The Storytellers

New Comedy Podcast: The Voice of God

2008-09-06T02:05:00.000-07:00

Hello, everyone.

I'm writing a new daily comedy podcast called The Voice of God.

God is drunk, bitter, angry, and has had it up to here with the whole lot of us. Up. To. Here. And so he's blogging daily, and telling us exactly what he thinks of us.

God is extreme, he's insulting, and he's (hopefully) funny. You can also subscribe to his daily rants through FeedBurner and have his rants downloaded straight to your ipod.

Start with the first one, in which God gives us five reasons why we should kiss his ass. And if you're new, check out how he has it out with a listener, draws a line in the sand, and loses.

Enjoy.

Heart of Stone: the Trailer

2008-07-01T23:39:00.000-07:00

Hi, everyone. The trailer and the website for the movie I've been working on for the last year are finally up and online.

The website is here: http://www.israelisf.com/. You'll find the trailer, pictures, details about the actors, details about the music, and about why a movie about new emotions is science fiction.

'Heart of Stone' is a low-budget, feature-length, independent Israeli science fiction film in Hebrew.

Ofer Berger, a world-renowned scientist, has a heart of stone. He has no emotions. One day, the floodgates in his mind open. Emotions pull out, wild, strong, uncontrollable, and behind them is something new and different and unknown...

Just for fun, here is the trailer (with subtitles):

Enjoy.

Comedian, Bash Thyself

2008-03-02T16:09:00.000-08:00

A while ago, we talked about how to be funny, a comedian must first be able to laugh at himself. To write effective satires, a satirist must be able to admit he’s wrong. That is the difficult task he expects of his audience, he must be able to deliver it himself. To be an effective and honest pundit, a pundit must be able to admit a mistake, to claim he’s changed his mind and to admit someone else might know better. That is, after all, what he expects of us.

Here are a couple of examples, inspired by last week’s events:

The Post-Oscar Jon-Slam

This excerpt is is taken from one from last Wednesday’s The Daily Show. In it Jon Stewart welcomes John Oliver, The Daily Show’s ‘Senior Hollywood Correspondent’, to talk about the Oscars that had taken place two days earlier. Soon the fact that Stewart was the host is mentioned by Oliver.

John Oliver: “And may I say, your performance was terrific.”

Jon Stewart: “Very kind of you. Thank you so much, John, for saying so.”

Oliver: “Absolutely. And far, far superior to the crapfest of two years ago.”

Stewart stares at the camera. Presently, he says, “John, that was me, as well.”

Oliver: “Indeed it was. But this was quite a turnaround for you. And it’s not just me saying so, Jon. That’s the consensus of the millions and millions of people all around the world,” Oliver continues, “who read about it.”

Stewart corrects him: “And saw it.”

“No, just read about it. Nobody saw it.”

Stewart begins to apologize, “Well, obviously, it wasn’t the highest rated Oscar ever...”

“No,” Oliver agrees. “It wasn’t. Unless by highest you mean lowest. It was the lowest. Or the least high. Is that what you meant, Jon? The lowest? Because it was that,” Oliver continues and continues to Stewart’s face. “The lowest rated Oscar. Ever. Of all times.”

“To be perfectly fair, though...”

“It’s almost funny, if you think about it,” Oliver interrupts Stewart. “When you did it before you were horrible and millions and millions of people watched it. Yet when you deliver a good performance, it disappears into the atmosphere to exist only as a brief moment in future Oscar montages.”

“That is somehow ironic.”

“I mean, two years ago,” Oliver continues, “with the whole world as your audience, you delivered a basic cable performance. Yet on Sunday night, with a world-class performance, you delivered a basic cable audience. It must be truly upsetting.”

“Well,” Jon says. “You can’t control an audience.”

“You certainly can’t, Jon.” Oliver produces a piece of paper and reads off it, “Adults 18 to 24 down 15%. Women 35 to 54 down 28%. People who know you, aged 18 to 49, down 72%. People who gave birth to you, down 100%.”

And so it goes.

The entire bit, which takes place on Stewart’s show, ends with Jon laughing at the camera and telling the audience “I think we have more fun writing the post-Oscars Jon-slam than we do anything else we do on the show.”

On the Other Side of the Scale...

The fact that Stewart is able to bash himself so powerfully, that he is able to admit (whether it’s true or not) that he is wrong or that he has failed, is a trait that allows him to come with a clean conscience to encounters like the following, from a couple of years ago. Here he tells the two hosts of Crossfire exactly what he thinks they’re doing wrong, to their faces. Note how he does come with a clean conscience because he has this trait, and note how the two hosts react. The high-browed “You don’t don’t do it, either” never fails to convince.

Do you see the connection between being able to admit you’re wrong and Stewart’s behavior? Do you see the connection between not being able to admit you’re wrong and the two hosts’ behavior?

