Writing: A three-second mistake that ruined an entire movie · 2:01pm Jun 3rd, 2014
If you don’t understand what makes something a story, it’s possible to make a tiny change that makes it not be a story anymore. The worst example of this I've seen was a movie that was ruined by its last three seconds.
I don’t recall its name. It was about a man who fell for a selfish, manipulative woman. She committed a robbery/murder, collected the money, framed him for it, and left, leaving him tied up for the police.
That would be a tragic story if it were the man’s story. It can't be the woman's story, because she isn't a sympathetic character, and because there is no question.
If she were a sympathetic character, we could worry whether she would succeed, but she is not.
If it were the man's tragedy, you could ask what he might have done differently. If it were her tragedy — say she felt bad about doing it, or felt forced to do it, or was led almost inevitably to do it by the circumstances of her birth — you could ask whether those forces that led her to do it could be defeated. If she hadn't made any money off it, you could ask why she did it.
But presented as the story of a woman who sets out to commit murder and burglary, and frame an innocent man for it by manipulating him emotionally, and gets away with it, there is no sympathy and no questions, and it is not a story.
The movie ran up to that point by playing on our sympathies for the man. I think. But by the simple mistake of following the woman as she walked away in the ending scene, rather than keeping the camera on the house where the man was tied up as she walked off-screen, they turned the final scene to her POV, turned the movie into her story, and threw everything I had felt up until that point out the window. Now it’s a movie about a protagonist who learned how to get what she wanted by murder and manipulation.
(BTW, this is one reason writers sometimes should write camera directions into their scripts.)
ADDED: We've gone thru this bit about definitions before. In my blogs, I use the word "story" to mean something more specific than "narrative". I believe there's some grammar or set of patterns that stories follow, and that things that don't follow those patterns don't get written down in books and called stories, except when someone makes a mistake. I believe the grammar and patterns have some parts that are different for different people and different cultures, but also that at some level of abstraction they are the same across most of human history. I use the word "story" to refer to narratives that follow these patterns.
If you want to use the word "story" differently, write your own blog. It won't help the discussion here to say that "story" means any sequence of events. All that does is define away the problem.
By "story" I don't mean the same as "good story". We use "good" and "bad" too often to describe how well or poorly a story is executed. I want to figure out what kind of narratives can't be made good stories no matter how much you polish them, and what kind of narratives are "stories" enough that you should bother polishing them.
The first stage of revision of a narrative is not polishing it, but figuring out how to turn it into a story. I push the characters and events around in my mind, and suddenly something clicks and I realize, Now that's a story. That's a thing that happens, a threshold that I cross, sometimes before even writing a word, and it's the most important part of the whole process, and the most mysterious.
Well, it's still a story. Just a really unpleasant and nasty one, about a really vicious Karma Houdini.
2170870 It's a narrative, but not a story. "Story" means more than just one thing after another. A story means there's a structure that makes it the kind of things humans would like to tell each other.
2170884
Point taken.
I don't understand how you feel that is not a story.
It might be a terrible story. It might be a terribly constructed story. It might be a story that slaps the viewer in the face with an ending that just completely squanders the viewer's investment of time, money, and interest and has no true point other than it's own events. But the depiction of those events is still a story.
I had similar experiences with 2 movies. One was about a man having a midlife crisis who meets a woman he falls in love with. During the film there are several flashbacks to his troubled childhood, mostly focusing on a girl his age who sadistically torments him by manipulating him into situations to get him in trouble where she is seen as the victim even if he was only doing as she asked, such as choking her. She has no apparent reason for doing this at all. She just saw the protagonist and decided to make him suffer. She is constantly being followed around by her shy younger sister who tries to discourage her antics. At the end, in the present, after he fends off a burglar who was in his girlfriend's home, she professes her love and they consumate their relationship. When he wakes up he wakes up alone with no sign of her... there might be a note or something... I don't remember... but anyway, the parting shot is of his lover riding away in a car being driven by his grown-up tormentor, showing that his girlfriend was her once-shy sister and that entire romance, including the burglar, was set up by this sadistic woman to punish him further by giving him love and then stripping him of it. The end.
