photo by Liam Andrew image courtesy of unsplash.com
So why do blogs get abandoned? It's hardly a mystery what's happened in these cases; people move on, their interests shift. They either lose the compulsion to publish material, or stop feeling rewarded by doing so, or both. But as obvious and maybe even natural as this process is, we learn anythingfrom it about creativity?
Photo by Pawel Kadysz image courtesy of unsplash.com
When I peruse the other random blogs on this website, it seems to be the one consistent thing I see again and again. A few last posts at the end, usually beginning with "it's been a while, I'm going to try to get back into this," and then radio silence for empty years and nothing in the present at all.
The second part of the Back to the Future film trilogy, as all dutiful fans remember, opens with Doc Emmit Brown, his friend Marty McFly, and Marty's girlfriend Jessica (brought along who knows why) descending on the whimsically named town of Hill Valley, California on the morning of October 21, 2015. It turns out that this date falls on a Wednesday; I know this now because, extremely strange to say, I find that today happens to be that same date.
The date is a long way coming, of course. I first saw the second film at some hazy point in my early childhood, being only four or five at the time of its release, and essentially ever since then 2015 has been "the year they go to in Back to the Future." It was true when I would occasionally become fitful about the movies during my childhood in the 90's, and would wonder where I'd be in 2015 and if I'd really have a hoverboard by then (I think I doubted it, but who knows), and it was true on New Year's day this year. "Reminder," a cheeky social media notification announced that morning, showing a picture of the bionic-implanted Griff and his weird lackeys saying something like, "In October of this year we'll be dressing like this."
But I hardly expected the Internet turnout the date has provoked today. There's no weirder barometer I think for the funny little film trilogy's lasting popularity than a casual glance at the news articles, merchandise advertisements, appearances by the film's stars themselves, and *ahem* blog posts all trying to cash in on the sudden popularity the movies are getting. How much of this excitement is in earnest and how much is happening, as I suspect many many things on the internet happen, in the spirit of Follow the Leader? I suppose a search in a week or two for people still talking about Back to the Future might be a good way of testing the waters; internet fads seem to flash up and die away faster than any other fads I know of. But at the very least it's touching that this many people clearly saw the day coming, and wanted to do something about it.
So why are these movies still so popular? The answer seems straightforward enough. Speaking as a blogger, I would say it's a combination of three factors. First, there's the fan's affection for its heartfelt characters. If the audience can believe in a character and like them, and want them to succeed, then those characters tend to stand the test of time better than almost any other part of a good story.
2015 was BTTF Year in my mind even while discovering hidden depths in 2012, like finding out how to make cars out of cardboard
Second, there's the memorable style, and which seems to have been a result of both happy accidents and careful refinements of the vision of its filmmakers. From the unlikely and iconic DeLorean DMC (the early drafts called for a time machine made out of a refrigerator and powered by Coca Cola), to the huge and breathtaking score (the first film had the largest studio orchestra recording to date), to the continuity hints (look again at the name of the mall at the end of the first film, see what's in the pattern on Doc Brown's shirt after he changes to less conspicuous getup in 2015) and quirks (compare the scene which ends the first movie and its meticulous, shot-for-shot recreation at the start of the second, made in order to replace Herbie the Love Bug's Claudia Wells' Jennifer with Leaving Las Vegas's Elizabeth Shue), there are a thousand small details across the three pictures that stay in the mind and reward repeat viewings.
And third, of course, there's nostalgia. When we saw this movie things were easier and probably happier, or at least the passage of time has made them so, and we can relive that feeling a bit when we pop in the bluray or DVD or betamax copy today. It makes us feel close to our own selves, our own stories, to revisit the adventures we've had, even (and perhaps especially for people like me) in make-believe.
Which brings me in a roundabout way to what I have to say about the movies, and I'll try to say it as quickly as possible.
When I was a kid, if I wanted to rent a movie from the town video store, four times out of five it was Back to the Future Part II.
What I want to know now is, why was this?
