Talk about the art of storytelling here.
Storytelling: the neverending story
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A cut and paste of my postings…
I don’t know whether to be flattered or to sue for appropriation.
😂😂😂
The spambot has been transgressicuted
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I mentioned Luke and Laura from General Hospital…
The two were a couple whose chemistry and looking great together started this “supercouple” trope on daytime soap operas.
Their wedding 40 years ago was one the biggest ratings for a soap episode in history.Thing is, story wise in the few times that they first met each other Luke raped Laura. In time though, the story had her falling in love with him and he became this town hero etc.
The things that were gotten away with decades ago on TV and Movies that wouldn’t go over well at all. We could compile a HUGE list that would break the thread, then forum, then Internet.
Looking back now, it is all like: WTF was society thinking?
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The things that were gotten away with decades ago on TV and Movies that wouldn’t go over well at all. We could compile a HUGE list that would break the thread, then forum, then Internet. Looking back now, it is all like: WTF was society thinking?
I guess it’s a combination of changing attitudes, shifting moral standards and greater awareness.
If it’s any consolation then I’m sure if people back then could see into society’s future they’d have a few “WTF are they thinking?” moments of their own too.
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Also, clarity in the genre tends to come with classic stories. Though, on the other hand, that is seen long after. Blade Runner and Chinatown are classics of their respective genres but they are also types of film noir but reimagining for a new audience. Classic usually ends up meaning a film that perfectly reflects the time in which it was made often more than its appeal to new audiences. People watching ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE when it came out had a very different reaction to it than decades later. It pretty much flopped.
So if a classic is timeless then why didn’t it have the same appeal at that time? I think it appeals to us today because it reflects a nostalgic appeal of a time that never existed. Pure nostalgia doesn’t take you back to a happier time in your youth but creates an artificial perfect past that you can virtually relive in the media or art. It is the happy childhood you never really had or the “pleasant lie” that tells you that you were happy.
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The controversy a few years ago in reviewing the song these days is that he is coercing her to stay for… you know … and he is insisting she stay despite her initial objections and desire to really go.
At no point in the song does he physically force her or threaten her. She came out to see him willingly and admits the evening has been “very nice”, so she’s not in his house against her will. He’s unfailingly polite, and the weather truly is terrible (she admits this herself) so he’s not trying to con her. He spends less than three minutes in the attempt to convince her. She twice accepts another drink while he’s talking to her, and literally says “I ought to say no, no, no, sir … at least I’m gonna say that I tried”. Every piece of evidence we have tells us that this is an entirely consensual situation. How is he the bad guy here?
I think people are reading in a controversy that isn’t really there, presumably to promote their own political agenda.
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The controversy a few years ago in reviewing the song these days is that he is coercing her to stay for… you know … and he is insisting she stay despite her initial objections and desire to really go.
Or maybe people are reading too much into the lyrics to suit a specific agenda. According to the original version, the woman “dropped in” on her friend/lover, meaning she showed up at his place with a purpose; and her reasons for wanting to leave have to do more with concern about preserving her reputation than about any concern for her personal safety. Her “desire to really go”, as you put it, doesn’t really seem that strong; I think she really wants to stay, but worries about what the neighbors will think. The only iffy line is when she says “Hey, what’s in this drink?”, which some modern-day listeners assume is a suggestion that he slipped Rohypnol (aka “a mickey”) in her glass.
The reality (IMHO) is that this is a cleverly-written duet for two young lovers, highlighting playful banter between two people who are attracted to each other that, because of references to cold weather and snow, has become associated with the Christmas holidays. If it is offensive to some, that’s a pity, but it does not deserve to be banned from radio as some have suggested.
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The reality (IMHO) is that this is a cleverly-written duet for two young lovers, highlighting playful banter between two people who are attracted to each other that, because of references to cold weather and snow, has become associated with the Christmas holidays. If it is offensive to some, that’s a pity, but it does not deserve to be banned from radio as some have suggested.
Yeah, the whole tone of the song is one of playful flirtation and the female part is clearly only faux-protestation.
It’s a nice fun romantic song that you have to really work hard to misinterpret as being about sexual harassment and coercion.
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As for the Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, they had very little experience before and how did they get millions to do the show in the first place? The last season exposed them as being good tracers of the novel (Greg Land) but when they had to do most on their own…
I’ve always felt like this is a bit of a simplistic take. Even when you have strong source material, building and running a hugely complex, costly and high-profile show like this isn’t nothing and they did it for many years successfully.
I know they didn’t have finished books to work from on the final season(s) but I gather they were still provided with notes on the overall direction of the story and outcomes for the characters.
