Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

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Too Much Perspective: On Writing with Moral Imagination

June 7, 2021 / / 18 Comments

Practicing morally imaginative storytelling means scrutinizing the values and messages encrypted in the fiction we produce—but it does not mean passing a “purity test.”

In Marty Di Bergi’s 1984 rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, the titular British heavy-metal band, faced with ebbing popularity and flagging album sales, embarks on a disaster-prone tour of North America in support of its latest release, the critically savaged Smell the Glove.  During a stopover at Graceland to pay their respects to the King of Rock and Roll at his gravesite, lead vocalist David St. Hubbins comments, “Well, this is thoroughly depressing.”

To which bandmate and childhood best friend Nigel Tufnel responds, “It really puts perspective on things, though, doesn’t it?”

“Too much.  There’s too much fucking perspective now.”

It’s a sentiment to which we can all relate, collectively endowed as we’ve become with a migrainous case of “2020 vision.”  At the start of the pandemic, long before we had any sense of what we were in for let alone any perspective on it, I like many essayists felt the urge or need or even the responsibility to say something about it, despite knowing I had no useful or meaningful insight.  I netted out with an acknowledgment that the months to come would present a rare Digital Age opportunity for quiet introspection and reflection—one in which we might expand our moral imagination of what’s possible, to invoke the exquisite wisdom of my mentor Al Gore, and perhaps envision a world on the other side appreciably more just, equitable, and sustainable than the one we had before the global shutdown.

Did we ever.  Here in the United States, we are now wrestling with issues of economic inequality, structural racism, police brutality, environmental justice, and fair access to affordable housing and healthcare with an awareness and an urgency not seen in generations, and President Joe Biden—responding to the social movements of his times like FDR and LBJ before him—has proposed a host of progressive legislation that matches the visionary, transformative ambition of the New Deal and the Great Society.

Reuters via the New York Times

With heartening moral imagination (certainly more than this democratic eco-socialist expected from him), Biden is attempting to turn the page on the Randian, neoliberal narrative of the past forty years and write a new chapter in the American story—one founded on an ethos of sympathetic coexistence, not extractive exploitation.  With our continued grassroots support and, when necessary, pressure, he might even be the unlikely hero to pull it off, too—our Nixon in China.

As for me?  I spent most of the pandemic thinking about narrativity myself.  Doing nothing, after all, was a privilege of the privileged, with whom I am obliged to be counted.  So, I used the time in self-quarantine to think and to write about the stories we tell, and I arrived at the resolute conclusion that we—the storytellers—need to do a lot better.

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In the Multiverse of Madness: How Media Mega-Franchises Make Us Their Obedient Servants, Part 2

May 3, 2021 / / 30 Comments

Editor’s note:  Owed to the length of “In the Multiverse of Madness,” I divided the essay into two posts.  If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read Part 1 first, and please feel welcome to offer feedback on that post, this one, or both in the comments section of Part 2 below.  Thank you.

Previously on “In the Multiverse of Madness,” we covered the three engagement strategies (and correlating tactics) transmedia mega-franchises deploy to keep us consuming each new offering in real time:  by leveraging FOMO via “spoilers”; by encouraging “forensic fandom” with Easter eggs and puzzle-boxing; and by reversing “figure and ground.”  Now let’s talk about why 1970s-born adults have been particularly susceptible to these narrative gimmicks—and what to do about it.

X Marks the Spot

Mega-franchises are dependent on a very particular demographic to invest in their elaborate and expanding multiverse continuities:  one that has both a strong contextual foundation in the storied histories of the IPs—meaning, viewers who are intimately familiar with (and, ideally, passionately opinionated about) all the varied iterations of Batman and Spider-Man from the last thirty or so years—and is also equipped with disposable income, as is typically the case in middle age, hence the reason Gen X has been the corporate multimedia initiative’s most loyal fan base.  Fortunately for them, we’d been groomed for this assignment from the time we learned to turn on the television.

Very quickly (if it isn’t already too late for that):  From 1946 through 1983, the FCC enforced stringent regulations limiting the commercial advertisements that could be run during or incorporated into children’s programming.  However:

Ronald W. Reagan did not much care for any regulations that unduly hindered business, and the selling of products to an entire nation of children was a big business indeed.  When Reagan appointed Mark S. Fowler as commissioner of the FCC on May 18, 1981, children’s television would change dramatically.  Fowler championed market forces as the determinant of broadcasting content, and thus oversaw the abolition of every advertising regulation that had served as a guide for broadcasters.  In Fowler’s estimation, the question of whether children had the ability to discriminate between the ads and the entertainment was a moot point; the free market, and not organizations such as [Actions for Children’s Television] would decide the matter.