Then there was the movie Fallen where the protagonist narrates at the beginning that this is a story about how he nearly died. The protagonist is a cop who investigates a series of murders which are revealed to be caused by a demon possessing humans. Long story short, he kills the current host and uses poison and allows himself to be possessed so that he will too die, and with no one else around for miles, the spirit will dispel without a host. At the end the demon possesses a cat and the narrator, still using the protagonist's voice, is revealed as having been the demon telling us about the time that he was nearly killed.
"Mary Sue came to Wall-Mart and bought a can of beans which she then used to make burritos at home for her and her husband Gary-Stu. Then they had sex. The end."
That is technically a story. It is also a piece of shit. But still a story.
I have criticized many fics for being badly written, having bad premises or plots, and having content and storylines that make them completely antithetical to their source material... but no matter how disgusted, disdainfull, or dismissive I am of a fic, technically it is a story, regardless of how unbelievably unappealing it is.
2171013
I think what he means is that there's no arc of development. Nobody learns anything, nobody is given anything meaningful. A story should tell a story, not just present us with a series of inevitable events that simply happen because that's the only way it'll ever happen, and neither the characters or the audience learn something nor are they even halfway entertained. Life isn't like that, and neither are stories themselves. An actual story makes you feel like you've taken away something meaningful, whether that's positive or negative.
I guess we should differentiate between the dictionary definition of a story and the meaning of a story as people want it to be.
2171013 You're using the word differently than I am, and in a way that isn't useful to me. If you use "story" to mean any random string of events, then it means the same as "narrative", or even just "words". That's useless.
I am using the word "story" to describe narratives that have properties that make it possible for people to want to listen to them. I use that word because I want people to be aware that there ARE such properties, that there are rules and regularities, that it is possible to talk about something being a "good story": or a "bad story" or "not a story".
2171039
Yeah, it's like when Film Crit Hulk said that The Amazing Spider-Man had no story because Peter Parker never learned anything from it. It even gets undone with one brief bit of writing like your example, with Peter's line about the best promises being ones you can't keep.
Not every movie needs to be a story (look at Funny Games - the whole point is that you expect a story, and don't get one), but I get what you're saying. I do think that the concept of "story" might be applied a little more loosely to films than to writing, but that's because I think films are inherently more emotional while writing is more cerebral.
2171165 I'd draw the distinction differently: a film may or may not be a story, and in an absolute sense its story-ness is disconnected from its good-ness. Similar to the way a book can be a story or not and this does not tell you whether it's a good book or not.
That is: a film can be a story and a bad film, or not a story and still be a good film. In the later example, it's a different kind of art. I haven't seen Funny Games, so I won't comment on it. I can think of some films that are basically moving pictures in a literal sense: they are the same (or at least very similar to) painting or illustration in their artistic attempt; Sleep comes to mind as a very pure example. Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (which is an hour of disconnected sketches recycled from the series) certainly fails Bad Horse's definition of story, but it still succeeds at its own artistic goal. The book examples might include poetry or even nonfiction.
There's certainly a lot to be said about the art of non-stories, but Bad Horse cares primarily about stories, so that's what he blogs about.
Napoleon Dynamite has been said to be pretty much a random events plot.
2171037
2171039
Well, while I consider the meaningfullness of a story to be almost completely subjective, I agree with the sentiment, if not the semantics.
Also midi-chlorians. Fuck 'em.