I think that to an extent the problems stemmed from having to suddenly accelerate the story, once they had a fixed endpoint (in terms of number of seasons left) to work towards – so all of the relaxed pacing and gradual character development suddenly had to lurch forward at a gallop, and it felt jarring and sometimes forced.
With several more seasons to finish off the series (which seems to be what they had wanted/expected) I think they could have told essentially the same story much more smoothly.
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Who in your opinion is a good storyteller?
Dennis Lehane.
If you’re not familiar with his novels, you probably know some of the films that have been adopted from his books: MYSTIC RIVER (directed by Clint Eastwood); SHUTTER ISLAND (directed by Martin Scorsese); GONE BABY GONE and LIVE BY NIGHT (both directed by Ben Afgleck).
He’s also written episodes of television shows including THE WIRE, BOARDWALK EMPIRE, and THE OUTSIDER.
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I hear reports of complaints over a diverse cast now, and complaints about the Eternals, but what else is new?
Worth noting that most of the negative reviews of Eternals have been nothing to do with the diversity aspect, more the quality of the story in general. So I wouldn’t fall into the trap of conflating those (as much as Disney might like to try and turn negative reviews into a sort of badge of honour reflecting how brave they are to introduce elements of diversity).
Kermode’s review makes it as clear as possible, although it is quite amusing the lengths that he has to go to in making it explicit that a bad review for Eternals is not automatically a knock against diversity:
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Storytelling evolves based on the trials of the culture. It really is not reasonable to expect the forms of stories from Ancient Greece or Shakespeare or even Victor Hugo or Tolstoy to necessarily appeal to or be right for today. People hail the classics but do they read them? Who goes to see a period accurate version of a Shakespeare play?
instead, these classics are rarely presented as they were written. Instead they are modernized and then people hail the classic when it was the modernization that actually appealed to people.
I a lot of those problems are actually indications of what people want to imagine. A story is simply about a person or people in a specific time and place attempting to achieve a goal, meeting obstacles and then achieving or failing to achieve that goal. There is no specific or “best” way to tell a story as that depends always on the audience and what they need to activate their imagination.
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It is hard to transition for traditional characters. Can you see a new Superman that isn’t Clark/Kal-el or a Batman that isn’t Bruce? Marvel has tried Miles Morales but…
Miles Morales is the high bar to aim for I think. They’ve done very well in carving him out as a new Spider-Man that stands apart from the original without their coexistence diminishing either of them, and they’ve made him a great compelling character in his own right so that he’s beyond accusations of superficial tokenism.
As well as Miles, I think the Kamala Khan version of Ms Marvel is another great addition that again hits all of those points.
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Nice comments on Miles Morales Dave…
Will the audience accept an all new all different Avengers team? Time will tell.
Then the X Men and FF are on their way too. (Interesting how they portrayed Tony as the smartest man and inventor. Makes me wonder how they will handle Reed Richards and even Dr. Doom who developed his own time machine in the comics.)
They could always de age Steve given the quantum experimenting the team in the beginning of Endgame. But that would be a little cheap and anti-climactic.
Like bringing back Jean Grey in the comics. 😂
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Will the audience accept an all new all different Avengers team? Time will tell.
In terms of the movies it feels like they’ve been gradually building up to Young Avengers for a while now. I think that could work and would feel sufficiently different that it isn’t just a bunch of replacement Avengers.
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In terms of the movies it feels like they’ve been gradually building up to Young Avengers for a while now. I think that could work and would feel sufficiently different that it isn’t just a bunch of replacement Avengers.
The MCU film lineup for Phase 4 through 2023 has no mention of a new Avengers movie, so they seem to be distancing themselves from that, instead seeming to focus on the idea of the multiverse, at least with the third Spider-Man, the second Dr. Strange, and the third Ant-Man films. If and when a new Avengers film arrives, the original members will just be memories and Fiege & Company can fill the team with new names and faces — just like they did in the comics.
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I’d like to think that if they’re smart they would call it the New Warriors, but let’s be real, the “Avengers” in Young/New Avengers is worth too much to not use.
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Storylines that take themselves way too seriously As said above…. Say what you will about the original Star Wars trilogy, but in ROTJ, there was some comic relief with Han Solo, some of the characters in Jabba’s palace (that singer and that little creepy thing that sat around Jabba), the Ewoks, and a few aliens. It dealt with the space opera of Luke, his father, his temptation with the Dark Side and the Emperor. Comic relief has its place to take off the tension of the story a little bit.
I think dramatic films need to take their characters seriously. If something randomly stupid happens to a character just to get a laugh, that’s breaking the reality of the setting.
