The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Do all of the actions have real consequences?

Lethal Weapon 2 is the most insulting movie I’ve ever seen. The villains are evil, snarling, Apartheid-loving South African drug dealers, but no matter how many people they kill, the police chief insists Mel and Danny let it alone: “Forget it, guys. They have diplomatic immunity. There’s nothing we can do about it! If you touch a hair on their heads, I’ll have your badge!” (Fun fact: This is not how diplomatic immunity works.) 

What a predicament! How will our cops figure out a clever way around this conundrum? Well, they don’t. They finally just get fed up and say, “Screw it!” They barge into the bad guys’ place and begin a raging gun battle. Oh no, what will the consequences be for our heroes? Answer: nothing. They eventually call in backup, the police arrive to help, and then they all stand up and cheer together. All of those threatened consequences just disappear.

A similar recent example is Taken, in which Liam Neeson wants his daughter back so badly that he’s willing to do anything. He even shoots a French official’s wife and then refuses her treatment until the official helps him figure out the whereabouts of the bad guys! Wow, he’s willing to throw his own freedom away to save his daughter!

Except not. Here’s how naïve I was: I genuinely expected the movie to end with Neeson in prison, getting a visit from his daughter, and assuring her that it’s all worth it if she’s okay. Nope. It ends with Neeson happily flying home with his daughter without a care in the world. How does that work?

Now don’t get me wrong. I realize that a lot of people love these movies just as they are, and they wouldn’t be happy to see our heroes sitting in jail at the end, but nobody’s proud of themselves for loving these movies. They get their adrenaline pumped, but when the credits roll, the taste of joy has already started to turn sour in their mouths. They know it doesn’t really make any sense.

Two thrillers that have stood the test of time did a much better job with this: The town’s economy gets wrecked because Brody closes the beaches in Jaws, and Lecter escapes as a result of helping Clarice in Silence of the Lambs. Our heroes make painful choices and must live with the grave consequences of the risks they take.

Of course, if actions require consequences, it’s equally true that consequences require actions. There’s nothing more ludicrous than a story with a lot of melodramatic Sturm und Drang, only to reveal at the end that there’s no actual drama.

Movie producers tend to get skittish, and they often demand that writers tweak the heroes at the last minute so they become “more sympathetic.” This can often result in ludicrous decisions. I saw two movies in 2003 that didn’t work for precisely the same reason: Both were stories of husbands seeking redemption for cheating, even though, as it later turned out, they hadn’t actually cheated!

Big Fish is all about a son’s attempt to forgive his fabulist father, played by Albert Finney, for betraying the family. Finney’s stories may be amusing, but they can’t cover up the fact that he left the family for another woman. Finally, he has to stop lying and admit the truth—that he didn’t cheat on his wife. Sure, Finney ran away and went to live with Helena Bonham Carter, but heavens no, he never actually slept with her—that would be unsympathetic! (The great irony here is we all know Burton had his own affair with Carter, and most of his fans forgave him, but heaven forbid they be allowed to forgive somebody onscreen for the same transgression!)

Shortly after, I saw Phone Booth, in which Colin Farrell plays a sleazy agent who stops in a phone booth to call a woman who isn’t his wife. While he’s there, a sniper who has bugged the booth starts shooting at him and threatens to kill him unless he calls his wife and comes clean. Finally, he has a tearful breakdown and calls his wife to admit the truth—that he didn’t cheat on her. He just thought about it.

I highly suspect that, in the original scripts, the protagonists had actually cheated on their wives. But some producer said, “Hey, he can't do that. That's unsympathetic!” But this makes no sense. If a story is about a man’s quest for redemption, then that quest will only have meaning if he’s actually guilty. The audience doesn’t want to sympathize with “goodness.” The audience wants to empathize with difficult dilemmas—the more difficult the better. Redemption stories are about dealing with the consequences of mistakes. The bigger the mistake, the bigger the consequences, and the more engrossing the story will be.

Everybody loves A Christmas Carol, but that wouldn’t be true if some publisher had insisted that Scrooge not be too mean to the Cratchits. He really needed redemption, which made the stakes sky high in this battle for his soul. That’s the source of the story’s meaning. Of course, that story also gains a lot of meaning from one of its most oft-quoted lines, which very much tapped into national pain: “Are there no workhouses?”

