One of the topics that came up at Illogicon was working with characters from cultures not our own. Different concepts of good, evil, honor, bad behavior—and even if they freak you out, you have to be true to your characters’ views. Particularly if it’s a historical setting. Natania Barron pointed out that the Roman protagonist in one of the things she’s working on has by our standards some really creepy attitudes, but they’re what you get when you’re in Rome (do you notice me avoiding the obvious joke?).
The remarkable thing is, you don’t even have to go back that far to get really different viewpoints. The protagonist of my 1950s-set Not In Our Stars But In Ourselves, for instance, is horrified to be framed for murder. He’s a lot more horrified that the woman he supposedly killed was (also supposedly) his black lover. If his parents should see that, if they thought he’d done that … for L.G. Walker, the possibility of people thinking he’s crossed the color line is horrifying.
I came across another example in New Worlds of Fantasy, an excellent anthology from the 1960s edited by Terry Carr. Eschewing epic and adventure fantasy, it includes Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Immortal,” Ray Russell’s tale of a composer’s pact with Satan (“Comet Wine”), and J.G. Ballard’s excellent “The Lost Leonardo” (a Wandering Jew story) though probably the best known tale today is Peter Beagle’s “Come Lady Death.”
And then there’s “Nackles,” a short story written pseudonymously by crime writer Donald Westlake (Harlan Ellison would later rework it into a Western Union script for one of the Twilight Zone revivals, but it never aired).
The premise of the story: Santa Claus has all the attributes of godhood, such as being everywhere at once (at least on Christmas Eve), judging our sins, answering children’s prayers and millions of devout believers. And most gods have some sort of evil counterpart. So when the central character starts telling his kids about Nackles, the anti-Santa who devours naughty children on Christmas Eve—and then tells other kids he meets, and encourages other parents to tell their kids—the belief that creates Santa eventually manifests a real Nackles as his player on the other side who carries of the drunk as the meanest, least-good person around (or so it’s implied—Westlake left the ending a little ambiguous).
The thing about “Nackles” is, the protagonist is a drunken, physically and verbally abusive man and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Okay, the narrator (his brother-in-law) gets him to stop hitting his wife by beating him up (I do not believe this works in real life), but there’s no suggestion of calling the cops or getting social services involved, let alone any consideration of getting divorced or moving out. Which is perfectly true to the time: Divorce was hard to get and spousal/child abuse really wasn’t taken seriously (particularly not when you’ve got a respectable middle-class taxpayer involved). Other than slapping the guy around, all the narrator can say is that he shouldn’t have let his sister marry the guy (which makes an assumption about the sister’s standing in itself). It’s a good plot and well written but it’s incredibly distracting to see a contemporary fantasy that feels so … un-contemporary.
Tag Archives: Twilight Zone
A world unlike our own (sort of another Illogicon post)
Writing eucatastrophe
JRR Tolkien defined a eucatastrophe as the miraculous happy ending he thought fantasy required—“a sudden and miraculous grace, never counted on to recur.” A triumph that makes the heart catch in the throat, that gains power not because it denies defeat and despair, but because it comes in spite of them.
This is tricky to write (I’d also argue it isn’t essential to fantasy, but that’s another topic). If you don’t set it up in advance, it comes off as deus ex machina. If you do set it off in advance, readers may see it coming. Watching the first season of The Twilight Zone on Netflix last week (I’ve been streaming it, episode by episode), I found two textbook examples of how to do it—and how to not do it.
In Mr. Denton on Doomsday, Dan Duryea plans a drunken ex-gunfighter, a man who crawled into a bottle after killing too many people who tried to make a name for themselves by out-shooting him. As local bully Martin Landau knocks him to the ground, a shabby old peddler pulls up into town … and a gun materializes by Duryea’s side. His hand falls on the gun, he gets to his feet and the gun fires itself, blasting Landau’s gun out of his hand (from the point of view of the characters, it looks like Duryea snatched up a gun and recovered his fast-draw skills). He regains his self-respect, stops drinking—and then learns Doug McClure is riding into town to challenge him. It’s all going to happen again.
The peddler, Professor Fate, offers a solution: A potion that will make Duryea the fastest gun alive for just ten seconds after he drinks—enough to guarantee a win. Desperate, Duryea accepts; McClure rides into town, Duryea down the vial—and sees McClure doing the same. Next second, both men (or rather, their guns) shoot, both crippling each other’s hands: Usable for everyday stuff, but they’ll never have the motor skills for a fast draw. Duryea gets to hang up his guns, and so does McClure.