It’s connected, man. To be a comedian, you need to be able to laugh at yourself. To be a satirist you need to be able to change your mind. To be a pundit you have to be able to admit you’re wrong.

Why Are Comedians Quick?

2008-01-24T09:03:00.000-08:00

Why do comedians seem to be so much quicker in their thinking than us normal people? How is it that they think so quickly? How is it that they respond quickly? Do they really think faster than we do? Is it a requirement?

Improv

The most extreme example of seemingly superhuman speed is found in improvisation, as anyone who saw Whose Line Is It, Anyway? can attest to. The first and foremost requirement of improv is this: No matter what happens, you must accept a premise you’re given, rather than knock it down. So if you’re on the improv stage, and your fellow actor says, “Look at that camel!” you don’t say as a response, “That’s a giraffe,” simply because you were had a good giraffe joke. That would knock down the premise you were offered and destroy the bit. You could say, “But why is it blue?” And by doing this, you accept the premise, go with it, and offer something to your fellow actor.

The people in the audience are not used to accepting new ideas without taking time to process and, perhaps, to refuse them. So when they see a new idea accepted so quickly and built upon, it automatically seems as if a lot of thought has gone into the response.

But that isn’t the case.

Accepting a new idea takes a lot of time for us. Accepting a new idea, to comedians, takes no time at all. If they don’t, they die.

The Live Interview

Let’s move on from improvisation to interview shows, from Late Night to The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, where comedians interview live people, forcing them to improvise jokes on their spot. Here’s one example:

In The Daily Show’s March 12^th, 2007 interview, comedian Jon Stewart interviews Senator Chris Dodd. He asks him why he is running for president.

Sen. Dodd: “First of all, I’m a first-time father. I’ve got a couple of young children, daughters, and I don’t want to sound naïve at all, and I look at them... I mean, you’ve got a couple of young kids. What kind of a future are they going to have? What kind of a world are they going to grow up in? What kind of a nation are they going to live in the 21^st century? And, frankly, right now, I think there is more at stake than probably ever before in my lifetime. Both with what’s going on at home and abroad. And I decided to get in this race and talk about what we could do to make it better for them. I know it’s naïve, but—”

Jon Stewart interrupts him, “Here’s what I’ve done. I also have young kids and I look at them, and I started building a bunker.”

Stewart automatically accepts Senator Dodd’s premise (thinking about the future while looking at your kids) and goes on from there. In fact, he continues, “Your idea could work, too. But I have a feeling, when the day comes, I’m not going to be knocking on your door, you’re going to be knocking on mine.”

As Stewart proves by taking Sen. Dodd’s premise and reaching the opposite conclusion, accepting a premise doesn’t actually make the other guy right. It just means you’re agile enough of thought to understand someone else’s premise. Then you go with that logic, and see where it leads you.

Smart People vs. Comedians

Adapting to changing circumstances, being able to accept new ideas, not sticking rigidly to your old position – these are all the necessary tools of a good comedian. They are also the marks of intelligence. So what happens when a quick and intelligent comedian meets a quicker and more intelligent man? The man may not be as funny, but he’s able to adapt to new situations just as fast as the comedian. Here is the best example I found in which the shoe was on the other foot.

This is from an interview in The Colbert Report (Feb. 8^th, 2006) in which Stephen Colbert, who, on a daily basis, stumps his guests by offering ideas (meaning ‘premises’) they’ve never thought of or didn’t expect to face, now interviews Prof. Alan Dershowitz. We’re going to look at the dialogue like a chess match.

Colbert introduces Dershowitz, then runs to the crowd, as he always does, and gets cheers. Colbert sits down.

Colbert: “Mr. Dershowitz, thank you for joining us.”

Dershowitz: “Thank you.”

Colbert: “Do you have an audience at work?”

Colbert’s opening salvo is framing a question Dershowitz clearly doesn’t expect. Dershowitz answers immediately: “I do, always. I teach to a class.”

Colbert: “You do? Really?” Colbert didn’t expect a ‘yes’ from his guest, but adapts quickly, “Do they applaud like this when you come in? Up in Harvard?” Colbert takes his question to a place Dershowitz would not have expected.

Dershowitz begins his answer even before Colbert finishes asking the question: “No, they react.” Dershowitz isn’t blocking by saying ‘no’, he’s splitting hairs, thus proving he’s accepted Colbert’s premise and is building on it.

“Oh, really?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“With fear, I’m assuming.” Colbert accepts Dershowitz’s premise and takes it one step further to a place Dershowitz clearly did not mean.

“I hope,” Dershowitz thus accepts Colbert’s premise again.

“Do you ever shroud a student like in that movie, The Paper Chase?” Again, Colbert offers a premise his guest was not expecting.

“No, they’re too smart.” Dershowitz does not deny the premise. He accepts it and within the rules of the premise finds a reason why it isn’t so. He continues, “They sit there with their, you know, Googles, and they know more than I do.”