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES, once you take gentle physics into account.
Alien	YES. She isn’t able to kill the alien without blowing up the ship.
An Education	YES. She can’t get back into her school.
The Babadook	Yes and no.  It is not unbeleivable that she suffered no real consequences for killing her dog and almost killing her kid (and vice versa) but it’s a little weird.
Blazing Saddles	YES. he gets sentenced to death for hitting the guy, etc.
Blue Velvet	YES. every transgression causes real suffering.
The Bourne Identity	YES. Very much so.
Bridesmaids	YES. Yes.
Casablanca	YES. Very much so.
Chinatown	YES. Very much so.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  The worst things that could happen keep happening, at work and at home.  “Donnie” and his wife have to go into witness protection.
Do the Right Thing	YES.
The Farewell	YES. but not what we expect.  Inaction ends up with positive consequences.
The Fighter	YES. Dicky goes to jail.  Both brothers have kids they rarely see.  The broken hand keeps Micky out of the ring for a long time.
Frozen	YES. Yes.
The Fugitive	YES. For the most part: he helps the guard (twice) but the guard turns him in anyway.  Gerard gets in trouble for shooting the other fugitive, etc.
Get Out	YES. Much more so in the original ending, where Chris went to jail for killing all those white people.  Instead they released a better stand-up-and-cheer ending, but we know Chris is going to have a hard time explaining his whereabouts and actions.
Groundhog Day	YES. Within each day, and even after: he never gets over all those suicides. “I’ve killed myself so many times, I don’t even exist anymore.”
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. Hiccup chooses to fight and loses a foot! Dragon cannot overcome his disability without help.
In a Lonely Place	YES.
Iron Man	YES. Lots of suffering on Tony’s part, women and friends truly resent his treatment of them even though they find him charming.
Lady Bird	YES.
Raising Arizona	Yes and no.  It makes sense that the whole thing unravels so quickly, but it’s crazy that they face no consequences for the kidnapping (or for killing Smalls!).  As for the consequences of giving up on a baby, the movie hedges, first implying that they had to content themselves with sending gifts to Nathan Jr. from afar, but then implying that maybe they did have kids after all.
Rushmore	Yes and no.  Max’s schemes all fall apart believably, and he suffers, but not as much as he really would.
Selma	YES. The world is changed by both King and Johnson.  King and Coretta never really have a rapprochment to show their marriage has changed, but we can tell from their body language.  It’s unclear if King blames and/or forgives Johnson for the FBI tape.  And of course the movie frequently taps into our knowledge that King will eventually be killed.
The Shining	YES.
Sideways	YES. …although Jack somehow manages to lie the consequences away after they hit.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Lecter escapes as a result, for instance.
Star Wars	YES. Helping the rebels gets his aunt and uncle killed.  Rescuing the princess gets Obi Wan killed.
Sunset Boulevard	YES. there’s no getting away from this.

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Are these issues and the overall dilemma addressed in a way that avoids moral hypocrisy?

Of course, if you’re going to invoke real pain, the trick is to avoid hypocrisy. I can only guess that writer-director Joss Whedon got a note from the studio that said, “The Avengers are just tools of the government the entire time. They should show some independence!” So he added in a very awkward subplot in which the Avengers work together to uncover their boss’s (Nick Fury) dirty secret: He wasn’t just using the stolen alien artifact to create clean energy; he was building weapons! Gasp! 

This tacked-on subplot not only goes nowhere, but it’s also totally out of character. The Avengers love weapons. They’re all defined by their weapons. Quick quiz—who’s who? Shield. Hammer. Armor. Bow. Guns. Fists. Any questions? For that matter, they’re also at war with a malevolent alien race. This is a movie that ends with Iron Man happily wiping out his enemies with a nuclear missile, and nobody bats an eye! Isn’t he the same guy who was just lecturing Fury about not building any more weapons?

If they wanted to add a quick antiweapons-proliferation subplot in the middle of an intensely pro-weapon movie, then they should have figured out a way to have that issue resonate in the second half of the movie, as well, instead of being instantly forgotten and totally contradicted.

Of course, this hypocrisy is specific to The Avengers, but there’s also the issue of the much bigger hypocrisy that hangs over almost every story about good and evil. Almost all heroic fiction is founded on the great hypocrisy.

See if you can spot the problem with this logic: “See that guy over there? He solves his problems by killing people! That makes him a problem! So let’s kill him! Yay!” Explain to me again who the bad guy is here? In the real world, thankfully, meeting violence with violence is most often seen as a tragic last resort, but in fiction, we aren’t satisfied until the villain has been turned into chopped liver. Watching people solve their problems through democratic action is boooring.