Martin Goodman, “Dr. Toon:  When Reagan Met Optimus Prime,” Animation World Network, October 12, 2010

In the wake of Fowler’s appointment, a host of extremely popular animated series—beginning with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe but also notably including The Transformers, G.I. Joe:  A Real American Hero, and M.A.S.K. for the boys, and Care Bears, My Little Pony, and Jem for young girls—flooded the syndicated market with 65-episode seasons that aired daily.  All of these series had accompanying action figures, vehicles, and playsets—and many of them, in fact, were explicitly based on preexisting toylines; meaning, in a flagrant instance of figure-and-ground reversal, the manufacturers often dictated narrative content:

“These shows are not thought up by people trying to create characters or a story,” [Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children’s Television] explained, terming them “program-length advertisements.”  “They are created to sell things,” she said.  “Accessories in the toy line must be part of the program.  It reverses the traditional creative process.  The children are getting a manufacturer’s catalogue instead of real programming content.”

Glenn Collins, “Controversy about Toys, TV Violence,” New York Times, December 12, 1985

This was all happening at the same time Kenner was supplying an endless line of 3.75” action figures based on Star Wars, both the movies and cartoon spinoffs Droids and Ewoks.  Even Hanna-Barbera’s Super Friends, which predated Fowler’s tenure as FCC commissioner by nearly a decade, rebranded as The Super Powers Team, complete with its own line of toys (also courtesy of Kenner) and tie-in comics (published by DC), thereby creating a feedback loop in which each product in the franchise advertised for the other.  Meanwhile, feature films like Ghostbusters and even the wantonly violent, R-rated Rambo and RoboCop movies were reverse-engineered into kid-friendly cartoons, each with—no surprise here—their own action-figure lines.

I grew up on all that stuff and obsessed over the toys; you’d be hard-pressed to find a late-stage Xer that didn’t.  We devoured the cartoons, studied the comics, and envied classmates who were lucky enough to own the Voltron III Deluxe Lion Set or USS Flagg aircraft carrier.  To our young minds, there was no differentiating between enjoying the storyworlds of those series and collecting all the ancillary products in the franchise.  To watch those shows invariably meant to covet the toys.  At our most impressionable, seventies-born members of Gen X learned to love being “hostage buyers.”  Such is the reason I was still purchasing those goddamn Batman comics on the downslope to middle age.

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In the Multiverse of Madness: How Media Mega-Franchises Make Us Their Obedient Servants, Part 1

April 26, 2021 /

Editor’s note:  By even the indefensibly prolix standards of this blog, the following essay—an analytical piece on Hollywood mega-franchises and how audiences wind up serving them more than they serve us—is a lengthy one.  Accordingly, “In the Multiverse of Madness” will be published in two separate parts, with the concluding installment following this one by a week.  I thank you in advance for your time and attention, neither of which I take for granted.

In last month’s post, I proffered that when a fan-favorite media franchise no longer serves us—when we come to recognize some of the popular fictions we’ve cherished embody values we no longer endorse, and potentially even threaten to stand in the way of where we need to go—often the best thing we can do for ourselves is to let it go, purposely and permanently.

Letting go is not about “canceling” (someone like disgraced geek god Joss Whedon) or boycotting (the films of, say, Woody Allen); it’s not about taking action at all.  Instead, letting go is not doing something any longer—not renting out any more space in your life or in your head to the likes of Whedon or Allen, or even to the culturally defining popular narratives whose very ubiquity we take as a God-given absolute:  Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, DC and Marvel, to name but a sampling.

Despite the universal prevalence of those transmedia brands—not merely the plethora of movies and TV shows, but the licensed apparel and iPhone cases, the die-cast collectables and plush toys—we can, if we choose, be done with any or all those franchises as of… right now.  To learn to live without them entirely.  And happily.  Even lifelong, hardcore superfans can learn to let go of their preferred multimedia pastimes.

It’s both easier and harder than you may think.

Just imagine never caring about ANY of this ever again…

But wait!  What if you happen to genuinely enjoy Star Wars or Star Trek or DC or Marvel?  If you’re a fan, and some or all of those entertainment franchises add value to your life’s experience, by all means, disregard this post’s advice.  Though perhaps first consider this:

For most of Hollywood history, the movie business has needed a hostage buyer, a customer with little choice but to purchase the product.  First, this was the theatre chains, which the studios owned, or controlled, until 1948, when the Supreme Court forced the studios to sell them on antitrust grounds.  In the eighties and nineties, video stores partly filled the role.  But, increasingly, the hostage buyer is us.

