A very special Marvel Reread Club: Interview with Douglas Wolk!

Steve and Matt Bird · 016 Marvel Reread Club conversation with Douglas Wolk

This week, in a break from the show’s usual format, we sit down with Douglas Wolk, the author of “All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told” and discuss his monumental achievement of reading every Marvel comic. We have an epic, wide-ranging discussion about what it all means, whether the older comics are primarily art or artifact, and whether you can make something morally coherent out of a story with so many authors representing fundamentally different eras of American history. 

 And for the first time before a national audience, Douglas debuts his delightful ukulele theme song!

Marvel Reread Club on Monday!

Hey guys,I’m going to start posting the podcasts on Monday to see if we can get more interaction. This was supposed to start this Monday, but of course that one posted late, on Tuesday. We have a Marvel Reread Club ready to post today but we’re going to hold onto it over the weekend and post it Monday.

Episode 34: Building Character Voice

The Secrets of Story Podcast · Episode 34: Building Character Voice

Welcome back! This week, James and I discuss the very things we’ve been talking about recently here on the blog: Metaphor Families, Default Personality Traits, and Default Argument Tactics. James quotes great wisdom forgetting that he’s quoting me, and I heap praise on James’s new book Dare to Know—It’s a kumbaya love fest!

And hey, here’s the facial expression generator from Scott McCloud’s “Making Comics” that I love and James doesn’t!

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the hero have a default argument tactic?

Similar to the default personality trait is the default argument tactic. As with the personality, tactics can greatly transform over the course of a story. Frequently, heroes will start off the story naïve and overconfident, using half-ass strategies because they’ve never been seriously challenged. As the heroes face up to the challenge, they will gain skills, hone weapons, and figure out how to accomplish things. 

Nevertheless, each character should have a default argument tactic throughout. Your characters will gain more and more arrows in their quiver over the course of the story, but they will always instinctively reach for this arrow first, from beginning to end. In any given encounter, it is only when this tactic fails that they will move on to another.

This is one of the least perceptible aspects of personality. You probably don’t think of yourself or your friends as having default argument tactics, but if you think about it now, you might realize that each one does. Start there, instead of with movies or books: Listen to the people in your life and how they instinctively try to win arguments.

We identified metaphor families using 30 Rock characters, so for default strategies, let’s look at that show’s former Thursday night companion, the equally brilliant Community. Let’s say you’re withholding a secret from a member of the Greendale Community College study group. How will they try to get it out of you?

• Jeff: He tries to trap you with the evidence of your lies in a lawyerly manner. 
• Abed: He poses faux naïve questions, noticing little details and psychological “tells” in your answers. 
• Annie: She asks genuine naïve questions, persistently interrogating until she gets the truth. 
• Troy: He halfheartedly attempts to lay logic traps and ensnare you with your own words. 
• Shirley: She passive-aggressively guilt-trips you. 
• Britta: She accuses you of hypocrisy, inconsistency, or a general lack of morality. 
• Pierce: He doesn’t strategize; he just insults. Unsurprisingly, he’s the most unlikable character. 

These strategies tend to have some overlap with the characters’ metaphor families or default personality traits. Jeff, Shirley, and Britta have strategies that relate to their backgrounds (lawyer, evangelical Christian, hippie). Abed’s strategy is related to his psychology (Asperger’s syndrome). Annie, Troy, and Pierce, on the other hand, use strategies that match up to their default personality traits (sweet, geeky, and arrogant, respectively).

In dramas, the characters will be less broadly sketched but still use distinctive default strategies—silence or verbosity, sexuality or piousness, logic or emotion, etc. A character with a consistent tactic will be far more believable.

Straying from the Party Line: Chris’s Lack of Metaphor Family, Argument Tactic, Strong Motivation, Goals, Insistence, and Decision-Making Ability in “Get Out”

So according to our checklist, Chris seems like a rather deficient hero in Get Out. Let’s look at at all the character tests he fails:

Does the hero have a consistent metaphor family (drawn from his or her job, background, or developmental state)?	Just very slightly.  He talks a little blacker to Rod than he does to her (“Yo, you at work?”) but for the most part he speaks rather generically.  He’s code-switching, and around white people he’s studiously generic in his metaphor family.
Does the hero have a default argument tactic?	Not really, and he loses every argument he has in the movie.  He’ll try things like, “That was a dollar, you just threw a dollar out the window” when she throws away his cigarette, but it’s a halfhearted attempt and fails.
Is the hero’s primary motivation for tackling this challenge strong, simple, and revealed early on?	His motivation is that Rose is all he has in the world (other than his dog and Rod) but we don’t understand that until halfway through.  Before he admits that, we wonder why he’s putting up with this.
Does the hero have a false or shortsighted goal in the first half?	He’s not very goal oriented.  In retrospect, we can figure that he might have seen this as an opportunity to have a family again, but he mainly just pastes on a smile in the first half and doesn’t try hard to impress.  He’s very polite but not eager to please.
And is the hero willing to let others know that they lack his most valuable quality, subtly or directly?	He gently points out to Rose her seeming naivete, but mainly just reacts to everyone with pointedly-quizzical looks.  He laughs off Rod.
Does the hero have (or claim) decision-making authority?	Absolutely none, as Dean jokingly points out.  And she drove, so he can’t leave without her approval.