An example would be Gimili the Dwarf in Fellowship of the Rings saying “Nobody tosses a Dwarf” (and its follow-up punchline in The Two Towers). That’s a terrible line, and it’s only in there because we the audience will get the subtext and laugh at it, not because it arises naturally from the character.
*But* the characters in even the most seriously dramatic films don’t need to take themselves seriously. Because humans don’t. We crack jokes and act goofy even (especially) is the most tense moments.
So Tony Stark can crack funny one-liners and put-downs even in the middle of a fight because it’s established that that’s his natural character, and it’s what makes him human and relatable.
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A character that I believe has aged well is Officer Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen) in Robocop (1987). She was always treated as an equal and she saved Robocop twice. She was tough, smart, and caring. She was never objectified and looked down upon because she was a woman.
Something rare to see, especially in the 1980s.
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“James Cameron subscribes to the problematic & entangled Ripley/Sarah Connor movie trope that strong women have to act/look a certain way,” states @JBraverman1 on Twitter. Some fans on Reddit agree to this point. “Notice that the characters they cite as ‘strong female characters’ are basically characters who are strong in spite of being women than strong because they’re women,” says Redditor u/rattatatouille. This scene implies that in order to be significant, women have to act more like men and give up any traits that are coded as feminine.”
I think they have missed the point that Sarah Connor is trying to fight an army of invincible killer cybernetic organisms. To do that, you need to be able to carry enormous guns and be ready to use them. If Redditor u/rattatatouille thinks that means giving up “any traits that are coded as feminine”, I suggest that says more about Redditor u/rattatatouille ‘s idea of what traits men and women “should” have. Is Redditor u/rattatatouille stuck in the Victorian era of gender norms?
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Yes, it seems like rather bizarre logic to get upset with a female character for defying gender conventions because it shows it being a positive thing for her to do.
Really, they’re railing against the idea of those positive traits being coded as masculine in the first place; which is of course exactly what the filmmakers who created characters like Ripley and Sarah Connor were getting at when they had those female characters show that they were equally as capable as males in that arena.
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I tend to agree, it seems to be a weak argument really.
Sarah Connor worked out a lot because she was preparing for an attack on her and her family. I don’t see why that isn’t feminine, you could spin it to argue that female MMA or rugby players aren’t feminine and that sounds more like a 1970s regressive stance than a feminist one.
I’m at a bit of a loss what they would have wanted.
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Well, the main way Sarah Connor fights the machines is by doing something no man could do: give birth to the man who is going to win the war in the future.
And to do that she has to sleep with Kyle to conceive John. So ultimately they shag their way to victory, something I think all viewers can get behind, whatever their gender.
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Watching this Hawkeye show and…
On most SH teams, the character with no superpowers makes up for that lack with something else like being the smartest one.
Batman has his Bat gadgets, fighting skills and this obsession to be prepared to always have the upper hand, Hawkeye has this archery and characterization. I don’t know about Green Arrow… Fill us in.
Black Widow is ultra-fighter. Always the quickest reflexes etc.
Have to make the team interesting and each character relevant.
Ah, yes. The trope known as Badass Normal.
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It’s funny how we consider Iron Man super-powered because of the suit, but we say that Batman has no super powers. And yet Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark are both normal humans. Bruce could have built (or bought) an Iron Man suit if he wanted to. The fact that he didn’t just makes him seem pretty dumb, actually
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It’s funny how we consider Iron Man super-powered because of the suit, but we say that Batman has no super powers. And yet Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark are both normal humans. Bruce could have built (or bought) an Iron Man suit if he wanted to. The fact that he didn’t just makes him seem pretty dumb, actually
True – and I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some alternate Batman story that addresses this – but if Batman is in his own world divorced from the rest of the DCU, it makes some sense as the only examples of superhuman people for him would be the monsters that he fights like Killer Croc or Solomon Grundy. So, superpowers would not be attractive.
However, in the DCU, there are all sorts of super-heroes who obtained their powers from science or magic or technology. Batman would certainly take advantage of that. At the same time, Batman’s war on crime is generally untenable so it makes as much sense that Bruce doesn’t pursue superpowers as it does that he’s the Batman in the first place and thinks that is really helping anyone.
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As for Green Arrow, Oliver Queen… He is the archer, I believe he was very rich but went broke… Black Canary… I only know of him from the early 70’s virtue signaling experimental issues from Denny O’neil where he teamed up with Green Lantern.
As for how he is in the JLA with the heavy hitters like Superman, WW, I don’t know. Please fill us in.
Again, a non-superpowered hero having to make up for the apparent discrepancy of powers with something else… to appeal to the reader.
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As for how he is in the JLA with the heavy hitters like Superman, WW, I don’t know. Please fill us in.