When we watch movies about would-be peacemakers, like the lovable, pacifistic small-town sheriff Jimmy Stewart plays in Destry Rides Again, we root for him, but we don’t really want to see him make peace with the town bully, because watching everybody put down their guns and go home would just be, you know, lame. We secretly long for the moment when he gets fed up and straps those guns on.

So how can you avoid the great hypocrisy and yet still have a satisfying ending? You can cheat. You can allow your heroes to make peace with the enemy army if you give that army a really evil, heretofore unrevealed boss. The most famous example of this is Star Wars. To redeem Vader, Lucas cleverly brought in the Emperor late in the game. Now they could team up against a greater enemy. Otherwise, the trilogy would have had to end on a hug and no fight.

I grew up on the Star Wars trilogy, and that pretty much ruined me for other sagas. That became my standard for greatness: Morally serious heroes should seek to redeem the villain, not kill him. Thus, I was inevitably disappointed with the endings of The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, Lost, and any other saga that gave lip service to complex moral dilemmas but, in the end, came down to happy ending = kill the villain.

This is one reason why I was so impressed by the movie How to Train Your Dragon. As I watched it, I was thinking, Gee, they’ve been training all this time for a big dragon battle, but now they’ve got us rooting for our hero to make peace with the dragons instead. If that happens, it’ll be admirable, sure, but won’t that feel kinda unsatisfying?

But then, halfway through, we find out the dragons have a big, nasty boss, and I smiled. “They’re going to make peace with every dragon except that guy.” Is it a cheat? Sure. But it’s a good way to satisfy both higher moral sensibilities and the need to still see just a little ass kicking.

Rulebook Casefile: The Muddled Metaphor of Pacific Rim

The central conceit of Pacific Rim is that one pilot can’t control a giant robot without getting a nosebleed (heaven forbid!) so they have to have two pilots do a mind-meld in order to share the load. Okay, that’s somewhat interesting, but what’s the metaphor here? I guess you could say that that’s a metaphor for how real world co-pilots learn to work together…but that has nothing to do with the core concept of Monsters vs. Robots. The metaphor, to the extent that it exists, is muddled, inert, and extraneous. 

Besides, the filmmakers don’t really care about this plotline: the whole first half is about how hard it is to mind-meld, and sure enough, the first time our heroes try it, they fail catastrophically, almost blowing up the base in the process. Naturally, they get fired...but then in the next big attack all of the other pilots fail and the boss has no choice but to call on our infamously-bad-at-mind-melding heroes. What will our troubled heroes see in each other’s memories this time, and will they be able to deal with it??

Sorry, we never find out, because once the movie finally gets to indulge in robot vs. monster mayhem, mind-melding is never shown or mentioned again! Who cares? We’ve got monsters to punch! We just have to assume the whole problem was dealt with offscreen, I guess.

This exemplifies so many problems we’ve talked about before. Mind-melding is hard to do but it isn’t hard to want to do. (It might have been if each pilot was trying to hide memories from the other, but neither one is.) The whole concept is an abstraction or an abstraction. Worst of all, this premise is neither how life is nor how life feels. You know how, in real life, if you want to defeat monstrous people, you have to reach into the memories of the person next to you? No? You’ve never felt that way? Of course not.

So what should they have done? Just look at the poster. I do freelance copywriting work for a book publisher, and one shocking thing they’ve taught me is that, if the premise for the book you’re selling is confusing or too dumb, you just lie about what it is in order to sell it, creating a tagline for what the book should have been. The buyers will be disappointed, of course, but hey, at least they bought it.

Sure enough, if you look at the poster for Pacific Rim, you’ll see that the tagline promises a much better concept: “To fight monsters, we created monsters.” That’s a movie I’d like to see! Some smart copywriter realized that the movie didn’t work because it wasn’t ironic, so he or she created a premise for the poster that was ironic, that did relate the basic concept. Monsters vs. Robots...what could go wrong with that? Well, what’s the most ironic answer? The robots turn out to be worse than the monsters! Then we’d have a movie!

