Believe Care Invest: Little Fires Everywhere

Why it might be hard to care for the heroes of this book:

• First of all, because we meet a ton of characters in these ten pages and it’s not at all clear who will be the main protagonist …and even when the novel’s over, it will still be hard to say. This is a true ensemble novel, even more diffuse than “Game of Thrones”, because it puts us in more heads.
• Then there’s the question of POV. We’re hopping into a lot of heads, but there’s another POV to take into account. When we meet Lexie, we jump into her thoughts:
• She glanced at her brothers, at her mother, still in her bathrobe on their tree lawn, and thought, They have literally nothing but the clothes on their backs
• …then there’s a comment: 
• Literally was one of Lexie’s favorite words, which she deployed even when the situation was anything but literal. In this case, for once, it was more or less true. 
• Who is saying that literally is one of Lexie’s favorite words? Lexie probably wouldn’t say that about herself, and she certainly wouldn’t say that she misuses it. So whose head are we in right here? Ng’s. As with Rowling and Vernon Dursely, we are meeting these suburbanites from a jaundiced point of view and that POV is the author’s own.

Believe

• First she has to get us to believe in this world, with she does effortlessly with a wealth of odd little details. Ng grew up in Shaker Heights in the 90s, so she has fun facts readily at hand. (“All the notes Serena had written her since the sixth grade, still folded in paper footballs”)
• Then she has to get us to believe in the Richardsons. This is tricky because, as I said above, we’re looking down on the judgmentally. On a certain level we’re supposed to scoff, roll our eyes, and say “typical suburbanites.” But they also have to seem real in very specific ways. 
• It’s also hard because she’s pretty much introducing this six member family all at once. That’s always super-risky. I thought, “Oh no, I’ll never get these characters straight.” But I needn’t have worried. As with Martin, Ng is a master at lightning-fast fully-realized characterization. Every chance she gets to differentiate the family members, she does so: 
• Last year it had paid for their trip to Martha’s Vineyard, where Lexie had perfected her backstroke and Trip had bewitched all the local girls and Moody had sunburnt to a peeling crisp and Izzy, under great duress, had finally agreed to come down to the beach—fully clothed, in her Doc Martens, and glowering. 
• Or: 
• Out in the driveway, she saw that Trip’s Jeep was gone, as was Lexie’s Explorer, and Moody’s bike, and, of course, her husband’s sedan. 
• Then she has to get us to believe in The Warrens. Once again, we do so not by jumping into their heads, but by looking at them with jaundiced eyes, in this case the eyes of the Richardsons: 
• They knew there was no Mr. Warren, and that Mia was thirty-six, according to the Michigan driver’s license she had provided. They noticed that she wore no ring on her left hand, though she wore plenty of other rings: a big amethyst on her first finger, one made from a silver spoon handle on her pinkie, and one on her thumb that to Mrs. Richardson looked suspiciously like a mood ring. 
• The wealth of detail makes it easy to believe in the reality of all eight characters (and more to come.) 

So how does Ng get us to care?

• Again, we’ll start with the Richardsons: We sense right away that these may be clueless, overprivileged white people, but hey, their house just burned down. As Lexie observes, everybody but her has only the clothes on their backs. We don’t know yet if they deserve this to some extent, and we suspect they might, but even so, it’s an outsized humiliation. No fair court of law would sentence you to have your house burnt down.
• As for the Warrens, we meet Mia and Pearl though the judgmental eyes of the Richardsons and we sense that these judgments are unfair, so we’re inclined to feel for them. We then get a chance to bond with Mia in a way that we haven’t really bonded with anyone, when we jump into her head to share her fright at this freaky world.
• Large motor scooters, each piloted by a man in an orange work suit, zipped down each driveway to collect the garbage in the privacy of the backyard, ferrying it to the larger truck idling out in the street, and for months Mia would remember their first Friday on Winslow Road, the fright she’d had when the scooter, like a revved-up flame-colored golf cart, shot past the kitchen window with engine roaring

But what about Invest?

• Ng does an amazing job in these ten pages of introducing this world, these characters, and a compelling flashforward towards a climax that implies a big mystery, but she doesn’t have time to introduce a problem to be solved, so we don’t really invest in anybody yet. In a book with a large ensemble, we search for the character that wants something, but nobody wants much in these 10 pages. In the next ten pages we’ll get our first character who really wants something, Moody, who will come to want Pearl. But we don’t really invest in him either.
• To a certain extent, this is not a book about the solving of a large problem. There will eventually be a unifying plot, but it will take almost a hundred pages for it to coalesce.
• Ng’s Shaker Heights will ultimately have certain things in common with another nearby municipality: Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio.” The flashforward to the fire will give this book a lot more structure than that one had (or at least the illusion of structure), but they’re doing something similar: Putting us in a dozen Buckeye heads and inviting us to feel the weight of the modern condition.
• In a Barnes and Noble podcast, Ng says of her book, “Everyone has thoughts about what’s going on, but nobody in the book has all the pieces, and I guess even when you’ve got all the pieces it’s not always easy to figure out what’s right.” That’s the goal of all truly-omniscient narrators, whether it’s George R. R. Martin or Leo Tolstoy or Ng. Ultimately, the large problem is life itself, and the only hero who can attempt to solve that problem is the reader, because only we have all the facts.

Podcast Art Question (And Big News!)

Big news: A great podcast network has offered to host and monetize us (in a non-annoying way!  Full announcement to come later). James said he was on board with the conditions that we finally change the music and the art, both of which he has long kvetched about. I have a great composer composing new music for us as we speak. As for art, James wants something that acknowledges his existence. As always, I thought I might involve you in the process! 

As you’ll recall, here’s the current art, which is just a square version of the cover of my book:

James worked this up at one point, which is fun, but I thought it was too busy:

So for this new opportunity, I starting working on a vastly simplified version of the above, and got as far as doing this:

But then I sighed in exhaustion. The artifacting around our heads just looks too amateurish, our necks end too awkwardly, etc. It’s just not good. James said he really wanted actual art, like this Harmontown art:

So, in a fit of desperation, I just drew this new logo in 15 seconds using my mouse in Photoshop:

And, wonder of wonders, James and I both kinda like it. It’s pretty ironic that this is the less amateurish version. But that’s its appeal, to a certain extent. So what do you guys think. Dare we go with this ridiculous version? Should we do this version with better art? 

But wait!  We have a new contender!  Commenter Friday whipped this one up!  What do you think?

Thanks for all of your input on so many things these past few weeks!

The Annotation Project: Little Fires Everywhere

Hi, everybody! It’s been a long time since we’ve done a new Annotation hasn’t it? Well, let’s not beat around the bush: I want a more diverse pool of examples for my book! So let’s explore some great authors, screenwriters and pilot-writers I haven’t covered, shall we? Let’s start with annotations for the first ten pages of “Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng. You can download these as a Word document here. 

My Big Question for You: How to Organize the Book?

Okay, guys, time for the big question: How on Earth should I organize this damn thing? In the pitch I sold, I proposed organizing it by example. Start out with some fun personal stuff like the last book, then have three longs chapters about Believe, Care and Invest (Possibly now to become Connect, Care, Commit?), then have 50 3-page chapters about 10 books, 10 movies, 10 TV pilots, maybe 10 non-fiction books, maybe 10 comics, something like that.

