So, continuing on from my previous post, I'd like to talk about the kind of intellectual avenues that disasters like Alien 3 and Exorcist II: The Heretic lead you down.
The first thing I wonder after films like this is, could you actually make a decent sequel to The Exorcist, or to Aliens? Is there a point in which the dramatic potential within a particular story has been thoroughly exhausted? The curve within which new ground can be covered and new aspects added to characters plummets exponentially downward? Our greatest cultural triumphs are not open-ended: in fact, the only continuously moving forwards works of literature and of the moving image in our society today are newspapers and soap operas. Everything else has to end at some point. Are some story's natural limits much closer than others? Or is it simply a case that with enough wit and determination, any story can be continued, but at a far greater creative cost to the individuals involved making it than if they were applying this effort to an original story?
I would argue the latter statement is probably truer than the former. Someone clever enough can always work out a way to extend a story - it's simply that the limits already set by what's already happened in the story world restrict the ability to cover new ground the way that clever person could if they were allowed to dedicate their energies to an original story with no such restrictions.
My second question to come from disasterpieces is normally, "Well, if it's possible to make a good version of this film - how would you do it?" As both Alien 3 and Exorcist II: The Heretic are sequels, I would say that the secret to a successful treatment would be to reconstruct the fundamental elements of the previous films and add a new concept that pivots the story into a new place and allows opportunities to break new ground as a storyteller. In simple terms, giving the audience something they will enjoy but did not expect - which was exactly the experience they want to repeat. By dissecting Alien 3 and Exorcist II and the expectations the audience had of these movies like an algebra problem, you can create some interesting suggestions.
First up, The Exorcist. The first film was as much a drama as it was a horror film - something the sequel film-makers ignored. It's impossible to create a convincing sequel to a drama using any of the same characters going through similar motions. You can't imagine a truly successful or interesting Requiem for a Dream 2 or a Raging Bull 2, and likewise, no-one wanted an Exorcist II with the same characters doing the same things.
The Exorcist, the original film, was set in the present day, in a world in which not even the Catholic Church believes demonic possession is real. That's examined perfectly in the first movie. And where can you go in the present world that will offer a different emotional landscape for a sequel? You can try to find somewhere primitive - like The Heretic did, but Africa adds nothing to the story, because it's still got the same two groups of people: a few with faith who believe demons exist, and a large majority who don't.
So the obvious place to situate The Exorcist II to create a rich and different dramatic landscape is in the past. If the sequel was set in a time and place in which nearly everyone believes in demonic possession, where sceptics are lone voices, and instead of moving straight towards demonic possession, we begin the film with the terrifying idea that people in this world believe that normal people around them are routinely possessed by witches and devils, we've turned the first movie on its head. In The Exorcist, we saw one demonic possession that was real. In this new idea of The Exorcist II, we could see a bunch of people who are not possessed (mentally challenged, criminals, the wrongly accused) but who are treated as such. A successful location for such a story could be Puritan New England between the 1640s and 1680s.
Now, the binary opposition between protagonist and antagonist in the first film is entirely clear: entirely decent priests with God in their hearts, versus a terrifying demon who wants to destroy the soul of the child it's in. When both priests sacrifice themselves at the end of the first film, that's the furthest logical extension you can make to the Christ-like priest characters and their arcs.
The only effective way to create a new and surprising opposition between our protagonist and antagonist in a second film is to create an exorcist who is almost as bad as the demon who he is trying to cast out. Let's describe this character as a Witchfinder - a man who routinely claims to find demons in people, who burns innocent women as witches, a man who some believe in private must be possessed by a demon himself to carry out such wicked punishments fellow Christians. What if he comes across a child possessed of a demon, a demon that tells him that it has come in human form to punish him, and will jump from one body to another until it ends up possessing the Witchfinder and his whole family?
What if the Witchfinder swears to exorcise the spirit, cast it out of human form, then burn the child afterwards to ensure that in no way can anyone else - especially his own children - be contaminated?