Colbert: “Yeah, with their internets.” Colbert accepts Dershowitz’s ‘Googles’ and builds on it. Mockingly, of course. “And their world wide webbing? It’s amazing.”

“It is,” Dershowitz accepts Colbert’s volley.

They move on to talk about Dershowitz’s book. Colbert puts it up on the table: “Okay, this is it. Preemption, a Knife That Cuts Both Ways. Tell me about the knife and why it’s cutting us.” Colbert presumes a false premise regarding the book.

Dershowitz opens his mouth to answer, and Colbert continues, “Is it cutting us?”

“It is cutting us.” Premise accepted.

“Whose knife is it?”

Not blinking, Dershowitz continues, accepting Colbert’s premise, and using it to make his point, “It is the knife of power that is being wielded. Preemption means, just simply, we get the bad guys before they get us. And that, sometimes, can be a good thing.”

“You look at us wrong, you get a God-smack.” Colbert immediately picks up on Dershowitz’s premise and goes with it one step further.

“No,” Dershowitz splits hairs again rather than blocking completely: “you try to kill us, you try to invade us, you try and terrorize us, and we’re going to get you first, but there are tremendous risks involved in doing that. Because we can get the wrong people, we can get there too early, we can provoke an attack, so it’s a knife that cuts both ways.”

“Well, this sort of sounds like anti-preemption here,” Colbert accepts what Dershowitz says and tries to take it to a direction Dershowitz doesn’t want to take.

“Well, it’s pro some preemption and anti some preemption,” Dershowitz clears his theme by understanding what Colbert said and explaining the difference between the two positions. “It all depends.”

“You can’t have it both ways!” Colbert aggressively introduces a new and unexpected premise (elsewhere known as The O’Reilly Premise).

“You can have it both ways. You have to have it both ways.” Dershowitz understands the other side but insists on his own.

“No, if you have to have it both ways, that’s why the knife cuts back and forth,” Colbert introduces a new premise in mid-argument, miming a knife cutting both him and Dershowitz.

“Absolutely,” Dershowitz accepts it.

“You want the knife to just do this,” he mimes the knife attacking only Dershowitz.

“But it has to be sterilized,” Dershowitz goes with Colbert’s premise even further. “You don’t want to cause an infection.”

Colbert moves on to his next thought: “Okay, so...” and then Dershowitz’s words sink in, and he stops, stumped for an answer. He was not able to adapt quickly enough.

The audience begins to laugh, as Colbert thinks of the next thing to say.

“I’m Jewish,” says Dershowitz during Colbert’s silence, accepting his own premise and going with it.

Colbert takes another few seconds, then, unable to think of something smarter, changes the subject.

And thus Dershowitz wins this battle against an intelligent, professional and mighty-quick comedian not because he’s funnier but because he’s that much smarter.

Accepting new ideas is a mark of intelligence. Understanding new ideas is also a mark of intelligence. Being able to adapt quickly is one, too. And always keep in mind that understanding the other side’s logic doesn’t make the other side is right. It just means you’re smart.

Soft Opinions

2008-01-15T12:59:00.000-08:00

Sometimes our convictions aren’t as deep as we think. Sometimes our convictions are soft. Sometimes they’re soft without us even being aware of how soft they are.

Let me tell you a story.

A Christmas Tale

One episode of Picket Fences, written by David E. Kelley, began at a school recital at the small and harmless town of Rome, Wisconsin. The teacher, Louise Talbot, is rehearsing the nativity scene with the kids towards the upcoming Christmas pageant. She’s playing the Virgin Mary. The police comes in, uncomfortably forced to enforce a court order to stop the rehearsals and to stop the show. It’s no longer legal to have religious content on public property.

Louise, who’s been one of the best teachers in the school for the last nine years, thinks it’s ridiculous and refuses to stop. The sheriff is then forced to arrest her and bring her before the town judge. The judge releases her and explains to the townspeople why they can’t have their pageant the way it’s always been done. He suggests, however, doing it on property that’s not public.

But now that Louise in the system, her fingerprints turn out to be the fingerprints of a man who’s been missing for quite a few years. It turns out, and Louise can no longer deny it, that she used to be a man. She had spent a couple of years dressed as a woman, then had a sex-change operation.

The school board is flabbergasted. They summon Louise to answer some questions. She appears, and with the help of a friend, shames them for thinking what they’re thinking to do. The day is almost won, but Jimmy Brock, the sheriff and a member on the board, turns the tables on Louise (classic Kelley) and shows everyone how she, by definition, has to be mentally unstable. So how can she teach our kids?

Louise is soon fired. She sues the school, and we head back to court. The judge (there’s only one judge in the small town) reverses the school board’s decision for being blatantly bigoted. The rehearsals for the nativity scene continue with Louise still as the Virgin Mary. But now that the news is out, parents come to the class and pull their kids from the pageant. Louise doesn’t want to, but relinquishes her role in the pageant so that the kids may have theirs.

