I have wanted to talk about Ready Player One for a while, but I wanted the, for lack of a better word, “hype” to die down first so that there could be an attempt at a reasonable discussion. But there’s one more thing that I feel I should do before getting into the themes and problems with the film, and that’s to essentially deconstruct why it’s not actually all that special.
So there’s this movie, which is ostensibly about a corporation that is trying to take over a place in order to use it for commercial purposes. Doing so would disenfranchise a not insignificant portion of a marginalized population. But that is more or less background noise until the final fight– the main story is a mystery, where the main character searches for clues with the help of allies in order to solve it. Part of the gimmick of the film is the huge amount of references to classic media.
So there’s this movie, which is about a group of five kids that are promised a prize unlike any other. A mysterious man guides them through a place of wonder and horror and fantasy. Our main character is a boy who is rather unremarkable in most respects, but his intuition and understanding of what makes the place wonderful is why the mysterious man thinks he is worthy of receiving the ultimate prize. The film also condemns those who lie, cheat, and steal to get ahead in life.
SPOILER WARNING: I will do my best to avoid major spoilers, but as with any review, it’s a bit buyer beware. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t get angry with me if you think I’ve spoiled something.
So, I definitely wanted to talk about Infinity War this weekend, and I was wondering what I might talk about outside of a straight review or a breakdown of my reaction to it, but I was given a great assist from The New Yorker, of all places.
In "Avengers: Infinity War," characters aren’t introduced; they just show up, and their behavior is entirely defined by the template set for them in other movies. https://t.co/meiJo0iQ4g
And yes, technically he’s right, but reading through the article it’s clear that all of these things that he’s saying that are technically true (none of the characters have proper introductions, it feels like the season finale of a TV show, the ending compels the viewer to put on the next part) are, I think, supposed to be interpreted as negative. But these criticisms are rather dismissive to all the people, films, and characters that allowed this movie to be made, like Homer, The Ten Commandments, and Buck Rodgers.
Those things do fit together in this context, of course.
Last time I wrote about character archetypes, I looked at specific archetypes pertaining to heroes and villains– the most common characters in fiction. This week we’ll be stepping away from that a bit, though still talking about major and plot-important characters. Because as important as your main protagonistic force and your main antagonistic force are, it’s often necessary to populate the story around those two forces. More often than not, however, these characters often come off as more functional characters than fully rounded characters.
There will be times when you have to have a functional character. Sometimes you need someone to give out exposition or technobabble and there’s not enough time to give them a personality. However, the closer the character is to your protagonist, the more rounded the character should be. Horatio has motivations and fully realized relationships, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, not so much. At least, until they do. A comic relief character can work very well, but if they’re the best friend of the main character and show up in several scenes, they’re going to seem rather one note.
These character archetypes can often come off as one note, as it is either particularly easy to write them as a purely functional character, or it is particularly difficult to properly write them. As you’re thinking about these archetypes, think about how they relate to your protagonist and antagonist, and what might make their relationships to the other characters more complex and realistic.
F for Fake and Ratatouille are kind of the same movie.
I mean, no, they’re not exactly the same. But they’re both mostly about someone taking credit for another person’s art, with strong critiques of the commercial business of art and a subplot deconstructing the relationship that art critics and other art experts have with artists and their creations. They’re even both directed by highly respected auteurs trying to salvage a project that the original director couldn’t complete. It’s just that one of those auteurs is Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles) and the other is Orson Welles (Citizen freaking Kane). The conclusions that both of the films come to are disparate, but contradictory.
First, a bit of plot summary. Ratatouille is a film about a rat that manages to become the head chef at a Parisian restaurant that somehow used to have 5 stars despite the Michelin rating system only going up to three stars. He achieves this by pulling the hair of his hapless human companion, which controls the human like a marionette. It’s my favorite PIXAR film of all time. F for Fake is an Orson Welles mostly-non-fiction film that is about two of the most notorious fakers of the 20th century. The first is Elmyr de Horay, an art forger that specialized in the post-impressionists, particularly Picasso and Modigliani. The second, and more famous of the two, is Elmyr’s biographer Clifford Irving, who also wrote a best-selling, but fake, autobiography of an even more famous man– a business tycoon by the name of Howard Hughes.