Now we've set up an interesting, new third act that builds on the structure of the third film - because we're not just wondering who we're rooting before between the demon and this vile zealot, or whether or not the child can be exorcised - but we're also fearful of what will happen when he is. Throw in a spiritually beleaguered assistant, and the dark suggestion that this Witchfinder might be possessed by a spirit of his own, or might well already be possessed or at least mentally ill - and we suddenly have a lot of interesting possibilities. Especially if the Witchfinder believes by the end of the film that his own children have become possessed by the devil and he must kill him - a complete reversal of the child/parent relationship in the first film - and you've got a much stronger- albeit sketchy - concept for the structural integrity of an Exorcist sequel than any of the ones that followed the original. Because once again, we start with the idea that it's a drama based around the concept of faith, rather than a bunch of kids with weird potty-mouth voices and funny contact lenses climbing up the walls.
The only question now is how to connect these two movies. How is this Exorcist movie linked to the previous one? I would argue that you'd do it very simply at the start of the film and leave it at that: a single title that might read something like this:
"Exorcisms were not always a curiosity.
Records show that in 1694, in Blue Plains, a small township in Maryland near present-day Georgetown, 36 young men and women were exorcised and 15 'unsaved' burnt at the stake.
There are no records to illustrate whether these demonic posessions were real, or the result of mass hysteria.
Only the name of the Exorcist remains: John Tyler."
So this is one way (and only one way) that the failure of Exorcist II: The Heretic actually suggests what I think sounds like a much better film.
2) Now let's take Alien 3. I'd say Alien 3 is more complicated example, because it has a first-rate sequel in the bag. I believe James Cameron is the undisputed master of sequels. In both Alien and Terminator, he manages to flip the concept of the first film on its head and create a satisfying conclusion to the idea begun in the first. Apart from realising he could turn the lone, silent, preditory alien in the first film into an army of seething insects in the second, changing the genre from pyschological horror to war thriller, Cameron isolated a small element of the first film and built it beautifully into a two-film character arc for our main character. Cameron teases out the alienation of Ripley in the first film (who ends up completely on her own) and isolates her through the first act of Aliens, then gives her real human interaction, friends and a surrogate daughter at the end of the second film. They may still float into the unknown, but they do so together.
So, how do you create a sequel out of that? I think the answer lies in what Ridley Scott himself said about an Alien sequel: you've got to go and explore where the aliens come from. This is the thing that Alien 3 and the much worse Alien Resurrection seem to forget - the films are not called Ripley. They're called Alien, and in the first move, you actually see a bunch of different aliens - they just happen to be dead and fossilized on an alien ship that you never see again through any of the following films.
So a third film has a wealth of opportunity to go back and tell us something new about the Alien universe, to transform the fear of the unknown - which is what drives the first film - into the excitement of discovery. If the first film was a horror, and the second twists the genre into an action movie, the third could pull the genre again, into an adventure/horror. A group of people are sent to find out where the aliens come from - after the first two movies, wouldn't you think there would be some interest?
We'd have to remove 'The Company' from the equation. By being revealed as the bad guys for two successive movies, any future dealings with this particular corrupt entity are boring as shit. And isn't it obvious that the aliens have some kind of 'company' of their own - that's what created the alien? What if they have dark plans for creatures like us, too - plans that involve searching societies like ours - societies where we are the 'aiien' to them, and transform and subsume us into their world?
I'm not going to say there isn't a massive risk approaching the Alien story this way - and that is that it risks stripping all the 'alien-ness' out of it if you pull away the veil too much. I would suggest that the less-is-more approach of the group discovering just one distant alien colony, far from the centre of this alien universe, where our group of protagoninsts quickly go from the excitement of discovery to the panic of escaping with their lives, having experienced just the tip of the iceberg - would be the most effective way to bring the story forward.
And the underlying concept - changing the world of the first two movies so that instead of their being an alien in our world, we are an alien in theirs - is a stronger starting position than either Alien 3 or Alien Resurrection.
Anyway - that's my two cents born of how much these two movies make me think. Do you agree with the ideas I've extrapolated for sequels to these movies, or do you think I'm full of shit?
Let me know in the comments.
Saturday 5 March 2011
Disasterpieces
Someone was talking to me the other day about Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, a film I've never seen. He used the term 'mess-terpiece' to describe it, which was entertaining, and got me thinking of similar movies: flops that may not have been vindicated by time, but nevertheless leave the world a better place by deviating that much from the norm.