I don't see why this disqualifies this as a story at all. A protagonist who gets what they want by murder and manipulation is not only something which was, at some points in history, seen as acceptable, and not only is actually fairly common (from a certain point of view) in some genres, but (warning spoilers for movies made in the 1990s follow. Seriously, even seeing the titles of these movies is a huge spoiler, though the first one is a bit of It Was His Sled at this point)
Are you claiming that The Usual Suspects isn't a story? The protagonist is without a doubt Verbal Kint, even though the "good guys" are most definitely the FBI/Customs agents investigating, and he wins precisely via manipulation and murder; indeed, at the end, we aren't even sure how much of what he told us was real. And yet it is widely regarded as a very good movie.
Another example of this is the movie Fallen. Here, the movie starts off with Detective John Hobbes running through the woods. "I wanna tell you about the time I almost died..." Cut back to him watching the execution of a serial killer, who hisses to him in a strange, dark tongue and sings "Time is on my Side" as he is taken to the gas chamber. We then follow the point of view of SOMETHING leaving his body and going elsewhere.
The rest of the movie is consumed with John Hobbes finding out that the serial killer was possessed by a demon who can enter the bodies of others and control their actions; it can enter the body of a weak-willed man (or animal) at a touch. The demon is messing with John Hobbes, singing the song he sang before his execution, threatening him and those around him, driving him to the very edge, but it can't possess him directly just by touching him.
Eventually, though, at the end of the movie, John Hobbes tricks it - after killing the demon's host, the demon tells him that it can possess ANYONE at a range if its current host dies, but that it doesn't want to possess him just yet, because that wouldn't be as much fun as ruining his life further. He keeps making things worse and worse for Hobbes, framing him for murder, and eventually Hobbes seems to go flee to a cabin in the middle of nowhere. The demon decides that his fun is over, possesses a fellow cop, and follows him out there with the intention of offing himself in order to possess him and make him into a serial killer, ruining his name forever. But he fails; Hobbes prevents the demon from committing suicide, critically injuring his present body, then smokes cyanide laced cigarettes before killing its final host, leaving it to possess Hobbes' dying body out in the middle of the woods, where there is no one else around to possess.
We're back at the start of the movie, except now the meaning is reversed - it wasn't Hobbes who was talking at the start, it was the demon. "Oh, you forgot something, didn't you?"
"Back at the start, I said I was going to tell you about the time I almost died. *chuckles* Be seeing you." Indeed, we had even seen it - there was a cat in the cabin, and the cat scampers off after Hobbes' body collapses in the woods, as Sympathy for the Devil plays over the closing credits.
I thought it was a very interesting movie. Of course, it only has a 40% on Rotten Tomatoes, so clearly a lot of critics disagree with me, but I liked it, and I don't think that changing the ending so that Hobbes won would have made it any more of a story. And I liked the way that the start of the movie set up the ending. Did the ending ruin it as a story? It might have made the whole movie into a shaggy dog story of sorts... but it was still interesting, and I wouldn't say that it was written down by mistake.
2171408 Napoleon Dynamite has the distinction of being the movie that many recommendation systems make the largest predictive error on--it's the hardest movie to predict whether someone will like it.
It has a lot of events that individually seem random, but taken together, I think they're not. It's the story of how Napoleon Dynamite became awesome, sort of by accident, by doing things for other people, as contrasted with his uncle Rico.
2171756 The last scene of The Usual Suspects shows Soze get into a car, then it switches back to Kujan. We feel Kujan's horror on realizing what's happened, not Soze's smug satisfaction.
I dunno, you might really have something here. I was looking through the list of movies with endings where the bad guy wins, and it sounds like a lot of people really don't like them unless there is something else to it, some bit of hope, or that maybe we like the bad guy well enough that it is okay that they won.
Watchmen ends with the bad guy winning, but possibly saving the world in the process. But we're still also given the hope spot of several of the heroes surviving and the question of whether Ozymandias will actually get away with it. The ambiguity of the ending there is important.
And when I watch a lot of terrible horror movies, where the bad guy almost invariably wins, it is true that they are unsatisfying.
It feels to me that you are confusing the term "story" (for lack of a better word) with aesops. To me, a story is a story if it has characters doing something for something. That's it. From that point, a story can then be classified into a type and so forth. I may be misunderstanding you but I'm just having trouble with what you are saying.