Watching it again earlier this year with my Films Are Art For Serious Hat on (it's not very comfy), I saw that the same thing is true now that was true when I was a kid. I was spellbound for the first twenty-five minutes or so, when the luckless Marty has to match wits and newly-found hoverboard skills with a gang of roughs in order to avert his son, the apparent clone Marty Jr., going to jail as per Doc Brown's scheme (the whole reason that they went to the future besides, well, you know, to make money with more movies).
Three things jumped out at me about those early scenes set in 2015 when I watched them again. First, Thomas F. Wilson, here playing Griff and elsewhere playing Young Biff, Old Biff, Really Old Grandpa Biff, and the original Mad Dog Buford, might be the most wonderful and most underrated asset those movies had. By the way, for anyone not aware that the guy is an accomplished musician and stand-up comedian in his own right, I request that you at least watch this video.
Second, I love the fact that the fact that in 2015 they're nostalgic for the 80s. This is almost certainly a not-so-sneaky ploy to avoid hazarding any guesses as to what pop culture in the year 2015 would be like, but it's also proved to be a weirdly accurate prediction: in thirty years, we'll be looking back to now. And here we are, 30 years in the future, and they've been proved right. (Also, that I still don't know what baby Frodo and Video Game Boy #2 are using to play their games if they're not using their hands. We have the Kinect now, and similar products, but that still works by registering body movement. Their thoughts I guess? Maybe that's why people be all the time wearing wierd plactics on their heads? We're getting closer to this all the time, but it still seems a ways off.)
Third, I noticed that as soon as Old Biff picked up the almanac from the trash can and they all headed off to Hilldale (spoiler alert I guess), my attention level dropped sharply. The rest of the movie is tightly paced, intense at times, and has a satisfying conclusion that is technically amazing to consider (they re-made the first movie's penultimate climax, interweaving a second penultimate climax seamlessly through it. Plus Billy Zane in 3D glasses). But if I'm trying to find out why I liked the second movie so much as a kid, then I have to admit the answer doesn't lie in the Potterville-esque version of 1985, or in 1955 revisited.
Where's My Hoverboard?
If I want to explain what I love most about the first thirty minutes of Back to the Future Part II, the blogger part of me wants to wax analytic about how the future is always one of the most fun places we can go in fiction, about how tomorrow being brighter has much the same to do with how the grass is greener, and perhaps into an exploration of other things promised to us in visions of the future from elsewhere in fiction which haven't yet come to be. But that would be ignoring the plain answer staring us all in the face.
I loved Back to the Future 2 as a kid for three reasons. Power laces, the flying DeLorean (the only way in my opinion they could have made it cooler), and the hoverboard.
All said and done, the idea of a Hoverboard, has to be one of the sheer simplest, sweetest, and coolest notions to come out of pop culture since the New Coke. After all, what can you do on a hoverboard that you can't do on a regular skateboard? Marty McFly does some great stunts on the one he borrows from a little girl, but how well to most of us know how to use a skateboard without finding out what the sidewalk tastes like? And sure, you're flying, sure, but you're flying about three or four inches above the ground. Doesn't any of this matter? Not in the least. I don't think there's a person reading this who wouldn't love to own one, myself included. Not even the promised Weather Service scheduling rain and sunshine down to the second can compete.
Pictured: the secret of happiness (image courtesy of flikr)
Yet here we are in 2015, no hoverboards. Disappointing, and I suppose doubly dissapointing for the kids who apparently thought they were real even in 1989.
Obviously we dont' have any of these things yet. And that's hardly the most disappointing thing I think about how the twenty-six years have turned out since the second film's release. There's an excellent short article on Wired that describes roughly where we're at, as a species, in terms of battling away at physics in order to bring the last of these into existence, which you can find here.
No word yet on the flying DeLorean, but there's always 2085 to look forward to. But this version of the future isn't all bad. What have we got instead? The wikipedia article on Moore's law, the (very) rough idea being that computers (well integrated circuits) get twice as complex every two years, has a fairly iconic and interesting image of its own to share:
"An Osborne Executive portable computer, from 1982, with aZilog Z80 4 MHz CPU, and a 2007 AppleiPhone with a 412 MHz ARM11 CPU; the Executive weighs 100 times as much, has nearly 500 times the volume, costs approximately 10 times as much (adjusted for inflation), and has about 1/100th the clock frequency of the smartphone." courtesy of wikipedia
Computers are everywhere now, as they were more or less hinted to be everywhere in the film, and the impact they've had on the way we work, think, relate to each other, communicate, see ourselves, and interact in general with the world around us on a daily basis is of course nothing that anyone in 1985 or even 2005 could have predicted. Would I trade my smartphone for a hoverboard? I think the answer is yes, but I have a nagging doubt that after about an hour of zipping about suburbia, I'd be reaching in my pocket for the use of the instant internet that wasn't there.