We’ll explore that possibility more next time…

Rulebook Casefile: Hypocritical Invocation of National Pain in Pacific Rim  

So what’s this movie about? The first answer might be “nothing”, but that couldn’t be more wrong: there are actually lots of twinges of real life national pain...but they’re all mentioned in passing in a hypocritical way:

• There’s a brief mention that the monsters are drawn to Earth because of our environmental devastation: “Depleted oxygen? We terraformed it for them!”
• Government assholes are building a futile wall to keep aliens out.
• We briefly glimpse a religion whose members blame themselves for the attacks.
• There’s lots of 9/11 imagery.
• There’s lots of World War 2 imagery.
• And the whole thing is very reminiscent of the Deepwater Horizon spill

But the answer to environmental devastation isn’t setting off nukes or killing monsters (even metaphorical ones). And surely the real world alternative to building that wall isn’t to build robots to beat up the “aliens”, is it?  The movie is just tossing in every idea it can get its hands out on without thinking any of it through. It doesn’t extract any meaning from any of these big ideas that it attempt to borrow.

You get the feeling that they came up with the idea, brainstormed a million different possible meanings for it, and then, instead of choosing one, they just used that brainstorm list as their script. This is equally true for both the plot and the theme: Sound and fury signifying nothing.

But wait, isn’t that the definition of the summer action movie? No, it isn’t. Action movies are supposed to feel like pure spectacle, but the good ones subtly use thematic resonance to make us care more, without forcing us to actively think about it on a conscious level. That’s the beauty of the form…when it’s done right.

Straying from the Party Line: Moral Hypocrisy in Stranger Things

You guys know I hate moral hypocrisy in stories. You should not, for instance, hold your heroes to a different standard than your villains. The one aspect of “Stranger Things” that I really didn’t like was the fact that Eleven kept casually killing people throughout the series. I didn’t like it for several reasons:    

• The series didn’t seem to have the time or the inclination to deal with the weight or ramifications of these killings, either for Eleven or the for the victims. The two agents she seemingly kills in the pilot (in the kitchen of the diner) disappear off screen so quickly, you hardly notice them.
• Instead, the killings are presented in a stereotypically “badass” way. I especially hated it when she cocks her chin to snap two guards’ necks in a flashback in a later episode.
• Worst of all, the story doesn’t need all this killing. She could just as easily have incapacitated these people by putting nightmares in their heads that make them collapse in horror, or made them writhe in pain with nosebleeds, or simply knocked them out psychically. Those all could have looked just as badass.

This is a series that’s all about the pain caused by the disappearance of a 12 year-old boy, but isn’t the death of each of these random government employees (who may not completely realize they’re working for a bad guy) just as sad? These guys aren’t exactly wearing Nazi armbands.

Such killings also constitute a big plot hole. As we see, family members tend to demand the truth when people disappear, and presumably Dr. Brenner would have his hands full at this point dealing with aggrieved relatives. (And that’s not even counting all the people killed by the monster or disappeared into the Upside-Down!)

Like a lot of stories that were actually made in the 80s, this series tries to walk a tricky line: a horror story about kids that will hopefully be equally appealing to teens and grown-ups: A celebration of innocence and experience at the same time, juxtaposing and combining the sensibilities of Mike and Hopper. For the most part, the series succeeds wonderfully, but I think it would have been even better if she was just knocking all those people out (in a horrific and badass way, if you prefer).

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES.
Alien	YES.
An Education	YES.
The Babadook	NA
Blazing Saddles	YES. Very much so.  The pain is real.
Blue Velvet	YES.
The Bourne Identity	YES.  Very much so.  For once a spy refuses to split the difference. There is no carping about “I feel bad about this mission, but the ends justify the means.”
Bridesmaids	YES. The economic and emotional pain is very real.
Casablanca	YES. Very much so.
Chinatown	YES.
Donnie Brasco	YES.
Do the Right Thing	YES.
The Farewell	NO. Well, not really, because dictatorship is never mentioned.
The Fighter	YES.
Frozen	YES. Yes.
The Fugitive	YES. Well, in the real world, it’s almost always poor minorities, not rich whites, who get railroaded, but it doesn’t feel hypocritical, rather, as Aristotle would say, making the fall from status larger makes the emotion feel more real.
Get Out	YES. Very much so.
Groundhog Day	YES. This town isn’t idealized.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. Yes, by fudging it, they make peace with all the dragons but one. Also, disability is treated honestly, which is almost never the case in movies.
In a Lonely Place	YES.
Iron Man	YES. Tony doesn’t come up with some clever guarantee that makes sure that his arms won’t go to bad guys. The thorniness remains.
Lady Bird	YES.
Raising Arizona	YES. Mr. Arizona isn’t turned into a monster in order to justify the kidnapping, for instance.
Rushmore	NA
Selma	YES. The movie avoids charges of hypocisy by being honest about the hypocisies of both King (in terms of his family life) and Johnson.
The Shining	YES.
Sideways	YES.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. It respects the horror of those cases.
Star Wars	YES. The empire resembles America (and the good guys the Viet Cong) and gives us a pretty unpleasant picture of ourselves.
Sunset Boulevard	YES. There’s no good way to get rich.  Joe is going to go home to be a copywriter in Dayton at the end.

