Good/Evil – How Damaging It Is

So fascism is the new democracy in Europe, as intolerance builds like bathroom mould. The cause of all this is quite simple: Idiots. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Even if you bunked off all your Literacy classes at school, you will know that all stories require conflict. The easiest conflict is ‘Good vs Evil’, where the story will begin with everything being all lovely, then baddies will arrive, the goodies must battle them in some way, the baddies seem to get the upper hand, but then at the last minute good vanquishes evil forever and everything goes back to being lovely.

There. I have just summed up 99% of everything ever written.

I call this structure ‘The Narrative Filter.’ TV Tropes probably has a better name, but I can’t be bothered to spend the rest of my day flicking through one of the biggest and most interesting websites ever created. ‘The Narrative Filter’ is thus named because the real world does not work like the template I described. You are seeing reality filtered so it appeals to a broader taste. Not a bad taste – just one everyone can get behind easily.

“But Max!” pipes up a fictionalised version of yourself I have just created, “the majority of all stories are devised for the sake of escapism. Sometimes the real world is really depressing, and it’s great to escape to a place where it’s clear whose good and whose evil.”

Yes, your right - fictional version of you. The only problem is that fiction and reality becomes far too confused through ‘The Narrative Filter’. You only need to look at the last Call of Duty game to see reality condensed into a broad, untrue narrative. The USA are good, Russia/South America/Arabs are evil. The baddies are evil because they want to defeat the USA…for some reason, and the USA are good because they fight back with their infinitely more powerful military hardware.

Do you see how damaging this might be to ones perspective of reality? ‘Baddies attack so we attack back harder,’ ‘Anything that attacks us is the most evil thing ever,’ ‘You prod us with a stick and we nuke you off the face of the planet because you totally deserve it’

Obviously not everything is as dumb as the Call of Duty franchise and its subsequent hellspawns. But this whole thing of evil baddies being evil because they are evil and must be stopped because they’re evil because they eat celery needs to stop.

The best villains talk sense. Richard III is hated by all due to his deformities, so he decides to live the rest of his life as a villain. Salieri (from Amadeus) becomes jealous of Mozart’s talent in comparison to his own mediocre music and wants vengeance. Big Brother (from 1984) is of the belief that its ideology will be the first to last forever – and thus Big Brother will exist forever. Magneto doesn’t want to live in secrecy as a mutant. The HAL_9000 sees all the humans on-board as threats to the mission and attempts to terminate them. Nigel Farage suggests that immigration is detrimental to our econo-ohwait.

The best villains need to talk sense because otherwise they do not exist. They are just targets for our heroes to shoot at. We look at them and think “Oh, I’ll never be like that guy” “Oh, something like that would never happen” “Oh, no-one would ever partake in the demonization of a different race. It’s not like we’re making the same mistakes RIGHT NOW”

Villains need to make us think “If something went wrong in my life, could I be this person?” Without any understanding of how the villain works the audience will begin to assume that actions do not have motivation. Someone bombs a marathon and everyone is like “That person must be evil. There is no other reason” Someone drives a plane through two towers and everyone is like “These people just want to watch the world burn. They had absolutely no reason to attack us.” People who vote UKIP are like “We’re not racist. We just want all these brown people out of our country.”

Our entertainment is propaganda. Ever since the Bible, good and evil have been finite states with no middle ground or motivation or redemption – and it’s really, really damaging. Because people don’t know that there is no such thing as good or evil, humanity continues to make mistakes…and we’re not learning from those mistakes.

A PLAYWRIGHT IS NOT AN AUTHOR...YOU POOP-HEAD!!

I was recently forced to read a load of academia about ‘The Death of the Author.’ (I’m not a literature academic because the only people who read critical essays are critical essay writers, and I’m not going to elbow my way into such a vicious cycle.) It was interesting that whilst the academics would quote Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht at will – because quoting famous people makes you intelligent – Beckett and Brecht were not authors. They were playwrights. 

OK, authoring and playwriting may seem interchangeable…and they are to an extent. Both a play and a novel are written, and it usually begins with one person sitting down and banging away at a keyboard whilst longing for death. The creative spark for a novel and the creative spark for a play are usually the same spark; often I’ve begun to devise a play only to realise it would be better suited as a novel – and vice-versa. 

But this is where the similarities end, because once a novel is completed then the story is completed. The characters and setting are locked within the plot, bound within the pages and the novelist can go and drink him/herself to death. When a playscript is completed, then the torment truly begins. 

