How to Create a Polarized Ensemble, Part 3: Maintaining The Ensemble

Maintaining a polarized ensemble for years can be a tricky proposition. One problem is that all characters have a natural tendency to become more three-dimensional over time. This is inevitable and not entirely bad: as audiences fall in love with characters, they want to see more sides of them, and actors certainly appreciate the chance to play more than one note.

But it can also be a problem. Fans of the TV version of “M*A*S*H” complained that, as the show went on, the characters had become too even-keeled and less funny as a result. Characters like Houlihan and Winchester, who had once been outrageous antagonists, had become likable characters, resulting in less comedic escalation.

Another problem with maintaining a polarized ensemble comes when you have to replace cast members. If you’re replacing more than one character at a time, you can theoretically flip the polarization of their replacements, but most shows only replace one character at a time, so the creators must find a replacement character who fills the same emotional role as his/her predecessor, which can seem overly formulaic.

Nevertheless, this usually works out better than the alternative. Let’s look at two cast changes on “Cheers”. When the great Nicholas Colasanto died suddenly at the end of the third season, the producers were in a bind: The show had two heads and three guts, but only one heart character, so they had to somehow replace Colasanto’s “Coach” with a very similar character.

They solved the problem elegantly by creating Woody Boyd. Superficially, he was entirely different from Coach: a young Indiana farmboy instead of an old Greek baseball coach, but he had the same heart, so the ensemble didn’t lose a beat.

Unfortunately, the next time they had to replace a cast member, they tried to get more ambitious. When essential co-star Shelly Long left after the fifth season, they decided to go a different route. Here’s casting director Jeff Greenberg from an excellent oral history of “Cheers” that appeared recently in GQ: “The producers wanted the opposite of Diane, someone who was grounded and not flighty.” Unfortunately, their choice was too grounded. Kirstie Alley did her best, but she was stuck with a less-than-extreme character that didn’t fit in with a polarized ensemble.

A more recent example is “The New Girl”, whose producers had the bad luck to have to lose a cast member before their second episode. Damon Wayans Jr. starred in the pilot because he thought his other sitcom “Happy Endings” would get cancelled, but when it got a last minute reprieve, he had to bow out.

From what we saw of him, Wayans’ character was extreme and very funny: an overzealous personal trainer (a “spleen” character, if you will).  I get the feeling that the challenge of replacing him was probably exacerbated by concerns about race sensitivity. The producers seemed to feel that they were caught in a trap:

• If they recast the role without re-shooting the pilot, that might seem to imply all black people look the same…
• But if they added a new character with a very similar personality, that might imply that all black people act the same…
• For that matter, if they replaced Wayans with a black character who was polarized in any way, that might imply that all black people were 1-dimensional caricatures. 

Pity the poor writer navigating America’s racial minefield! (But not as much as, you know, actual victims of racism, who have it a little worse)

As a result, they felt that they had no other choice but to pull a Rebecca and add an even-keeled replacement to the polarized ensemble.  Luckily they cast a funny and likable actor in the role of Winston, and the show’s excellent writing staff have found plenty of ways to integrate his laid-back character into the show’s dynamic… but Winston still seems somehow vague compared to the rest of the cast. Whether he polarizes more over the course of the show will be interesting to watch.

Let’s look at one final example: “How I Met Your Mother”. When the show began, we had a tightly-knit, classically polarized four-person ensemble, and a fifth character who was a somewhat cryptic object of desire. Robin wasn’t really a character, she was just a mystery for Ted to solve. Once their relationship had run its course, Robin kept hanging around, somewhat awkwardly. Like Rebecca and Winston, she was an even-keeled character who seemed out-of-place in a polarized ensemble.

But these days she fits in just fine. This isn’t because her character polarized but because the rest of the ensemble de-polarized: Ted learned to trust his gut, Barney grew a heart, Marshall became more responsible, etc. As with “M*A*S*H”, the sharp edges fell away. Now we have five un-polarized characters. On the one hand, that means less potential for hijinks, but it also means that the audience feels gratified that our emotional investment in these characters’ growth has paid off.