The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Does the story include twinges of real-life national pain?

It was 1977, and America was depressed. We’d just lost a war, and, even worse, deep down where we wouldn’t even admit it, we suspected that we had deserved to lose. 

Then, an amazing thing happened. A great work of art came along that began the process of healing that wound, a movie called Star Wars.

In the movie, three American stars played scrappy young rebels taking on a massive empire. The empire kept using its advanced technology to track and slaughter the rebels, leaving smoking villages filled with charred corpses. But a ragtag band of farmers and outlaws won out by hiding in jungles, infiltrating the enemy army, striking fast, and scattering quickly, all the while drawing strength from a meditative, churchless spiritual force.

George Lucas was giving America a chance to empathize with our former enemies and refight the war on their side. As they watched Star Wars, Americans happily made that switch and felt their souls were a little bit cleaner.

Now let’s jump ahead a few years: It was 1984 and America seemed to be on the edge of nuclear war. Few could imagine a bright future. In The Terminator, the Soviets became giant robots, and nuclear war became a robot apocalypse, but the implications were clear: We were caught in a closed loop that had only one end. There was nothing left to do but ride off into a sun-bleached desert to prepare.

Cut to eight years later, and writer/director James Cameron updated his fable in Terminator 2. The big, scary, deep-accented robot broke out of his programming, now determined to destroy his own side’s weapons and break the loop, even if it meant destroying himself in the process. In the end, we’re back on the highway, but now it’s night, and we have no idea what awaits us down the road. We’ve been sure of the coming doom for so long; can we handle the freedom of not knowing what the future brings?

Nobody walked into these movies expecting any political content, and even afterward, most remained blissfully unaware of the movies' deeper implications. Audiences just knew that these movies had resonated with them on a much deeper level than many other blockbusters.

Those stories are science fiction, which is the most allegorical of genres, but all stories become more meaningful when they include twinges of real-life national pain. There’s a myth that the movies of Hollywood’s golden age ignored the Great Depression and created a fantasy world of glitz and glamour, but if you actually watch the movies, nothing could be further from the truth. The depression is a constant reality, and it’s that pain that gives the movies their weight, even as they create a parallel glamorous reality for their characters (and audience) to aspire to.

You can’t count on your audience to bring their sense of morality with them, but you can count on them to bring their fears, pain, and doubts. They don’t want to think directly about those things, but you can add great resonance to an otherwise apolitical story by indirectly referencing them. This is true even for comedies: Great comedy always has an undercurrent of pain running through it, just under the surface.

If you want your story to be more meaningful, you should feel your country’s pain, but you shouldn’t exploit that pain. More on that next time… 

Rulebook Casefile: National Pain in “Get Out”

I always say that if you really want your story to resonate with the a lot of people, it should tap into National Pain. Is there any better example of this than Get Out? Here’s Peele in a discussion with Chance the Rapper on the DVD:

• All the great horror films have something to say. They have a real horror that they’re about, and the issue of racism had been ignored in this genre, and I felt like this meant to fill in a gap, a missing piece of conversation. Maybe this’ll fuck shit up in the wrong way, I don’t know. Art and communication is the one tool we have against the true horror of the world which is violence, so I hope that this is an inclusive experience, and that it inspires people to just talk. We’re also in need right now for things that are going to bring us together as people, so hopefully this movie creates a collective creative catharsis, in a way.

In the commentary, he talks about how he wrote the script under Obama but shot it under Trump:

• When President Obama was elected, we entered this era that I call the post-racial lie: “We got a black president, it’s done, we’re past it.” And many of us know that race is very much alive and racism is alive and it’s the monster that was simmering beneath the surface of the country for a while, and so I felt like this movie was originally meant to address that. Now we live in a completely different era, and it’s been fascinating to see how this movie’s journey has led up to this moment, where now I feel like it’s more relevant in a way than ever.