Incidentally, U.S. Patent Number 8,769,844, owned by Nike, Inc. and issued July 2014, is titled "Automatic Lacing System". I think we all had secret hopes that they'd be rolling these out by now, but sadly so far no shoe, as far as I can see in scanning the voluminous Back to the Future Day procedings online. LATER, as I'm about to publish: great Scott.And it's for an excellent cause.
But my real reason for writing this is to point out that this seems to be a different, and for me very strange, kind of thing. It's nostalgia, sure, but nostalgia for what exactly?
What's Next
It's a strange kind of nostalgia that seems to be directed towards a past image of how things can turn out one day, except now of course the image is in the present, and soon to be in the past. What? Let's try that again. So this picture of the future, which is so old now that even the future part is now in the past, has turned into this kind of a different version of the present we're nostalgic for, one which of course was fiction all along, but which was still meaningful for us, and is meaningful still. It's almost like looking into a parallel universe, or even an alternate timeline. One which we never really thought would be true, but which it would have been great to see.
The former philosophy major in me wants to christen this kind of thinking with some odd and uselessly technical term, something like "Counter-factual" nostalgia. But this isn't a new thing; there were science fiction stories in the late 1800s about the turn of the 3rd millennium that have been proved wrong a hundred times over. Take the following illustration, which I think I've mentioned in these posts before, Leaving the opera in the year 2000:
The policeman in the middle is owning that look like a boss
Nor is this sort of thinking very uncommon. Come to think of it, it happens to me about once a week: on Sunday afternoon I'll look up from my junk food and video games and discover the To-Do List for the weekend that I made on Thursday, and shake my head at how foolishly optimistic the past version of myself seems to be.
But it is a funny sort of thing, and today's connection with 1989 and with all of our own personal histories seems striking.
It also, I'd like to tentatively suggest, can be a dangerous way of thinking. The thing that troubles me is, 30 years from now, what will we be looking back on? What's new in the world today
Earlier today, when I realized what day it was, I was almost overwhelmed with a feeling that I was spending today fairly uselessly, on forgettable day-to-day work in a more or less dull office. There's no BANG BANG Streak announcing the appearance of a flying DeLorean that I've seen so far, so what makes today special, outside of this longing for the past?
We're living in a world, in terms of popular fiction, and especially in the medium under discussion namely Movies, of sequels and re-makes and other recycling of past ideas and past stories. It seems like more and more of the serious film-making production money is getting spent in less and less chancy ways, investing and re-investing time and again in properties which have succeeded before, and which they feel to be more or less safe.
Ironically this is indeed part of Back to the Future's legacy; they never really meant for there to be a second or third film when they made the first -- why on Earth would Doc have taken Jennifer to the future along with Marty if they really had planned on doing so? That part seems to have stumped the writers so hard they had to tranquilize the poor character out of existence throughout practically all of both sequels. The two follow-ups were filmed and released back-to-back, which was also not a common practice in the late 80's and which is much more common today, and are of course wonderful fun, but the precedent they set is, I think, sort of a dangerous one.
Back to the Future, the first movie, was a crazy idea. It didn't really strictly speaking have any reason to have become such a smash success, besides that weird fateful combination of luck and charm that worked so well in its favor, and still works today. But I rather doubt if it would succeed if it were released for the first time today, especially with only a modest budget and marketing. Word-of-mouth and the phenomenon of viral social media go a long way towards making things popular that might be unknown to us all otherwise, but it's a different world now than it was in 1985 (citation needed), and new ideas and new movies simply don't have the welcome that they used to have.
But don't let's get downhearted about that!