Okay, we’ve got one more piece that spills over into next week, in which we look at another type of odd beast: the partially polarized ensemble…

How to Create a Polarized Ensemble, Part 2: Two-Way and Four-Way Polarization

Not all polarized ensembles are neatly divided as Kirk, Spock and McCoy. There are lots of other ways to slice and dice a group. Let’s look at a couple of ways to polarize a four-part ensemble. In the most classic version, you have a fairly 3-dimensional lead character with three polarized advisors to act with the characters uses as sounding boards, representing his/her own head, heart and gut, as seen above.

Despite their protestations to the contrary, the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz is clearly head, as the tin-man is heart and the cowardly lion is gut. As for “House” there was actually an episode where Dr. House had to make a diagnosis on plane without his interns around. He realized that he couldn’t think straight without three advisers, one of whom was brainy, another who was caring, and a third who was self-interested, so he appointed three random people on the plane to play those roles!

Here’s two more examples... HBO has made the same show twice: a 3-dimensional New York essayist writes about the post-feminist woes of her generation, taking her examples from her three friends: a naïve romantic, a promiscuous risk-taker, and the smart, responsible one who gets frustrated by the boring men she gets stuck with.  Here’s how “Sex and the City” and “Girls” break down:

Another way to polarize a cast of four is to split the gut role into two: the boorish slob and the cocky, impulsive one.  Examples of this include “The Fantastic Four”, the original cast of “Cheers” (We’ll see how they changed tomorrow), and “The Simpsons.”

Yet another way to polarize a quartet is to add a fourth element floating above the other three: Faith. (Thanks to commenter Mark for pointing out that the Three Musketeers belong in this group. The pictures are from Alex Toth’s animated version of the story):

But what about a show led by two people? 2-way polarization is a bit more unpredictable. As with 3-way polarization, the two characters add up to one whole person, but each pairing is different, split along the lines of a fundamental dilemma that is universal to human nature:

• Even though “The Honeymooners” had a three member ensemble, it was really just a two-way split. Ralph and Alice respectively represented optimistic ambition and pessimistic practicality. Norton wasn’t really a foil for either, merely serving as Ralph’s sidekick in his get-rich quick schemes. 
• The “X-Files” heroes personify the divide between skepticism and belief. 
• On “24”, frenetic super-secret-agent Jack Bauer had every weapon at his disposal except one: moral authority. Meanwhile, subdued president David Palmer had to work under the terms of constitution that gives the chief executive no powers at all except one: moral authority. They could only solve the conspiracies that threatened the country by working together, as two fractured halves of a whole.

Okay, tomorrow we’ll look at the pitfalls that can occur when a polarized ensemble goes through a shake-up...

Creating a Polarized Ensemble, Part 1: The Pros and Cons of Polarization

Recently I watched the pilot for  NBC’s new “Hunger Games” knockoff, “Revolution”.  Our heroine, “Not-Katniss”, is a bad-ass sixteen-old archer who makes daily hunting trips into the forbidden zone around her martial-law-controlled town, until the ruling militia shows up to take her sister brother.  Being the impulsive rule-breaker that she is, she instantly decides to go after them....but wait, first her doctor-stepmother and a nerdy former internet billionaire insist on coming along.  Not-Katniss indignantly demands, “Why should I bring you two along?” 

They never really explain that in the world of the show, but anyone who’s been reading my posts knows the answer: because these are three one-dimensional characters, representing head, heart and gut, who come together to form one whole person.  I’ve written seven previous posts and done a podcast about polarized ensembles (all can be found here), but my ideas have developed over time, so now I’m going to put it all together. (I apologize for repeating some info)

Once you start looking for this sort of polarized ensemble, you see it almost everywhere, even multiple trios nested within the same show:
Roughly speaking, these are some of the qualities associated with each archetype:

• Head: “I think”, Smart, analytical, talker, scientist, professor, unemotional, critical, too focused on odds, father, Freud’s ego, stick in the mud, “This is a bad idea”
• Heart: “I feel”, Caring, sensitive, listener, doctor, worried about human consequences, conscience, mother, Freud’s super-ego, emotional, merciful, frequently a southerner (Dr. McCoy, Kenneth on “30 Rock”, Woody on “Cheers”), “Who will get hurt?”
• Gut (also spleen and cajones): “I want”, craving, hungry, horny, boaster, coward, self-interested, child, Freud’s id, honest, impulsive, “Wouldn’t it be fun…?”