Today, the major franchises are commercially invulnerable because they offer up proprietary universes that their legions of fans are desperate to reënter on almost any terms.  These reliable sources of profit are now Hollywood’s financial bedrock.

Stephen Metcalf, “How Superheroes Made Movie Stars Expendable,” New Yorker, May 21, 2018

Consider:  How many of us are unwitting “hostage buyers”—fans who continue to subscribe to certain multimedia franchises no longer out of pleasure, but lately out of habit?  Out of decades-long conditioning?  We may watch Star Wars, for instance, simply because we’ve always watched Star Wars, even if we can’t truly recall the last time we actually enjoyed it the way we did when we were ten years old—with pure and wondrous abandon.  Bad word-of-mouth will steer us clear of a one-off bomb like Blackhat or King Arthur:  Legend of the Sword or The Happytime Murders, but it’ll merely lower our expectations for Star Wars:  The Rise of Skywalker and X-Men:  Dark Phoenix and Terminator:  Dark Fate, not deter us from seeing those umpteenth sequels for ourselves.

When that happens—when we’re willing to spend our money, time, and attention (our three primary modes of currency) on a product we know in advance is shit—we’re no longer fans of those franchises so much as brand loyalists.  Habit buyers, if not outright hostage buyers.  And it can be hard to recognize that in ourselves—harder than we might realize.  I was still reading Batman comics into my thirties, who-knows-how-many years after I stopped enjoying them—long after a once-joyful pleasure became an interminably joyless obligation.  So, why was I still reading and collecting them?

Because I’d always read comics, from the time I was a kid; I’d buy them at the corner candy store in my Bronx neighborhood with loose change I’d rummaged from the couch cushions and reread each one a thousand times.  I’d share them with my grade-school gang, and vice versa.  I’d collected them for as long as I could remember, so it truly never occurred to me a day might come when they no longer added value to my life—when they’d outlived their onetime reliable purpose.  And for years after I reached that point of terminally diminished returns, I’d continue to spend money, to say nothing of time and attention, on a habit I wasn’t enjoying—that did nothing but clutter my home with more worthless shit that went straight into indefinite “storage” in the closet.  Why the hell did I do that?

Because I’d ceased to be a fan and had instead become an obedient brand loyalist—an institutionalized hostage buyer.  And, to be sure, corporate multimedia initiatives—which is to say the those so-called “mega-franchises” from which there is always one more must-see/must-have sequel, prequel, sidequel, spinoff, TV series, tie-in comic, videogame, and branded “collectible” being produced—very much count on our continued, unchallenged fidelity to once-beloved concepts and characters…

… and they are doubling down on the billion-dollar bet they’ve placed on it:

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Here Lies Buffy the Vampire Slayer: On Letting Go of a Fan Favorite—and Why We Should

March 15, 2021 / / 40 Comments

Last month, actress Charisma Carpenter publicly confirmed a longstanding open secret in Hollywood:  Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator and Avengers writer/director Joss Whedon is an irredeemable asshole.

For years, fans of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which aired on the WB and UPN from 1997 to 2003, have had to reconcile their adoration for a show about a teenage girl who slays monsters with the criticism that often swirled around her creator.

Mr. Whedon’s early reputation as a feminist storyteller was tarnished after his ex-wife, the producer Kai Cole, accused him of cheating on her and lying about it.  The actress Charisma Carpenter, a star of the “Buffy” spinoff “Angel,” hinted at a fan convention in 2009 that Mr. Whedon was not happy when she became pregnant.

In July, Ray Fisher, an actor who starred in Mr. Whedon’s 2017 film “Justice League,” accused him of “gross” and “abusive” treatment of the cast and crew. . . .

On Wednesday, Ms. Carpenter released a statement in support of Mr. Fisher, in which she said Mr. Whedon harassed her while she was pregnant and fired her after she gave birth in 2003. . . .

Over the past week, many of the actors who starred on “Buffy,” including Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy Summers, have expressed solidarity with Ms. Carpenter and distanced themselves from Mr. Whedon.  The actress Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Buffy’s younger sister, Dawn, alleged on Instagram on Thursday that Mr. Whedon was not allowed to be alone with her.