Interestingly, he says that the shift from Obama to Trump was the reason he changed the ending:

• By the time I was shooting it, it was quite clear the world had shifted, racism was being dealt with, people were woke, and people needed a release and a hero, which is why I changed the ending and had Rod show up at the end.

(I say in my checklist that movies should reflect the way the world works, and that’s far more true of the original ending, but I agree with Peele: Everyone needed to stand up and cheer instead of seeing how it would actually go down. The brilliant solution was to give us that moment where we think he’s going to be arrested, and that hits us like a ton of bricks …but then it’s Rod, and our horror turns to elation. He’s giving us both emotions.)

It’s interesting to try to parse exactly what the movie is saying about the Obama era. One key question that can’t be answered: Is Dean telling the truth when he says he’d vote for Obama a third time? Is that just a lie to put Chris at ease, or does he mean it? Obviously what Dean’s group wants is white minds in black skins. Is Peele saying that that’s what Obama represented to some pseudo-liberals? (Chris is neither surprised nor impressed when Dean tells him this.) Peele says in the commentary that in America, “all black people are in the Sunken Place” One can’t help but wonder to what degree that he’s talking about Obama specifically.
 Peele first became a household name (and got to meet Obama) because of a recurring skit on his TV show where he impersonated Obama’s placid exterior while his sketch partner Keegan Michael Key acted out Obama’s hidden angry side. It was hilarious, and painful, and cathartic: Obama fans were gratified to finally get to see the anger that surely must be trapped under the surface of “No-Drama Obama”, possibly in his own personal Sunken Place.  It’s unimaginable what Obama must have gone through as he endured constant racial hatred from Fox News, but he rarely let it show.

Peele is grappling with profound national pain, but he’s doing so in an entertaining, even thrilling way, without a lot of speeches.  His metaphor does the work.

Rulebook Casefile: Predicting National Pain in “24”

As writers, it’s our job to keep our ears to the ground. As one commenter (okay, fine, it was mom) put it on the post for Bright Young Things…

• Waugh saw WWII coming the same way Kafka saw the Holocaust coming, Fitzgerald saw the Crash coming, Tolstoy saw the Russian Revolution coming, and Chaucer and Dante saw the Reformation coming. A good writer, being a careful observer, is going to be good at observing the direction things are headed in.

Nowhere was this more shockingly obvious than in the case of 9/11. Most obviously, Tom Clancy predicted an extremely similar attack in his 1994 novel “Debt of Honor”, but there were also several eerily prescient images set for release the month of the attacks…

• Both “24” and “Alias” were shows debuting that September about US antiterrorism squads facing off stateless terror organizations, and they both had to edit their pilots after the attacks.
• In comics, “X-Men”, “Superman” and “The Dark Knight Rises” all had storylines published that month in which planes crashed into skyscrapers to launch apocalyptic attacks.
• And of course, this album was released a few days before the attacks.

Tapping into real life national pain doesn’t just mean saying “Hey, remember that thing that just happened, I’m going to give it a shout-out”. It also refers to giving voice to the fears, doubts, anger, and violence lurking under the surface of our modern life, and considering what dangers might be about to erupt.

Rulebook Casefile: Invoking National Pain on “Cheers”

If you watch the “Cheers” pilot, you’ll see typical shots of random extras in the background enjoying the bar, but one of them stands out: a flinty-looking old lady in a wheelchair, drinking alone. This is a glimpse of what might have been, because she was supposed to be a regular character. Here’s veteran staffer Ken Levine on his excellent blog, explaining what happened:

• “The character was named Mrs. Littlefield. She was an opinionated old broad from the D.A.R. She was in the pilot and the decision to drop the character was made after it was filmed. Politics just didn't fit with the mix. So they cut out her part, but there are a few shots here and there where she is still in the background. Just look for a sweet white-haired little old lady who used to have lines. Since several back-up scripts were in the works before the pilot was filmed, we also had to go back and write her out of those episodes as well.