It works because even though it’s obvious Fate is up to something—the ending’s no deus ex machina—it’s never clear what (I expected a much nastier twist). And also because Duryea plays a good guy in a no-win situation, someone who needs a eucatastrophe.
Not so Ida Lupino in the next episode, The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine. A Hollywood star in the 1930s, she’s become a recluse, sitting in her mansion, watching her old movies (back when you had to rent 16-mm copies and run them on a home projector), dreaming of her glory years a quarter-century gone (the resemblance to Sunset Boulevard is not coincidental, I’m sure). Unable to deal with growing old and no longer getting great romantic leads (supporting parts are not for her) she finally walks into the movie screen by the power of her longing, there to meet all her old co-stars (or rather the characters they played) and dwell in glamor, unaging, ever more.
It’s a good concept: Robert Bloch did well with it in The Movie People. And it fits Rod Serling’s fondness for stories of people recovering their lost past. But it doesn’t work. Partly because it comes out of the blue—until we see Lupino onscreen at the end, it’s a straight drama.
And partly it’s because I can’t see any reasons she gets a eucatastrophe. In other Serling stories in this vein, the characters are regaining a lost love (Static), tragically losing everything (Night Gallery: They’re Tearing Down Tim Reilly’s Bar) or suffering the hell of sitting around a nursing home waiting for death (Kick the Can). Lupino’s problem is simply that she doesn’t like being in her fifties. When her former romantic lead shows up—now a fiftysomething manager of a supermarket chain—she throws him out because he’s not the heartthrob she remembers.
She’s not miserable because her life sucks. Her life sucks because she’s miserable. Like the brooding protagonist of another episode, The Trouble With Templeton, she needs a eucatastrophe that adjusts her attitude, not her life.
And that’s how to make a eucatastrophe ending fail.
The idiot plot
As you probably know, an idiot plot is defined as one which only works because the characters act like idiots. Knowing there’s a maniac loose in the building, they decide to go off alone. Or the woman sees her boyfriend with a beautiful woman, assumes that it must be his wife and never thinks to ask him or she’d learn it’s his sister/ward/aunt (a plot so hackneyed, Jane Austen joked about it back in the early 1800s).
There are, however, times when having characters act like idiots will actually work.
•They are idiots. Mystery novelist John Westermann (author of Exit Wounds, among other things) observed in an article for Writer’s Digest that having a stupid, incompetent lead can be a gift: If they screw up an investigation or miss a vital clue, hey, they’re morons——what do you expect?
•They can’t do the smart thing. In Twilight Zone: Printer’s Devil, for instance, Burgess Meredith as a sinister typesetter suggests that if the protagonist wants his services, he should sign a contract giving up his soul. The protagonist understandably balks, so Meredith starts needling: Imagine a modern sophisticated man like you actually thinking I’m the devil, and that I actually buy and sell souls! You’re that credulous? The protagonist can’t admit this, so inevitably, he signs …
•They act like idiots for character reasons.
Take Lt. Worf on Star Trek. If the sensible thing to do happens to be dishonorable, he’s going to be stupid, because he loves honor more than anything.
Or consider Marvel’s Fantastic Five miniseries of a few years ago (set in their alt.world M2 universe). By the last issue, Doom has conquered the world with a robot army, trapped the Fantastic Five——but then Reed tells him that if they don’t settle their long feud man to man, Doom will always have to wonder if Reed wasn’t his superior.
Doom spends a couple of panels muttering that he’d have to be insane to risk everything he’s won by going one-on-one with Reed … but Doom has an ego the size of Mt. Rushmore and deep down, he fears Reed is his superior. So while it’s completely stupid to play Reed’s game, it’s completely in character.
I tried something of the same in my psi steampunk novel Questionable Minds. The book establishes early on that my protagonist, Simon, has some anger issues concerning his wife’s death. So it’s entirely plausible (I hope) that when the villain announces he has Simon’s daughter prisoner and she’ll die if Simon crosses him, Simon’s response is to go berserk and try to kill the guy, without even thinking about the girl’s fate.
Most idiot plots, of course, are just stupid. But once in a while, idiocy makes sense.
Filed under Writing
Compromise
Ever see The Fountainhead?