But now I’m doubting that. Obviously I’ve just done 20 movies here so far on the blog (more in raw data form than the actual essays I’d write for the book) That’s more examples than I’d off in the book, but right away it started feeling a little monotonous to me. If I just frog march my readers through 50 examples, pointing out similar things about each one, it could be hard to read the whole thing.

So I’m freaking out. So here are some other ideas:

I could organize it around pieces of advice, such as using humiliation, then give a lot of examples of that. The problem is that that’s the way I organized my last book, and it might seem too similar.

So here’s a new idea: Organize it around reasons that characters will be hard to identify with. Jerk heroes we love. Passive heroes we love. Petulant heroes we love. Then look at a bunch of examples of each and how they’ve overcome this baked-in liability. As we’ve seen, every great hero breaks some rule of identification, as well they should. You don’t want to have a mathematically-perfect Likeable Character. Something specific about this particular character is going to create a speed bump to likeability, and then you use your powers to get your audience over that speed bump.

I’d had an idea for another book called “The Exceptions: How to Break Every Writing Rule”. What if I kind of combined the ideas?

I dunno.  Any other ideas?  Organize my book and I’ll thank you in the acknowledgments!

Should I Be Asking About Compassion?

In my first book, I point out that a moment of humanity sometimes involves compassion, and I’ve begun to wonder if BCI discounts compassion too much. Specifically I caught on this exchange in Iron Man.

• Do you plan to report on the millions we’ve saved by advancing medical technology or kept from starvation with our intellicrops?

Going back ten years, I’ve launched a lot of broadsides against “Save the Cat” and its idea of a big heroic moment at the beginning, but have I gone too much in the other direction? It just makes sense that compassion would play a role in making a hero likeable. I really wish I had been keeping this in mind as I rewatched the first 15 minutes of the 20 movies we’ve done so far, because now it’s hard to remember if there was a lot of compassion in each of these:

• The 40 Year Old Virgin: Well, I think he generally feels like a compassionate person, but does he really have a moment of compassion?
• Alien: Not really? She’s the only one who visits Parker and Brett, but not really out of compassion.
• An Education: Not really?
• The Babadook: She’s exceptionally kind to the old folks at the home she works in.
• The Bourne Identity: He seems like a nice guy, but… not really?
• Blazing Saddles: Not really? His rebellion at the beginning may be showing compassion for the Chinese woman who passes out out, but there’s no indication he even saw that.
• Blue Velvet: Not really?
• Bridesmaids: Not really?
• Casablanca: Well, he cuts off the girl who’s drinking too much?
• Chinatown: He claims he helps out people who need it, but we’re not sure we believe him.
• Do the Right Thing: Not really?
• Donnie Brasco: Not really?
• Frozen: Again, I think she generally feels like a compassionate person, but does she really have a moment of compassion?
• Get Out: He checks on the deer.
• Groundhog Day: No.
• How to Train Your Dragon: He won’t kill Toothless.
• In a Lonely Place: He’s nice to the old drunken actor.
• Iron Man: He talks about feeding the world, but we’re not sure we believe him. Certainly the reporter seems dubious.
• Lady Bird: Not really?

Inevitably, I’m going to end up rewatching all these, and I’ll look closer for a moment of compassion in each one.  Should I start asking this question on the movies going forward?  Are there moments of compassion I’m missing in these movies?

Okay, So Where Are We? (Oh, and By the Way, I Sold a New Book)

Okay, guys, I’m not supposed to announce this yes, but yes, as I’m sure many of you have guessed, I sold a new book! We haven’t settled on a title yet, but my pitch was entitled “Believe, Care, Invest: How to Get Anyone to Fall in Love With Your Hero in Ten Pages or Less”. We haven’t sealed the deal yet, but it looks like it’ll be coming from Penguin Random House sooner rather than later after I turn it in!

As soon as we had an offer, I started panicking and posting movie BCI pieces everyday, not as a first draft of the book, but as data gathering. Now that we’re halfway through the alphabet let’s go ahead and figure out what we’ve got so far:

• Why the hero might be hard to identify with: I didn’t have this when we did the BCI novel pieces, but I think it’s essential, and might be a main organizing principle of the book.
• Believe: One of the things I’m learning is that the things that make a character believable are the same things that make them hard to like (such as the sordidness of Jake Gittes’s P. I. business.)
• Care: I’m getting a better sense of this.
• Invest: I’m inclined to stick with the BCI language because I’ve already used it in my first book, but I have wondered if I should stick with this word. Part of the problem with my title is that “Believe, Care, Invest” sounds like a book about investing! I kind of prefer “root for” now, but I’m not sure.

That brings us to James’s Five E’s. I sort of included these just as a joke because we had just discussed them on the podcast, but I do think James is really onto something with most of these. I won’t break down every example in the book according to these, but I think I will talk about four of them frequently.

• Eat: It is wild how common this is and how much it does seem to add to each of these movies. A huge part of Believability.
• Exercise: This was already on the checklist and it’s clearly a big part of Invest.
• Economic Activity: This is also clearly very important, sometimes for Believe, Care, and Invest.
• Enjoy: This is clearly another big contributor to Believability. It goes far towards making a character, especially if they’re in a bad situation, feel like a complete human.
• Emulate: If you go through those 20 pieces, you’ll see that I found this in more than a few movies, but I’ve never been convinced it plays a big role in Believe, Care, or Invest.

And the final two categories I’ve been considering so far: 

• Rise above: I think that my contribution to the the Five E’s turns out to be essential. I think I’ve discovered almost every character eventually rises above their economic situation (walks off their job) at some point, but when they do so (sooner or later) is a big part of what defines them. There’s probably some big theory still to be gleaned from digging into that data. 
•  High five a black guy: I think I’ll stop including these in these blog posts, and certainly won’t focus on this in the book. It’s a funny phrase, and a good way to skewer some movies (like Blue Velvet!), but it’s not an issue in many movies.

But that brings me to another issue that I’ve begun to feel I should be examining in each movie. In my first book, I point out that a moment of humanity sometimes involves compassion, and I’ve begun to wonder if BCI discounts compassion too much.  Let’s discuss that next time...

Believe Care Invest: Lady Bird

Why Lady Bird might be hard to identify with:

• She’s bratty. Her mom asks “How did I raise such a snob?” She’s a little racist to her Latino brother.

Believe

• She begins by saying: “Do you think I look like I came from Sacramento?” We’ve never heard it put in quite that way, but we instantly identify: We’ve all wondered if our hometown leaves a taint on us. (Think about how terrible the generic version would be: “One day I’m going to make it out of this town and be somebody!”)
• One thing that could fall under both Believe and Care: She’s strident about things she’s wrong about. Again, we empathize, because we all remember what it was like to be precocious. She seems believably 17, moreso than most screen teens.

Care

• Her mom is emotionally abusive: “You’re not even worth state tuition. Just go to city college, with your work ethic. Just go to city college, and then to jail, and then back to city college.” But she’s also accurate in some ways (“You don’t think about anybody but yourself,”) so it hits home.
• She pretends to know who Jim Morrison is when flirting with a guy, which is the sort of thing that always makes us wince with identification.