Other important things to note about polarized ensembles:

• Any of the three can be the lead character, as indicated by the red arrows above.
• The best polarization is done impartially.  The point is not to prove the “gut” character wrong and the “head” character right.  They should be equally matched in their debates.
• Polarized characters tend not to die, because they need each other.  When one of the three dies, the story feels out-of-whack.  

All of this leads us to our first big question: is this a good idea?  Aren’t 1-dimensional characters a sign that the writer has failed?  Aren’t 3-dimensional characters automatically superior?  Not necessarily.  Both options have their pros and cons:

The Cons of having a Polarized Ensemble:

• You have to accept that your characters will be 1-dimensional, not 3-dimensional.
• The dialogue will not be entirely naturalistic.  In real life, everyone is 3-dimensional (even if they don’t seem like it right away.)
• If you have a multi-racial cast made up of polarized 1-dimensional characters, then there is a serious danger that the minority characters will seem to be stereotyped (or reverse stereotyped, which also seems cynical).  There are three solutions to this: you can write a polarized show with only one race (as in most of our examples), you can have a multi-racial ensemble of 3-dimensional, non-polarized characters (“The Wire”, for example), or you can risk accusation of stereotyping and do it anyway, hoping that the audience will see that your heart is in the right place (“30 Rock”, Community”)

The Pros of Having a Polarized Ensemble:

• Sometimes 1-dimensional characters are more relatable than 3-dimensional characters.  When we watch “The Simpsons”, rather than fully identify with any one character, different parts of our personality relate to Homer, Marge, Lisa and Bart. 
• While the resulting dialogue isn’t naturalistic, it is still, in a sense, realistic: A polarized ensemble won’t remind us of actual conversations, but it will remind us of the debate going on within our own head.  A polarized ensemble is a way to dramatize our internal debates.  This is why a 3-dimensional lead is sometimes given three 1-dimensional sidekicks to strategize with, to dramatize the debate the lead is having with his/her head, heart and gut.
• Well-rounded characters, by definition, have no rough edges, and it’s hard to get them to spark off each other.  1-dimensional characters have more extreme views, so they create more conflict. Compare the un-polarized leads of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” with the original show. 
• That conflict tends to develop in an impartial way.  If you’re pitting head against heart against gut, you’re not posing a no-brainer decision between “right” and “wrong” or “weak” and “strong”, you’re posing a difficult dilemma in which fundamental human impulses, each of which is universal, are pitted against each other.  A head vs. heart dilemma, for example, is not only hard to solve but hard to want to solve, which means that it is a genuine conflict, not just an obstacle.

Okay, this is already getting massive, so we’ll come back tomorrow for part two, where we’ll explore 2-way polarization and 3 types of 4-way polarization.  (I know, I know, you were told there would be math!)

Storyteller’s Rulebook #150: The Hero Should Be Special

Okay, folk, my massive Head-Heart-Gut synthesis is taking longer than I thought, so I’m pushing it back to tomorrow.  In the meantime, here’s a short piece to tide you over...
You’ll probably be shocked to hear this, but when I was a child my favorite “G.I. Joe” figure was Snake Eyes.  If you know what I’m talking about, then you get my joke, because Snake Eyes was everybody’s favorite.  He was so bad-ass!  Just look at these guys! Who’s the awesome one?  The mystery man in black, that’s who!  Now don’t get me wrong, I loved every member of this elite fighting force…but Snake Eyes was special.

Then in 2009, they made a G.I. Joe movie, but, this time around, Snake Eyes didn’t become a breakout character.  To see why, let’s take a look at the cast:

Snake Eyes isn’t special!  They’re all in black!  The producers thought, “If the fans love Snake Eyes so much, let’s make everybody look like that!”  As a result, there was no character that popped, and the movie flat-lined. 