But then I was troubled by a couple of films that you couldn't describe as 'mess-terpieces'. These were films I'd seen that weren't simply a critical disaster and poison for those who made them - but so notoriously flawed that only someone who can hold perverse affection for the unloved (like me) would even think about talking about them. I'm talking about what I'm going to call disasterpieces - films whose execution from start to end are so astonishing (often astonishingly bad) that they provoke admiration as well as hurt and bafflement.
To define disasterpiece, I'm going to use two films - both highly anticipated - both horror films from world-class directors. John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic, and David Fincher's Alien 3. These films for some reason bare an uncanny resemblance to one another - and not just because they're both follow-ups to perhaps the two greatest horror movies of the 1970's.
They're similar to one another in that they stay with you after you've watched them - just like really good films do. To begin with, you think it's only because they're such a disturbing waste of talent. But there are scenes in both films that are quite haunting - often in a strange and intangible way - the way a Kubrick scene can haunt you. It doesn't make sense in a logical sense, but certain scenes muddle around in your limbic brain: an experience that is absolutely absurd and yet absurdly cinematic. The image of a shaven-headed Ripley confronted by the salivating Alien in a close-up is probably the single-most iconic image within the entire Alien series. The first Exorcist II scene showing the terrified Kenyan villagers fighting a plague of locusts within a dream is genuinely startling.
I think these movies have a weird appeal because a lot of the wrong choices made in them, coupled with startling if unintelligible imagery, gives you a sense of what a big-budget hollywood film directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky or Louis Bunel would look like - even if we only get this sense for ten percent of the movie. They also stay with me because they raise interesting questions about the nature of sequels and the our ability to transform and grow ideas. It's almost impossible to imagine either of the films as a dramatically successful movie - nearly all because of the underlying concepts behind them.
To start with, both Alien 3 and Exorcist II seem to have been made without understanding what made the previous films effective. In the first forty minutes of Alien, you don't see any aliens. Ditto Aliens. In The Exorcist, the change in Reagan is slow and steady, and the whole movie is designed around slowly persuading you that demonic possession is actually possible. These films were about the worlds the characters lived in before they were about the monsters that terrified that well-established world.
This is partly a problem with sequels. People who went to see Alien 3 wanted to see aliens. What's more, they knew more or less everything about the aliens. What's wrong with cutting to the chase? Similarly, people who went to see Exorcist II: The Heretic clearly were paying to see exorcisms. Maybe these audiences also forgot that their favourite parts of the previous movies was slowly being persuaded that these horrifying things that don't actually exist are real. That's certainly the case with the film-makers, who seem to have completely forgotten this: what do you see in the opening shots of Alien 3, and in the first scene of Exorcist II?
You see a face-hugger bleeding acid, and a girl possessed by the devil.
In doing this, both films not only create a world with the story's extraordinary selling point - an alien, a possessed girl - and render it completely mundane. What they do with these antagonists is even worse - acting as a giant slap in the face to the audience in relation to their expectations to the previous movies. How so?
You know how you felt good at the end of Aliens because Ripley saved Newt and killed the Alien Queen? According to Alien 3, you were a moron to feel catharsis at the end of that movie, because right after the credits stopped, a face-hugger shat an egg down the main character's throat, it sent the ship into a spiraling crash and then all the others died. BOOM! Welcome to the movie.
Remember how The Exorcist totally shattered your nerves by showing you a young girl transformed and tortured by the devil over two long hours, finally being released by the brave acts of two magnificent priests who sacrifice their lives to exorcise her? According to first act of the Exorcist II they shouldn't have wasted their time, and neither should you. The devil's still inside Reagan. So the movie is more or less telling you that the last one is a complete waste of fucking time.
I don't know if this is simply a problem of sequels reaching their terminal arcs - their story places of no return, where no continuation can be made that doesn't harm the characters or concepts that have come before - but both of these beginnings are involved in actively destroying the point of the previous films. Even if they were brilliant from that moment onwards (and they're not), they would still have failed because they act as a slap in the face to everything in the story that's happened before. This is perhaps why I have a grudging affection for both movies, because they have an tremendous amount of balls to turn to the audience and raise both middle fingers.
