On Saving the World

Miniature re-creation of the Temple of Artemis
image courtesy of wikipedia

“Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”  

-The Talmud

Who was Herostratus?  

According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, he's the man who, on July 21, 356 BC, burned down one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, namely the ancient Greek Temple of Artemis, at Ephesus, in what is now Turkey.  He did it because the temple was famous, and by burning it down he wanted to become famous, too.

After he burned the temple, and openly took credit for it in order to acquire his desired notoriety, not only was he put to death, but the Ephesians in charge ordered anyone who even spoke his name to be put to death as well.  Apparently, again according to the wikipedia, the only reason we know even his name, is because an ancient historian called Theopompus, who was alive at the time the temple was burned and who was described by a contemporary scholar as "A man who wrote slander, not history," noted it in his account of the temple's destruction in his Hellenics.

Of course, because of this I can find little else known solidly about the man without further research.  To a certain extent I understand and sympathize with the punishment; unless some form of deterrent is found, what's to keep others from following his example?  But I’m still curious about the guy, and why he really did what he did.  What was his profession?  Was he another architect and was jealous?  I doubt this somehow.  Did he have a family?  This I don’t know, it could cut either way.  Was he successful in any other aspect of his life?  On the one hand, I’m irked that the guy destroyed something to be famous, and to a certain extent it worked.  I don’t really want to give the guy what he wants, but I can’t help feeling curious.

I was going to say I’m neutral about this sort of thing, but when I started to write about a more recent example of something famous getting destroyed because the person who destroyed it wanted to be famous, I realized, sort of to my surprise, that I didn’t want to write about that guy, or what he did, because I feel he shouldn’t get what he wanted by doing what he did.  It’s a little infuriating to be partial about this, I’m not usually this way.

The real question I wonder about is, does banning the mention of his name really work?  I notice that the article about Herostratus isn't flagged for deletion by the wikipedia editors; he’s part of the history of the Temple of Artemis.  It had been destroyed once before Herostratus came along actually, by flood, a few centuries earlier.  And it was rebuilt after Herostratus destroyed it, and later this third version was destroyed again, by the Goths, or someone, it's a little hazy.  All we have now are a few foundation stones and written records to suggest that it ever really existed at all.

On one hand, I don’t think that fame is fame, no matter what kind.  What you’re famous for matters I think; Herostratus may have gone out in a blaze of glory, but what if he hadn’t been put to death?  What if instead they had arranged for him to be followed around by a small group of armed men and one man with a loud speaking voice, so that every time he entered a place or passed by in public, the loudspoken man could pronounce loudly, “This man is Herostratus, he burned the Temple of Artemis, because he could not be famous for anything else,” or something like that.  He might have enjoyed it at first, but give it a few decades to sink in.  Let the words form bitterly on his tongue for the thousandth time, just before they're shouted out by his permanent paid-for chaperones.

Or maybe he didn’t have a few decades left when he did the deed.  Was he old, or terminally ill, when this happened?  We’ll never know.

So Herostratus is part of the story of the temple, just like he wanted.  You can deny him his noteriety for this if you want, but in the end, when time has made the tragedy impersonal, his anonymity will only make him a more curious figure.  I think of this as a sort of Paradox of sorts, you could call it the Paradox of Herostratus, if you don’t mind giving him more fame for it, but that's another post.

The reason I was thinking about Herostratus has to do with superheroes.  I was thinking about the question What Makes A Superhero Story a Superhero Story, in connection with an earlier post about the different kinds of trouble that happen in stories.  It’s my assertion that without some kind of trouble, you can’t have a story, or at least not a very good one.  The problem to be solved is basically in my mind another way to look at the plot, what gives the reader a reason to keep listening/reading.  If I remember right, in that earlier post I said that more or less the simplest kind of trouble you can have in a story is to have to Save the World.

I think Saving the World is the simplest kind of storytelling trouble because it’s the easiest to understand, and the easiest for the audience to sympathize with.  To paraphrase the eloquent saying of Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy, we can all get behind wanting to save the planet Earth, because each and everyone of us is “one of the idiots who lives in it!”