The same rule applies to a hero’s abilities.  In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne went to the orient and learned through grueling experience how to become a warrior: they taught him to disarm anybody with a whirl of kicks and thai-boxing punches.  When he came back to Gotham, he was the only one who could do that stuff.  It was really bad-ass.

But by the time we get to the risible third movie, everybody can do it.  Okay, I guess maybe it makes sense that Bane can do it, because he was trained by the same people …but even Catwoman can do it, and she’s just a prostitute-turned-jewel-thief!

As soon as she disarmed three people who were pointing guns right at her, I knew I was going to be in for a long three hours.  Batman wasn’t special anymore.  He was just another bad-ass in a bad-ass filled world.  The hero has to be special!  You can give the other character’s their own special look or their own special abilities, but don’t diminish your hero as you do it.  

Another Podcast, The Wire and Dickens, and More Head Heart Gut to Come

It’s happened again, I’ve co-hosted another episode of James Monohan and Cheryl Klein’s storytelling podcast “The Narrative Breakdown”.  This episode is about creating ensembles. 

Inevitably, we talk quite a bit about my “head, heart, gut” theory, which began here and continued here, here, here, here, here and here, but keeps expanding in my mind, so come back tomorrow (and maybe longer) where I’ll try to integrate all those previous pieces for the first time, with some nifty visuals.  


Meanwhile, in the podcast, you’ll hear that we repeat the common wisdom that “The Wire” is Dickensian in nature.  As it turns out, shortly after we recorded this episode, Cheryl was amused to see that Salon’s book editor Laura Miller had apparently heard us and disagreed vociferously.  This was my response to Cheryl:

That’s funny, but I’m not sure I buy it.  She digs for traits that “The Wire” doesn’t have in common with Dickens, but none of these are traits that all Dickens novels have.  If you’re prepared to talk about “Dickens” as one body of work, then you’ve already accepted that you’re going to generalize. 

I would say that the heart of the comparison lies in shared traits she didn’t mention: 

• An impossibly large cast of resourceful-but-ultimately-tragic characters who are ground up by the wheels of institutional indifference, but find moments of happy transcendence in their everyday lives.  
• The lack of focus on immediate goals, replaced by the pleasure of visiting and re-visiting members of that cast as their fortunes rise and fall multiple times over many years. Just when you think you’re never going to see a character again, they pop back up in a different phase of their life.  
• Taking an anthropologist’s joy in replicating the strange and witty jargon of the streets.

Storyteller’s Rulebook #149: The Villain’s Plan Should Be Good For the Villain

We all know that the villain’s plan must be bad for the hero: “Oh no, he knows everything about me, he’s been plotting against me for weeks, he can taunt me with intimate knowledge of my every weakness!”  This keeps escalating, as the villain outsmarts the hero at every turn, making the situation more and more desperate…

…But as you have fun ruining your hero’s life, please stop once in a while and remind yourself of one thing: the villain’s plan must be bad for the hero…and good for the villain.

We’ve seen this plot in thrillers so many times, I’ve almost lost count, the innocent blackmailed into committing a crime: Nick of Time, Reindeer Games, Training Day, Collateral, Flightplan, Vantage Point, The Lookout, Eagle Eye, Salt, etc…  And it will re-appear in upcoming movies like The Driver and Autobahn, but the concept is nonsensical in oh so many ways:

1. Why would you want someone doing the job who wants the whole thing to fail and for you to go to jail?  How hard is it to just hire a willing accomplice? America is filled with desperately-poor people, who do horrible things in return for just a few bucks.  Some of these people are longtime gang members, or underpaid cops, or ex-military, or survivalists… They’re gonna have the skills you need.  Just hire one. 
2. So often in these movies (see: The Lookout, Reindeer Games, etc.) a big part of the villain’s plan is to have his girlfriend offer lots of great sex to our unsuspecting hero, as a way to lure him into the world of crime.  But that’s just not the way a man’s mind works.  Guys use money to get a girlfriend, they don’t use their girlfriend to get money (Maybe if the guy’s a pimp with a stable of girls that he doesn’t care about, but that’s never the case in these movies…the crook always has one girlfriend and he’s burning with jealousy the whole time!)
3. The only conceivable reason to blackmail someone into committing a crime is if they’re the only person with the access to do it.  Maybe this person has the code to the vault, or watches over the state’s witness as he sleeps, or is the only one the president trusts…  And yet, the biggest problem with these movies is the person being blackmailed is always given an impossibly hard task that they have no idea how to accomplish! 
4. Even worse, there’s often another person who does have the required access and we can see that they’re the one who should have been blackmailed:  