This sense of bravado stems from very similar attitudes of both directors towards their source material. Boorman turned down the first Exorcist because he hated what the story did to a little girl - and intentionally created a sequel that was "about good, not evil". Fincher consciously wanted to drag Alien 3 as far away from Aliens as possible - back to the lean, cruel, stripped-back horror of the original. But both in doing so bypassed what had elevated the material with audiences and kept it moving forwards. I'm no huge fan of Aliens, either - but I think it's an incredible sequel (even if it changes not only the tone and genre of the series, but completely changes the character of Ripley from the first film). As much as I love Alien, I can't imagine an Alien 2 treated like, say, Jaws 2 - a re-hash of the first film, trying to go after the same scares, the same revelations, with a second-hand aping of the first director's famous style. In fact, I can imagine that film, because that is pretty much Alien 3.
I still can't help liking both movies. We could spend another ten paragraphs eviscerating the films, but instead I think there's only one other aspect you really need to cover. The seed of all the problems with both these films isn't that they failed to meet their audiences' expectations: it's that from the beginning, they were not resolved enough to not meet their audiences' expectations and take their own paths. They still get bogged down in exactly the same exorcism stuff and (almost exactly) the same aliens as in the previous movies. I'm not saying it's in the realms of possibility to let a comedy sequel of Alien slip through production at Fox, but if you're turning a horror movie whose unique feature is the subversion of the supernatural into a technological and biological form (the Alien, which shorned of these trappings is just another spooky killer ghost), and turn it into a metaphysical psychodrama in which this monster becomes a devil and figure of temptation - essentially turning the whole series into a religious allegory - then you've got to go all the way. If you really want to make an Exorcist sequel about goodness, you've got to cut out all that spooky bullshit.
But the thing that inspires me personally about disasterpieces is that they inspire me to think of better ways of approaching the subject matter than plain, crappy sequels that simply make you say, "They should never have made another Die Hard film".
So after the jump, I'm going to put some thoughts together about how we might construct - from a purely conceptual level - more successful jumping points to these two troubling films than where Alien 3 and Exorcist II: The Heretic started off.
In the meantime, does anyone else have a favourite disasterpiece of their own?
But then I was troubled by a couple of films that you couldn't describe as 'mess-terpieces'. These were films I'd seen that weren't simply a critical disaster and poison for those who made them - but so notoriously flawed that only someone who can hold perverse affection for the unloved (like me) would even think about talking about them. I'm talking about what I'm going to call disasterpieces - films whose execution from start to end are so astonishing (often astonishingly bad) that they provoke admiration as well as hurt and bafflement.
To define disasterpiece, I'm going to use two films - both highly anticipated - both horror films from world-class directors. John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic, and David Fincher's Alien 3. These films for some reason bare an uncanny resemblance to one another - and not just because they're both follow-ups to perhaps the two greatest horror movies of the 1970's.
They're similar to one another in that they stay with you after you've watched them - just like really good films do. To begin with, you think it's only because they're such a disturbing waste of talent. But there are scenes in both films that are quite haunting - often in a strange and intangible way - the way a Kubrick scene can haunt you. It doesn't make sense in a logical sense, but certain scenes muddle around in your limbic brain: an experience that is absolutely absurd and yet absurdly cinematic. The image of a shaven-headed Ripley confronted by the salivating Alien in a close-up is probably the single-most iconic image within the entire Alien series. The first Exorcist II scene showing the terrified Kenyan villagers fighting a plague of locusts within a dream is genuinely startling.
I think these movies have a weird appeal because a lot of the wrong choices made in them, coupled with startling if unintelligible imagery, gives you a sense of what a big-budget hollywood film directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky or Louis Bunel would look like - even if we only get this sense for ten percent of the movie. They also stay with me because they raise interesting questions about the nature of sequels and the our ability to transform and grow ideas. It's almost impossible to imagine either of the films as a dramatically successful movie - nearly all because of the underlying concepts behind them.
