Storytelling kinks

[seriousfic]

Watching Hellboy 2 – fantastic, by the way, four stars, although the villain gets tiresome at the halfway point and if you’re like me you’ll spend a goodly percentage of the supposed “oh, what a tragedy, alas Babylon!” time thinking “Don’t be so stupid, stupidhead!” Or words to that effect – it struck me that you never really outgrow your storytelling kinks. One of the triangles from Blade 2 make a reappearance in Hellboy 2, right down to Luke Goss playing the same archetype (it’s a good thing they gave him long white hair in this and shaved him bald in that, otherwise you’d think the only difference was that he watched An Inconvenient Truth in the interval between movies).

If you’re me, this is one of the thousand and one things you can worry about as a writer, as I seem to have a fetish for the “hero worrying about what he’ll have to become to resolve the conflict” conflict. I like it, of course, since it’s almost a satire of the usual heroic arc… a hero that starts off light will “mature” into a more serious hero, a hero who starts off dark will lighten into a more at-peace hero (and thus find the “light” preferable). Plus, it makes for an easy contrast. If you take the villain and make him someone the hero doesn’t want to become, then he serves as a cautionary tale. It raises the stakes – if the hero doesn’t do so and so, he’s going to end up like that.

That’s all well and good, you might say, but before you know it, you’re Steven Spielberg and you’ve made a thousand films about your daddy issues. Now, you may not see a problem with being Steven Spielberg, but if George Lucas comes up to you and says he wants the next Indiana Jones movie to have aliens in it, then it’s good to not be Steven Spielberg because Steven Spielberg doesn’t have a good right hook.

Comments

[time-lordy.livejournal.com]

Yes, a good right hook was needed then. Not everything has to have aliens in it.

Do you think that having our heroes evolve is a recent thing, at least as far as moden society is concearned? John Wayne never really had to become anyone other or better than John Wayne. Is this need for our heroes to not be perfect from birth something new?

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

It's more like someone in Hollywood got a hold of Joseph Campbell's story and became convinced that every movie had follow the formula as rigidly as a blueprint or be a huge flop.

To that, I say... what's Wall-E's character arc?

[time-lordy.livejournal.com]

I think Wall-E, which I haven't seen and don't plan on seeing ever, follows that other Hollywood tactic of pandering to children, and getting their parents to buy movie tickets. In a word, greed. So, Wall-E will have as much, if not slightly less, of a character arc than Jar-Jar Binks.

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

Dude, no, you're thinking of Dreamworks animated crap. Pixar does family films, not children's films. That's why people still remember Toy Story and not Shark Tale.

If people put half the effort that went into Wall-E, into Wanted or Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, we'd actually have some worthwhile movies.

[time-lordy.livejournal.com]

then it might be worth a look.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

I kind of like the idea of miniature character arcs - characters learning from mistakes and picking up new skill-sets and such - but I also really like the idea that there's a lot of stuff about them, including certain faults, that stay fairly fixed.

Then again, I tend to prefer characters who are what I consider fairly cool to begin with, like House and the Doctor, where part of what's great about them is that they start out as, and remain, asshole-savants. So, from that standpoint, my bigger problem is when the stories bring down the Emo Hammer on such characters.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

In my own fic, I notice that I tend to fixate on sex, devote more attention to dialogue than staging, and try to "fix" a lot of character relationships.