The pageant, then, continues as planned. When the nativity scene arrives, the kids change the text, and talk about how the kids don’t want to live in their parents’ bigoted world. They refuse to accept the bigotry, they say, and invite Louise back to the stage. Their speech is moving, and in an emotional scene Louise walks out from the audience and stands on the stage. A few grownups in the audience begin to stand and clap. Slowly, more and more grownups stand up. A few more grownups look around, and they come to their feet and clap, too.

Now... you get that, right? You can understand people looking around, seeing that it’s okay with everyone else, and getting up as well. Seems natural, doesn’t it?

Soft Opinions

The thing is that these are the same people who only a few moments ago were sure that this was a line that could never and must never be broken. And when they saw that many other people accepted the new circumstances, they immediately saw that there was no real harm. Their opinions seemed to be hardnosed and steadfast convictions. But as soon as the rest of the people didn’t agree, the convictions behind the opinions vanished.

Sure, it’s a TV show and it didn’t happen in real life. But their behavior probably seemed natural to you as I told you the story (and certainly if you saw the episode). It’s easy to believe, because that’s how most people would behave.

So: How many of your convictions are soft? How many things you consider are lines in the sand are actually lines in the sand on the beach? One wave, and they’re gone.

Make a List

Test yourself: What convictions, what issues, what opinions do you hold that you’re certain of? What would you fight for? Make a list. Then look at the list and as you go down the list, issue by issue, imagine that everyone you know suddenly believes in the opposite.

How many of these positions would you keep? How many of these issues would you still believe? Which of your opinions are soft and would change if everyone else’s opinion changed? Which of your opinions would never change no matter what everyone else thought? Which opinions would you really fight for?

It’s election time. Time for real opinions, not soft ones. Now, seriously, go make that list.

Women Versus Blacks

2008-01-12T15:43:00.000-08:00

In the last post we talked about how, in the current political situation, Hillary Clinton can’t make any move regarding any ‘black issues’ without automatically losing to Barack Obama. She can’t be blacker than him. She can’t understand what it’s like to be black the way he can. If she makes a move on any black issue, black activists will do Obama’s work for him, and he will win without having opened his mouth.

Now the question that comes to mind is this: Does it work the other way around?

Let’s imagine a scenario: Obama suddenly talks about women rights, and how he respects his wife and how strong and intelligent she is, and how he learned from her that women have it bad and how he wants to fix the situation. Would this give any kind of victory to Clinton the way it would give a victory to Obama if she made such a statement about black people? Would people assume Clinton is way ahead of him on this? Would there be a backlash against Obama, that as a man he doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about? Would people assume that Clinton knows ten times better than he does everything about ‘women’s issues’? Seems to me that the answer to all these questions is ‘no’.

So the real question is: Why not?

That is not a political question. It’s a question in human behavior, which is a subject we like to tackle here. In looking for an answer, I only found one, and it’s a sad one: The majority of women doesn’t respect women.

To explain this answer let’s work our way from the conclusion backwards. If most women didn’t respect women, then they wouldn’t trust a woman to represent them. In fact, they would be suspicious of her. If most women didn’t respect women, then they couldn’t really form into cohesive and influential groups representing women. In fact, they would form fragmented groups with little influence. If most women didn’t respect women, they perhaps would think that their own conditions are bad but that other women perhaps deserve what they have. All these results are true, and they all stem from one premise: The majority of women doesn’t respect women.

That is a sad state, and I wish there was another answer to the question. In fact, if you have a better answer, please share it with us.

False Premises in Today's Politics

2008-01-12T02:46:00.000-08:00

With elections looming, politicians are everywhere. ‘Tis the season.

The last couple of seasons of the The West Wing, may it rest in peace, were devoted to the election process we’re seeing today. First, Santos (played by Jimmy Smitts) ran as an idealistic candidate for the Democratic nomination, while Arnold Vinick (played by Alan Alda) ran for the Republican nomination. Once they both won, they ran against each other. We got to see a lot of inside politics. We got to see why politicians say what they say, what their advisers tell them to tell us, and what moves that we see really mean to them.

Accepting the Premise of the Question

One of the most important issues we saw time and time again was the candidates’ refusal to answer questions the premise of which was decided by the other guy. The reasoning behind it was that, once you accept the other guy’s premise, once you accept the framing of the question, it doesn’t matter what you say, they will win the argument when the day is done.

For example. Leo McGarry, running for Santos’ V.P., is an old hack at politics, having run the country from behind the scenes. But now he’s a politician. He’s supposed to talk to reporters. Here he is being briefed by Annabeth (Written by Debora Cahn):

Annabeth: “Press is here for the Q&A. Now remember, you control the conversation. You don’t like what they ask, don’t accept the premise of the question.”