In the commentary, Peele points out something interesting:

• “I could talk all day about how amazing Daniel [Kaluuya, who plays Chris,] is. I mean, at some point we realized, y’know, Chris doesn’t have very many lines in this. And it’s true. His role is to just kinda get out of here without the shit hitting the fan. You know even in these scenes here [taking abuse from Jeremy at dinner] he’s just trying to minimize the awkwardness and make it through the weekend and get out, so that’s why he’s not gonna pop off, and of course, he’s in love, so we understand why you’re on your best behavior at your love’s parents’ house.”

Chris is told by Dean early on that his role as boyfriend is to say “She’s right, I’m wrong,” as often as possible, but of course there’s a racial component to that as well. Chris is expected to say that to every white person. When the cop arrives, the black man is in deadly peril, but the white girl has power over the cop, which she happily flexes.

As I say above, Chris shows more personality in his brief conversations with Rod than with anyone else. Long before he gets sent to the sunken place, Chris is hiding inside himself, and we understand that, so we still find him compelling in spite of his lack of some of the surface traits we crave. He’s somewhat self-less (but not selfless) and generic, but we sense more under the surface of Kaluuya’s performance, so we don’t reject him.

And it’s essential that we see his great photography at the beginning: the ultimate way to show the soul of the voiceless.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES.  Inept sarcasm
Alien	YES, cites the rules.
An Education	YES.  Faux naïve, but with a withering use of evidence of the other’s hypocrisy or ignorance.
The Babadook	YES. Meekly assents, then lashes out.
Blazing Saddles	YES. Bizarre zaniness to disarm you, swaggering charm to win you over.
Blue Velvet	YES. Ignoring all disagreement, proceeding with a slight smile.
The Bourne Identity	YES. he puts the ball in your court (for instance, handing her the money before he asks her to decide, then asking her to give it back if she wants to say no.)
Bridesmaids	YES. But not a good one. She gets brittle and defensive, lies badly, makes promises she can’t keep. She also likes to put up a false front.
Casablanca	YES. Tells insultingly bland lies (“I came for the waters.” Q: “Where were you last night?” A: “That’s so long ago, I don’t remember.”)
Chinatown	YES. Won’t listen, bulldozes over you, nails you with inconsistences and evidense he’s uncovered.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  he plays it cool and silent, looks askance at the person, convinces the person that he’s the one who knows what’s going on.
Do the Right Thing	YES. Ignores your protests, then repeats what he said in the first place.
The Farewell	YES. Appeal to Western ethical reasoning.  Tell a lot of lies while insisting others tell the truth.
The Fighter	YES. Shrugs, gives up, and mutters his dissent
Frozen	YES. Naïve insistence
The Fugitive	YES. He’s clearly not good at making his case verbally.  All he can do is blurt out denials: “I didn’t kill my wife.” He tends to succeed by disappearing, both visually and in other ways: he breaks in by muttering, changes order by scribbling an illegible signature.  Even when he confronts Nichols at the end, he just blurts out the accusations.  So yeah, he has a consistent tactic, it’s just incompetent.
Get Out	NO. Not really, and he loses every argument he has in the movie.  He’ll try things like, “That was a dollar, you just threw a dollar out the window” when she throws away his cigrette, but it’s a halfhearted attempt and fails.
Groundhog Day	Sort of: petulant complaining. He’s never very good at getting others to do things.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. Stammering out a string of excuses until something sticks.
In a Lonely Place	YES. encourages them to talk, lets them hang themselves, then shoots them down swiftly and brutally.  Or he just punches them.
Iron Man	YES. Sarcastic direct assault, “what are you going to do about it”-style. Cuts the other person off with a quick, witty, withering line, then smirks while they try to answer.
Lady Bird	YES. Mischaracterizes her scene partner: (“I’m sorry I’m not perfect.”) Insists on her own reality if spite of evidence: “What I’d really like is to be on Math Olympiad.” “But math isn’t something that you are terribly strong in.” “That we know of YET.”
Raising Arizona	YES. Folds quickly
Rushmore	YES. Dismissive of all opposition
Selma	YES. With allies he keeps them onboard by talking about the future: With his wife: “Look here, I’m going to a pastor somewhere soon, college town…maybe the occasional speaking engagement…”  With Johnson, on the other hand, he rejects all talk of the future and talks only about the present.
The Shining	YES. Jack is mock-jocular, accusatory and condescending. “Have you ever thought about my responsibilities?” He keeps quizzing each about the other for fuel to use against them.
Sideways	YES. Traps people. / emotional blackmail “Did you like the new ending?” “Yes.” “Everything after page 750 is exactly the same.” / “Just wanted to let you know I’m not coming to the wedding.”
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Listens closely, picks apart holes in your story, uses your own argument against you.
Star Wars	YES. Ineffective disputation
Sunset Boulevard	YES. slipperiness, he deflects all conflict.