Invest

• She certainly does something active to protect herself from her mother’s verbal abuse, but it’s not exactly the cleverest solution: She jumps out of the moving car. Cut to a pink cast that has “Fuck you mom” written on it. So she’s kind of bad ass in a very hapless way.
• We admire her gumption. She runs for student government knowing she won’t win, and makes cool posters. She tries out for the musical with no experience and she’s the only one who dresses up.
• We admire her wit, although sometimes when she thinks she’s intentionally and unintentionally funny at the same time.

Five Es

• Eat: She and the family have eggs. She and her friend wolf down communion wafers.
• Exercise: Other than jumping out of the car, no. We don’t even see her in gym class in the school montage.
• Economic Activity: Lots of class resentment. Eventually she will get a job at a coffee shop.
• Enjoy: She and her mom share a good cry as they finish the audiobook of “Grapes of Wrath”. She and her friend giggle and talk about masturbation.
• Emulate: She and her friend look at models in a magazine and say, “Why can’t I look like that.” They imagine what life would be like if they lived in a nice house. They say of a classmate: “She’s so pretty, her skin is luminous, we should try tanning.”

Rise above

• She will later ignore her coffeeshop customers to hit on one guy and comfort another.

High five a black guy

• Just the opposite: She’s a little bit racist towards her adopted Latino brother.

Believe Care Invest: Iron Man

Why it might be hard to identify with Tony

• He’s an asshole. He’s a merchant of death. He’s a trust fund baby. His womanizing has not aged well.

Believe

• He’s so disarming and relaxed in the back of the Hum-V that he feels real. (“I don’t want to see this on your MySpace page”) He has distinct metaphor family and attitudes. Later, I love that he’s listening to “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies (“I just wanted a Pepsi!”) while he’s working. He’s not a stereotype of a rich guy or engineer. He feels like you could have a beer with him.

Care

• But we would despise him if his Hum-V caravan wasn’t blown up by terrorists. Then a bomb with his own name on it explodes and his shirt fills up with blood. Then he wakes up in a cave where terrorists are seemingly making a blackmail video of him. Then he finds out that his weapons are being used on innocent people. He has a bad day.

Invest

• Everyone is amazed and intimidated by him. “You’ve been called the Da Vinci of our time.” He asks, “Feared or respected, is it too much to ask for both?”, and he does get both.
• The ultimate bad-ass shorthand: Cool guys don’t look at explosions.  Yes, I will share the video again: 

Five Es

• Eat: He’s drinking alcohol.
• Exercise: Not really.
• Economic Activity: He’s closing a big sale when we first meet him.
• Enjoy: He’s very much enjoying himself, no matter what he does.
• Emulate: He’s emulating his father a bit, but also refusing to do so.

Rise above

• He doesn’t show up to get a business award because he’s playing in a casino instead. Then he gives the award away to a casino girl.

High five a black guy

• A black guy says that Tony is his friend and mentor (but it’s a fully-realized character, so it’s not bad.)

Believe Care Invest: In a Lonely Place

So how are we doing? Are these interesting? Is there a book here? I think it’s time soon for a round-up piece halfway through the alphabet where I start sifting this data and thinking about how to turn this into an interesting book.  And I think maybe we need to add some more categories to look for in every movie.  More on that soon...

Why it might be hard to identify with Dix:

• By design, the movie never wants us to fully identify with Dix (a name that is not coincidental.) The movie wants us to be unsure if we should empathize with an unjustly accused man, or skeptical of a possibly guilty man.

Believe

• Dix may be a downer, but his personality nevertheless sparkles: The girl at the bar complains that he never picks up the phone when she calls: “Don’t you like to talk anymore?” “Not to people who have my number.” Later, she says, suggestively, “Remember how I used to read to you?” He responds, “Since then I’ve learned to read by myself.”

Care

• When we first meet Dix, a kid asks for his autograph, only to be told by a friend, “Don’t bother, he’s nobody.” Dix says, “She’s right.” He’s down and out.
• We empathize with his panic when the hat check girl in his apartment cries out “Help! Help!” while reading out the plot of the novel.
• And of course, there’s nothing that makes us care more than seeing a character falsely arrested …if it is false.

Invest

• He’s not famous enough for the kid to appreciate his autograph, but most people know and respect him, including the woman in the next car over at a stoplight.
• He’s the only one who’s kind to the old, drunken actor, so we feel we can trust him.
• We agree with him about his disdain for the book and Mildred. We admire his wit.

Five Es

• Eat: He has a drink with friends. He eats eggs at home
• Exercise: Not really. Hops out of his car to start a road-rage fist-fight.
• Economic Activity: He’s considering taking on a screenwriting job.
• Enjoy: He’s amused by his own wit, but he doesn’t enjoy much.
• Emulate: He’s supposed to emulate more successful writers, but he refuses.

Rise above

• “I won’t work on something I don’t like.” “Are you in any position to be choosy?” He sneers back: “You know what you are, you’re a popcorn salesman.”

High five a black guy

• No

Podcast Episode 18: Michael Arndt and Insanely Great Endings

The Secrets of Story Podcast · Episode 18: Michael Arndt and Insanely Great Endings

Hey folks, it’s a podcast already! Most of this episode dates back to that trove of pre-George-Floyd recordings we made, which we finally exhaust here. Before you watch this episode, we recommend you watch this great video. It’s well worth your time! But if you don’t have 90 minutes to spare, we do sum it up in the podcast before we discuss it.

Believe Care Invest: How to Train Your Dragon

Why it might be hard to identify with Hiccup:

• It’s always tricky to establish your hero as a lovable underdog without them tipping over in the territory of being an unlovable loser. Hiccup is right on that line when we first meet him. He’s very puny, especially compared to the Vikings all around him. He’s got a squeaky voice. Everyone pities him. “You can’t lift a hammer, you can’t swing an axe,” they tell him.

Believe

• The level of detail in this world is stunning right away, both in terms of the visuals and the narrative world-building. We begin with a paradox: “My village has been here for seven generations but every single building is new.” Then we find out why: Dragons burn it down regularly. The strange mix of Scottish and Norse culture feels new.
• They hired Roger Deakins to help “light” the movie because they were tired of overlit CGI movies. Right away, we’re thinking, “Oh, this feels more real than a PIXAR movie.” iii. He was given a hideous name so he could frighten off gnomes and trolls, which is a unique detail.

Care

• Dragons are trying to kill him and everyone else. Everybody yells at him to get back inside. His father doesn’t approve of him, to put it mildly. His boss tells him “You need to stop all this.” “You just pointed to all of me.” “Yes, that’s it, stop being all of you.” He can’t get a date with the girl he likes.

Invest

• So just when we’re saying, “I can’t invest in this loser,” he uses his inventing skills to bring down the most feared dragon of all, the Night Fury. No one’s ever done that before. Now we love him.

Five Es

• Eat: No
• Exercise: He’s running around when we first see him, then hauls his equipment to the edge of town.
• Economic Activity: He’s working his job which he’s clearly good at. “I’ve been his apprentice ever since I was little …well, littler.”
• Enjoy: Not really.
• Emulate: “You are many things, but a dragon killer isn’t one of them.” “I just wanna be one of you guys.”

Rise above:

• He’s ordered not to leave his job (“Stay. Put. There.”) but runs out as soon as they’re not watching him to go down a dragon.
• …but then, once he’s downed a dragon, earning himself the job he’s always wanted, he rises above that job as well, and decides that they should all make peace with the dragons.