Leo says, “I’ve been rejecting the premises of questions since the Hoover Administration.”

The two of them now face reporters. Says one, “Mr. McGarry, are you still in AA?”

Leo avoids the question: “Good to see you, Christine.”

The reporter insists, “When was the last time you went to a meeting?”

Leo answers, “I’ve made statements about that before. You should take a look at them.”

Reporter: “Does your cardiologist think you can handle this kind of stress?”

Leo: “My cardiologist has made a statement about that. You should take a look at it. See, what I’d like to talk about is what Matt Santos can do to improve the public schools here in Pennsylvania and across the country.”

Sounds like every other professional politician we know. He evaded the uncomfortable issues, didn’t say anything he didn’t want to, accepted no bad premises, and led the answers to his own agenda.

Later on, however, he slips up:

One Reporter says, “Mr. McGarry, are you finding the campaign trail exhausting?”

“Invigorating, Kevin, thanks for asking.”

“Is Speaker Haffley floating an education issue with the White House?”

“I don’t know what’s going on in the Speaker’s office, but I can tell you that Matt Santos has the most practical approach to improving teacher quality we’ve seen in a long time.”

“Is it similar to Haffley’s plan?”

“The Santos plan is a comprehensive.”

“Why is the President working with Haffley if this is the candidate’s baby?”

“Because the Constitution empowers the President to sign bills into law and doesn’t empower candidates to do anything.”

Annabeth steps in, says Leo has to go. Once they’re alone, Leo says to her, “I accepted the premise of the question, didn’t I?”

In accepting the premise of the question, Leo said his own candidate has no power. That’s a mess-up.

The thing about mess-ups is that they don’t look like mess-ups when they happen. But the rules of the ‘game’ are clear: the second you accept the other guy’s premise, somewhere down the line you will lose the argument. Before we move on to real life, let’s look at one more fictional mess-up from The West Wing.

Santos, a Democrat, keeps losing on defense issues, even though he’s a Reserve Air Force pilot, while Vinick never served a day. That’s because Republicans always have a better image on security issues. But when Santos is called to serve, Santos goes to serve. And suddenly the news channels are filled, day in and day out, with Santos, looking good in uniform, climbing aboard the air-force jet, and flying off.

Suddenly, Santos is catching up to Vinick in the polls. A rattled Vinick loses it for a second when talking to the press (written by Lawrence O'Donnell Jr.) when a reporter asks him if it was a stunt:

“A stunt?” Vinick seems shocked. “No, that was devotion to duty. That’s what makes the American military the greatest fighting force in the history of the world. And I hope Congressman Santos continues to do his duty when I’m Commander-in-Chief.”

It sounds like he jabbed Santos. But he didn’t. In answering the way he did, he accepted the premise that Santos is a military guy, thus giving his opponent more credence. Santos says it best when he watches it on TV: “I’ll take any sentence that has ‘Santos’ and ‘do his duty’ in it.”

Today’s Politics

In real life, we’ve learned to pick up on this kind of dialogue when politicians refuse to answer questions. We’ve learned (hopefully) to pick up on it when people spout talking points rather than real thoughts on TV. But sometimes it’s more complicated than just answering a question. These days, Hillary Clinton has tried to gain ground on the black race issues.

Her problem is that she’s fighting Barack Obama’s premise. Any attempt to go for the ‘black’ issues would immediately give victory in the argument to Obama. She can’t be blacker than him. She can’t understand what it’s like to be black the way he can. He doesn’t even have to say it. With this issue, he doesn’t even have to do anything to win it. Any time Clinton raises the black issue, at this stage of the race while going against Obama, she is losing votes and giving them to Obama.

False Premises in Today’s Politics

We’ve seen how people unwittingly accept other people’s premises when answering questions or when raising issues, but false premises are everywhere. In fact, we take many of them for granted to such an extent that we don’t even see them. And in accepting a premise, we help it along.

False Premise #1: There Are Only Two Real Choices In (American) Elections.

The question is: If you took a second to think about it rather than take it for granted, would you still think it’s true? Since when are you satisfied with only two choices in anything? Do you accept two choices of milk? Two choices of coffee? Two choices of cars? Two choices of houses to buy or apartments to rent?

Is a choice between two things actually a choice in your eyes in anything but politics?

Americans are so finicky, expecting a wide selection in everything they buy. And yet they expect no such choice from their politicians, the people who write the laws and have the ability to send their kids to war.

Two choices? Is that it? Is that the premise you choose?

A good reason to accept that premise is an apparent lack of choice. Third-party candidates never have a real chance. But whoever says that third-party candidates are the alternatives actually accepts the false premise. They are not the only alternative. Which brings us to the next false premise:

False Premise #2: One Party, One Opinion

This premise says that voting a Democratic candidate into office helps the Democratic Party and voting a Republican into office helps the Republican Party. Seems natural and obvious. But it doesn’t have to be true.