If you look at the script, the final version is almost verbatim the way it was written, with the exception of all of Mrs. Littlefield’s lines being cut out. She’s very funny, but you can see why she had to go:

But, that said, the show was political, just in a different way. Let’s look at the amazing cold open:

 There is so much packed into this.  Yes, it’s funny, and it introduces our setting and central character, but it’s also a bit of a mission statement:

• “That’s what they say: ‘War is gross.’” The first amazing thing about this line is that Danson dares to play it melancholy, not like a punchline, letting us know that there’s something under the laugh: We’re here underground hanging onto our working-class traditions in this bar but there’s a younger, more privileged generation up there with a breezy contempt for those traditions who literally cannot conceive of what real suffering is like.
• “This is the thanks we get,” the kid says in faux-reactionary outrage as he turns his back on Sam’s world. Our heroes would spend the next eleven years camped out in this bunker as their working-class world was gradually demolished above them.  More and more bartenders now have (useless, overpriced) college degrees.  We’re all Diane Chambers now. 

Mrs. Littlefield was an attempt to inject partisan political humor into the show, but it didn’t work, because the show was really about class politics, albeit only implicitly, and that was a subtle source of its power.

The 40 Year Old Virgin	Just a little bit.  Their south Asian coworkers mention 9/11, etc.  Jay says “That’s my third strike!”  (They cut out that Cal was writing an Iraq war novel)
Alien	YES. it’s quite prescient about the rise of corporate sovereignty in the ‘80s.
An Education	YES. It’s a true story about the birth of the modern feminism, the prison of suburbia, anti-Semitism, etc.
The Babadook	NO. for the same reasons.  This is a story that would be little different in another country, or indeed even five hundred years ago.
Blazing Saddles	YES. Oh very much yes.  Original screenwriter Andrew Bergman pitched his script as “Eldridge Cleaver rides into town on a pony.” He said to Mel, “Play 1974 in 1874.” The original title was “Tex X”
Blue Velvet	YES. Somewhat: drug violence coming to small town.
The Bourne Identity	YES. Very much so.  Liman’s father interrogated Oliver North on national TV and he based Cooper on North.
Bridesmaids	YES. The economic collapse of 2008 is everywhere.
Casablanca	YES. Very much so.  It’s all about the pain of the war.
Chinatown	YES. Very much so.  It’s as much about Watergate as it is about 1937.
Donnie Brasco	YES.  the over-surveillance of the ‘70s.
Do the Right Thing	YES. Very much so.  Real life police killings are referred to many times.
The Farewell	YES. Hints of it for both countries.
The Fighter	YES. Very much so.  Lots about crack, etc.
Frozen	YES. The story is inherently critical or the pricessess-ification of girl-culture, ecouraging girls to see the problem with the traditional princess-love-story paradigm
The Fugitive	YES. Very much so: The false conviction epidemic.
Get Out	YES. Very much so. It had a lot to say about the Obama era, when it was written, and the Trump era, when it was directed.
Groundhog Day	YES. “He used to work at the mine before it closed down” etc.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. There are lots of parallels with the “War on Terror”
In a Lonely Place	YES. postwar domestic violence and depression loom large: “Dix hasn’t been this good since before the war.”
Iron Man	YES. Very much so: America’s corrupt adventure in Afghanistan, war profiteering.
Lady Bird	YES. They keep watching the Iraq war on TV.
Raising Arizona	YES. Very much so. JFK, Nixon and Reagan are all name checked. “I tried to stand up and fly straight, but it wasn’t easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House. I dunno, they say he’s a decent man, so… maybe his advisors are confused.”
Rushmore	NO. Just slightly: Max’s plays are about national pain (Vietnam, Watergate, Serpico) but he fails to seriously grapple with these issues (although his play does make Vietnam vet Blume cry), but the movie itself is totally decontextualized.  We don’t know what city we’re in or what year it is.
Selma	YES. Very much so, then and now.  Common does the final song and mentions Ferguson.
The Shining	YES. Jack’s slaughter is tied into many famous American atrocities, the movie can be seen as cautionary tale of the rise of the “angry white man”.
Sideways	YES. Bush and Rumsfeld on TV of screwed-up couple, collapse of publishing industry, death of the creative class.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. Echoes of Bundy and other cases.
Star Wars	YES. The whole thing mirrors Vietnam very closely.
Sunset Boulevard	Somewhat.  (The topical references are all local: the betrayal of ex-silent stars, the Black Dahlia murder) There’s no hint of postwar malaise of anything like that, but it’s hinted that super-rich monsters like Norma were created by the lack of an income tax before the war, and the new 90% top tax bracket has relegated them to the past.