High five a black guy

• No

Believe Care Invest: The Fighter

Whoops, I’ve been moving in alphabetical order, but I missed this one!

Why it might be hard to identify with Mickey:

• He’s quiet and downcast. Dicky steals every scene from him. He has a daughter he’s not raising.

Believe

• Once again, the least likeable aspect is the most believable: that daughter that lives with her mom and stepfather. Also, the complex story of Mickey’s sisters and brother and their two dads makes us rightly say, “Nobody would make that up.” We know it’s a true story (they mix in real footage) and including confusing or alienating details like those reassure us that it’s not simplifying or prettifying it. And, of course, Wahlberg makes a very convincing citizen of Massachusetts.

Care

• We begin with a universal situation: Mickey does all the road work while his brother goofs around and tries to pick a pretend fistfight. The next day, he has to wait around while his brother stands him up. When Mickey tries to pick up Charlene, she dismissively says, “I heard you were a stepping stone, the guy they use against the other fighters to move the other fighters up.” When Mickey tells his daughter he’s going to win his upcoming fight, his ex-wife says, “It’s cruel to mislead your child, Mickey.”

Invest

• Mickey’s a bad ass (he beats up a patron disrespecting Charlene) but he’s a thinking man’s fighter: “Boxing’s a chess game, I’m gonna pick my punches to take him down.”

Five Es

• Eat: They all go out drinking.
• Exercise: Very much so, he’s shadowboxing, walking all over town, punching a punching bag, and finally sparring in the ring.
• Economic Activity: He’s working raking gravel for the city and he’s got a prizefight coming up.
• Enjoy: He enjoys shadowboxing with his brother and drinking with his family (though he’s a little discontent in each situation.)
• Emulate: He’s expected to emulate his brother, who fought Sugar Ray Leonard, but he’s tired of emulating him.

Rise above

• He lays down his rake to spar with his brother.

High five a black guy

• Very much! It’s quickly made clear that the black people of Lowell love Mickey and Dicky, though we’ll never see them again.

Believe Care Invest: Groundhog Day

Why it might be hard to identify with Phil

• He’s a depressed jerk, working a dead end job and deluded about his prospects for finding a better one.

Believe

• The mundane reality of a weatherman, standing in front of a blank blue screen, make it feel real. Odd regionalisms like blood sausage make the setting believable. Phil’s got distinct language: As Larry says, “Did he actually call himself ‘the talent’?”

Care

• Just a bit, we agree with him that Rita’s perkiness is somewhat off-putting and identify with him for feeling like he wants something more out of life. We certainly share his exasperation with Needlenose Ned Ryerson. We identify with him when he steps in a puddle, all the more so because he was storming off in a huff when he did it.

Invest

• Even though he’s clearly not very happy, he’s also clearly a good entertaining weatherman, blowing on the map to make the clouds move, etc. His main prediction will turn out to be wrong, but we don’t know that yet.

Five Es

• Eat: He refuses to eat with his co-workers, then refuses breakfast as hit B&B the next morning, complaining that there’s no espresso and cappuccino. Later in the movie, he will eat ravenously.
• Exercise: No. He walks around town a little.
• Economic Activity: He’s doing his job, trying to get a better job
• Enjoy: Not at all
• Emulate: Not that I can tell.

Rise above:

• Well, he wants a better job, but he’s not ready to rise above his current one. Later, he walks off the job, but that might be considered “sink below”, not rise above.

High five a black guy

• No.

Believe Care Invest: Get Out

Why it might be hard to identify with Chris:

• He’s passive. This trip isn’t his idea. He lets his girl dismiss his fears and throw away his cigarette.

Believe

• Right away, with an opening scene recalling the murder of Trayvon Martin, we know we’re in for some Real Like National Pain. This is going to gutpunch us.
• Chris doesn’t have a lot of personality, but his photographs give us a world into his soul, making him feel real. The fact that his dog has IBS feels real, as do the details of Rod working at the TSA.

Care

• When we first see him, he nicks himself shaving, foreshadowing bloodletting to come. Then, having the seen the introductory scene (and the title), we’re already screaming “Get Out” to Chris as his girlfriend dismisses his concerns about being chased away with a shotgun. We’ve all been gaslit by our significant others, from time to time.

Invest

• We don’t invest in Chris very much, because he’s a pretty weak guy, but it keeps coming up that his most valuable quality is his eyes, and we like good eyes. And we like that he’s wary, even though he chooses to ignore his own wariness. We admire that he checks on the deer to see if it’s suffering.

Five Es

• Eat: Rose brings pastries, but we don’t get to see them eat them. We do see them eat soon after arriving upstate.
• Exercise: No
• Economic Activity: Not much with Chris and Rose. We do see Rod at work.
• Enjoy: He semi-enjoys hanging out with his girlfriend, but he’s already in the sunken place, half-present and half watching himself and Rose from afar with a wary eye. We like her when she says of her dad and Obama, “He’s definitely going to want to talk to you about that and it will definitely fucking suck,” but he can only half-smile. She only fully wins him over when she stands up to the cop: “That was hot.” “I’m not going to let anyone fuck with my man.”
• Emulate: Well, Chris is busily code-switching when he’s talking to Rod and Rose at the same time, one on the phone and one in person. He “acts black” with one and “acts white” with the other, but the real him is too sunken to be fully either.

Rise above

• No

High five a black guy

• He is a black guy.

Believe Care Invest: Frozen

Why it might be hard to identify with Anna

• She has no skills. She’s very naïve. She doesn’t know how to take care of herself.

Believe

• Right away, as a small child, Anna is brimming with unique personality. She says, “The sky’s awake, so I’m awake!” with mock-theatricality.
• It’s a simple trick, but it usually works, Anna’s a klutz (She wrecks the cake) She’s very human (“Don’t know if I’m elated or gassy, but I’m somewhere in that zone.”) She wakes up looking like a mess. (We then skip over the scene where she presumably orders her servants to fix her hair.)

Care

• Right away, Anna is almost killed, then her memories are taken from her, but we don’t really identify with those, because they’re not universal. But then her older sister shuts her out and won’t play with her anymore, and that’s a far more universal emotion many of us can identify with.  Then, of course, her parents die, because it’s Disney. We also feel for her when she embarrasses herself with Hans: “you’re gorgeous—Wait, what?”

Invest

• We don’t invest in Anna very much. We adore her, we empathize with her failings, but she doesn’t seem like someone who we can trust to solve this problem. Her only secret weapon is love. When she trudges off into the snow after her sister, we believe that she would do it, because we know how much she loves her sister, but we’re also saying, “Her? She’s our hero? She’s not up to this.” Luckily she quickly finds allies.

Five Es

• Eat: “I wanna stuff some chocolate in my face!”
• Exercise: Little Anna plays energetically with sister. Older Anna rides her bike around the house.
• Economic Activity: We begin with men engaged in the hard work of buying and selling ice, and we’ll soon meet a grown up ice dealer. Even the queen must deal with trade agreements.
• Enjoy: Anna very much enjoys playing with her sister.
• Emulate: Anna plays with dolls and emulates women in paintings

Rise above

• Well, when we talked about this on the blog, I defined it as “rising above mundane circumstances”, and Anna does that, though she never really endangers her job.