What I'm saying is that the idea of a hoverboard makes me happy, even if the hoverboard itself doesn't. But even in this era of blockbusters there are good ideas coming through. The idea of Jaegers fighting Kaiju makes me happy too. So does the idea of TARS snarking at Coop. So do Rocket Raccoon and Groot. Let's keep embracing and encouraging new ideas with the same fervor we look back on the old, and 30 years from now the world will be a much richer place for it.
If the success of these movies, and their enduring popularity, have anything to teach us, it's that we should get wild in making our new stories. We should do unusual and un-obvious things, and not be afraid to be idiosyncratic. More often than we'd be willing to believe, our ideas might be crazy enough to work!
The whole point of this story is invention! If we were to find Doc Brown in his lab today, I don’t think he’d be talking about stuff that happened 30 years ago. He’d be asking us to look at what's next, about his next big project, whatever it is. He invented a refrigerator in the old west and an electronic telepathy helmet (it was in beta) in the 50s. This is the character whose parting shot of the whole trilogy is to say that he’s not interested in revisiting the times and places he’s already seen. (Of course that could just be to set up the amazing hover train sequence, in which case I’ll still let it slide.)
Let these movies inspire you to be creative, to go make something new, to answer a question or fill a need that you see in the world, even if it seems like a dumb or wild or crazy idea at first.
The sequel movies have a wonderful message at their heart, which I think is worth repeating to oneself at least once a year in the form of the films themselves, and which is worth repeating often when things aren't going right. And it was delivered again, today, with a surprisingly moving delivery from the man himself (in an advertisement of course, but the feeling is there).
But the original movie had a message equally important to remember, and possibly even more worth repeating to one's self. It's the message I'll close with, and it's because of that sentiment, I would argue, that we have the pocket computers and even half-hoverboards we have today.
Photo by Joshua Earle image courtesy of unsplash.com
I was sitting down to write a post and I said to myself, Hey, I should really finish one of those series of posts that I started, and then never got back to. And then I realized: I do not currently know how many of those there are. There may be too many to count.
I hate blogging about blogging, it’s not what I’m trying to write on here, and it’s not what you want to read, at least so I imagine. But I’m in the tall grass here, and
So I’m going to take a short break this week and try to at least get a handle on all the juggling pins I have in the air that deserve should be brought back to earth at some point. Consider it a checklist for the next few essay series, unless if something more interesting or more urgent comes up. Maybe that should be ‘until when.’
Unfinished Essays
First is the “Favorites” series. This one got a little ugly.
Hey, I hadn't even got to that one yet.
This one started with the best intentions, and I actually had something like a long-term plan for bringing it off. I wanted to illustrate, in reverse, that I think there are four main kinds of stories, the way I understand them, and this would lead into a discussion of what makes those stories the way they are. Sort of a new categorization of genre, but based on the structure of the story instead of its content. In hindsight this was more like a structure I wanted it to grow along as it progressed (nota benne: even with essays this is a crapshoot).
The analysis became self-sustaining, and sort of breached its banks. The series ran into a second month, the breach breached with an endless series of analyses of, ye gods, Hamlet. At this point, for some unknown reason (cough) I lost steam eventually, and we didn’t finish our analysis of puzzle stories, the second of the four categories I was working on.
So if I want to pick that one back up, I’ve got to keep the description and analysis of each favorite story short. If you’ve got a point you’re trying to make by talking about something from the ground-up, remember that you’re going to have to get to that point sooner or later.
Also if it’s picked back up, I have to be sure to nudge things along more towards a definite statement, even if I have to occasionally say “this will make sense later, for now remember that X is X, and it’s important because of Y.”
I think the series may have, in general, been too much for this media, unless short posts (≈400 words) are going up every day, and that’s the only thing that’s going up. This is a blog, not a textbook. The comics and the essays have to be unrelated, to keep it from being boring.
But I’ve started it, and it deserves to be finished, because we might learn something. You never know.