“I would like to validate what the women of ‘Buffy’ are saying and support them in telling their story,” Marti Noxon, one of the show’s producers and longtime writers, said on Twitter.  Jose Molina, a writer who worked on Mr. Whedon’s show “Firefly,” called him “casually cruel.”

Maria Cramer, “For ‘Buffy’ Fans, Another Reckoning With the Show’s Creator,” New York Times, February 15, 2021

If the copious fan-issued blog posts and video essays on this damning series of insider testimonials is an accurate barometer, Millennials have been particularly crestfallen over Whedon’s fall from grace.  It’s only over the last few years, really, I’ve come to truly appreciate just how proprietary they feel about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  That surprises me still, because I tend to think of Buffy as a Gen X artifact; after all, the modestly successful if long-derided (by even screenwriter Whedon himself) feature film was released five years before its TV sequel.  (If you don’t remember—and I’ll bet you don’t—the movie’s shockingly impressive cast includes no less than pre-stardom Xers Hilary Swank and Ben Affleck.)  I recall seeing this one-sheet on a subway platform during the summer between sophomore and junior years of high school—

Fran Rubel Kuzui’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1992)

—and thinking somebody had finally made a spiritual sequel to my formative influence:  Joel Schumacher’s Gen X cult classic The Lost Boys.  (Turned out, however, I was gonna have to do that myself.)  I was sold!  I marvel still at how the advertisement’s economical imagery conveys the movie’s entire premise and tone.  So, yes—I was the one who went to see Buffy the Vampire Slayer in theaters.  Guilty as charged.

But it was the TV series, I’ll concede, that took Buffy from creative misfire to cultural phenomenon, so it stands to reason it made such an indelible impression on Millennials.  I submit that more than any content creator of his cohort—more so than even celebrated pop-referential screenwriters Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Williamson—Whedon is preeminently responsible for the mainstreaming of geek culture at the dawn of the Digital Age.

Buffy not only coincided with the coming out of geeks from the dusty recesses of specialty shops, it helped facilitate that very cultural shift:  As John Hughes had done for Gen X a decade earlier, Whedon spoke directly to the socially and emotionally precarious experience of adolescent misfits, and his comic-book-informed sensibilities (before such influences were cool) endowed the Buffy series with a rich, sprawling mythology—and star-crossed romance (beautiful though it is, Christophe Beck’s Buffy/Angel love theme, “Close Your Eyes,” could hardly be described as optimistic)—over which fans could scrupulously obsess.

What’s more, all three cult serials Whedon sired were alienated underdogs in their own right:  Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a reboot of a campy B-movie on a fledgling, tween-centric “netlet” that no one took seriously; Angel, a second-class spinoff that was perennially on the brink of cancelation (and ultimately ended on an unresolved cliffhanger); and Firefly, his ambitious Star Wars–esque space opera that lasted exactly three months—or less than the average lifespan of an actual firefly.  That these shows struggled for mainstream respect/popular acceptance only burnished Whedon’s credentials as the bard of geek-outsider angst…

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One Good Idea: Reflections on My Longest-Running Project—and Most Successful Creative Collaboration

February 15, 2021 / / 34 Comments

My wife and I are celebrating twenty-five years together this winter.  God, that’s three impeachments ago.  To place it in even more sobering perspective, the January morning we’d met for our first date at the AMC on Third Avenue at 86th Street, I’d never in my life sent an e-mail.  At best, I had peripheral awareness of the “World Wide Web”—whatever that was—and certainly no idea how to access it (not that I’d ever need to).  I definitely didn’t have a cell phone—which, admittedly, would’ve come in handy, seeing how I was running late to meet her.

But we met that morning just the same; in those days—don’t ask me how, for this secret, like the whereabouts of Cleopatra’s tomb, is permanently lost to history—folks somehow met up at a prearranged location without real-time text updates.  It’s true.  We met many more times over the month that followed, in many more locales around the city:  Theodore Roosevelt Park on the Upper West Side; Washington Square Park in the Village.  (Public parks are a godsend for penniless students at commuter college.)  It was cold as hell that winter, but I never cared; I was happy to sit outside in the bitter temperatures for hours—and we did—just to be with her.  By February, we were officially inseparable—and have remained so ever since.