If you vote for, say, a Democrat, and it’s good for the Democratic Party, then that man is loyal to the Party and not to you. Voting for a party and not for a candidate means that the entire Party is one choice, one opinion, has one set of rules and one agenda. That’s good for both Parties, but it’s bad for us.

If you come to a candidate from a place that says: If you do the things I like, if you go the way I want, I will vote for you, no matter what Party you come from – in that case, the candidates will suddenly have to suck up to you, rather than their bosses. They will have to do what you say, rather than what their Party says.

They need you. Make them work for it; break Party lines.

If it works, the Parties themselves will do their best to fight it. But they will adapt and change. Because they need your votes and they need your money. At the end of the day, both parties work for you.

It doesn’t matter who’s to blame for the situation (whichever situation it is that bothers you). It doesn’t matter who did what when. Make the candidates take a stand by telling them you’ll vote for them (or not) based on positions you find important, completely disregarding Party lines. Make both Parties work for your vote specifically, creating ‘one Party, many opinions’.

The alternative is to go on accepting the Parties’ premise and going on as before. In accepting the premise that there are only two choices in elections and in accepting the Parties’ premise that there is one party, one opinion, you make sure that the Parties win. One election cycles, the Republicans are on top. Another election cycle, the Democrats are on top. In both election cycles, you’re on the bottom. Just as Leo made sure the other side won when he answered the question, just as Vinick lost the argument the second he accepted Santos’ premise, and just as Clinton is losing the race issue by tackling it. Accept both Parties’ premise, you help them both win. In not accepting the premise, there is a chance that you will win.

Forcing Us to Think (Again)

2008-01-06T12:06:00.000-08:00

Every so often we’re going to come back to a theme we’ve talked about before. Some ideas are worth it.

Now we’re on David E. Kelley fairness watch. Here is our first. Now it’s time for the second.

David E. Kelley Fairness Watch

David E. Kelley is the only writer today who is able to write one side of an argument (say, in a court drama like Boston Legal) in such a convincing way that the viewers agree with that side, know they’re going to win, and certain that there are no strong counter-arguments. Then Kelley lets the other side speak, and when that lawyer’s done, the viewers are equally certain that his/her side’s case is completely right.

This forces the viewers to think. With equally-strong and powerful arguments on both sides, the outcome is uncertain. And our brain works more than we think it does when watching TV, imagining what could happen, what would happen, and why.

Here are two examples from a recent Boston Legal episode.

YouTube

Clarence, who works for the firm and sometimes dresses as a woman was caught on tape, dressed as a woman, screaming at some guy and going absolutely nuts. That footage is then put on YouTube, to Clarence’s chagrin. Clarence sues YouTube for defamation.

And so, they go to court. There the judge appears with a helmet on his head, to everyone’s amazement. A red helmet with a white stripe.

“Before we begin,” the judge says, “some of you may or may not have noticed that I’m wearing protective head gear. I sustained a small wound while gardening. My doctor advised to take conservative precautions until the stitches are removed. Please pay no attention.” With that out of the way, the case begins.

The first thing YouTube’s lawyer does is make sure whether the footage fairly and accurately depict what happened? And it does. There is no doubt about that. Clarence takes the stand, and, as a lawyer, is forced to admit that the law expressly protects internet sites “from online defamation liability arising from material posting on their sites by individuals.”

The issue is clear. The law is clear. Clarence admits the footage was not doctored. What you see is what really happened. And the law protects sites like YouTube. Clear-cut and simple, isn’t it?

Now it’s Clarence’s lawyer’s turn to speak. “Your honor, this was an extremely embarrassing event, aired world-wide on a website, absent the context that occasioned it.”

The helmeted judge does not understand. “The footage depicts what happened. So where’s the damage?’

“Your honor, think of it. We’ve all had a meltdown or two. A mortifying episode or two. Typically, we’re allowed to live those moments down. But now thanks to the internet, we can’t. Suppose,” he produces a handheld video camera, and points it at the judge, “I taped you as ‘Justice Bauble Head’.”

“Put that thing down!” the Judge is beside himself.

“How would you like to be defined—” he continues to tape.

“Put it down this instant!”

He puts the camera down and turns it off. He then takes a breath and starts calmly, “My point is: Life’s little embarrassing moments are now having far-reaching and more devastating consequences. If the day has come that we are going to be publicly and globally shamed by our foolish missteps, then the laws of defamation should keep pace. Certainly when these tort laws were drafted, the legislators never contemplated YouTube.”

And he sits down.

Do you know who’s going to win now? Even if you think you know who’s right, Kelley phrased the positions in such a way as to make them equal: Will the judge go with the law and decide against Clarence, or will the judge decide to go against the law because the law is wrong? You don’t know. But you’ll think about it.