To start with, both Alien 3 and Exorcist II seem to have been made without understanding what made the previous films effective. In the first forty minutes of Alien, you don't see any aliens. Ditto Aliens. In The Exorcist, the change in Reagan is slow and steady, and the whole movie is designed around slowly persuading you that demonic possession is actually possible. These films were about the worlds the characters lived in before they were about the monsters that terrified that well-established world.
This is partly a problem with sequels. People who went to see Alien 3 wanted to see aliens. What's more, they knew more or less everything about the aliens. What's wrong with cutting to the chase? Similarly, people who went to see Exorcist II: The Heretic clearly were paying to see exorcisms. Maybe these audiences also forgot that their favourite parts of the previous movies was slowly being persuaded that these horrifying things that don't actually exist are real. That's certainly the case with the film-makers, who seem to have completely forgotten this: what do you see in the opening shots of Alien 3, and in the first scene of Exorcist II?
You see a face-hugger bleeding acid, and a girl possessed by the devil.
In doing this, both films not only create a world with the story's extraordinary selling point - an alien, a possessed girl - and render it completely mundane. What they do with these antagonists is even worse - acting as a giant slap in the face to the audience in relation to their expectations to the previous movies. How so?
You know how you felt good at the end of Aliens because Ripley saved Newt and killed the Alien Queen? According to Alien 3, you were a moron to feel catharsis at the end of that movie, because right after the credits stopped, a face-hugger shat an egg down the main character's throat, it sent the ship into a spiraling crash and then all the others died. BOOM! Welcome to the movie.
Remember how The Exorcist totally shattered your nerves by showing you a young girl transformed and tortured by the devil over two long hours, finally being released by the brave acts of two magnificent priests who sacrifice their lives to exorcise her? According to first act of the Exorcist II they shouldn't have wasted their time, and neither should you. The devil's still inside Reagan. So the movie is more or less telling you that the last one is a complete waste of fucking time.
I don't know if this is simply a problem of sequels reaching their terminal arcs - their story places of no return, where no continuation can be made that doesn't harm the characters or concepts that have come before - but both of these beginnings are involved in actively destroying the point of the previous films. Even if they were brilliant from that moment onwards (and they're not), they would still have failed because they act as a slap in the face to everything in the story that's happened before. This is perhaps why I have a grudging affection for both movies, because they have an tremendous amount of balls to turn to the audience and raise both middle fingers.
This sense of bravado stems from very similar attitudes of both directors towards their source material. Boorman turned down the first Exorcist because he hated what the story did to a little girl - and intentionally created a sequel that was "about good, not evil". Fincher consciously wanted to drag Alien 3 as far away from Aliens as possible - back to the lean, cruel, stripped-back horror of the original. But both in doing so bypassed what had elevated the material with audiences and kept it moving forwards. I'm no huge fan of Aliens, either - but I think it's an incredible sequel (even if it changes not only the tone and genre of the series, but completely changes the character of Ripley from the first film). As much as I love Alien, I can't imagine an Alien 2 treated like, say, Jaws 2 - a re-hash of the first film, trying to go after the same scares, the same revelations, with a second-hand aping of the first director's famous style. In fact, I can imagine that film, because that is pretty much Alien 3.
I still can't help liking both movies. We could spend another ten paragraphs eviscerating the films, but instead I think there's only one other aspect you really need to cover. The seed of all the problems with both these films isn't that they failed to meet their audiences' expectations: it's that from the beginning, they were not resolved enough to not meet their audiences' expectations and take their own paths. They still get bogged down in exactly the same exorcism stuff and (almost exactly) the same aliens as in the previous movies. I'm not saying it's in the realms of possibility to let a comedy sequel of Alien slip through production at Fox, but if you're turning a horror movie whose unique feature is the subversion of the supernatural into a technological and biological form (the Alien, which shorned of these trappings is just another spooky killer ghost), and turn it into a metaphysical psychodrama in which this monster becomes a devil and figure of temptation - essentially turning the whole series into a religious allegory - then you've got to go all the way. If you really want to make an Exorcist sequel about goodness, you've got to cut out all that spooky bullshit.
But the thing that inspires me personally about disasterpieces is that they inspire me to think of better ways of approaching the subject matter than plain, crappy sequels that simply make you say, "They should never have made another Die Hard film".