A lifetime has passed since then, one in which, hand in hand, we’ve graduated college, traveled to Europe on several occasions, moved across the country (on September 11, 2001 of all cosmic dates), weathered the deaths of a parent apiece, eloped in Vegas, cared for twenty-four different pets (mostly fosters), consciously practiced patience with and developed deeper appreciation for one another during this indefinite interval of self-quarantine (we haven’t seen our immediate family on the East Coast since Thanksgiving of 2019), and have perennially quoted lines from GoodFellas to one another… because, well, GoodFellas might be the only thing that’s aged as well as we have.

Goodfellas Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta at the Jackson Hole diner in Queens, the site of many of our dates in the college years

She’s certainly aged preternaturally well in her own right.  She was the prettiest girl at school—no minor triumph, given that there were almost 20,000 students at Hunter College at the time—but she’s impossibly more beautiful today.  When I glance in the mirror, however, I in no way recognize the kid that fell in love with her all those years ago.  This is a good thing.  I think—I hope—I’m a much better man today than I was then.  Kinder; more compassionate; more sensitive; more patient.  Certainly wiser.  And hopefully more deserving of the love she’s given so freely and steadfastly.  Indeed, hopefully that above all else.

All the best ideas to grace my life over the past quarter century have been hers, without so much as a lone exception.  Long before I took up blogging, she’d encouraged me to do so.  I was such an incorrigible Luddite, however; furthermore, I reasoned it would be a distraction from my “real” work:  screenwriting.  Now I wish I’d swapped screenwriting for blogging years earlier.  The former—my bright idea—made me miserable; the latter has allowed me to better know myself unquantifiably.  I am an exponentially better writer for this continuing project—the one she had the wisdom to suggest years before I could see the value in it myself.  She didn’t hold that against me, though; she even set up my WordPress domain.  Now you get to read all about the esoteric bullshit she alone used to entertain over dinner.

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Grounded and Elevated: Screenwriting Secrets for a Sure-Thing Hollywood Pitch

January 18, 2021 / / 30 Comments

Despite everything, it seems I still have a few friends in Tinseltown.  A development exec I know, aware of my blog’s polemical crusade against late-twentieth-century nostalgia as well as creatively and morally bankrupt storytelling, recently forwarded several e-mails containing informal pitches (from agented writers) he’d solicited for “reboots” of three classic IPs straight from the Gen X archives.  They offer fascinating firsthand insight into the demoralizing vocation of Hollywood screenwriting.

It might surprise those outside the industry to learn only a small fraction of a given screenwriter’s time and effort is spent developing original stories, known as “spec scripts.”  Few of those screenplays ever sell (certainly nowadays), and fewer still are produced; mostly, such projects are mere “calling cards”—writing samples designed to establish a scribe’s commercial sensibilities and creative credentials so he or she might be given the opportunity to vie for “open assignments.”  In those instances, a prodco controls the film rights to an intellectual property (IP)—a novel, a comic book, an old TV series—and, accordingly, invites such candidates to come in and pitch a take on it.

For instance, my prison break–zombie outbreak mashup Escape from Rikers Island afforded me opportunities to pitch cinematic adaptations of the pseudo-documentary series Ancient Aliens and the Japanese manga MPD-Psycho, as well as a remake of the 1992 action thriller Trespass.  If you’re higher up on the food chain—in, say, J. J. Abrams territory—that’s when you might get a shot at a gold-plated franchise like Star Wars or Mission:  Impossible.

Nicolas Cage as an anxiety-riddled screenwriter struggling to adapt “The Orchid Thief” in “Adaptation”

Because for the most part, Hollywood isn’t looking for new ideas; they have enough branded IPs to keep them in business through infinity and beyond.  What they’re looking for are skilled stenographers—writers-for-hire who can take a preexisting property and, juggling input from a thousand different chefs in the kitchen, turn it into a viable script for which a movie studio will be persuaded to invest millions of dollars.  That’s the litmus test:  Can you take an established IP and from it write a script that will motivate the studio to write a check?

The following proposals provide an insider’s glimpse into that singular development process.  With my contact’s express permission, I have reproduced the relevant text from his e-mails verbatim, including all typographical errors and syntactical idiosyncrasies, but excluding the identities of the authors, their representation, the executive, and his production company.

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The Biden Climate Plan: Some Key Goals and Considerations

December 13, 2020 / / 14 Comments

Though it seems like a lifetime ago, I opened the blog this year with a post I’d titled—with entirely unintentional and unforeseen irony—“A 2020 Vision of Hope.”  In it, I discussed a number of auspicious signs that America was on the cusp of finally making a meaningful commitment to addressing the climate crisis—from regional sustainability initiatives, to Gen Z activism, to carbon pricing, to the November election.  So determined was our movement, it couldn’t be derailed by even a global pandemic.  Over the summer, in “What Comes Next:  Lessons on Democracy and Narrative from Hamilton,” I shared my enthusiasm for the promising ambition of the Biden climate plan, a document that appeared by all evidence to be a real-time reaction to the interconnected crises of global warming, economic inequality, and systemic racism—all of which reached a boiling point this year.

