Movies and Storytelling:
Another good source of wisdom is in stories people tell. As I’ve mentioned before, myths, legends, and fables of old were stories that were often told to illustrate good and bad qualities in people. (They were also used to record history or explain pre-scientific hypotheses.) Heroes of a story are heroes because they’re the people that you want to win. You want them to win because they exemplify characteristics that you admire. Villains are villains, and you want them to lose, because they exemplify despicable characteristics.
Modern storytelling works exactly the same way. Books, plays, and especially movies all follow the pattern of heroes and heroic qualities versus villains and villainous qualities. (I’ll use movies hereafter for my examples, but the same principles apply to all three.) No hero character in any movie, even if he’s the vilest anti-hero ever, will ever reach the end of the movie without having developed at least one redeeming quality. If somebody tried to make a movie like that, it would leave the audience emotionally unsatisfied. Emotionally satisfied audiences means money for producers, producers understand that, and that’s how they stay in business.
How do I know all this? Because the movie industry has developed a scientific formula for writing screenplays. (Don’t look so surprised!). You can read all about it in The Anatomy of a Screenplay, by Dan Decker. Quite simply, movies are made about events happening, and the best way to illustrate those events and their significance is through their effects on the main characters. There are a fairly limited number of basic plot concepts you can use in a movie, no matter how many unexpected twists you throw in, but character concepts are infinite, which make the main characters arguably the most important part of the movie.
First you need main characters the audience will care about. Then events need to start happening to the main characters so the audience will care about the outcome of the events. Then the course of events needs to become so powerful that the main characters are carried along by it. Then the course of events needs to start turning out so badly that the main characters are forced to make some drastic decision to try to keep themselves from being defeated utterly. Finally, the conflict needs to be resolved in a manner the audience will find emotionally satisfying, even if all the heroes die. To do that, you divide the plot line up into quarters, mark your quarter point, your turning point, and your lost point, etc., etc., and a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop, you have the outline for a screenplay.
Any movie can make lots of money in the first week with enough advertizing, but in order for the movie to stay in theaters or better still, become a classic, it needs to have heroes the audience will want to win. In order for the audience to want them to win, there has to be something about the characters the audience can relate to. As events of the movie unfold, the audience will react to those events according to the effects they have on the main characters. For the audience to continue to want the heroes to win, the heroes have to react to those events in ways the audience will admire. The audience doesn’t have to admire the heroes at first, they just have to admire them by the end of the movie. The heroes start the movie either as ordinary people or as ordinary people with some extraordinary abilities. If you try to make a movie where the hero starts out as an indestructible superhero, there’s no way you’ll ever be able to construct conflict that will personally affect that hero. Then the audience won’t care about the events of the movie, nobody will recommend it to their friends, and the producers will lose money on it.
If the movie is successful, it will be because people went to see the movie, reacted favorably toward it, and that caused more people to go see it. Because more and more people keep seeing the movie as time goes on, the admirable qualities of the heroes will become known to more and more people. As more and more people see the movie and admire those qualities, that movie and those characters will become cultural landmarks that people can refer to. That’s exactly how and why my friend was able to tell his parents, “Yeah, well Luke Skywalker was a rebel,” and expect them to understand what he meant (whether or not they actually did).
Where am I going with all this? Right here for the moment: Classic movies succeed because the people who write them figure out how to exemplify qualities that everyone can relate to. Not some people, not most people, all people. Movies that don’t do as well don’t because they appeal to smaller numbers of people—because they depend on their audiences understanding certain cultural references, they’re targeted to a certain age range or other demographic, or something of the sort. For instance, the highest-budget comedies never come anywhere close to the highest budgets for action movies because comedies never do as well in foreign countries as action movies do. Action movies are pretty self-explanatory, but comedies only work if the audiences get the jokes— which isn’t easy when you have to translate the movie into a different language and show it to an audience that isn’t as familiar with American culture.
Invariably, lots of people will not go see any given movie because they disapprove of, or are uninterested in, the way that the qualities of the characters are presented, the things that happen in the movie, or any number of other factors. Other people won’t think they approve of the admirable qualities of the heroes because they approve of other qualities more and may not think those qualities are important enough to make a whole movie about, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t approve of the qualities themselves.
Take Fight Club, for instance. Lots of people have seen that movie. Lots of people have recommended it to their friends. Why? Because it was boring? Because the heroes were dorks? I think not. People liked it and recommended it to their friends because Jack and Tyler are both driven by the pursuit of free will—a very popular ambition. Jack is a dork at the beginning of the movie, he’s just an ordinary guy who feels like something is wrong with his life, so he can’t sleep. He starts looking for a solution to his problems, and eventually he meets Tyler. Tyler has a lot of ideas about how to find free will, so Jack tags along with him. Over the course of their adventures together, Tyler figures out how to win their free will once and for all. When Jack finds out Tyler’s plan, he thinks that he doesn’t want free will that badly, until Tyler proves to him that he really does. Jack overcomes all of his obstacles in the movie and gets what he wants, even though at the beginning of the movie he was just an ordinary guy who never would’ve thought any of it was possible. Tyler doesn’t seem so lucky by the end of the movie, but he does achieve his own goals.
See what I mean? I can talk about characters in a movie and the way they heroically deal with their circumstances, and lots of people know what I’m talking about. The movie has become a cultural landmark that people can cite in reference to the pursuit of free will. The characters embody good characteristics, and anyone can agree that they’re good characteristics, even if that person hated the movie.
To put it another way: Movies succeed because the heroes’ admirable qualities are built on basic evolutionary thought so everyone can relate to them.