So after the jump, I'm going to put some thoughts together about how we might construct - from a purely conceptual level - more successful jumping points to these two troubling films than where Alien 3 and Exorcist II: The Heretic started off.
In the meantime, does anyone else have a favourite disasterpiece of their own?
Wednesday 23 February 2011
Pageantry vs Drama
So I was talking (arguing) with my friend Will yesterday about Sam Mendes's Road to Perdition.
Will said that the film was, in his opinion, the greatest crime movie since The Godfather Part II. I was telling him that he was full of shit. We had a good time.
Anyway, something that came out of our discussion (which we recorded for a future podcast) was my feeling that the problem with Road to Perdition - and the main problem with a lot of pretty good films like it (think about epic films set in the past, say, directed by Ridley Scott) is that no matter how pristinely they might have been put together, they're not dramas. They're pageants.
Imagine being a Victorian kid standing in a crowd as gaudily dressed actors walk by at the head of a parade. You see Saint George. You see a Princess. You see a Dragon. You would be able to go home at this point if you were interested in the story, because you already know exactly how it's going to end. You stay, not for the tale, but the spectacle. And that's how it is in these films, too.
There's an inevitability to the structure and characterisation of a pageant film. You know the good guys and the bad guys instantly. You're not cast adrift in a world where you have no idea what's going to happen next - there are rarely any surprises. You suspect not only how the film is going to end, but every arc and major plot point once the main characters have been established. While our main character may fight and bleed, there's a depressing inevitability to his winning of gun-fights or sword battles. No matter how stylish, or how high the stakes seem to be, conflict is never really dramatic. And people do not act like freezing rain is splashing down their faces in the night, because they're not real characters, they don't feel it. They act and react in cinematic ways that look great rather than belong in any kind of real, believable world. Because in a pageant, the lighting, effects, scoring - all the patina of cinematic credibility - come to the foreground because there's almost nothing behind them.
What was interesting was that when I asked Will who the most interesting characters in Road to Perdition, he replied instantly with exactly the same answer as me: Daniel Craig ("Connor"), and Jude Law ("Maguire").
Not Tom Hanks. Not Paul frickin' Newman, a man with more magnetism than the other three combined. Why is it that Craig and Law - who are meant to be most loathsome characters in the film - who torment and ruin the main characters and destroy their lives - the very people we should be rooting against the most - why are these the characters we most look forwards to seeing?
This question got me thinking about other films that were more pageant than drama. In almost every "good" film that succumbed to this trend, there's an outstanding character who lifts the whole production, and he's almost always the one you're meant to be rooting against.
Think about the most memorable character from Gladiator. You could ask 100 people, and 99 of them would have the same answer. Joachim Phoenix ("Commodius") is more interesting than all of those sword-fights in the Colosseum combined. Ten years on, he's the only thing that makes the movie okay to rewatch. The only startling image from the whole long, boring film is Commodius, lying on top of his own sister, experiencing some kind of unexplainable sexual epiphany. Why on earth is this incestuous rapist more appealing than a good-hearted general who kicks ass to avenge his family?
Before we go into that, let's take a third example. Saving Private Ryan. This film is a more difficult kettle of fish, because the genre-defining beginning and the weird, childish end kick the first act and conclusion out of the classic pageant form. Nevertheless, if you take the film through my pageant criteria, it fits - you instantly know who the good guys and the bad guys are (the Nazis, right?) - you know they're going to get picked off like flies trying to save one soldier - you know that no conflict will stop them from doing this - and you know it's going to take a long-ass time before they get there. It's much more of an ensemble piece than the other films which again makes pulling one character out more difficult. But there's one character I guarantee you'll remember when you start to think about it...
...That fucking German soldier, Joerg Stadler ("Steamboat Willie"). I can't remember him being in more than three scenes. You want to see more of this guy than Tom Hanks. And he's a fucking Nazi.
So why? Why these despicable characters hijacking the high ground of these stories? The answer is simple, really. They're the only dramatic characters in a pageant. As such, they're the only characters in the film who aren't totally predictable. They're the only ones who don't conform to the oppressively formal arcs of the story.