High five a black guy

• No

Believe Care Invest: Donnie Brasco

Why it might be hard to identify with Donny:

• As we discussed in our most recent podcast, he plays his cards close to his chest. We’re not even sure he’s a good guy.

Believe

• …but that makes him more believable (We’re finding this, aren’t we? The things that make a character believable are often potentially off-putting if not balanced out with Care and Invest.) 
• Also as James and I discussed, we admire both his expertise with jewels, and his cool way of conveying that Lefty’s gem is fake: He examines it and then says, “Why don’t you give it to your wife…You should give it to someone who don’t know any better.”
• When Donnie finally calls his wife, and she’s gotta go back to sleep, he says, “Put the phone on your pillow, I wanna listen to you breathe”, which is a painful way of saying “I miss you” that we’ve never heard before.
• The details of the mafia world are fascinating and convincing (The difference between “friend of mine” and “friend of ours”.)

Care

• Because Donny, in the guise of an apprentice, is subtly dominating Lefty almost from the beginning, we don’t actually fear for him very much. We worry about him more when we see the damage this does to his marriage and family.
• We always love humiliating ironies, and it’s ironic when both the mafia and the FBI tell him at the same time that his mustache violates their regulations, but his wife tells him, “That was the only thing I liked about this job.”

Invest

• We always like watchful eyes, and the movie begins with a close-up of Donnie’s watchful eyes. He quickly proves himself to be a bad-ass, beating up the guy who gave Lefty the jewel. We admire how he manipulates Lefty. He tells the FBI: “I got him, I got my hooks in the guy.”

Five Es

• Eat: Misses Christmas with his own family to eats Coq Au Vin with Lefty’s family.
• Exercise: All he does when he’s in his apartment is lift weights.
• Economic Activity: He’s pretending to be a jeweler while actually working for the FBI: He tells his wife, “You get the checks, don’t you?”
• Enjoy: Not at all, except listening to his wife breathe. He pretends to enjoy dinner with Lefty, but we’re never sure to what degree he’s just acting with Lefty.
• Emulate: Emulating Lefty every way he can.

Rise above

• Not until the very end of the movie, when he half-heartedly tries to get Lefty to flee before he can get arrested, but even then he’s unwilling to break character, so he fails.

High five a black guy

• Nope.

Believe Care Invest: Do the Right Thing

It’s interesting all the ways that Mookie is like Ripley from Alien. They both stick by their company, even at the risk of their friend’s lives, until almost the end of the move, when each one decisively decides to destroy their workplace. Both serve in their story as the only one who bridges upstairs and downstairs (Ripley is the only one who ever goes down into the bowels of the ship to visit Brett and Parker, Mookie is the only one who lives in both the black and white worlds.)

Why it might be hard to identify with Mookie:

• He’s passive and sullen. Notably, Lee shows us Tina complaining about her son’s deadbeat father (“Your father ain’t no real father, he’s a bum”) without letting us know she’s talking about Mookie until halfway through, which would probably make him too hard to care about before we’d had some chance to bond with him.

Believe

• The number one word for this movie is vivid. Ernest Dickerson’s color palate is so vivid. The little details of life in NYC are so vivid. Everyone’s personality is so vivid. The dialogue throbs with life, from Senor Love Daddy’s patter to the corner men’s shit talk. (“If Mike Tyson dreams about whupping my ass, he’d better wake up and apologize.”)
• At Mookie’s job, Lee dissects the way power works in a way that feels very real, with the job of sweeping up being pushed down the ladder from Sal to Pino to Vito to Mookie to Da Mayor.
• My all-time favorite “Special Feature” moment involves an awkward moment between Danny Aiello and Giancarlo Esposito over Sal saying “American-Italians” instead of Italian-Americans. Lee was smart to take Aiello’s change, because it sounds much more specific to this character and therefore real.

Care

• It’s the hottest day of the year and nobody’s air conditioning is working. Sal says, in reference to his agitation from the heat, “I’m gonna kill somebody today,” which turns out to be sort of true.
• Although Sal likes and pays Mookie, he also treats him like a slave in some ways: “There’s no free here, I’m the boss. No freedom, I’m the boss.” Mookie is humiliated when he’s told to kick his friend out of the pizza place (“Talk some brother talk to him”) for demanding pictures of black people be put on the walls. “I gotta work here, you’re fucking my shit up,” Mookie says, only to be told, “Stay black,” and we empathize with his humiliation.

Invest

• Mookie isn’t easy to invest in. The moment when we really decide we like him is when he comes out onto the street to walk to work, runs into some Jehovah’s Witnesses, and jauntily shouts “Hell no!” without breaking his stride. Other than that one negative encounter, we see that everybody else likes and respects Mookie, and he’s got a strong community backing him up. We see that he grapples a bit with Da Mayor’s advice, “Always do the right thing.”

Five Es

• Eat: Never
• Exercise: He delivers the pizzas by foot.
• Economic Activity: He’s counting bills when we first see him. His motto is “Gotta get paid.”
• Enjoy: He enjoys talking with his sister in the first scene. It would be harder to identify with him if we didn’t see that.
• Emulate: He wears Jackie Robinson’s 42 jersey, and tries, like Robinson to absorb racism without reacting for most of the movie.

Rise above

• He has to choose between his job and his friend and chooses his job. Sal says, “Mookie, want to get your friend out of here?” and he does so.

High five a black guy

• He’s a black guy.

Podcast Episode 17: Two More Character Tricks

The Secrets of Story Podcast · Episode 17: Two More Character Tricks

Hi everybody! So this is all very confusing, but one month ago, James and I had a marathon night where we recorded enough material for two podcasts, then George Floyd was murdered, and we decided to sit on them so as not to distract from the painful and long overdue reckoning that followed. Now we’ve finally gone back and recorded a bit more material for both, and I’ve finished cutting them. I’ve posted one and now and I’ll post the next in a week or two. Hope you like it.

Believe Care Invest: Chinatown

Why it might be hard to identify with Jake:

• He cares more about his venetian blinds than his client’s feelings. He’s a money-grubbing bottom feeder, but he’s also a bit of a dandy, and neither of those are very appealing to us. These things help our ability to believe in his reality, but hurt our ability to care about him.

Believe

• Right away, we’re saying, “Oh, this isn’t a phony Hollywood PI, this is the real deal, handling sordid divorce cases.” On a “Believe” level, we find his non-noble attitude to his clients to be refreshing: We’re finally getting to see what PIs are really like. Later, while he’s supposed to be investigating his clients at the Water Board hearing, he’s reading the Racing Form.

Care

• We don’t really care about Jake until 16:38, when another customer at his barbershop accosts him, saying, “You’ve got a hell of a way to make a living.” Jake, wounded, says, “Listen pal, I make an honest living, people only come to me in a desperate situation, I help ‘em out.” Now that we’ve seen him endure a public humiliation, we care a bit more about him.
• He then has another embarrassment we identify with when he tells the dirty joke to his operatives and doesn’t realize Mrs. Mulwray is behind him.