On December 8, I delivered a presentation on the Biden climate plan to the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project; I have reproduced the text of that talk below.

There is no doubt about it:  The tireless work of environmental activists over the past two years moved President-elect Biden appreciably to the left on the matter of the climate crisis.  Everyone here—all of you who selflessly and compassionately allocated time and energy from your busy lives to prioritize this issue, whether by training with Vice President Gore, attending a climate-strike rally, merely dialing in to this very meeting—made a difference.  President-elect Biden hears our collective voice; he shares our sense of urgency.

And though the incoming president will only go so far as to say the Green New Deal provides a “crucial framework” for meeting the challenges we face, much of the language from his campaign speeches, as well as his extensively detailed climate plan, echoes phrasing from the Green New Deal verbatim—a testament to and direct consequence of the pressure and the power of our movement.  In the two years since I trained under Mr. Gore, the climate breakdown has gone from a political lightning rod to a political litmus test.  All of us take a share of credit for that.

Like the Green New Deal, Biden’s comprehensive climate plan, which he intends to fund by rolling back the Trump tax cuts, takes a holistic approach to solving our interconnected crises by calling for a $2 trillion accelerated investment in infrastructure, transit, the power sector, housing, agriculture, and—most crucially—environmental justice, with the bulk of those resources to be deployed during his first term.  The overarching goal is to set the United States on an irreversible path to achieve net-zero emissions by no later than 2050, and, in the process, facilitate a just transition by creating millions of good-paying union jobs—yet more language adopted directly from the Green New Deal.

Does the proposal pass every environmentalist purity test?  No.  But the Biden Plan to Build a Modern, Sustainable Infrastructure and an Equitable Clean Energy Future—oof, that’s a mouthful—is an exhaustive plan with a commensurably exhaustive name that I encourage everyone to read, but let’s talk for a minute about a few of its key goals with hard timelines attached.

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The End: Lessons for Storytellers from the Trump Saga

November 21, 2020 / / 22 Comments

The election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. earlier this month offered the very thing our movie franchises and television series have denied us for two decades:  catharsis.

For a writer, it turns out I may suffer from a staggering lack of imagination.

I will confess to anxiously entertaining all the apocalyptic post–Election Day scenarios contemplated by even our most sober pundits and analysts:  the disillusion-fueled outrage on the left should Trump eke out a narrow Electoral College win despite losing the popular vote to Biden; or, the armed militias activated by the president in the event of his loss.  Like the set of a Snake Plissken movie, store windows on Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive were boarded up; correspondingly, I barricaded my own front and balcony doors as I watched, sick to my stomach, an endless caravan of MAGA-bannered pickup trucks roar past my home in the liberal bastion of Los Angeles the weekend before Election Day.  I girded for the possibility (if not inevitability) of social breakdown, fully aware I would not be cast in the part of uber-competent dystopian hero—the Rick Grimes or Mad Max—in that story.

What I never imagined—not once, even fleetingly—was that upon receiving official word of a Biden/Harris victory, cities across the country, and the world over, would spontaneously erupt into large-scale celebration worthy of an MGM musical.  Ding-dong!  The witch is dead!  It was a perfectly conventional—and conventionally predictable—Hollywood ending, yet I never saw it coming.

The galaxy celebrates the death of Darth Vader

Despite all the warnings I’ve issued about the unconscious maleficent messaging in our commercial fiction—stories in which messianic saviors redeem our inept/corrupt public institutions (Star Wars and superhero sagas), armed men with badges act without even the smallest measure of accountability (action movies and police procedurals), and environmental destruction/societal collapse are not merely inevitable but preferable (Mad Max:  Fury Road, The Walking Dead), because apocalypse absolves us from our burdensome civic responsibilities—this election season has exposed my own susceptibility to pop-cultural conditioning.

It wasn’t merely a spirit of doomism I nursed throughout October; it was an unchallenged assumption that the interminable Trump narrative would simply do what all our stories now do:  hold us in a state of real-time presentism (“We’ll have to wait and see” and “I will keep you in suspense” are common refrains from the outgoing president) rather than arrive at definitive conclusion.