When Steamboat Willie escapes with his life we think - "What the fuck is that guy going to do next?" The same when we see Jude Law get shot in the eye and left for dead in a swanky bridal suite. And the worst thing about end duel in Gladiator is that we know Commodius is going to have to die. We don't just like these reprehensible characters because they exceed our expectations of what subsidiary characters can do in a genre. We actually start to sympathise with these characters, because we see how no-one in their worlds feels their pain. And they don't put up with their pain, either - they have drive and enterprise - I mean, Jude Law really tries to kill Tom Hanks while all the other antagonists just wait around, Commodius wants to be emperor so much he kills his own father, and Steamboat Willie, he digs his own grave like a motherfucker and with virtually no English persuades a bunch of determined executioners to spare him. These characters exhibit a dynamism and an unwillingness to concede to what fate has set out for them in a world otherwise completely controlled by preordained destinies.
In fact, these characters have a deeply-ingrained desire, then actively try to pursue that desire throughout every scene of the film they're in. In other words, they exhibit all the traits of a classic protagonist, when the three films' main characters are passive with no desires that don't come from circumstance.
And doesn't this seem to you to like swapping the main character and subsidiary characters around?
Anyway, I'd be interested if anyone else has examples of Pageant films and characters that make them worth watching by refusing to conform to the rest of the film.
Will said that the film was, in his opinion, the greatest crime movie since The Godfather Part II. I was telling him that he was full of shit. We had a good time.
Anyway, something that came out of our discussion (which we recorded for a future podcast) was my feeling that the problem with Road to Perdition - and the main problem with a lot of pretty good films like it (think about epic films set in the past, say, directed by Ridley Scott) is that no matter how pristinely they might have been put together, they're not dramas. They're pageants.
Imagine being a Victorian kid standing in a crowd as gaudily dressed actors walk by at the head of a parade. You see Saint George. You see a Princess. You see a Dragon. You would be able to go home at this point if you were interested in the story, because you already know exactly how it's going to end. You stay, not for the tale, but the spectacle. And that's how it is in these films, too.
There's an inevitability to the structure and characterisation of a pageant film. You know the good guys and the bad guys instantly. You're not cast adrift in a world where you have no idea what's going to happen next - there are rarely any surprises. You suspect not only how the film is going to end, but every arc and major plot point once the main characters have been established. While our main character may fight and bleed, there's a depressing inevitability to his winning of gun-fights or sword battles. No matter how stylish, or how high the stakes seem to be, conflict is never really dramatic. And people do not act like freezing rain is splashing down their faces in the night, because they're not real characters, they don't feel it. They act and react in cinematic ways that look great rather than belong in any kind of real, believable world. Because in a pageant, the lighting, effects, scoring - all the patina of cinematic credibility - come to the foreground because there's almost nothing behind them.
What was interesting was that when I asked Will who the most interesting characters in Road to Perdition, he replied instantly with exactly the same answer as me: Daniel Craig ("Connor"), and Jude Law ("Maguire").
Not Tom Hanks. Not Paul frickin' Newman, a man with more magnetism than the other three combined. Why is it that Craig and Law - who are meant to be most loathsome characters in the film - who torment and ruin the main characters and destroy their lives - the very people we should be rooting against the most - why are these the characters we most look forwards to seeing?
This question got me thinking about other films that were more pageant than drama. In almost every "good" film that succumbed to this trend, there's an outstanding character who lifts the whole production, and he's almost always the one you're meant to be rooting against.
Think about the most memorable character from Gladiator. You could ask 100 people, and 99 of them would have the same answer. Joachim Phoenix ("Commodius") is more interesting than all of those sword-fights in the Colosseum combined. Ten years on, he's the only thing that makes the movie okay to rewatch. The only startling image from the whole long, boring film is Commodius, lying on top of his own sister, experiencing some kind of unexplainable sexual epiphany. Why on earth is this incestuous rapist more appealing than a good-hearted general who kicks ass to avenge his family?