• In Salt, they blackmail the one person at the CIA who isn’t on the detail protecting their target.  She has to fight every other agent in order to get to him.  Why not blackmail one of those guys?  In fact, it later turns out that one of those protectors has been helping the bad guys all along.  Why not simply have him kill the target? 
• Likewise in Vantage Point, they blackmail a random guy into killing the president, despite the fact that someone on the president’s detail is working for them!  Have him do it!
• In The Lookout, the bad guy uses his girlfriend to coerce the brain-damaged janitor into helping him break into the vault…even though the janitor has no vault access!  Meanwhile, we see that there’s a sad sack female teller who’s so lovelorn that she’s pining for the janitor…Why doesn’t the bad guy just seduce her??  She actually has access!  And that way the bad guy is the one who gets to sleep around, instead of watching his girlfriend do it! 

I’ll say it again: People only want what they want!  For characters to be believable, whether good or evil, they must pursue their own self-interest!  Characters who only care about tormenting the hero make just as little sense as characters that only care about helping the hero.

The appeal of these movies is very cynical.  We like to live vicariously through characters who pull off spectacular crimes, but we feel morally alienated from them…unless the perpetrators are being blackmailed, in which case we can sympathize with their predicament and enjoy their transgressions.  This person literally gets to be “criminal for a day”, and who wouldn’t want to try that?

But these movies made no damn sense, as audiences tend to realize two hours after they’ve left the movie theater.  They’re just empty calories, and it’s time we abandoned this worn-out cliché.

(And before you can ask, “Hey, what about your beloved Red Eye?”, allow me to point out that it’s a clear exception: she is the only one with the required access, they’re asking her to do something that is easy for her to do, and they’re not seducing her into it, but rather confronting her directly, so there’s no vicarious thrill, just a painful dilemma… Red Eye is how you do it right.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook #148: Be Like Cable News

 In keeping with my comment discussion yesterday with J.S. about false balance, a post that synthesizes some previous posts:

Pay off is what goes into the trailer, but you should spend most of your actual screentime on set-up.  It takes a lot longer to roll the rock up the hill than it does to roll it back down. In fact, by the time you’ve done all that setting up and paying off, that you won’t have much time for anything else.  

You can’t have “slow character scenes” and “fast plot scenes”.  You have “set-up” scenes in which tension slowly builds as the characters reveal themselves in ways that put them in opposition, then, when the tension twists too tight, you burst into a big plot-filled pay-off. 

This can happen within one scene or over the course of several… you can devote ten minutes of screentime to one long wind-up that ends in a big confrontation, or you can devote that same time to six short character interactions, set over the course of six months, that culminate in a big showdown at the end of that sequence.

As I said here, there is another type of slow scene other than set-up: aftermath or “fallout” scenes, but these should mostly be avoided.  You should just skip right to the next set-up.

This is especially true for comedy.  A dialogue exchange or even a whole scene that sets up a comedic pay-off is great: the audience will get more and more excited as they anticipate the coming joke, then go crazy when it arrives.  But if you show the aftermath of the joke, or let the characters discuss the punchline after it’s been delivered, everything deflates. 

Now don’t get me wrong, this is actually very unrealistic: In real life, nobody ignores a devastating zinger or a massive pratfall, but it’s standard in comedy, because it’s necessary in order to keep things moving at a fast, funny clip.  Everyone should be in too much of a hurry to set up the next joke.  

Here’s a strange example of this principle at work: As predicted by Network, news programming now see itself primarily as entertainment programming.  Sure enough, they follow this rule religiously, even thought it results in terrible news. 