The Racist Cop

In the same episode, the firm has another case. A policeman shot an unarmed black man, who fit the description of a suspect. The policeman says he was reaching for what appeared to be a weapon. But in truth, he reached for something else. In addition, the policeman has a history of erroneously shooting black men, and to top it off, when the D.A. tests the policeman under an MRI, it turns out that his brain responds with more violent emotions when he sees a black than when he sees a white man.

With the case drawing to a close, the prosecution speaks first: “Policemen do tough work, dangerous work. The cities across this country seem to grow more and more dangerous. That is a reality. But here’s another reality. African-Americans have been targeted disproportionately in both arrests and excessive force. Blacks comprise 13% percent of our population, yet 44% of our prison population. And how many times do you have to turn on the news and see that yet another innocent, unarmed black man has been shot dead by the police before we say ‘enough’? Eight times he shot him! Even his partner, who is also his friend, called the shooting reckless. Was it an honest mistake? Yeah, sure, like the last time he mistakenly shot an unarmed black man. How many mistakes can we allow him? Do we keep tolerating these executions or not?”

And the prosecution sits down. So, does the defense even have a case? And even if it does have a case, it can’t be equally as good, can it? All the facts are in.

The defense speaks: “The victim matched the description of the armed suspect. He raised his hand with something metallic in it. It looked like a gun. My client reacted. The District Attorney did not offer even one witness to dispute that. Instead, he gave you a brain scan. The police can now take our blood, our hair, our DNA. They can make us give handwriting samples, voice patterns. They can check our computers to see what interests us, our GPS’s to see where we’ve been. And today they’re introducing scans to show our feelings. Where does this stop? And let’s assume these MRI’s really can show that my client feared black people more than whites. So what? The law has to distinguish between thought and deed. The Supreme Court is doing away with warrants. Our administration eavesdrops on all of us. Are we really going to allow this government to unleash the thought police? Are we that scared? We must be. Because today the prosecution is trying to convict a man of murder with nothing more than an MRI. God help us.”

So... Who do you think won this one? What would you vote if you were sitting in the jury?

One thing is certain: Your brain thought about it whether you wanted it to or not.

Is 'African-American' Offensive?

2007-12-26T12:27:00.000-08:00

Is the expression ‘African-American’ offensive? Yes, it is.

That is because the term is ethnocentric. It assumes that the United States is in the center of the world. Here’s why.

The expression comes to replace the word ‘black’. But it denotes not only skin color or ethnic origin, it also assumes citizenship. An African-American is, by definition, American. But not all black people are American. In fact, most of them are not.

What would Americans call French blacks? What would Americans call blacks from Nigeria or South Africa or the U.K.? Even in the U.S. itself, if a black man walks down the street in New Jersey, that hardly means he’s a U.S. citizen, does it? Why call him American?

Why would a new term for ‘black’ include the word ‘American’? Why would a new term for ‘Asian’ include the word ‘American’? People would only suggest the expression (and, later, adopt it) if they automatically assumed that the U.S. is in the center of the world, that most people come from America, are in America, and that not much outside of America exists. That seems to be the only way such an expression could get acceptance. The fact that it got to be so popular means that a large part of the American people believe this deep down.

This isn’t new. The term ‘American’ itself has hinted at this for years. Ask a Canadian if he’s American, and he’ll say “No, I’m Canadian.” But a Canadian citizen is an American in the same way that a citizen of the U.S. is American. And let’s not even mention South America.

The terms ‘American’, ‘African-American’, ‘Asian-American’ and their like tell us something about the people who invented them, about the people who adopted them, and about the people who use them.

When People Think For Themselves

2007-12-17T10:12:00.000-08:00

We’ve talked about how a large part of David E. Kelly’s humor forces the viewers to think, whether they want to or not. Now we’re going to talk about how his drama forces the viewers to think, whether they want to or not.

The Courtroom

One of the things that sets Kelley apart as a writer of TV court dramas is his ability to present both sides equally, without prejudice. This is how he usually does it in like L.A. Law, Picket Fences, Boston Legal, The Practice, and even, occasionally, Chicago Hope: When it’s time for the jury to decide, one side stands up, and gives his case. The case is so convincing and clear and simple that we, the viewers, think that that’s it, it’s a done deal, he’s going to win, the jury’s going to go this way, and there is nothing the other side can say that can save the day.

Then the lawyer for the other side stands up and presents his case. And by the time he’s done, the viewer thinks: That’s it, he’s right, it’s a done deal, he’s going to win, the jury’s going to vote his way.

Very few writers can pull that off. And, of course, the viewers remember that they said they same thing a couple of minutes ago about the other side. This forces them to think for themselves, to weigh both sides, to make up their own minds which way the jury will go and which way they would go. When both sides are given the best representation, it’s up to us to do the thinking. Usually, writers chew the conclusion for us and give us conclusions they hope we'll share. Less thinking is involved.