The erosion of cathartic narrativity is a subject I’ve admittedly addressed a lot here on the blog since I first published “Journey’s End” over five years ago, but it’s essential to understanding how the Trump presidency came to be, and why we all felt such an atavistic sense of relief when it reached an end on November 7.

Around the turn of the millennium, storytellers mostly abandoned the Aristotelian narrative arc—with its rising tension, climax, and catharsis—in favor of “storyless” fiction with either a satirical-deconstructionist agenda (Family Guy, Community) or to emulate the kind of open-ended worldbuilding previously the exclusive province of tabletop RPGs and videogames (Game of Thrones, Westworld).

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Trick-or-Treating Is Canceled? Why Disrupted Halloween Traditions Are Nothing to Fear

October 26, 2020 / / 32 Comments

Owed to my Romantic proclivities, the most spiritually challenging aspect to living in Los Angeles is its seasonal monotony.  I am never so acutely aware of it than at this time of year, when my biorhythms, still calibrated for the East Coast after nearly two decades, anticipate the cooling of the air and coloring of the foliage.  With only gentle reminders, at best, from Mother Nature of the Earth’s shifting axial tilt, a greater metric burden is placed on holidays:  Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day is how I make the mental transition to spring; Fourth of July reminds me summertime has commenced in earnest; Thanksgiving heralds the coming Christmas season, when those who are dear to me will be near to me once more.

In that way, holidays do more than merely mark the passage of time—another birthday, another Mother’s Day, another New Year’s Eve—but in fact give the year its very structure.  With the exception of August, which itself is traditionally a time for family vacations, every month has at least one official holiday that helps define it.  The particular aesthetics of one over the other, from its foods to its music to its very color palette, conjures a fully immersive sensory experience all its own.  Sure, we may prefer some holidays over others, or celebrate some more than others, but where would we be without them?

I guess we’d be in 2020.  I don’t know about you, but the only friends I got drunk with on St. Paddy’s were Sean Penn and Gary Oldman; the only baseball games I got out to this past spring featured Cleveland Indians starting pitcher Charlie Sheen; the only beach I visited this summer was out on Amity Island.  My cousin’s son turned twelve this past May, and I couldn’t help lament he wouldn’t be spending what will likely be his last summer of innocence on the streets with his friends as I did; I sent him a copy of Stephen King’s The Body so he could at least have a vicarious boyhood adventure.  We’ve all made due however we must this year, “celebrating” seasonal occasions in our living rooms or backyards, clinging to the semblance of normality those traditions provide in these traumatically abnormal times.

But when the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health prohibited trick-or-treating last month, that was a bridge too far.  Parents—not kids, mind you—went apeshit, and the very next day L.A. softened its position substantially, merely recommending against the time-honored practice, so cease-and-desist with the hate-tweets, please!  Banning trick-or-treating was perceived as canceling Halloween—an unacceptable sacrifice in a year full of previously unthinkable compromises.

The Peanuts gang goes trick-or-treating in “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” (1966)

It’s impossible to imagine my own parents, who always made the holidays special, reacting so histrionically.  The first decade of my late father’s life, after all, coincided with the Great Depression; I don’t think he would’ve felt particularly sorry for us had trick-or-treating been suspended on account of a major public-health crisis.  And not because he was unkind or unsympathetic, but rather because he wouldn’t have viewed it as an impediment to celebration.

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The Road Back: Revisiting “The Writer’s Journey”

September 28, 2020 / / 20 Comments

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Christopher Vogler’s industry-standard screenwriting instructional The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers, here’s an in-depth look at why the time-honored storytelling principles it propounds are existentially endangered in our postnarrative world… and why they’re needed now more than ever.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell identified the “monomyth”—the universal narrative patterns and Jungian psychological archetypes that provide the shape, structure, and emotional resonance of virtually every story in the Western literary canon.

As it’s more commonly known, this is the “Hero’s Journey,” in which the status quo is disrupted, sending our protagonist on a perilous adventure—physically or emotionally or both—through a funhouse-mirror distortion of their everyday reality (think Marty McFly in 1950s Hill Valley, Dorothy in Oz) in which they encounter Mentors, Shadows, Allies, and Tricksters throughout a series of escalating challenges, culminating in a climactic test from which they finally return to the Ordinary World, ideally a bit wiser for their trouble.  From the Epic of Gilgamesh to a given episode of The Big Bang Theory, the Hero’s Journey is the foundational schema of storytelling.