Before we go into that, let's take a third example. Saving Private Ryan. This film is a more difficult kettle of fish, because the genre-defining beginning and the weird, childish end kick the first act and conclusion out of the classic pageant form. Nevertheless, if you take the film through my pageant criteria, it fits - you instantly know who the good guys and the bad guys are (the Nazis, right?) - you know they're going to get picked off like flies trying to save one soldier - you know that no conflict will stop them from doing this - and you know it's going to take a long-ass time before they get there. It's much more of an ensemble piece than the other films which again makes pulling one character out more difficult. But there's one character I guarantee you'll remember when you start to think about it...
...That fucking German soldier, Joerg Stadler ("Steamboat Willie"). I can't remember him being in more than three scenes. You want to see more of this guy than Tom Hanks. And he's a fucking Nazi.
So why? Why these despicable characters hijacking the high ground of these stories? The answer is simple, really. They're the only dramatic characters in a pageant. As such, they're the only characters in the film who aren't totally predictable. They're the only ones who don't conform to the oppressively formal arcs of the story.
When Steamboat Willie escapes with his life we think - "What the fuck is that guy going to do next?" The same when we see Jude Law get shot in the eye and left for dead in a swanky bridal suite. And the worst thing about end duel in Gladiator is that we know Commodius is going to have to die. We don't just like these reprehensible characters because they exceed our expectations of what subsidiary characters can do in a genre. We actually start to sympathise with these characters, because we see how no-one in their worlds feels their pain. And they don't put up with their pain, either - they have drive and enterprise - I mean, Jude Law really tries to kill Tom Hanks while all the other antagonists just wait around, Commodius wants to be emperor so much he kills his own father, and Steamboat Willie, he digs his own grave like a motherfucker and with virtually no English persuades a bunch of determined executioners to spare him. These characters exhibit a dynamism and an unwillingness to concede to what fate has set out for them in a world otherwise completely controlled by preordained destinies.
In fact, these characters have a deeply-ingrained desire, then actively try to pursue that desire throughout every scene of the film they're in. In other words, they exhibit all the traits of a classic protagonist, when the three films' main characters are passive with no desires that don't come from circumstance.
And doesn't this seem to you to like swapping the main character and subsidiary characters around?
Anyway, I'd be interested if anyone else has examples of Pageant films and characters that make them worth watching by refusing to conform to the rest of the film.
Tuesday 22 February 2011
Welcome
Welcome to Script Suicide. This is a blog written for people like me.
What do I mean by people like me? I mean people who love writing scripts, but hate trying to squeeze every fucking story idea into a thriller/comedy that might appeal to teenage boys. I mean people who try to write spec TV samples and end up writing 200 page epics set in Ancient Carthage instead. I mean people who've never had a real credit, but can't imagine writing a giant, $200 million script that they couldn't also direct. I mean people who spend more time trying to hone their writing skills than their pitching and networking skills. And I mean people who spend years writing scripts better than the ones they read, but feel like no-one will ever read it.
If you're one of those people - half a head-in-the-clouds dreamer, and half a stick-in-the-mud writer, then this might be the place to share a few laughs, a few commiserations, and perhaps share a little inspiration.
And if you're not one of those people, I wish you all the success in the real world - a place that seems to be the equivalent of a Swiss euthanasia clinic for creative hopes and dreams.
After the bounce I'll be talking about some recent things I've been thinking about.
What do I mean by people like me? I mean people who love writing scripts, but hate trying to squeeze every fucking story idea into a thriller/comedy that might appeal to teenage boys. I mean people who try to write spec TV samples and end up writing 200 page epics set in Ancient Carthage instead. I mean people who've never had a real credit, but can't imagine writing a giant, $200 million script that they couldn't also direct. I mean people who spend more time trying to hone their writing skills than their pitching and networking skills. And I mean people who spend years writing scripts better than the ones they read, but feel like no-one will ever read it.
If you're one of those people - half a head-in-the-clouds dreamer, and half a stick-in-the-mud writer, then this might be the place to share a few laughs, a few commiserations, and perhaps share a little inspiration.
And if you're not one of those people, I wish you all the success in the real world - a place that seems to be the equivalent of a Swiss euthanasia clinic for creative hopes and dreams.
After the bounce I'll be talking about some recent things I've been thinking about.
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