The things to unpack in these films are mostly the questions that they raise about the nature of art and art criticism. Kyle Kallgren’s review of F for Fake begins with the question “Is there such a thing as fake art?” I would posit that both films say the answer is “no”, but for different reasons.
From character archetypes last week to character analysis this week. One of the favorite pastimes of Harry Potter fans (other than complaining about Harry Potter stuff) is sorting characters who are not in Harry Potter into the four Hogwarts houses: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. There are a few schools of thought as to how to go about this. The simplest is the way that it appears to happen in the books — heroes in Gryffindor, villains in Slytherin, smart people in Ravenclaw, everyone else in Hufflepuff. This, to many, is quite reductive and does not fully encapsulate the complexities of what the houses have come to represent. However, this is also how the houses are seen within the general public due to the nature of how the books were written. Sorting characters is as much literary analysis and, specifically, character analysis, as much as it is kinda fun.
Building a character is an incredibly difficult part of any writing experience, even if you are just rolling some dice to get some stats. In any narrative work, having believable characters can make or break a production. Even in Science-Fiction and Fantasy, where, by all accounts, your entire cast could be non-human, if they don’t act and behave in recognizably human ways, that puts off an audience. Now, that could be your intention, and we’ll get into that a bit today, but there should be at least one character that your audience should be able to relate to and recognize their own experiences in.
But your characters also need to serve a function. From a strictly Doylist view, all characters are just people that plot happens to. Their function within the story can be categorized, and this is where archetypes come in. A character archetype is simply a category of character which describes the role that the character plays within the story. And with any category there are sub-categories and exceptions, but as with any type of categories, these are broad strokes. There is also the mistake that some writers make in that they start with the archetype and then never go anywhere with it. An archetype isn’t a character, it’s simply their function within the story. You have to give your character a personality and motivation and agency beyond their archetype to make them interesting.
So why use archetypes? Well, because it’s a pattern that you can follow. It’s a way to build your story and your character before you have a clear idea as to what your story and your character is. I mean, you probably have a good guy and a bad guy, they have a fight, Triangle wins. Triangle man.
(Also this is part one because there are far more archetypes than I’m going to list here, but here are a few to start out with.)
“Superman is dead. Superman remains dead.
And we have killed him.” —Kyle Kallgren
There’s a reason that Wonder Woman is the best film out of the whole of the DCEU. Wonder Woman wasn’t afraid to admit that their main character was a god.
The heroes of the DC Comics company have always been more god-like than their Marvel counterparts. From the Teen Titans, to the New Gods, to the Amazons, gods and god-like imagery have permeated the universe. Even Batman, the lone Übermensch of DC’s trinity, is still a keystone to the entire DC universe, which is pretty god-like, in my opinion.
But we’re not here to talk about the princess or the bat. We’re here to talk about him.
Character motivation is possibly the most important aspect of narrative writing. Without character motivation, there’s no plot. And while narrative art without plot does exist (just ask Dziga Vertov or Godfrey Reggio) most books, films, tv shows, stage productions, and other things that we tend to associate with the art of language (as opposed to visual or musical art) has some kind of plot. And the most basic of these plots? Character wants something, has to overcome obstacles to get it, and either succeeds or fails. Luke Skywalker wants an adventure, he leaves the planet, blows up a Death Star, and becomes a hero. Indiana Jones wants to find the Ark of the Covenant, he contacts an old girlfriend, flies to Egypt, and the Nazi’s faces melt. Prince Hamlet wants to avenge his father’s murder, he grapples with his mental illness, distances himself from his social circle, and then kills King Claudius, but dies in the process.
Character motivations can change over the course of a story, usually as a “be careful what you wish for” kind of thing. You also can have unmotivated characters that are notable in their lack of motivation. But most plot consists of the motivation of the protagonist coming directly into conflict with the motivation of the antagonist, or the motivation of society, or the motivation of the universe itself sometimes. Figuring out your protagonist’s motivation is entangled in the plot and conflict of the story.
I’m going to look at a few different stories with varying complexity in terms of motivations and how they work, because unlike my other writing advice, figuring out your own character’s motivation is individual to your character and story. You can list a million different stories that have a million different characters with a million different motivations. I’m looking at these stories, but there are plenty more examples to look at if you’re having trouble.
OR Why The Princess Bride is one of the most faithful adaptations while also supposedly removing the entire conceit of the source material.
Because, well, it is.