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the hero have a default personality trait?

Metaphor families are a great way to decide what language a character will use, but it’s equally important to establish a default personality trait. 

To begin, let’s differentiate between three interrelated aspects of a hero’s personality:

1. Their emotional state will change wildly from scene to scene. As your heroes go on the most momentous journey of their lives, they’ll quickly pass from frustration to joy to despair to triumph and everywhere in between. 
2. Separate from their emotional state is their philosophy. Unlike emotional fluctuations, which happen in almost every scene, characters will engage in one big philosophical change over the course of the story: from selfish to bighearted, from innocent to cynical, from loner to joiner, etc. 
3. Neither of these is the same as the character’s default personality trait. Because characters are in such an extreme state of flux, it’s tempting to simply declare that they have no fixed personality for the time being. After all, they’re questioning everything, so they’re hard to nail down. The danger is that no fixed personality quickly becomes no personality at all. You need to find a few hard-and-fast rules that always govern how a character talks, even as his emotional state varies and his general attitude shifts. 

Our emotions and attitudes may change, but our default personality trait stays the same. If a character’s default personality trait is gloomy, then you’ll always be able to identify that, even if the character happens to be happy today, because he will say something like, “I’m oddly happy today,” or “I’m happy for once.”

When you first meet people, it can be hard to tell the difference between their current emotional state and their default personality trait, but it becomes obvious over time. A certain overall aspect of their personality will always shine through, no matter what their mood or their current philosophy might be. Fictional characters should be the same way.

In Spartacus, the great Charles Laughton plays a bloated, cynical hedonist named Gracchus, who is more interested in aesthetic pleasures than the moralistic rhetoric of his fellow senators. But he discovers his conscience at the worst possible time—when he realizes it’s up to him to take a stand for democracy by martyring himself to protest the rise of tyranny. When we last see him, he picks out a knife to slit his wrists, but then he wrinkles his nose—the knife isn’t pretty enough. He chooses a more aesthetically pleasing knife, smiles, and then goes to the bathtub for a luxurious martyrdom.

By sacrificing himself, he’s doing something wildly out of character, but he still can’t shirk his default personality trait. Paradoxically, that’s why the audience accepts his change of heart. Gracchus has undergone a philosophical transformation, but his default trait remains the same. As a result, we still believe in his character, and his sacrifice becomes all the more powerful.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES.  A downer, lame joker, laughs at own jokes, overly specific in his descriptions
Alien	YES, resentful fuming.
An Education	YES. Coolly watchful and quietly sarcastic.
The Babadook	YES. Brittle
Blazing Saddles	YES. Sarcasm, charm, brilliance.
Blue Velvet	YES.  creepy placid optimism.
The Bourne Identity	YES. he’s honest, plainspoken, good-humored.
Bridesmaids	YES. She’s an eye roller.
Casablanca	YES. Sharp-witted, breezy, withering sarcasm
Chinatown	YES. Cynical
Donnie Brasco	YES.  he ‘s sullen and resentful both at home and on the job.
Do the Right Thing	YES. Sullen
The Farewell	YES. Glum, which is a very alienating trait
The Fighter	YES. Meek, quiet, humble, seething
Frozen	YES. Sunny, awkward
The Fugitive	YES. He’s anti-social, devoted, gruff, compassionate.
Get Out	YES. Leery but too much of a peace-maker to act on his fears.
Groundhog Day	YES. Even after he becomes saintly, he’s still mildly sarcastic about it. He has the piano teacher kick the girl out so he can learn, he gets exasperated with the boy he saves for never thanking him.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. He’s sarcastic and a pessimist, even when things are going well.
In a Lonely Place	YES. sarcasm
Iron Man	YES. Cockiness, charm
Lady Bird	YES. Her teacher then tells her “You have a performative streak”.  She’s overly dramatic, likeably shallow and vain.
Raising Arizona	YES. Mild, underreacting, put-upon
Rushmore	YES. Enthusiastic
Selma	YES. Brilliant, inspirational, steely, weary
The Shining	YES. Jack is testy and insincere.  Danny is meek.
Sideways	YES. Negativity.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Humility.
Star Wars	YES. Petulant, whiny, wisecracking
Sunset Boulevard	YES. bitter cynicism.