The Ayn Rand-scripted adaptation of her novel (which I haven’t read, so I’ll focus on the movie) focuses on Howard Roark (Gary Cooper), a brilliant architect outraged that his customers won’t build his designs exactly the way he designs them but instead want—changes. He grimly soldiers on, refusing to compromise, and finally attains success as people realize his genius and he attains success without having to compromise or change his designs one iota.
With that outlook, Ayn Rand must have been a nightmare to edit … but I digress. The point is, as a creative person, I have mixed thoughts about this.
On the one hand, I can think of many ways the creative people who didn’t bend have benefited us. The art of the past 150 years would have been much poorer if the French artist Manet had stuck to subjects that the public and the tastemeisters approved of, instead of then-edgy shots of modern life such as “Olympia” (check out the book The Judgment of Paris for details). If Maya Lin had backed off from the shitstorm of hostility her Vietnam memorial triggered and compromised on something more conventionally memorialish, we’d be the losers. Sticking to their vision in the face of great odds produced greatness.
On the other hand, compromise isn’t the death of art. Almost all the great motion pictures of the 1930s and 1940s were compromised, in a sense: The studios told the directors what movies to work on, what stars they’d be using, assigned the writers; the writers could create a great script, then find it rewritten for one reason or another. Yet somehow greatness did result, repeatedly. The same compromises take place in theater and television in only slightly different ways (check out The Twilight Zone Companion for how much Rod Serling had to deal with).
Plus a great many talented artists-Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Dickens—wrote with money in mind at least as much as having their “vision” put into print (as TYG sometimes points out, Dickens got paid by the word, hence the length of his books).
I guess the long and short of it is, purity is commendable, but as a friend of mine says, if it takes a compromise to get your work before the public, that doesn’t condemn you to mediocrity (he specifically cites Ariadne Auf Naxos, a Strauss opera in which a clown troop and an opera company are forced to merge their performances to fit into a limited time slot).
Peter David, for example, started off in comic-books, later added Star Trek spin-off novels to his repertoire. Both those represent a compromise of sort—when you work with corporate-owned properties, you can’t do whatever you wish—but that didn’t stop him becoming a successful fantasy novelist as well. Successful fantasy and SF writers including Theodore Sturgeon, David Gerrold and Larry Niven have put time in writing TV scripts, which again, includes compromise (check out Harlan Ellison’s account of the classic Trek episode City on the Edge of Forever for how nutty it can get). So far as I know, none of them insisted every word be said exactly as they wrote it, and not even Ellison went around blowing up Star Trek sets (in contrast to Roark, who blows up one project when a friend welches on his promise to build it exactly as Roark designed it).
Certainly compromising can go south. If the money’s good, the temptation to stick with the low-hanging fruit rather than pursue your personal vision is tempting—not that I’d know personally, but I’ve read enough accounts to accept that it happens. And the market can be a lot more supportive of people who keep working within a limited range rather than someone who hares off after something completely new.
On the other hand, purity can go south too. It’s a short step to the idea that being successful proves you’re a sell-out (yes, I have seen that argument made). One of H.P.Lovecraft’s disastrous beliefs (from the point of view of professional success) was that writing with an eye to selling was degrading; you should write to please yourself, then if someone buys it, that’s just gravy. To think about the market meant lowering yourself and pandering to the common herd. Small wonder HPL didn’t become a success until he was dead.
And the illusion that your work is genius and that tampering with it is like putting charcoal on the Mona Lisa is seductive. Take the film Black Hunter, White Heart: The thinly fictionalized story of making The African Queen by the screenwriter came off as “How, I, the sensitive artist, struggled to save my beautiful script from a crass director.” Maybe it’s true, but the self-indulgent score settling annoyed the hell out of me.
Sometimes editing is good. Sometimes even talented visionary people need to make changes (The Great Gatsby underwent a lot of changes under the guidance of legendary editor Maxwell Perkins).
Sometimes it’s just a matter of money. Mystery writer Lawrence Block told a story in one of his writing-advice columns about an editor who wanted a minor scene, in which a woman goes to bed cuddling her pet python, rewritten (having a woman in bed with an animal was apparently a big no-no). Block said since he was being paid in the four-figure range, and it wasn’t essential to the plot, he did it. And apparently didn’t blow up the publisher’s office.
All things being equal, I’d prefer not to compromise. But let’s face it, how often are all things equal?