Boxing glove arrows.
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With most super powers, there is a weakness that completely nullifies them, so the narrative reason to have normal humans with multiple skills on a team is they won’t be turned completely useless if someone has Kryptonite or hits Iron Man with an EMP. Again, it would be ridiculous if anyone took it realistically, but it’s fundamental to the genre — like having teenagers as partners.
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With most super powers, there is a weakness that completely nullifies them, so the narrative reason to have normal humans with multiple skills on a team is they won’t be turned completely useless if someone has Kryptonite or hits Iron Man with an EMP. Again, it would be ridiculous if anyone took it realistically, but it’s fundamental to the genre — like having teenagers as partners.
Yes
What was that Elseworlds years ago… “Act of God” or something, when some flash in Earth’s atmosphere wiped out all the superheroes’ powers and only the heroes and villains who were tech based were the strongest ones.
(Green Lantern was so stupid. The instant of the flash, he tried the ring and said out loud “My ring is not working!” Then the villain turned around and said “Is that so?”)
Batman was training the weakened heroes to get in shape. They were nothing without their powers. Wonder Woman and Superman lived together, had a child and the last page, they left him in his room, closed the door and he levitated things in the room.
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What was that Elseworlds years ago… “Act of God” or something, when some flash in Earth’s atmosphere wiped out all the superheroes’ powers and only the heroes and villains who were tech based were the strongest ones. Batman was training the weakened heroes to get in shape. They were nothing without their powers. Wonder Woman and Superman lived together, had a child and the last page, they left him in his room, closed the door and he levitated things in the room.
Also we got several great JLA stories during Grant Morrison’s run where heroes were neutralized in some way and relied on their non-powered heroes (mainly Batman or Green Arrow) — also we got to see the superpowered heroes show how effective they can be without their powers. In the same way Batman should be ablke to give himself superpowers, superheroes also should train when their powers aren’t effective – which is why Batman trains Superman in fighting.
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Something that has always annoyed me the trope of the treasure hunter evading all the ancient traps in order to get to the prize.
Are you telling me no one in the hundreds or thousands of years that the temple/structure has stood has ever attempted to steal the treasure? There should be a trail of skeletons leading up to either the empty altar/pedelstal where the treasure used to be as someone else got it a long time ago OR it is inaccessible due to the “final trap”?
Additionally, assuming no ever tired to get the treasure,, would the traps still even be functional after centuries and millennia? Aridness or humidity, depending on where the treasure is located, would play havoc with with the mechanisms behind the traps. I would imagine that they would have deteriorated and failed over the centuries. I could see the explorer stepping on the trigger and nothing happening or they hear so movement, a “CLUNK” sound, then nothing happens.
It’s one bit that always loses me.
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There has been a backlash of sorts about the Sex and the City revival with articles about how dated the original show really is, the attitudes of the women and how “white” NYC is on the show. The gay men on the show are for comic relief and to be in awe of the fashion styles and taste of the women (nothing is better than gay male validation for a sophisticated white woman), and black men have the women giggling among themselves over how “well endowed” they are, or a fetishizing. Also, how can Carrie afford such a lavish lifestyle of dining out, expensive shoe spending, and such and apartment on a freelancer writer’s salary? NYC is just a playground for them, much like LA was for the 90210 kids and also the Kardashians.
I say all this whitewashing started with those Woody Allen movies about the lives of white and Jewish intellectuals living on NY Upper West Side. No black or Hispanic people at all. Then that portrayal spread to shows like Seinfeld, Friends, the HBO Girls on gentrified Brooklyn and so on.
Now the backlash is also about Emily in Paris and it’s portrayal of Paris and French culture.
Someday, we will get as real a story on a city.
I am now urged to get into the Wire…
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But that’s the plot of every romance novel aimed at adult women too, even today. And going all the way back to Wuthering Heights. These are written by women for women, which gives us a very confusing picture of what women want.
I mean, going by our choices of fiction, boys want to save the world and excel at sports, while girls want to get almost raped and finally end up with their almost-rapist
Taking those novels to represent fiction in general is like reading only The Sun and saying that’s what all newspapers are like.
Our pulp fictions give us traditional, expected patterns including old and for most of us at this point very tired gender stereotypes. There’s still a market for all of this, but it’s become a more limited one these days.
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Our pulp fictions give us traditional, expected patterns including old and for most of us at this point very tired gender stereotypes. There’s still a market for all of this, but it’s become a more limited one these days.
I don’t think they are that tired actually. I still think the majority of the audience whether male or female, white or person of color or gay or straight is spending a lot of money for this. YA romances like Twilight or not so YA books like 50 Shades of Gray are massive sellers and successful movies and they really haven’t changed much from the basic Romance formula at all.