The Writer's Journey graphic
The stages of the Hero’s Journey

The book’s influence on the visionary young filmmakers who came of age studying it was quantum:  George Lucas consciously applied Campbell’s theory to the development of Star Wars (1977), as did George Miller to Mad Max (1979), arguably transforming a pair of idiosyncratic, relatively low-budget sci-fi projects into global phenomena that are still begetting sequels over forty years later.  After serving Western culture for millennia, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, the Hero’s Journey became the blueprint for the Hollywood blockbuster.

In the 1990s, a story analyst at Disney by the name of Christopher Vogler wrote and circulated a seven-page internal memo titled “A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” a screenwriter-friendly crib sheet that was notably used in the development of The Lion King (a classic Hero’s Journey if ever there was one), evolving a few years later into a full-length book of its own:  The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of which was published this past summer.  The nearly 500-page revised volume is partitioned into four sections:

  • MAPPING THE JOURNEY:  Here Mr. Vogler characterizes the mythic archetypes of the Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Ally, and Trickster.
  • STAGES OF THE JOURNEY:  Each monomythic “beat”—The Call to Adventure, Crossing the First Threshold, Approach to the Inmost Cave, etc.—is given thorough explanation and illustration.
  • LOOKING BACK ON THE JOURNEY:  Using the tools he teaches, Mr. Vogler provides comprehensive analyses of Titanic, Pulp Fiction, The Lion King, The Shape of Water, and Lucas’ six-part Star Wars saga.
  • THE REST OF THE STORY:  ADDITIONAL TOOLS FOR MASTERING THE CRAFT:  The appendices are a series of essays on the history, nature, and cultural dynamics of the art and craft of storytelling.  After 350 pages of practical technique, Mr. Vogler earns the privilege of indulging a bit of literary theory here, and his insights are fascinating.  He devotes an entire chapter to the subject of catharsis, “comparing the emotional effect of a drama with the way the body rids itself of toxins and impurities” (Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers, 4th ed. [Studio City, California:  Michael Wiese Productions, 2020], 420).  Stories, in that sense, are medicinal; their alchemical compounds have healing properties—more on this point later.

Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey codifies mythic structure for contemporary storytellers, demonstrating its form, function, and versatility through more accessible terminology than Campbell’s densely academic nomenclature, and by drawing on examples from cinematic touchstones familiar to all:  The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Titanic, etc.  Like The Hero with a Thousand Faces before it, The Writer’s Journey has become, over the last quarter century, an essential catechism, affecting not merely its own generation of scribes (including yours truly), but the successive storytelling programs that stand on its shoulders, like Save the Cat!

Comparison of Vogler’s Hero’s Journey and Snyder’s “beat sheet”

But why is it essential?  If Campbell and Vogler and Blake Snyder have simply put different labels on narrative principles we all intuitively comprehend from thousands of years of unconscious conditioning, why study them at all?  Why not simply trust those precepts are already instinctive and immediately type FADE IN at the muse’s prompting?

Because just as a doctor requires an expert’s command of gross anatomy even if no two patients are exactly constitutionally alike, and an architect is expected to possess a mastery of structural engineering though every building is different, it behooves the storyteller—be them screenwriter, novelist, playwright, what have you—to consciously understand the fundamentals of the narrative arts:

The stages of the Hero’s Journey can be traced in all kinds of stories, not just those that feature “heroic” physical action and adventure.  The protagonist of every story is the hero of a journey, even if the path leads only into his own mind or into the realm of relationships.

The way stations of the Hero’s Journey emerge naturally even when the writer in unaware of them, but some knowledge of this most ancient guide to storytelling is useful in identifying problems and telling better stories.  Consider these twelve stages as a map of the Hero’s Journey, one of many ways to get from here to there, but one of the most flexible, durable, and dependable.

ibid., 7

I’ve read and reread previous versions of The Writer’s Journey endlessly, and I take new insight from it each time:  An excellent primer for aspirants, it yields yet richer dividends for experienced writers—those that can readily appreciate it vis-à-vis their own work.  Though this updated edition, which includes two brand-new essays in the appendices (“What’s the Big Deal?” and “It’s All About the Vibes, Man”), was certainly sufficient reason in its own right to revisit The Writer’s Journey, I had a more compelling motivation:  I wanted to see for myself how Mr. Vogler makes a case for the type of conventional story arc he extols in the face of mounting evidence of its cultural irrelevance in our postnarrative era.

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