Invest

• From the opening photographs, we can see that he’s obviously good at his job, but we’re not sure how skilled he has to be to do it. It’s only when he pulls a very clever trick that we suddenly invest in him: He gets tired of waiting for Mulwray to leave the beach, so he reaches in his glove compartment where he’s got a stash of cheap fob watches. He puts one under Mulwray’s tire and goes home. The next day he checks the broken watch to see what time Mulwray left. Suddenly, we love this guy. We always love resourceful heroes.

Five Es

• Eat:No
• Exercise: He walks a lot, climbs building and cliffs, etc.
• Economic Activity: His whole life is his job.
• Enjoy: Not at first. At the water board meeting, he thinks it’s funny when a farmer brings his sheep in. Later, he loves telling his operatives the dirty joke. (Often, enjoyment opens a hero up to embarrassment)
• Emulate: I guess you could say he dresses like a classier PI than he is.

Rise above

• He tells fake Mrs. Mulwray she should let sleeping dogs lie. “You’re better off not knowing.”

High five a black guy

• Nope.

Believe Care Invest: Casablanca

Why it might be hard to identify with Rick:

• We don’t even meet him for 9 full minutes, and we wait even longer for him to speak. We spend that time looking for some character to invest in, not finding one, and getting frustrated. Once we meet him, he’s fairly cold and ruthless, and somewhat accommodating of his Nazi occupiers.

Believe

• The opening narration creates a complex and fascinating world that feels very real. The production design is fantastic. It really feels like we’re in an outdoor African city rather than an indoors Los Angeles studio.
• Rick has a distinctive way of dressing and speaking. He has a strong personality. He has lots of secrets, which we always like: “I came to Casablanca for the waters.” “What waters? We’re in the desert.” “I was misinformed.”

Care

• Nazis are everywhere. Someone is gunned down in the street for having Free French fliers. Rick clearly dislikes having to accommodate them. He betrays just a tiny hint of wistfulness when he watches the plane fly off to Lisbon. He likewise betrays a hint of guilt when Ugarte is pulled out of his arms by the Nazis. He’s a bit embarrassed when another customer says to him, “When they come to get me, Rick, I hope you’ll be more of a help.” But of course we don’t really care about him until his true love shows up married to someone else.

Invest

• He has total control of his bar in lots of badass ways, and a lot of sway in Casablanca. “Perhaps if you told him I run the second largest banking house in Amersterdam?” “It wouldn’t impress Rick, the leading banker in Amersterdam is now the baker in our kitchen.” He finds little ways to stand up to the Nazis He knows all. He knows that Ugarte killed the couriers and calls him on it.

Five Es

• Eat: No. “Madame, he never drinks with customers, never.”
• Exercise: No
• Economic Activity: Lots of it
• Enjoy: No, he specifically refuses wine, women, and song.
• Emulate: No

Rise above

• Refuses Deutchbanker’s money “You’re lucky the bar’s open to you.”
• Café and Sam not for sale at any price “I don’t buy or sell human beings.”
• Tells one of his bar customers, “You’ve had too much to drink.”

High five a black guy

• Very much so! Sam won’t take double to work for Ferrari.

Believe Care Invest: Bridesmaids

I might be posting seven days a week for the next few months. Hmm, I wonder why...?  No telling!

Why Annie Might Be Hard to Identify With:

• We debated on the podcast whether having sex helped us identify with a character. I said that it doesn’t, because everybody in the world is basically sexually unsatisfied, either in terms of quality or quantity. In this case, our heroine gets to have sex with Jon Hamm. She’s living the dream! How could anyone identify with that? 

Believe

• …but the saving grace is that he’s a terrible lover, and she understandably doesn’t enjoy it. But c’mon, it’s Jon Hamm, so we can see why she would pretend to. 
• When she has breakfast with Lillian, one of her complaints is “He calls me ‘dude’ a lot,” which is nicely relatable.
• Later, her boss at the jewelry store says to her, “The whole reason you have this job is because your mom’s my sponsor in AA and I’m doing you a favor”, which is nicely oddly specific.

Care

• Jon Hamm says, “Wow, this is so awkward, I really want you to leave, but I don’t know how to say it without sounding like a dick.” She then has to climb over his gate to get out. Lillian tells her, “You hate yourself after you see him”
• She has to walk by her shuttered bakery.
• She’s losing her best friend. 

Invest

• We really come to BCI all at one time when she wakes up the next morning, sneaks out of bed to do her hair and make-up, then sneaks back in and pretends to wake up. Very resourceful and adorable. (Other than that she’s a fairly hapless characters, so it’s a bit hard to invest in her.)

Five Es

• Eat: She and Lillian have a happy breakfast. 
• Exercise: She has energetic sex. She climbs over his gate. She and Lillian hide behind a tree to do sit-ups while listening to a personal trainer they didn’t pay for, then have to run away when he catches them.
• Economic Activity: The personal trainer (Terry Crews) complains, “C’mon, it’s only 12 bucks.” She passes by her shuttered store: “I’m the genius who opened a bakery during the recession.” She now works at a jewelry store.
• Enjoy: She and Annie are very funny and relaxed together, pretending to have horrible teeth, etc.
• Emulate: Pretends to be a “cool girl”, telling Hamm, “I’m not looking for a relationship now either.” Her jewelry boss asks her to put on a “love is eternal” face.

Rise above

• She says “I don’t want to go to work today.” At work, she tells a couple buying rings that love doesn’t last, putting her emotional need to vent over her professional duties.

High five a black guy

• Her best friend is biracial, and a fully realized character, so it doesn’t apply.

Believe Care Invest: The Bourne Identity

Why Jason might be hard to identify with

• He’s literally a blank slate. You might think we would most readily identify with an “everyman”, but they’re actually hard to identify with. We like heroes who know more than they show. 

Believe

• But we always like characters who have a lot of secrets, and that’s still true when his secrets are even secret from himself. His wounds take a believable amount of time to heal. He practices saying “Tell me who I am” before the boat lands. Watching characters practice for conversations is always relatable, for some reason. 

Care

• He’s literally lost everything. He doesn’t even know his name. He’s afraid of every cop and every siren.  He’s a walking wound. 

Invest

• He doesn’t know who he is, but right away he’s doing pull-ups on the boat.  He’s tying sophisticated knots compulsively. He speaks multiple languages. As soon as he confronts some cops, he busts out amazing moves to take them out. We love this bad-ass. Of course, as I’ve pointed out before, the moment we really fall in love with this is when he’s escaping from the embassy, sees an evacuation plan on the wall, and rips it off so he’ll have a map. 

Five Es

• Eat: Just the opposite, he chooses not to eat with the sailors (but he must at some point). 
• Exercise: He does pull-ups on the ship. 
• Economic Activity: The ship doctor gives him some money, he goes to a bank to get the rest of his money. 
• Enjoy: Nope he doesn’t enjoy anything until later in the movie.
• Emulate: I guess sort of when he ties knots while hanging out with the sailors? I got nothing.

Rise above

• He finds out who he is but decides not to report back to the US government. He leaves his guns behind in his safety deposit box, even though he’s figured out he’ll need them for whatever his job is. 

High five a black guy

• Nope.

Believe Care Invest: Blue Velvet

Why Jeffry might be hard to identify with:

• He’s odd. He’s detached. He’s ultimately kind of disturbed.
• This world doesn’t really feel very realistic, and it certainly doesn’t feel like North Carolina, although it was actually shot there, but I think that’s intentional on Lynch’s part. He’s more interested in portraying an idea of “Americana” rather than a specific place in America.