Ironically though, when you go back to the actual “pulp” fiction of the 40’s like James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, they depicted far less sanitized and much more complex views of gender and sex than the stereotypes in the mainstream. In the pulps, they are more archetypes and they still attract a massive audience today even from people who wouldn’t admit it publicly.
In other storytelling tropes, it is interesting to ask what type of hero is your hero.
I have a saying (I like coming up with sayings
) – “Life is not a story, but it is made up of a lot of different stories all muddled together with no clear end or beginning. In each of the stories of your life, you are the hero, but you are also a supporting character in the stories of everyone else in your life. The only person in a story that doesn’t support anyone else is the villain.”In that sense, it is interesting to look at the types of heroes in popular fiction in relation to what they say about leadership.
In corporate America, people – probably people like me
– would come up with a bone-headed saying and it would drive tons of interpersonal training programs and personal development seminars and so on… and then people would realize that it was boneheaded and everyone would forget about it and pretend all that stuff never happened. Gone like the Tulip market in 1600’s Amsterdam.One of those ideas that is still popular today is “Everyone is (or should be) a leader.” It just ends up obscuring or diluting or even completely demolishing what it means to lead and to follow. Naturally, a leader needs followers and, if you want to get anything done, that means you need fewer leaders and more followers. In America, this concept is completely broken and a lot of it has to do with these ideas like “a man’s home is his castle” or “everyone is a leader” and the entirely wrong-headed stereotype of the Alpha personality. It encouraged people to turn into a bunch of angry bullies and elect some of them of them to government office.
In popular fiction, there are many types of heroes – usually, it’s the underdog type of hero that turns out to be someone everyone loves in the end – some form of Cinderella or Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. However, I’m interested in the Discovered King compared to the Man with No Name. King Arthur is a good example of the Discovered King, but this was common with all the Greek heroes like Perseus or Theseus as well. The Man with No Name would be like The Lone Ranger, Maverick (also a trickster hero) and actually most of the superheroes from Batman to Spider-Man.
The Discovered King also is the classic Hero of a Thousand Faces that you see with Luke Skywalker or Neo (aka The One). In this case, he is a normal person that discovers he actually is a very special person with a “great destiny.” He finds himself surrounded, almost by chance, by people that believe in his great destiny, though he himself cannot believe it, and he retains their support even in the face of great defeat until he finally accepts that destiny and redeems their faith in him. Then he earns or is rewarded with a leadership role in the community – usually kingship.
The Man with No Name hero wanders into a town or whatever situation that is suffering some great evil. He has a particular set of skills and a moral code that allows him to free the community from that great evil and he also faces defeat often due to betrayal, but he eventually succeeds because the oppressed people of the town have enough faith to take the risk to help him.
You see this in old and even ancient tales like Heracles’ labors, Oedipus facing the Sphinx or all throughout the Chinese novel The Journey to the West. Caine in KUNG FU is also this sort of hero as were many Western heroes on television since the 50’s. This hero might be rewarded with some leadership position like Sheriff (the kings of the Old West in fiction), but because of the nature of weekly series and monthly comic books, the hero would normally leave (“who was that masked man?”) or hide in an alter ego.
However, the Discovered King is far more about becoming a leader and valuing supporters while the other is more about supporting others even when it is a risk to yourself.
Most interesting in contrast to these is the tragic hero. This is a hero that usually starts in an elevated position and then by the end discovers they are actually the bad guy in the story. The theater critic James Wood (not the actor with a similar name) would point out in his classes that classic tragedies had happy endings and that classic comedies had unhappy endings. In a tragedy, the land is suffering some sort of oppressive condition and the death of the hero alleviates it. In Oedipus, for example, Oedipus is the king of Thebes and the play opens with the city (polis) suffering great plague and drought. Oedipus learns that the gods have cursed the land due to some great taboo broken by one of its citizens and he becomes a detective to find out what was done and who is the culprit. In the end he learns that it was him – he killed his father and married his mother.
It is easy to see that characters like Richard III and Macbeth are villains fairly early on, but even Hamlet is the bad guy in Hamlet. Who does Hamlet support in the play? I mean, by the end, you can ask who hasn’t either died or been devastated beyond repair by Hamlet’s pursuit of vengeance on the words of what may have been a complete hallucination in his own mind?
In the play, Fortinbras is usually left out of consideration, but the unseen character is a conceptual foil to Hamlet. Where Hamlet is over-intellectual and indecisive, Fortinbras is depicted as bold and active and very honorable. The majority of Hamlet’s actual action is based in deception and misperception. He pretends to be insane, accidentally kills Polonius mistaking him for the King, and then runs away with pirates after dooming his old college buddies to the gallows with forged letters from the king.