This can't be Georgian England, that guy wasn't a big deal until at least 1882! image courtesy of imdb.com
This one I think didn’t go that bad (badly! Who taught you adverbs?!), though it did suffer somewhat from over-compartmentalization of its entries. By which I mean each segment got written so far apart from its predecessor that it was impossible to keep up the flavor and the general drift, and the ideas, which should have been conjoined across entries and back each other up, were as useful to one another as a suspension bridge’s towers without cables between.
By which I mean I kept putting off writing the next one until a few days before it was due to go up, and, surprise surprise, they lacked both forethought and any spontaneous energy. All the alive-feeling of something canned for weeks before being unshelved and served, combined with all the careful attention of something thrown together at the last minute. As Aunt Betsy used to say, “Ba-a-ah!”
This dereliction is especially egregious on two counts: first, if I’m not mistaken (I’ve turned off the WiFi to get this post done and cannot check), I left it actually on an essay cliff-hanger, with the next post to resolve some issues of character changing with or without changing setting.
Second, it was proposed as the Three Body Problem of starting a story; if you’re going to write a series of how things are essentially and inseparably intermingled, and that you can only understand one thing by understanding the others, it’s probably not so great an idea to write about one one month and then the other two months apart.
I think this should probably be written, as I originally planned, en block all at once, or as near to all at once as possible, and then parceled out in discreet, short segments over time. This would avoid a lot of the troubles that come from too much time passing between entries (repetition, unrelated thoughts stealing the action, loss of focus) and get the thing done.
If I can’t do it all at once, I should at least set aside enough time to re-read the last of the previous entry before starting on the next, in order to ensure some continuity of effect.
Still, not a bad thing. Some surprises came out of the details.
Writing: a balancing act of excuses, deadlines, and excuses. image courtesy of imdb.com
A recent notion, just introduced last month or the month before at the earliest (I would check this but I don’t currently have wifi).
The trouble with this one is I’m kind of sick of the subject.
I was trying to write a series of essays trying to figure out why we, the people who pay money to watch movies and TV shows mainly, are not sick of superheroes yet.
And then an unexpected thing happened: I got to be so sick of superheroes all of a sudden that every time I sit down to write something I
The other trouble is EVERYONE, I mean every single person blogging about writing and entertainment, is writing about super heroes right now. And they have been since about 1954 or sooner. Unless something wonderful and new occurs to me, it’s just white noise.
Still, I’m interested, me, in this subject, because I really do want to know why these stories are so enduring. If they are. And the only full post I’ve done about it so far, On Saving the World, was actually meaningful to write to me, so maybe one day I’ll pick it back up. Originally I thought I’d write the series over the summer, which is the season of superheroes, but maybe now I’ll be subversive and think about them again when it’s time for costumes, who knows.
Kinds of Story Meanings
This I mentioned above was the planned follow-up to the Favorites series, and I hope one day it still comes about. I should get the favorites out of the way, so I can write this one, I think it’s worth thinking about.
In other words, not one I’ve started, but one I’m still looking forward to, if I can get out of my own way.
The Unfinished Stories
Oh lord, he’s not going to write about writing fiction that was never wrapped up, is he?
You had your chance, Jubal.
Well, it’s also a part of this blog that’s in its own middle without apparent threat of ever being brought to justice. I mean, being finished enough to actually make sense. Whichever. Also the above isn't my work, so I take no responsibility for it.
I’m not going to analyze the unfinished stories, I think that would be like a kind of suicide. So I’ll just list them:
Tireless (two detectives are investigating an odd murder)
Roam (man with surfaces but without substance is currently lost in Asia)
Untitled Ben and Dan series (they're trying to get through a very slow-going verbal description of Dan's new story, and were last seen fleeing their bar as smoke alarms went off).
What’s next?
I’d like to tackle these in the reverse order that they’re mentioned here, in order to wrap up the most recent first. However, as mentioned above, unless I’m suddenly overcome by something new to say about the whole Superhero thing, I think that one can be safely left to dissolve until it’s a bit more more off-topic.
So maybe I’ll alternate the two.
In the meantime, I’ve got a seriously messy set of folders labeled ‘blog’ to try and clean up... better me than you, reader. OH WAIT WHAT ABOUT the series I started on sad things and why sadness? Dang it!!!
Or I’m going to go watch Beverly Hills Copy. Either way.
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.
