In an interview with playwright Kenneth Lonergan, the recent Oscar winner of the amazing Manchester by the Sea, was asked why he thought the typical Hollywood product was so emotionally disingenuous. His critique was poignant, scathing even. He spoke of being a part of those writers rooms, receiving the script notes by committee. Abour how creative decisions are forced. The stories get injected with canned material. The reason the Hollywood product feels so routine, predictable, and with phony emotions is because that is because they are made in a routine, predicable, phony way.
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I’ve observed that over the last twenty-five years or thereabouts, there is more and more a kind of story dictatorship around therapizing the protagonist. There is a forced narrative where every character has to have this by the numbers story arc. It goes like this: We have a hero with a troubled past (insert past trauma or daddy/mommy issue), and they have a call to adventure (which they are reluctant to do, but accept when things get rough), they go on the adventure and as they acquire new skills and accomplish the outside quest to overcome an opponent, they go on an “inner journey” to repair the (fill in past trauma or daddy / mommy issue), resulting in a symbolic connection between the action and the inner action. In other words, the narrative is simplified around being a therapeutic intervention to repair the inner life of a character.
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This is certainly a key way to tell a story. It’s a method that has been done wonderfully in Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, Children of Men, Sideways, Thor: Ragnorok, and many others. It’s also lead to a lot of stinkers. Having this formulaic approach is not a full proof ticket to a compelling motion picture. In fact, insisting on it can be an obstacle to the story. Lonergan’s example is Doctor Strange, in which the emotional backstory is “ladled in”. It’s about a doctor who acquires magic and that’s cool and all. But the audience is also asked to care about his emotional life too? How deeply moved are we supposed to get at Doctor Strange? When we remember that film is it because of his quest to overcome the challenges of his backstory, or because the call of the magician? In short, what is the movie really about?
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I’m imagining writers rooms where they see an adventure and think of a hero and say, “hey, let’s give this character some daddy issues.” It comes from no organic place within the story – it’s artificially injected. This inorganic choice is not unusual to film. Indeed, it’s part of the reason pop music sounds the same with canned beats and predictable turns. It’s the chicken nugget of story. It follows, in essence, some of the routine production ethic of capitalism, and thus the culture industry. It’s a formula that might sell tickets for a quick fix, but how many of these motion pictures are, well … moving? While there are some successes in this mode of production on an artistic or even literary level, could it be that the dictators of screenwriting textbooks are doing more harm than good?
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Older movies seem to have a greater diversity in terms of their story telling methods. Older films didn’t seem as obsessed with this Campbellian forced therapeutic mononarrative. An you imagine some hired hack script doctor going to Sergio Leone to remind him to give The Good, The Bad and the Ugly an emotional backstory? The man with no name doesn’t have inner complexes. Likewise, James Bond didn’t have daddy issues. The Dude doesn’t have backstories or traumas to overcome in The Big Lebowski. Indiana Jones did not have inner turmoil and he did not ever reject the call to adventure. In the original Alien, Ripley didn’t have a backstory – it was all about survival. The guys in Deliverance don’t have backstories. Rosemary doesn’t have a traumatic past she has to get over in Rosemary’s Baby. Forrest Gump doesn’t have a character arc, he is as he does. Chance Gardner in Being There has no inner turmoil to overcome, no arc.
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It’s interesting to think of a franchise that’s lasted a long time like Star Trek and how it’s changed with cultural trends, not just trends of storytelling. The original Captain Kirk didn’t have daddy and mommy issues. The show wasn’t about daddies and mommies. It was about exploring new life and new civilizations. You might think of Spock’s relationship with his parents. Yes, in one episode it was revealed how awkward Spock is with his father. It certainly wasn’t an issue that dominated the series. Star Trek wasn’t about Spock’s daddy issues.
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Compare how these characters were written compared to the J.J. Abrams abomination of Star Trek. Kirk and Spock have daddy issues from the get go. Spock is turned into a brooding youth. When Star Trek Discovery arrived, the show delved deeply into the inner emotional lives of Michael Burnham, the supposed adopted sister of Spock whom we’ve conveniently never heard of in the previous fifty years of trekking lore. All these characters are tortured by lost loves and painful pasts, which they talk about with each other out in the open, airing their emotional baggage with each other in these expositional on-the-nose diatribes of mommy and daddy issues. Star Trek, like so many other stories, has become crypto-group therapy. It used to be about new life and new civilizations. Now it’s a cult of me.
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There’s nothing wrong with therapy. The therapeutic situation can make for great storytelling. It works in great films like Ordinary People and Good Will Hunting. Those are great films with serious character arcs. It’s all about being real, and the story is right to be about this emotional transformation. The question that needs to be asked is what is the story about – it is about the inner life of a character, or is it really about something else? Will Hunting belongs on the couch. Superman not so much – which is one reason why everyone hates the new brooding, self-reflective Superman movies.
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Luckily there are stories and films that buck the trends and can show us something different. One reason I like film is that it’s sort of a time machine into the past and into other cultures. It’s a good thing no one told Werner Herzog about three-act structure. Or no one told Robert Altman he had to have just one main protagonist. Or no one told Nicolas Roeg or David Lynch about character arcs. There are other ways to tell stories. They’re out there, waiting to be organically discovered .
A Fragile Dignity 