Most of the ancient Greek heroes had tragic endings as well, and I think much of this may have been born out of a social urge to dismantle the notion of the exceptional heroic person and leader. In Athens at the time and Elizabethan England, new societies were growing and much of the internal conflicts opposing that growth was due to the personalities of the leaders clashing for power. As attractive as these leaders are, I think people also understood that their leadership brought more hardship on the community so the whole concept had to be sacrificed for more harmony in the society.
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The thing is that most of those cities are also responsible for those stereotypes. Many times the location is chosen due to benefits provided by the various institutions in the cities, states and countries and they have input into the locations and their depictions.
Honestly, though, and this applies to storytelling in general, no author has any obligation to be honest or realistic. The creation of fiction and its enjoyment does not take place in the real world – it is imaginary. It’s a mistake to expect anything realistic from a movie or a novel.
The real problem for me is that non-fiction writing and filmmaking are increasingly using fictional techniques to deliver the information. So, I’ll listen to a story on NPR and it’s formatted like a prime time television show. Cold opens, plot twists, red herrings. I’m listening for news, not a goddamn murder mystery. Are you a news reporter or a wanna-be television writer?
Ironically, one of my favorite fiction writers, Vonnegut, used journalistic principles he learned writing stories for newspapers and magazines when he started writing fiction.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
I think the fact that news stories are so pseudo-fictional in their approaches and that there is this mistaken idea that fiction should be realistic has really blurred the line between work that should be informative and work that is intended only for the imagination.
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Antagonists aren’t always the villain. Who’s the antagonist of Richard III or Macbeth? Who’s the villain in The Iliad, Achilles or Hector? Is Odysseus even the “hero” of The Odyssey?
The question is often decided on who the person supports. Indiana Jones is kinda a bad guy in his movies until he chooses to put someone else’s needs over his obsession to obtain some ancient piece of junk. In every movie, he causes all sorts of trouble for people to get something and then sacrifices that thing to save the people he’s put in danger.
Protagonists can be villainous and antagonists can be heroic.
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That’s a good point. Indiana Jones is a bad guy really. Except in the prequel TEMPLE OF DOOM where he obviously has a change of heart.
The more I think about Raiders, the worse it gets. I mean, plenty have people have pointed out that if Jones had stayed home, Belloq would have gotten the Ark and opened it in Berlin for Hitler thus preventing WW2 and the Holocaust.
However, there are plenty of moments where you just think “what was the plan there?” Like when the Nazis are carrying the Ark through the desert and Jones pops up on a rock with a bazooka in hand. There’s like a battalion of Waffen SS there and this is when and where he makes his move? And exactly how did Jones want this scene to play out? What did he expect to happen?
I mean let’s say they actually gave him the ark. Was he planning to carry it out of the desert on his back?
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The more I think about Raiders, the worse it gets. I mean, plenty have people have pointed out that if Jones had stayed home, Belloq would have gotten the Ark and opened it in Berlin for Hitler thus preventing WW2 and the Holocaust.
I don’t know who popularised this theory of Indy’s actions in Raiders not mattering, but I always roll my eyes whenever I hear it.
Essentially it boils down to the fact that the nazis aren’t ultimately killed/stopped by Indy but by opening the Ark.
But if Indy hadn’t been involved there would have been loads of differences in the outcomes of the story. Marion likely would have been killed by the nazis at her bar. The nazis would have likely taken the headpiece and so discovered the ark earlier. The US government wouldn’t have got their hands on the ark in the end.
Oh, and perhaps most important, the movie wouldn’t have been anywhere near as entertaining.
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Well, yeah, but from the point of view of the German soldiers, this is horror movie. These are mostly low level guys missing their families in the middle of a hot desert on some mission to find and transport a magic box if they even know why they are there.
Then, out of nowhere, they start to get picked off one by one by this dangerously homicidal cockroach of an American archeologist. I mean there is that scene where Indy gets off the U-boat that he somehow survived traveling underwater for what seemed to be hours or even days. He attacks a soldier to steal his uniform but it’s too small. Another soldier catches him, but doesn’t realize he’s the crazy American so Jones attacks him and steals his uniform because it’s a better fit.
It’s played for laughs but you know he had to kill both those guys and dump their bodies in the water or they’d just warn everyone when they woke up.
Then at the end they all get killed by monsters in the magic box. And there is a whole movie’s worth of material cut out for Indy and Marion getting the Ark from the middle of the desert to Washington DC.