Whether the characters grow or be good-sort or actually learns something from their efforts doesn't matter. It's all about the whole picture and what type of story were you reading/watching. It's about expectations and theme. I personally can't invalidate narratives such as the ones you've described as non-stories because you really have to be more specific.
I know you are using the term "story" for something grander than a narrative but god do I think... Let me try again to organize my thoughts.
In the movie that you written about above, you mentioned that you couldn't root for the woman who got away with her crimes in the end. But what if you weren't meant to? There are plenty of stories written through the ages to serve as warnings. That the characters were case examples as to what not to do in your life. That you should listen to the moral and be better because of it. That in the place of characters who did not known, you would know and be changed.
And again, it all kinda depends on the audience watching. This movie might have failed your expectations but for someone else... it was necessary.
I can't remember the name of the movie you're referring to, but contextually it's very similar to Body Heat.
In the end it didn't go anywhere for me. You can hate the female lead for being coldly manipulative and framing the male lead, and feel somewhat bad (maybe) for the male lead who murdered for her and took the fall for it, and you can mildly despise all of the people who helped her along the way to reach her goal in some way (usually illegal). But at the closing, there's nothing that can provide a connection to anything that could claim to be within normal human experience and offer some insight into what it means to be human. It just ends a slow-falling tragedy with an injustice.
You made me think about what it would take to change those final moments of the movie to turn it into something else. I'd appreciate the change now, by your definition of a story. It could have been made so much more clever and meaningful.
2171846
But the cop is not the protagonist in that movie, he's one of the antagonists. Admittedly, it's ending on a shot of the antagonist defeated, while you perceive the movie you're complaining about as ending with the antagonist triumphant.
But with this movie that upset you isn't it possible the people who made the movie disagree with you on who the protagonist is?
Villain protagonists exist. Perhaps they just failed to make theirs engaging enough to make the audience root for the bad guy simultaneously with being horrified by them..
Yes. To someone who thinks that love and goodness is bullshit, and has no morals of any kind, it would be a great story. The rules about what make a story refer to the reader's own beliefs.
Shitty stories exist. Good stories with villain protagonists exist, but not flat-out "search and replace good guy with villain" stories. You can't take the story of "Rocky" and replace Rocky with a spoiled rich kid whose dad hires him expensive trainers and bribes his opponents to take a fall. That would be a narrative but not a story.
To make it interesting, name some villain protagonist stories.
2174308
Well, the ones that come to mind are
Clockwork Orange (in particular the movie version)
The Flashman novels.
Paradise Lost
the movie American Psycho
The Black Company
Those Star Wars books named after (and following) various Sith Lords. Oh and all the comics they made starring Darth Vader hunting down and killing various Jedi.
Scarface
American Psycho
arguably a bunch of Black Adder episodes
Doctor Doom and the Masters of Evil (great comic book series)
The Last Argument of Kings series by Joe Abercrombie (seriously, if this movie you saw upset you don't read this, the end of it upset me).
Anyway, I didn't see this movie you're blogging about, so I could be completely wrong, I was just playing Devil's Advocate.
EDIT:
Ah, if it's entirely subjective than people are definitely not always going to write to any particular reader.
2174623 Take "Clockwork Orange", since I've read that, & also some things the writer wrote about it.
He wrote that novel to protest behaviorist psychology. Some psychologist thought they could use behaviorist principles to reform the worst criminals, by making them not enjoy violence anymore. It's a novel that I'd call "evil lying shit". Very well written, but it's deceptive propaganda. Maybe I'll post later on why I hate that novel. It's great, artistically, but it's a deliberate attempt to trick its readers.
First, the novel Burgess wrote had a final chapter in which Alex reformed, on his own, after the government's attempt failed. That chapter was deleted in the US edition, which made Burgess furious.