About ten years ago, cable news totally transformed itself.  Previously, the news model had always been to tell people what happened over the course of the previous 24 hours.  But these days the networks almost never do that.  Instead, 95% of their airtime is devoted to speculation about what might happen in the next 24 hours.  This is true for several reasons:

• Even if something only happened an hour ago, the networks are terrified that it will be considered old news because it’s already appeared on the internet. 
• They’re even more terrified of seeming biased towards one political party or the other, and nothing is more biased than actual facts: Either the president delivered on his promise or he didn’t.  Either the opposition party’s prediction came true or it didn’t.  (And of course, what terrifies the networks the most is the notion that both parties may be wrong.)  But if all you ever talk about is what might happen, then you can be totally even-handed: perhaps one party will turn our right, or perhaps the other one will.  Who can say?
• But the most important reason is this: talking about the future is far more dramatic.  Since their goal is to entertain, they have no interest in fallout (aka: the actual news).  “What’s done is done,” they now say, “but the question of what will happen next is so much more dramatically compelling!” 

This is a principal that makes for horrible journalism, but it undeniably makes for great entertainment, so you should do as they do: keep the focus on what’s going to happen.

Storyteller's Rulebook #147: A Skewer Is Better Than A Slam

I love Louis C.K.  Except when I don’t, like when he was on “The Daily Show”  defending Daniel Tosh’s rape humor.  The problem with almost every modern comic, even my favorites like Louis and Patton Oswalt, is that they give in to bitter rage too easily.  The greatest comedians are irreverent, but never cruel.  They skewer, but they don’t slam.  This isn’t out of deference to propriety, it’s out of an understanding of what devastates people and what doesn’t.

When you skewer someone deftly, you make them think, “there’s something wrong with me.” When you simply slam them, they just think that there’s something wrong with you.  To skewer, you must find the one weak spot in their armor and slide the knife into their gut at just the right angle.  Otherwise, you’re simply whacking away at their armor with blunt force, which doesn’t make a dent. 
George Carlin, who all of these guys acknowledge as the greatest stand-up of his generation, was an expert skewerer, and he proved it by sticking it to his own side just as effectively as the other.

For instance, he would make fun of right-wingers for retroactively re-naming things to reshape the world in their image, then he’d turn around and do the same thing to the environmentalists on his side, pointing out that one day they realized, “Hey nobody wants to spend any money to preserve jungles and swamps”, so they invented “rainforests” and “wetlands” because that sounded better—“but hey, you’re not fooling me, those are just jungles and swamps!”

Hearing that really stuck it to me.  It’s not like I heard this and decided that we should no longer preserve rainforests and wetlands, it’s just that I thought, “Huh, I love to rail against the bad guys for twisting language, but my side does it, too, in helpful ways, so I guess I’m not really against that tactic, I’m just against the way they use it, so I should be less hypocritical in the way that I howl about this stuff.”  

That’s what it feels like to be skewered: this guy has snuck his hooks into your head and he’s changing the way you think.  When Louis C.K. says that feminists never shut up, do you think that any feminist thought, “Wow, he’s right, I guess I should shut up.”?

Storyteller’s Rulebook #146: Every Scene is a Mini-Movie

Last time, we were talking about how an action sequence had to break down into a series of mini-goals, with the hero gathering clues and figuring out how to succeed. Let’s look at a short scene that’s full of mini-goals from this last season of “Breaking Bad.”

At the end of the episode “Buyout,” things have gone sour between Walt and his business partner Mike, so Mike zip-ties Walt’s wrist to a radiator to keep him out of the way while Mike goes to shut down their business. Walt sits there feeling furious, wanting to stop Mike’s plan, but what can he do?

In a remarkable silent sequence, we follow Walt’s every thought as he tries to get out, ultimately going through a ten-step problem solving sequence that should seem fairly familiar:

1. Problem: Walt has been tied up with a zip tie connecting his wrist to a radiator, while his business is being shut down.
2. Opportunity: He notices the coffeepot.  Maybe he can break the glass and use it cut the zip tie…
3. Conflict: … But he can’t reach it.
4. Hero tries the easy way: He hooks the coffeepot cord with his foot.
5. The easy way culminates in a midpoint disaster: He yanks but the pot goes flying all the way across the room.  Walt is crushed.
6. Hero finds the special weapon in the darkness of the cave: He realizes that the cord in his hand has another use…
7. Hero tries the hard way: He strips the wires with his teeth...
8. Spiritual crisis: He winces as he realizes that he must burn his own wrist, creating stigmata-like wounds…
9. Commits to the right path, though he still has a long way to go: He grimaces as he slowly burns through the cord, and his wrist….
10. Triumph: The cord breaks, Walt cools his wrist with water, then goes out to ruin Mike’s deal.