First you have to find a theatre-company, unless your already part of one. Once you get to the company, you’ll realise that they only have two female actors – so there goes your female ensemble cast. Then you get to the theatre the plays going to be performed at to find it’s bloody tiny, so you’ll have to cut out your golden fortress. Then you begin rehearsal to find that the director wants to have everyone perform naked – meaning the costume department basically gets a free pay check. Then you find that your lead actor can’t be naked without also doing a little dance, so that’s another re-write. Then the lighting technician says it’s impossible to simulate rain, so there goes your tribute to Singing in the Rain. 

Your script now looks completely different, re-written by both the company and circumstance. Whilst this often means that the material is actually stronger, sometimes it can ruin the piece. Either way, the playwright cannot be considered the author because the play is not the sole voice of one person. 

Does that mean a playwright can still be an auteur? Well of course. Beckett and Brecht are immediately recognisable in their work. But even Brecht and Beckett had to undertake large re-writes during the rehearsal period. They would have had input during the creative process, and would have had to deal with the biggest obstacle a writer faces: Compromise. 

Even Shakespeare would have collaborated very closely with his actors and directors, tailoring his plays to suit the place it was being performed and the people performing it – which is why Shakespeare obviously wrote all his plays and anyone who says otherwise doesn’t understand how theatre works. 

Yes, Shakespeare is not an author. The works you were forced to study at school were probably re-written by the actors that worked on them. So, in a weird way, Shakespeare didn’t write his plays…except he so obviously did.

Make Em’ Human - Make Em’ Flawed

Recently I’ve been re-reading The Hunger Games. Not in a casual reader way, but in a “ve vill torture you until you reveal your secrets!” way. Never have I come across something that I’ve liked so much, yet have no idea why. I’m actually kind of annoyed with it.

I can’t just be that Katniss is a strong-willed female protagonist who is a perfect example of a female action-hero, can it? In Literature, there are quite a few female role-models - far more than in film, TV, and especially Video Games.

No, there is more to The Hunger Games than that. Character is an exceptionally important part of any art-form, but The Hunger Games is very much plot and tension focused. Character is still a make-or-break part of the book, but it’s not the most vital element. But now is not the time for The Hunger Games. I shall report back once it finally cracks under interrogation.

But, in working out why Katniss is such a great protagonist, I realised it’s because she was actually a human.

For a while, female characters came in two forms. Either you had the helpless damsel (self-explanatory), or the femme-fatale - a antagonistic woman who often uses her femininity to her advantage.

There are good and bad examples of the femme-fatale, as there are good and bad examples of any character archetype. But from this came a new archetype, the ‘Strong Independent Woman’ archetype.

You know that civilisation has failed when your eyes roll at the words ‘Strong Independent Woman’.

The problem with this archetype is that, like any bad archetype, those three words are the only things that define that character as a person. In fact, often the ‘Independent’ part is scrapped as the character must fall in love with someone due to the obligation that every mainstream work must have a love-story thrust in somewhere, even if the plot doesn’t demand it.

So we have two words. ‘Strong’ and ‘Woman’. Those are terrible words - particularly ‘Woman’ because what does that mean? That she can read a book whilst watching TV?

If a character is nothing but strength and X chromosomes, then that character is obviously going to be flawed. She won’t be a human being, she will be a robot that communicates in punches and sassiness. This is the case with 99% of female action-heroes.

Think of all the words that describe Katniss. ‘Strong’ will probably pop up, but so will ‘Sympathetic’, ‘Barbed’, ‘Sarcastic’, ‘Cunning’, ‘Hardened’, ‘Self-reliant’ among many, many others. Quite a few of those words are not kind ones. She at times treats Peeta and everyone else harshly. She’s reluctant to play along with the Capitol, and this gets her into trouble in the second book of the series. She has a range of different emotions and traits, not just strength and being female.

Bugger! I said I would stop talking about The Hunger Games…

This idea that the character should be human can carry across to any minority that needs to be represented more. Often gay characters suffer from being identified just from their sexuality, when in reality the majority of LGBT people are human above everything else. Obviously you can’t just ignore the fact your character is gay - thats even worse than turning her/him into a crude stereotype. But ‘Gay’ shouldn’t be the first word used to describe the character. It should preferably follow an ‘and’ after a string of other interesting traits.

The same goes with black characters, characters with mental health issues, disabled characters, characters from a different religion, or just characters from other cultures. Make them human. Make them flawed. Everything else will follow.

Right, back to The Hunger Games. I think I’ll try a more extreme torture. How about I ruin the ending to Mockingjay for it?