Believe

• So in some ways Jeffrey is hard to care about because he’s so odd, but it’s helps that he’s odd in specific ways. “I used to know a kid who lived there, had the biggest tongue in the world.” “You know the chicken walk?” We’ve never seen a kid be odd in quite this way, and that makes him more believable.

Care

• He’s come home from college because his dad is in a coma and he needs to help out. He visits his dad and it affects him. We also share his frustration when he’s given no information about the case.

Invest

• He’s not the easiest hero to invest in, because he’s very unskilled, but we love curious heroes with good eyes, and he’s certainly that: He spots the ear that no one else would have spotted, and later says, “I’m just real curious like you said.”

Five Es

• Eat: Not until minute 17, when he enthusiastically takes Sandy to Arlene’s diner.
• Exercise: He likes to go for walks. There’s how he finds the ear, and later how he courts Sandy at night.
• Economic Activity: He’s come home to work in his parents’ hardware store. The whole town is named after their industry, Lumberton.
• Enjoy: He’s pretty joyless at first, but he starts to perk up when Sandy comes into his life. They’re awkward together but they still enjoy each other’s company.
• Emulate: He imitates the police.

Rise above

• He borrows the stores bug-spraying equipment under false pretenses in pursuit of his kink. Presumably he lets his investigation distract from his duties.

High five a black guy

• This is a particularly egregious example. Suddenly Jeffrey is best buds with two black guys who work at the store, and then they disappear from the script forever! And one of them is seemingly magical, because he seems to see all even though he’s blind! “Oh it’s so good to have you back,” one of them says warmly.

Believe Care Invest: Blazing Saddles

Let’s see what James is missing!

Why Bart may be hard to care for:

• He’s pretty instantly lovable. 

Believe

• When we meet Bart, he’s working hard on the railroad, then the overseer comes up and complains that the black workers aren’t singing like in the slave days. Bart leads them in a chorus of Cole Porter’s “I Get No Kick From Champagne.” On the one hand, it’s literally unbelievable, since the song wasn’t written yet, but on the other hand, it’s so oddly specific that it makes him come alive. 

Care

• The deadly danger of Bart’s job is established right away as a Chinese co-worker passes out from heat exhaustion, only to get docked a day’s day for “sleeping on the job”. The extreme racism of his bosses is then established as they say the n-word many times and then refuse to rescue him from the quicksand. 

Invest

• He’s very clever and badass. He humiliates his racist bosses, then pulls himself out of the quicksand, then hits his boss on the head. As sheriff, he brilliantly gets himself out a deadly situation. 

Five Es

• Eat: Nope. 
• Exercise: Bart goes over to check out the quicksand by using a handcar. 
• Economic Activity: He’s working hard at his track-laying job. 
• Enjoy: He has a fun time singing, mocking his bosses, and later mocking the governor. Once he’s sheriff, he enjoys riding into town in his new duds. He enjoys drinking with the Waco Kid. 
• Emulate: He kicks up his heels on the governor’s desk. He acts like Randolf Scott once he’s sheriff. 

Rise above:

• Refuses to sing what his bosses want him to sing. After they escape from the quicksand, Bart’s boss gives him a shovel and tells him to put it to good use. As Bart picks up the shovel, his friend sees what he’s going to do and says, “Don’t do that, man.” “Uh-uh baby.” “Don’t do that.” “I have to.” Bart stands up for himself and his co-workers though it puts his job at risk. 

High five a black guy

• Hey, an actual black hero!  I promise we’ll have some more!

Believe Care Invest: The Babadook

Why Amelia may be hard to identify with:

• She’s a very selfless character, and there’s always a big risk onscreen that this will be the same as self-less. Her life is consumed by taking care of her disturbed son and the residents of the old folks home where she works. She has no hobbies or interests of her own. Do such people exist? Of course, but it’s hard for us to identify with them. We identify most readily with moments of self-interested motivation. 

Believe

• It’s absolutely essential that, after we’ve seen her selflessly serve her son and the old folks, we finally see her (reluctantly and morosely) masturbate in bed with a vibrator. She does have her own needs. Of course, she’s interrupted by her son, who’s had a bad dream and insists on sleeping in her bed. Later, when none of the old folks are responding to her bingo calling, she starts calling out numbers like five billion. She shows just enough independent personality for us to believe in her reality. 

Care:

• We care for her immensely, as her life is almost all suffering. Her husband died on the way to the hospital where she gave birth to her son. Her son is now getting increasingly emotionally disturbed, endangering the lives of everyone around him. 

Invest

• We see right away that she’s a good, loving mother as she shows her son that his closet and under his bed is empty. We see her do a good job taking care of the old folks. When her son reads the disturbing titular picture book, she seemingly stays up all night reading him pacifying books. 

Five Es

• Eat: She’s briefly glimpsed having breakfast with her son. 
• Exercise: No 
• Economic Activity: She works her job. 
• Enjoy: Her co-worker Robbie tries to a bit to joke around with her, but she can’t really join in. It’s tricky with horror movies, where you’re trying to create an increasingly oppressive tone. I think maybe it would have helped us believe in her if there had been a five second shot of her and her son having fun playing a game, just to convince us that she’s fully human and capable of moments of enjoyment. 
• Emulate: Not that I could tell. 

Rise above

• She leaves work when still on the clock to just sit in the mall having an ice cream cone (with disastrous results). 

High five a black guy

• Nope.

Believe Care Invest: An Education

Let’s look at Lone Sherfig’s An Education, which is always a delight...

Why it might be hard to care about Jenny:

• She’s fairly passive, but c’mon, it’s Carey Mulligan, we’re all gonna love her. 

Believe:

• We begin with a montage of her life in school (though we don’t really see her in it). They use the sides of their fists to make baby feet on the windows, which is something I remember from my childhood that I’d never seen onscreen before. 
• She has an oddly specific metaphor family of injecting French into her conversations awkwardly. 

Care

• Her father tells her she’s not allowed to think for herself. The boy who likes her is dull.  She’s stuck in the rain.  

Invest

• She’s so much cooler and smarter than her parents or the boy in her class who likes her. She listens to French pop. She’s interested in the arts. She’s the only one who can answer the teacher’s question about “Jane Eyre”. We like her for not disliking that David is Jewish, and calling out her dad’s prejudice. 

Five Es

• Eat: Yes, she’s eating with her parents in the first real scene, then again when Graham comes over. She goes out for espresso with her friends. 
• Exercise: In the montage, they’re hula-hooping, learning dance (Girls dancing with each other), playing lacrosse, etc. She walks through the snow to get to school. 
• Economic Activity: He gives her the amount of money for a new cello for the right to drive alongside her with her cello in his car. He buys her lots of stuff right away. 
• Enjoy: She and her friends hang out and laugh. She enjoys listening to French records. 
• Emulate: She uses French whenever she can and tells her classmates of her plans to become a Frenchwoman after Oxford 

Rise above

• Well, she thinks a relationship with David will allow her to rise above her petty circumstances, but in fact he’s using money to seduce her into sex and a life of crime, so she’s more a prisoner of her economic circumstances than she realizes. If she had money (either came from money or worked a job), she would be more immune to David’s charms.