As I’ve said before, movie structure was discovered, not invented. It derives from the fact that most movies are about the solving of a big problem, and most human beings go through a familiar sequence of steps when trying to solve a big problem.

Once you embrace this model you see it everywhere. I pointed out here that I myself go through every step in my screenplay model whenever I attempt to write a screenplay. This sequence shows that the structure can also be shrunk down apply to individual scenes. This is just one silent scene, but it’s about a man trying to solve a huge problem, so, unsurprisingly, all of the necessary beats are there—they just go by really fast.

Storyteller’s Rulebook #145: Say No Way To Melee

Okay, okay, so we’ve established that John Carter and Green Lantern have nonsensical stories and flat characters…but who cares, am I right?  These are big sci-fi action spectacles!  We come for the adrenaline pumping hell-yeah moments!  All that other stuff is just what you fast-forward past on the Blu-Ray! 

Well…no.  As stultifying as the character scenes were in these movies, nothing could have prepared me for how profoundly boring the action scenes were.  Matthias Stork has edited together an excellent series of video essays about how poorly shot, poorly edited and generally chaotic action movies are today.  But at least some of the sequences he features were well-written, before the directors messed them up.  What has become more and more common, however, are action scenes that die on the page.  
The main problem, in a word, is melee.  With the help of CGI, writers know that directors can simply throw whole armies at each other and let them lash out wildly at each other for twenty minutes.  Why put one thing onscreen when you can put everything?  But watching a hundred Green Lanterns shoot beams at a yellow blob isn’t very interesting, nor is watching a thousand green Martians hack away at a thousand red Martians.  


Yes, in the old days, there were budgetary reasons to cut away from the main action, but there were also story reasons.  We can only invest ourselves in the goals of the main character, and that goal can’t just be “to win”.  A good action sequence must be broken down into a series of mini-goals, with lots of ups and downs: shifting tactics, surprises, reversals, etc.  An action scene is a mystery scene: the mystery of “how can I overcome this opponent?” so the hero should be gathering clues the whole time.

Which leads us to another CGI-inspired problem, the villains are just way too big.  In the book, John Carter defeats a normal-sized white ape bare-handed, which makes for a thrilling action scene.  In the movie, he defeats two 50-foot high white apes, which is just boring.  In order to root for a hero, we have to be right in there with him, helping him figure out his next move.  We have to have some sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the villains while we root for the hero to overcome the former and exploit the latter. 

This may sound counter-intuitive: defeating one 6-foot ape is bad-ass, so it should be more bad-ass to defeat two 50-foot apes…but no.  The first feels like a man-to-man fight, which triggers our primitive instincts and gets our adrenaline pumping.   The second is clearly a man vs. effect fight, which just makes us idly wonder how big the budget was.

The ultimate bad guy in John Carter (who wasn’t in the book at all) is literally a god: he can fly, teleport, read minds, turn invisible, turn intangible, and create laser guns out of thin air.  How are we supposed to root for anybody to defeat this guy?  (And don’t ask me how or if he did get defeated, I was totally lost by that point.)

Likewise in Green Lantern, the yellow blob defeats every other Green Lantern simultaneously, then goes on to destroy whole planets, but when the new rookie Green Lantern faces it, he just says, “I dunno, why don’t I try to push it into the sun?”  And yup, that works.   Like John Carter, he never investigates anything, never discovers any hidden weakness, never learns anything new from experience…he just keeps saying, “Maybe this will work” and it pretty much always does.  

So I could go on for several more weeks about the flaws of these movies, but I’ll go ahead and call an end to this postmortem.  I watched them so that you don’t have to.  Heed the wisdom of my scars.  