It’s a weird story when you think about it.
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Well yeah, it’s the Luke-kills-thousands-when-he-blows-up-the-death-star argument isn’t it.
These stories depend greatly on our point of view.
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Well yeah, it’s the Luke-kills-thousands-when-he-blows-up-the-death-star argument isn’t it.
These stories depend greatly on our point of view.
A certain point of view?
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Well “maybe the nazis were just misunderstood innocents” is certainly an interesting angle.
It is one of the parts of the movie that is a little vague. Except for the Gestapo agents and Major, the German soldiers were just soldiers no different from British or French or American and they hadn’t even invaded Poland at the time. They wouldn’t have been involved in the holocaust either in 1936, so they are just there on a mission as essentially security guards. It’s not that they were misunderstood – the soldiers that Jones kills in the movie are just doing their job – they aren’t a group of malevolent bad guys, their leaders are. However, if stealing ancient artifacts from their rightful places is crime worth dying for, then Jones is just as guilty or even moreso than they are.
They probably don’t even know what the mission is — not just because it would be top secret, but because for most of the German commanders, it would be so bizarre and ridiculous that it would be too embarrassing. Sending a whole battalion of soldiers on a mission led by a Frenchman to find an ancient Jewish artifact? That’s about the least Third Reich-ish thing they could possibly be doing. Certainly, I doubt they expected to be doing much killing for this.
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So…
Would you also classify Ozymandius as a villain?
Yes, but the reason he’s such a great villain is that he makes us re-examine our concept of what a villain is, and we’re forced to consider how complex and ambiguous the moral decisions of real life can be, and how the concept of villainy applies in that situation. So he’s very unlike the classic moustache-twirling serial villains that he mocks in his dialogue.
His actions – murdering millions of innocents – are horrific to us, but his argument is that the ends justify the means. That by killing those people he’s saving many more, and so his actions are heroic and laudable. And from a certain point of view he’s right. It’s not dissimilar to the Trolley Problem ethical question that has been popularised in recent years.
In comparison, Rorschach’s absolute, black-and-white vision of morality seems naive and simplistic and ill-fitted to real-life problems.
So it’s part of Watchmen commenting on how the typical approach of superhero comics to morality doesn’t really help much with actual, real-life moral and ethical dilemmas.
What do you think, Al? Is Ozy a villain?
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Veidt’s the obvious antagonist but he’s only the villain in the original comic book (it was a comic book dammit! Graphic novel is too pretentious).
in the movie, you do not get to know any of the people in New York who will be wiped out. In the comic you do.
So the movie comes off much more in line with Veidt’s obvious “Atlas Shrugged” point of view – Alan Moore directly referenced Ayn Rand when describing the tone of Watchmen and he was certainly influenced by the novel Super-Folks which also criticized the popular objectivist tone of American culture in the late 70’s and 80’s.
if you don’t see or know any of the people killed in New York then you can go along with the idea that they died so millions of others could live. That Veidt and the others are “superior” people that not only have the right but obligation to make these decisions.
And Snyder, maybe even his biggest supporter Christopher Nolan are certainly in that camp too.
but in the comic, you know these people Veidt is sacrificing. He’s exempting himself from this act but his life is no more valuable than theirs so his choice is contrasted against their lives and you see the vanity and futility of his actions. He’s sacrificing millions of lives he doesn’t know or care about for millions of other lives he doesn’t know or care about. So in the end he’s just doing it for himself.
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in the movie, you do not get to know any of the people in New York who will be wiped out. In the comic you do
Yeah, that’s a good point and it does make a difference to our perspective.
In the original DKR, I always liked the little vignettes we get woven through the story about regular Gothamites. The way you can see how Batman’s actions are filtering through and having an effect on the city and its population more widely. It was something I felt was missing from the sequels.
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in the movie, you do not get to know any of the people in New York who will be wiped out. In the comic you do.
Well, you do if you watch the director’s cut =P
Also, I wouldn’t say he’s a “villain”, even in the CB, mostly because Moore made a point of stripping away the notions of “hero” and “villain” from the characters, they’re all a bunch of REALLY flawed people (at various degrees of course), and that goes for pretty much every character in the CB, even Dr Manhattan displays a lot of very human flaws despite his claims to the contrary.
But either way, I’m not so sure you need to ‘get to know’ anyone to understand the gravity of his actions (and more so in the movie where Adrian kills A LOT more people than in the CB) or even to understand that yes, in the end he’s doing it out of a sense of self-importance, because in the end none of those things change the moral quandry the story poses.
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The way you can see how Batman’s actions are filtering through and having an effect on the city and its population more widely.
Trickle-down batconomics.