Second, the novel is not a story about Alex, the narrator, being violent and getting away with it. It's about the government's attempt to reform him. The /government/ is the protagonist, meaning the character who initiates the action and makes things happen. Alex is the viewpoint character. But the story is about the government failing to reform him, and about the question of whether it's better for someone to be freely evil, or be forced to be good.
God, I hate that whiny half-assed sophomoric theology/philosophy. It's not deep. It's shallow. But anyway, the novel is explicitly about whether the government is morally justified in what it does to Alex.
Okay, now take the Black Company. That's not about villains, either. The characters hurt each other because they're in situations where they have no good choices. They're generally torn up and ethically conflicted about what they do, and they have their own code of behavior, which they try /very hard/ to follow, and the novel is about times when they can't live up to even that standard.
There's hundreds of years of commentary on who the hero was in Paradise Lost. It's not so simple.
Scarface is a story about the wages of sin--Scarface brings his own destruction down on himself.
2179056
I always saw the government as the antagonist, actually. And while it's true that they are the ones who make things happen, is it not also true that the antagonist is frequently the force to which the protagonist must react?
Plus, I deliberately cited the movie version, because the endings are different. There's no reform at all in the movie, just the main character being free to indulge his base instincts once more.
Oh, another villain protagonist: The narrator of your fairy tales for kids series.
There are hundreds of years of commentary on who the hero is on Paradise Lost, but you know the average reader remembers the lines of and roots for the devil. He had all the best parts and resonates quite well with the audience.
2179524 I don't remember Paradise Lost, & I'm sure I never read the whole thing, so let me ask: Does Satan actually do anything bad in it? How about God? Which of them behaves better?
I think I'm going to call the "comedy" exception for my bedtime stories tales. Comedy is a different beast, and I don't claim to understand it.
antagonist/protagonist are words that different people use differently. Bottom line, the reader/viewer isn't supposed to be happy that Alex gets to kill people again in Clockwork Orange. It is not a story in which we root for Alex to overcome obstacles given him by the government so that he can rape some more.
2187048
Ah. I suppose you are using it differently, then. I see protagonist as simply the central character around whom the story revolves, usually the viewpoint character, the one we follow and mostly see things from the side of. Besides, the 'government' in Clockwork Orange isn't really developed into a character, so it's difficult to call it the protagonist. The protagonist isn't necessarily the one driving the plot though. Frequently the plot is driven by the antagonist, the one the protagonist struggles against. For a simple example, the Joker more often drives the plot than Batman in his appearances but Batman is usually the protagonist (there are a few comics written from the other perspective). Or the killer in Seven, he's the one driving the plot, even though he's the antagonist to our police protagonists.
That's why Scarface was still the protagonist even if we were meant to want to see him fall.
Paradise Lost? The Devil starts out wrong but understandable and goes off the rails as it goes. It's a 'start of darkness' story to use the common vernacular. Most people do prefer the earlier bits where he's still wrong and villainous but hasn't reached his full level of evil yet.
You should give Dr. Doom and the Masters of Evil a try though, if you can stomach Western comics, it has an excellent villain protagonist. Over the course of the story, Dr. Doom manipulates other villains, fights gods and heroes, all for the sake of one wish. When he gets it we discover he was lying to his allies about what he wanted it for all along. Then he wins. It's hard not to root for Doom, because he's such an over-the-top grandiose evil and he's clever and charismatic. That's why I was wondering if perhaps your movie wanted to make a likeable villain the audience would root for on some level even as their actions were morally reprehensible and just failed, instead making someone you'd rather see lose. A bit like Hannibal Lechter, though he's not really the protagonist (that would be either Clarice Starling or Jack Crawford, depending on the story), many of the audience liked seeing him get away, leading to increased focus on him in later stories (sometimes to their detriment).
EDIT: Actually, I think Hannibal's popularity played a part in the creation of Dexter, a series wherein the reader/audience (since the novels were adapted to TV) is encouraged to root for the protagonist who's a serial killer.