Storyteller’s Rulebook #144: Women Shouldn’t Have To Have It All

Both John Carter and Green Lantern shared a big flaw with Attack of the Clones: the love interest who has six stressful jobs but still wants to spend all of her time soothing, scolding or smooching the hero. 

• As I pointed out here, Natalie Portman in AOTC is a queen and a senator and handy with a laser pistol, but she really just wants to hang out with her psychopathic boyfriend. 
• Lynn Collins in John Carter is a scientist, a princess and a warrior, but when she meets her very first space alien in a chaotic mid-air collision, she’s already flirting like crazy by the time they hit the ground.   
• 23 year old Blake Lively in Green Lantern is the CEO of an Aviation company, and a superstar test pilot (these were two separate characters in the comics that were combined into one), but she spends every night throwing herself at her douchebag ex-boyfriend, despite the fact that he’s doing everything he can to wreck her company, literally and figuratively.  

“So what?”, you may ask.  “Who says women can’t have it all?  Why can’t they bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and still never ever let him forget he’s a man?”  Well, okay, they can…but they shouldn’t have to.  You would never have a male character that’s a flirty scientist-warrior.  It’s a bizarre agglomeration of traits. 

Of course, these writers’ hearts may be in the right place…They don’t want a love interest that’s just a love interest, and they don’t want her to be useless in the action scenes for fear of presenting a bad role-model. But the real reason that they’re piling all these roles onto the female lead is that they desperately want to avoid having any other female characters in the movie. 

If you want to say that “women can be anything”, that’s great, but the way to show that is to have multiple women doing multiple things, not to have one woman do everything. 

I hate to keep going back to Superman, but in the Superman comics I read as a kid, he had lots of positive female characters in his life: the love of his life was a tough investigative reporter, but he also worked with a kick-ass lesbian police lieutenant and had a platonic partnership with an even more kick-ass Amazon princess. 
That’s the way to do it.  If you combined all of these women into one character, who was all those things but still selflessly devoted herself to soothing Superman’s tortured brow every night, then that would be pretty damn silly. 

Storyteller’s Rulebook #143: The Difference Between an Action Movie and a Thriller

At the beginning of Green Lantern, a voiceover tells us about the rich tradition of the Green Lantern Corps.  Over time, we see them training, we see them fight a yellow blob in space that wants to kill them, and we see them gather in a big amphitheater, where they stand at attention while an angry man with a funny little mustache tells them that they will remain mighty because they worship “willpower”.  Then they all raise one hand in salute. 

Do these sound like good guys to you? 

Nevertheless, the movie might have possibly overcome its Hitler-ish overtones if it had once, just once, shown any of these non-Earth Green Lanterns helping anybody. Even after our Earth-bound Green Lantern accepts the job, he never once helps anybody who’s not in danger because of something related to…the Green Lanterns. 

Every single threat in the movie traces back to that yellow blob, and the yellow blog was itself created by, you guessed it, the Green Lantern Corps!  This is one of those movies where the heroes could have solved the whole problem by not doing anything.   

Remember that montage in Superman: The Movie where Superman catches the cat burglar and the crooks on the boat, then gets a cat out of a tree?  They would cut it out sometimes on TV, but I always missed it.  Green Lantern could learn a thing or two from that.  These scenes showed why it was all worth it.     

The big difference between an action movie and a thriller is civilians.  You’re allowed to have a noir-ish thriller in which nobody but our hero is ever in danger, but action heroes can’t just be victims of the fickle finger of fate.  They’re taking responsibility for other people.  And they didn’t create the menace in the first place.  Popeye Doyle didn’t start the drug trade.  John McClaine didn’t hire Hans Gruber.  Keanu Reeves didn’t put that bomb on that bus.  These guys saw that civilians were in trouble so they stepped in to help.

Yes it’s ridiculous in super-hero movies whenever they have that clichéd scene of a girl in a dark alley being menaced by the inevitable gang of multicultural thugs.  But you know what’s even more ridiculous?  Not having that scene.  Because what’s the point of being a superhero if you’re not going to help?