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in the movie, you do not get to know any of the people in New York who will be wiped out. In the comic you do.
Well, you do if you watch the director’s cut =P
Also, I wouldn’t say he’s a “villain”, even in the CB, mostly because Moore made a point of stripping away the notions of “hero” and “villain” from the characters, they’re all a bunch of REALLY flawed people (at various degrees of course), and that goes for pretty much every character in the CB, even Dr Manhattan displays a lot of very human flaws despite his claims to the contrary.
But either way, I’m not so sure you need to ‘get to know’ anyone to understand the gravity of his actions (and more so in the movie where Adrian kills A LOT more people than in the CB) or even to understand that yes, in the end he’s doing it out of a sense of self-importance, because in the end none of those things change the moral quandry the story poses.
<span style=”caret-color: #222222; color: #222222; font-family: Raleway, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;”> But either way, I’m not so sure you need to ‘get to know’ anyone to understand the gravity of his actions (and more so in the movie where Adrian kills A LOT more people than in the CB) or even to understand that yes, in the end he’s doing it out of a sense of self-importance, because in the end none of those things change the moral quandry the story poses.</span>
I think it should. It goes back to the ethical thought experiment where a railroad manager has a choice to save a passenger train by transferring it from a broken track to a safe one, but there is a person on the safe track who would die.
So, it’s saving a train load of people vs one death. Difficult but simple. Who wouldn’t choose the train over the single person?
Now, same situation but one change. The one person is your child.
it makes a difference when you know the people getting sacrificed. It affect the story too.
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2) for us the audience, it’s just a fiction story, so we don’t really give a fuck about any of the characters.
You don’t ever get attached to characters in a story?
Not in a way I’d get attached to real people, but in this case I’m talking about the analogy Johnny proposed.
But at any rate, I gotta be honest, I didn’t get attached to any of the people of New York in Watchmen, except the main characters, and yes, even in the CB… they’re all just background characters, I don’t really care for the newspaper guy, for the kid, or for the psychiatrist, and I didn’t feel particularly attached to them when they got blown to smithereens… maybe you guys did?
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For me, the stories of the regular people was central to the essential theme that the “heroes” did more harm than good by reducing the actual unpredictable nature of the human factor. In large part, the heroes, especially Veidt and Manhattan, were responsible for the static crisis of the world. Also, Veidt is directly responsible for the immediate nuclear crisis.
Meanwhile, in New York we saw people coming together to help each other in trouble right before they die. It casts Veidt’s assumptions in a much more villainous light. We don’t know for sure what would happen as people are unpredictable.
For me, it was never really a question that Veidt was evil. Of course he was in the story. And the only one saying that we shouldn’t apply ideas of good and evil in the world was Veidt. Of course, he would say that.
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I disagree here. For me, the characters on the street like Bernard and Bernie at the newsstand are really important to make you feel the impact of that big development at the end of issue #11.
Without that you don’t get that grounded, street-level perspective on what’s happening, and you’d be seeing things more from Ozy’s perspective – the numbers rather than the people.
But we all react differently to this stuff, and maybe for some readers that aspect just doesn’t matter.
But I don’t think it’s a cheap trick for a writer to make us care about their characters. I think it’s one of the fundamental reasons you engage with a story.
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I’m siding with Dave on this topic. As far back as the ’70s, when Marv Wolfman was writing Marvel’s TOMB OF DRACULA, he would introduce a bit character, give us his/her name and a bit of their backstory, and let us get to know them. Then, when Dracula attacked them, we got the feeling he was killing a “real” person rather than just a nameless, faceless object. It made the killing feel more personal because we had a connection of sorts to the character.
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I think we’re talking about two different things though… I agree that there is a lot of narrative value in having the everyman perspective in a story, sure… but that’s not the same thing as having an “emotional attachement” to them.
Add to that the fact that, if we’re being honest, Bernard and Bernie’s functions in the book aren’t so much of importance to the plot in that sense, but rather that they’re the vehicle for the sub-story of the book, or put it in a less confusing way, what’s important about them is that they provide the glue for the sections of the Black Freighter, which is the actual important part of the book.
Same goes for the psychiatrist, who is the only other notable civilian in the book, because his funtion in the book is tied to Rorshach’s plot and narrative. And like David kinda said, I don’t even think Moore intended them to have an emotional ressonance with the readers.
I don’t think that knowing who Bernard, Bernie & the psych are and knowing that they get vaporized has any emotional impact on the story, much like knowing who the guy in the newspaper is and knowing that he survived… sure, they provide a valuable enough perspective from the civilian side of things, but Watchmen isn’t really about the civilians of that world or even their perspective.
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