He's just so wise.
image courtesy of imdb.com

Most often Superhero movies, and movies in general I think in the last twenty years or so, have been mostly about saving the Entire World, usually either the planet Earth or at least human civilization, from either utter destruction (typically), total enslavement (sometimes), or some other thing that would change the world until we no longer recognized it (almost always).

Whether we outlaw their names or not, I think there will probably always be another Herostratus.  I don’t really understand the appeal in wrecking something great, because I think there are different kinds of fame, but I think that the appeal will always be there for somebody, as long as there are things famous enough that destroying them will get you to be famous, too.  And I think there’s a lot in common between what makes a Herostratus want to burn down a temple and what makes a storyteller want to put The Whole World at risk in their story.  

I’m not trying to be derogatory, and I have myself written, at great length, a ridiculous number of stories and story ideas involving the World being in jeopardy and being saved.  I just think that “The Whole World” is a shortcut, the way that burning a famous temple is a shortcut.  To get to the point, I’m most interested in how these stories come to a head, how the trouble is actually avoided, how the World is actually Saved.  When a story like this is in print, what are the descriptions and actions we’re given?  When it’s in a movie, what are the images?  

I find that it’s very rarely a matter of depicting more than a handful of real people, the heroes and villains included, being put in actual danger.  Almost always, the only characters are the heroes and villains, everyone else is a bystander.  Which is sort of the way it has to be, it’s the way we’re trained to interpret the information, if the people actually being put in jeopardy by the World’s imminent destruction were to take on dimensions and characters of their own during the Final Showdown, we’d be distracted by their sudden and otherwise inexplicable introduction into the action.  Storytelling needs some sort of understood continuity in the stream of information being presented if it’s going to function, unless you’re James Joyce, I guess.

Even in my favorite movies that depict the heroes Saving the World, the saving the world part isn’t the real reason why the movie is so good.  In Ghostbusters and The Avengers, the threat to the world and the characters feels real, and important, but it isn’t the first thing we care about.  The first thing we care about is how much fun the heroes are having while at work.  

Sure, he's dangerous, but firstly he's a great excuse for manly friendship and jokes.
image courtesy of imdb.com

These are stories that would arguably be almost as good if The Whole World weren’t at stake, but I suppose the conceit doesn’t at all hurt the mood.

My point is, when The Whole World is in danger in a story, it’s usually not really The Whole World, it’s usually New York City, or Los Angeles, or Tokyo, or Neo-Tokyo, or a small research camp deep in the  Antarctic night, and the only reason we think the Whole World is in danger is because of an inferred indirect effect caused by the villain winning; in other words, because the characters say so.  There are obvious exceptions to this rule, like Armageddon, but even here it’s the characters who’ve been talking all along that get the most attention, and the only real nod to The World is that the things getting blown up by the asteroids (spoiler alert) are not in the United States.

So the question becomes, how do storytellers define “The World?”

Last week, as a stopgap/prelude to this post, I posted a pair of pictures.  I think that both embody a way of looking at the world in ways that are more interesting than as a shortcut to making an uninteresting story more interesting, and making an unthreatening threat seem more dangerous.

The first is a famous photo of the Earth itself, the planet I mean, taken at the request of Carl Sagan by Voyager I in 1990, thirteen years into the probe’s flight, when it was about forty times as distant from Earth as the Earth is from the sun.  When I look at it, I think of a passage from C.S. Lewis’ first interplanetary novel, Out of the Silent Planet:

