented to me what that Northrop made so few attempts to escape, and I wondered how sympathetic that would be onscreen, but I simply assumed that the adaptation would play up the steps he did take (For one, during the original journey to New Orleans, he did successfully send a letter to his wife telling her of his situation, but she was unable to locate him, and for another, he fled into the swamps more than once, only to be brought back), and show that, in his mind, he was always in the middle of some (quixotic) long-term strategy to free himself…

…But when I saw the movie, I was shocked to discover that the movie went the other way…

• Rather than foreground his few attempt to be free, it eliminated most of them. Crucially, though it left in the second two attempts at a letter, many years later, it eliminated the first letter on which he hung his hopes for the first ten years.
• Even more baffling, most of that painful irony that seemed to be generated so naturally by this story was ignored by the filmmakers. There’s never any real sense of Solomon feeling any guilt-wracked superiority to his fellow slaves.

And so we arrive my main concern: we finally get a movie about slavery with a black writer, a black director and a black star…but it still denies its hero agency and irony, which has always been a major criticism directed towards movies about blacks that have been made by whites.

This is largely a movie about watching Solomon suffer in stunned silence. As I said, that’s probably the more honest choice, but it’s a frustrating choice for a moviegoer who’s hoping to bond with the internal dilemmas faced by a character. The movie denies itself some clear opportunities to connect its audience to Mr. Northrop’s ironic internal state in favor of examining his suffering in a very external way, freezing us out instead of sucking us in.

Wouldn’t we have felt that suffering more deeply and painfully if we had been aware of how it contrasted with the pitiful hopes for freedom that he cherished because of that first letter? Wouldn’t we have felt more agony if we had been made to share Northrop’s inevitable guilt-wracked feelings of superiority to the other slaves?

Of course, I’m aware of how ridiculous it is to raise these concerns: We finally have a movie about slavery made by black men, and along comes a white guy (born and raised in Georgia no less, whose grandfather’s grandfather was a confederate soldier) telling them that they did it wrong! The sheer cinematic power and historical import of this movie combine to make it a great masterpiece and exactly what we need, and the fact that guys like me didn’t get to stick our noses in for once is a wonderful thing. But I can’t help feeling a little frustrated by some of the choices.

Narrative Breakdown Podcast on Irony

Hey guys, the Narrative Breakdown podcast is back with a run of new episodes, and they were nice enough to ask me to drop by again.

Today, James Monahan and I discuss irony and our conversation pushes my thoughts on the subject into areas that I’ve never covered here on the blog, so you might want to give it a listen!

Check it out on the web here or subscribe on iTunes here!

And here are some of my previous posts on the topic:
Seven Types of Storytelling Irony.
All Good Stories Are Ironic.
Successes and Failures Should Be Ironic.
Misunderstandings Must Be Ironic (featuring The Apartment)
Lincoln vs. Amistad.
And my write-up of Margin Call.

Point of interest: Here on the blog, we were discussing motivation earlier this week and whether or not TV characters can have more complex motivations than movie characters.  I mentioned that I hated movies where detectives are supposedly motivated by the fact that the victim reminds them of someone they failed to save long ago...

...but in the podcast, I praise the long-running storyline on “Homicide” where precisely that dynamic comes to fuel the character of Det. Bayliss.  Again, the difference is time.  On the show, we see the orignal case fall apart, we recognize the picture of the girl in Baliss’s cubicle year after year, we share his frustration, we feel the resonance when he gets similar cases, years later.

When movies attempt this sort of long-distance motivation, it feels cheap and unearned, because they’re referring to an event that means nothing to us.  On TV, if they’re committed to the long haul, they can pull it off beautifully.

(Also, it’s worth noting that whenever a case reminded Bayliss of the unsolved Adena Watson case, that usually meant he was about to screw up. Complex motivations are more likely to lead to failure  than success!)