The Princess Bride film is one of the most successful and best known of all those fantasy films from the 80’s that Hollywood was releasing to try and capitalize on Star Wars. It’s on several people’s best films and favorite films lists (including mine!) and for good reason, it is an excellent film. I mean come on, it’s got fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles– it’s got everything. It’s also adapted from a book, written by William Goldman, who also wrote the screenplay. It’s to the point that in the introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition of the book, Goldman remarks “If you’re reading this, dollars to donuts you’ve seen the movie.” My copy is actually a very nice hardback that contains both the 25th anniversary introduction and the 30th, along with the original one that sets up the whole premise of the book.
Does it help that the author wrote the screenplay? Certainly, and Goldman certainly had experience with adapting– he also wrote the screenplay for his own Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and would later adapt Stephen King’s Misery which was considered unadaptable and is also the only King adaptation with an Oscar (Best Actress Kathy Bates).
But ultimately what works about the book was never going to work on film, and what works about the film is projected right onto the page. The biggest problem about a beloved adaptation of a book is that it can supplant the original images of the text, but given how close the text of The Princess Bride is to the film, it’s less of a concern than for most others. It really is that good an adaptation.
Of course, many would consider such a thing, well, inconceivable.
When it comes to Romance and Romantic poetry, I’m a bit of an Aestheticist. And so were they for that matter; Percy Shelley and John Keats were basically proto-Aestheticists, the Gothic revival was mostly for the aesthetic, and then of course there’s George “the template for countless Sad Vampire Protagonists” Gordon, Lord Byron who–
Oh, you’re looking for romance. Well, they aren’t mutually exclusive.
Little-“r” romance and capital-“R” Romance don’t really have much to do with each other at first glance, but they aren’t incompatible. The Romantics– and by that I mean the British Romantics, I know there were Romantic periods in other countries’ literary canons but that’s for another day– put great importance in big, complicated emotions like horror and awe and wonder. Poems like “Tintern Abbey” and “Ode to the West Wind” are typical of the reverence and contemplation upon the natural world that was emblematic of the era. Many of the Romantics were also Classicists, influenced by the cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome. …Mostly by way of Ovid, but The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is suitably Homeric, and Prometheus Unbound was based on plays by Aeschylus. There was also a touch of mysticism and personal mythology, particularly with William Blake. We’re not going into Blake. This time.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the Romantics, was the writer who defined poetry as “the best words in their best order”. John Keating, as portrayed by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, was the one who said that poetry was invented to woo women. As long as there is literature, in whatever form it decides to take (the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to philosophers, historians, a songwriter, and Winston Churchill), there will be people writing love poetry, no matter what the era is. We can use these poems to examine Romantisism through a romantic lens and see how it compares to the more traditional love poetry that people are used to, because as much as I love Shakespeare, he does not hold the monopoly on love poetry. To quote a contemporary poet, “Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs”.
After all, what’s more Romantic than tying the carcass of a dead bird around your neck to symbolize the burden of your greatest mistake while you watch all your friends die?More →
06/05/2018
Ready Player One Is the Epitome of Curative Fandom
valeriemclean1919 Ernest Cline, fandom, intertextuality, Movies, Ready Player One, The Nerd Writer, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Writing About Film, About Writing 0 Comments
I have wanted to talk about Ready Player One for a while, but I wanted the, for lack of a better word, “hype” to die down first so that there could be an attempt at a reasonable discussion. But there’s one more thing that I feel I should do before getting into the themes and problems with the film, and that’s to essentially deconstruct why it’s not actually all that special.
So there’s this movie, which is ostensibly about a corporation that is trying to take over a place in order to use it for commercial purposes. Doing so would disenfranchise a not insignificant portion of a marginalized population. But that is more or less background noise until the final fight– the main story is a mystery, where the main character searches for clues with the help of allies in order to solve it. Part of the gimmick of the film is the huge amount of references to classic media.
So there’s this movie, which is about a group of five kids that are promised a prize unlike any other. A mysterious man guides them through a place of wonder and horror and fantasy. Our main character is a boy who is rather unremarkable in most respects, but his intuition and understanding of what makes the place wonderful is why the mysterious man thinks he is worthy of receiving the ultimate prize. The film also condemns those who lie, cheat, and steal to get ahead in life.
So there’s this movie….
More →