High five a black guy

• Nary a person of color to be seen.

Believe Care Invest: Alien

Okay, that went well, so let’s continue alphabetically and go on to Alien. How does the movie get us to believe, care, and invest in Ripley?

Why she might be hard to care for:

• Because they’re intentionally hiding the fact that she’s the hero! This movie wants to do a fake out and kill the person who seems to be the hero halfway through, so they’ve got to subtly build up Ripley to be a compelling back-up hero without us noticing. A very tricky proposition!

Believe

• As sci-fi, the biggest trick is to get us believe in the existence of this weird world. They do this with how un-sci-fi it is: how dingy the ship is, the way the lights flicker on unsteadily, etc. There’s an odd little drinking-bird toy sitting out. The space traffic control base being in Antarctica is a good example of “Make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.”
• As for Ripley, she’s the only one who pets the cat. She says, “That’s not our system” in a sing-song-y voice.  She tells Brett to fuck off.  She’s wearing Converse All-Stars, which is always a likeable shoe.  I’m stretching here.

Care

• The others complain about being woken up early, but she doesn’t. Eventually we feel for her when she has to choose between the life of her crewmember and the safety of the rest of the crew ...and when she gets overruled, possibly because she’s a woman (though the part was written for a man.)

Invest

• She’s the only one who’s willing to go from upstairs to downstairs to visit Parker and Brett. She seems to be the most careful about her job.  She takes the initiative to decode the transmission and finds out it’s a warning, then asks to go warn the others. 

Five Es

• Eat: They all eat breakfast together right away.
• Exercise: None whatsoever. It’s a very still movie.
• Economic Activity: We begin with an onscreen title: “Commercial towing vehicle, ‘The Nostromo’ Refinery processing: 20,000,000 tons of mineral ore.” All they talk about is the company, what they owe it, and what it owes them. They act because of “Penalty of total forfeiture of shares.”
• Enjoy: They enjoy breakfast and joke around right away: “I feel dead.” “Anybody every tell you you look dead?” They all laugh, even Ripley just slightly
• Emulate: Not that I can see, but maybe James will point out something I missed again.

Rise above:

• Not right away, but eventually.  Ripley doesn’t rise above her economic circumstances until near the end of the movie, when she finally breaks with the company.

High five a black guy:

• The first we see of her is when she laughs at the black guy’s joke. In this case, he’s a fully realized character, so it’s not an egregious example.

Believe Care Invest in The 40 Year Old Virgin

Okay guys, I’ve been meaning to do these for some time, especially after James dropped his five E’s on us in the last podcast. So I’ve subjected all my movies to a five Es test… but now James wants to drop two more E’s in the next podcast, and I don’t want to have redo all of these so I’d better start posting these first! So let’s start (alphabetically) with Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year Old Virgin!

For each of these, we’ll start with: Why the hero might be hard to care for:

• John Powers is one of my favorite film critics of all time. When he was reviewing You’ve Got Mail (a remake of The Shop Around the Corner) on “Fresh Air”, he lamented that, “Of course, in this new version, the man and woman both run their own businesses. They can’t work in a shop, because then they’d be losers.” He was right to decry the bastardization or the original, but the fact is, audiences do have a bias against characters who work in retail, so that was something Apatow had to overcome to get us to root for Andy in this movie. 
• And of course, Andy’s a loser in lots of other ways. It’s one of the great paradoxes of writing: Audiences love underdogs, but we’re hardwired not to like losers, because we want to invest in a hero to win in the end, and we won’t invest in a character who seems like they’re bound to lose. Walking the thin line between underdog and loser is one of any writer’s hardest tasks. 

Believe

• As I used to show in this video (before I went back and censored the clip, because a lot of kids were watching the videos) Andy begins this movie with one of the all time great “Believe” moments: He wakes up with a massive erection, then has to figure out how to pee. The best “Believe” moments are those that make you say, “I recognize that from my own life, but I never thought I’d see it on screen! This is so real!” 

Care

• We care right away because he seems very lonely, and painfully awkward around the woman in the store, then we wince with embarrassment for him as he tries to hide his shameful secret, unconvincingly telling the others, “No ass is worth thinking that much about, I always say.” 

Invest

• It’s not tremendously easy to invest in Andy yet. It is good that he kicks the guys’ asses at poker. …But wait, let’s look at James’s five Es! They may tell us more about why we invest… 

The Five E’s:

• Eat: Andy makes himself a nice-looking breakfast, then recounts to Cal a story about carefully making himself an egg salad sandwich. 
• Exercise: Andy has no sexual outlet, but it’s not for lack of keeping himself in shape. He wakes up and exercises several ways. Then he bicycles to work 
• Economic Activity: He goes to his job at a stereo store, and seems to do his work well. 
• Enjoy: Andy can’t really enjoy himself at home, or chatting with co-workers, but then he tries to enjoy hanging out with the guys, and almost succeeds until his love life comes up. 
• Emulate: For some reason, when he exercises, he looks at a picture of Doug Henning, but that’s all I got. 

In the podcast, I mentioned that character often have a moment where they have to rise above their circumstances, so does he do that?

• When they invite him to play poker in the story after hours, he says he’ll tell the boss, and they believe him, but then he reveals he was just joking. He’s willing to put his job at risk to find belonging. 

And finally, does he five a black guy?

• Very much so. Before he bicycles away, he says a friendly hello to his black upstairs neighbors Joe and Sara, who will basically never be seen again.

So is this exercise worth doing?  Let me know!  I think James E’s are proving out to generate some good clues to likeability.  Let’s keep going... 

I Cheat On James Again! Here I Am on the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast

Bulletproof Screenwriting is a great podcast where they talk to all the biggies in screenwriting ...and me! Host Alex Ferrari actually gets me to talk about my abortive career and lessons from the trenches, a topic James and I have studiously avoided. Of course, I talk about Star Wars too much, and I cover some of the same material from the most recent episode of my own podcast, but that’s only about five minutes, so just skim through it. Most of this is pretty new and there’s lots of good stuff here. Enjoy!

Podcast Episode 16: Neat Tricks for Creating Compelling Characters

The Secrets of Story Podcast · Episode 16: Neat Tricks for Creating Compelling Characters

Hi guys! So sorry for being gone so long without an explanation! Things are up in the air and I kept expecting them to settle down so I could start posting again.  They haven’t yet, but they may soon!

In the meantime, here’s a new plague-time podcast episode!  Appropriately enough, James is pitching the value of isolating your characters, as well as five neat tricks all starting with the letter E.  It’s a good one!

I Love This App For Listening to Your Manuscript

Hey guys, I occasionally let people pitch their apps here even though I haven’t really tried them, but in this case I’m voluntarily pitching an app because I really like it.  If you’ve read my book, you know that I say you should listen to your writing read aloud by your computer, in order to find typos and separate yourself from the material for a rewrite.  Well, I left it up to you how to do that, and you may have discovered that the tools that were available kind of sucked.  No longer!  There’s a great new app called “Edit Out Loud” that exists just for that purpose.  When it first dropped, it had problems, but the creator of the app was very responsive to all my concerns and worked with me to get it up and running on my phone.  I’ve listened to a few book for my manuscript consultation service on it and it works like a charm.  You can even mark it up to a certain extent while you listen!  Get this app before you revise.