"Pale Blue Dot"Photo by Voyager 1
image courtesy of wikipedia

'"She is still well above the southern horizon." It directed his attention to something like a small window. Whatever it was, it did not appear to work like an earthly telescopes Ransom thought; though an attempt, made next day, to explain the principles of the telescope to the sorn threw grave doubts on his own ability to discern the difference. He leaned forward with his elbows on the sill of the aperture and looked. He saw perfect blackness and, floating in the centre of it, seemingly an arm's length away, a bright disk about the size of a half-crown. Most of its surface was featureless, shining silver; towards the bottom markings appeared, and below them a white cap, just as he had seen the polar caps in astronomical photographs of Mars. He wondered for a moment if it was Mars he was looking at; then, as his eyes took in the markings better, he recognized what they were - Northern Europe and a piece of North America. They were upside down with the North Pole at the bottom of the picture and this somehow shocked him. But it was Earth he was seeing - even, perhaps, England, though the picture shook a little and his eyes were quickly getting tired, and he could not be certain that he was not imagining it.  It was all there in that little disk - London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of an empty house near Sterk.

"Yes," he said dully to the sorn. "That is my world." It was the bleakest moment in all his travels.'

I think the image mostly speaks for itself: the world, our whole place, from a very large number of very real viewpoints, is a very small, limited, and vulnerable place.  I move my thumb, like Tom Hanks, it disappears and reappears again.  Thinking about this old stone globe this way makes it seem a little silly to write stories where it’s In Danger, because it feels like it’s in danger all the time, we’re just too close to it to know it.

The other image is a woodcut by M.C. Escher, made in 1959, called Circle Limit III.  It reminds me of one of my favorite interpretations of the Save the World story, which I’ll get to in the a minute.

Circle Limit III M.C. Escher

image courtesy of wikiart.org

The reason I like thinking of this image if I’m thinking about Saving the World is: it’s never as simple as you think it is.  We think about the world as a Whole, when really there is nothing we have within the clear reach of language that is more clearly better understood as being composed of different parts.  If you consider anything closely and carefully enough, you can see that it’s not a single thing at all, but has an almost unlimited number of integral parts making it what it is.

Everything is this way, the Whole World and everything in it included.  The longer you look, the more you see.  The only exception I’ve read about is that superstrings could be a kind of absolute, because if anything’s smaller than them, it simply can not, by the current definitions of physics, be measured.  But I’m not holding my breath.

To bring this all to earth and tie things off, I argue that if you're telling a story, you don't need to put the whole world at risk to get your audience's attention.  I think it's time we try to move past the Saving the World storyline, if we're ever able to.  Just one character, if we care about them and want to see them survive, can mean more to the audience than the whole fictional, say-so threatened offscreen planet.  

It's nice to have the largest stage possible for a story, and it's easy to understand something famous because its premise, the planet Earth, was famous to begin with, but it's not necessary to get a good story going, and stories without easy shortcuts, that have characters and struggles that matter to us for good reasons, are often the more rewarding.

But there will always be another Herostratus, because unoriginality springs up without source.  So there will always be Saving the World stories, and we can at least take comfort that talented storytellers can still find ways to make them interesting.  Those ways probably will involve sympathetic characters, and not the Whole World, but who's counting.

My favorite interpretation of the Save the World story is actually a mistake.  The first time I watched The Matrix, or at least one of the first times, I watched it with my Mom.  If you’ve seen the movie, read on, if you haven’t, why are you reading this, you have more important things to do with your day.  The very last sequence of the movie features the hero talking to an unknown person on the phone.  He delivers a short speech to them before (spoiler alert) demonstrating his newly acquired abilities by flying into the air, up past the camera and out of sight.  Like I said, his speech, though effective, is a short one, and being young at the time I managed to misinterpret it.  My first thought was that Neo wasn’t talking to the Agents and the other machines at the end of the movie, he was talking to some native resident of the Matrix who wasn’t freed yet.

And because I thought it was odd that the hero was wasting time on the phone, instead of using his superpowers to save all the people all at once, I asked my Mom why Neo was bothering to cold-call people one at a time.  Whether she’d misunderstood or not, I don’t know, but she understood my question, and said, “Because that’s how you have to save the world in real life.  You have to do it one person at a time.”

I remember being disappointed by this answer at the time, as simply talking to people is not very flashy business, but the more I think about what makes good stories good, even the ones that involve Saving the World, I think I’m beginning to see the wisdom in it.