The ability to think for yourself to Kelley, perhaps, is more important than the fact that you reach the conclusion he agrees with.

Kelley doesn’t always do this, but more often than not, he does. Here are two examples from the third episode of this season’s Boston Legal:

Cockfighting

The firm’s client, Miguel Obisbo, has been charged with cockfighting, and he admits to it. The time has come to put it to the jury.

The prosecution gets up and says: “It’s not just that it’s against the law. It’s indecent, barbaric, inhumane. Two chickens – roosters, I should say – are thrown in a pit and forced to do battle until one loses consciousness due to blood loss, at which point the other pecks its head off. It’s sick. And this man openly, notoriously, broke the law to commit a sick, sick crime, one he admits committing. Just having a nun translate for you,” he refers to one of the defense lawyers’ tricks, “doesn’t put you on the side of the angels.”

And with that, he sits down.

Now it’s the defense’s turn: “Ever realize chickens are smarter than dogs? Much, much smarter than horses. And we call them ‘fowl’. How sad that the chicken by far is the most abused animal on the planet, raised in crates less than a square foot, the ends of their beaks snapped off after hatching, pumped up with antibiotics to keep them alive in conditions that would otherwise kill them, genetically altered so that they grow twice as fast, sent off to the slaughterhouse after only 6 weeks of living – typically in open crates where millions of them either freeze to death or get baked alive. The ones who do arrive undead are scalded to defeather them. Then they’re hung upside down and electrocuted just enough so that they don’t flap around when they’re getting their throats slit. It’s not good to be a chicken.

“Now, the cockfighters, they get real food. They get real room to move. They’re often loved as pets. They get at least two good years before they’re even asked to do combat. And if he’s a really good fighter, he gets to retire, to stud service, where he can live the life of... Denny Crane,” he points to Denny. Then he returns to the jury, “The simple truth is that if the chickens in this country hope to be afforded a modicum of dignity, he has to fight. Studies show they might actually enjoy it.

“Now, I suppose you could find my client guilty, because technically he broke the law, which screams out with hypocrisy. Or you could say, ‘Wait a second; Miguel Obisbo offers chickens a better life.’ Miguel Obisbo now trusts you to be... humane. Not just for his sake, but for the chickens’.”

So... Who do you think won?

Abstinence Only

Notice, by the way, that in the last example and the next, Kelley never talks down to us. The sentences and the arguments are intelligent and thoughtful and... long. The reason we follow them, the reason they’re not boring, as conventional TV wisdom would have us believe, is that each statement advances our heroes’ success or causes one step closer to their plight. So as long as he sticks to the merits of the case and as long as the points are convincing, he keeps our attention.

Moving on: 15-year-old Abby Holt has had unprotected sex and gotten the HIV virus. She is now suing her school, for having taught ‘abstinence only’ rather than teaching her to use condoms.

The school’s lawyer stands up to give his closing argument:

“Your honor, I think we all agree that fifteen is too young to be having sex. Is there anyone here who takes issue with that? Sometimes, when the right answer is ‘no’, you say ‘no’. You don’t start tinkering with morality to coincide with logistics. Kids need to hear ‘no’, not ‘here’s how, just in case’, but ‘no’.

“Abstinence was the right answer here. If she hadn’t had sex, she wouldn’t be HIV positive. And even if you are so determined to opt for pragmatism, abstinence is still the right answer. Since the implementation of this policy, the teen pregnancy rate has gone down 30%. More and more kids are choosing not to have sex, and that’s good. Whether they get sick or pregnant or not.

“And if parents disagree, by the way, they can choose to teach their kids about condoms and birth-control pills and diaphragms. But once the schools start doing so... Come on, you’re explicitly telling the kids it’s expected of them to be sexually active. And many start doing so because they feel all their friends are. Sure, you can pass out condoms. But it is simply more responsible, more moral, and, yes, more safe to practice abstinence. That’s what we should be telling them. And this school is.”

The school is not responsible for the girl getting HIV, is it?

Alan Shore gets up to give his closing:

“This case isn’t about teenage pregnancy. She didn’t get pregnant, she got HIV. I can see why you’d want to make it about teenage pregnancy, since... Well, actually, I can’t. The United States has the worst teenage pregnancy rate of any industrialized nation. And contrary to what Mr. Jovanka would like us to believe, there’s no evidence whatsoever that suggests using condoms or teaching students about condoms makes them any more inclined to have sex. None. They’re already inclined to have sex, since early puberty. They’re simply going to do it. We all do it. Birds do it, bees do it, educated fleas do it. One day, your honor, even you...” At which point the judge angrily uses his gavel.

Shore recovers, “Yes.” Then he continues: “The fact is, this case has nothing to do with the efficacy of abstinence-only programs. This case is about religion, politics, and federal funding. Our present administration, in blind service to the religious right, has transcended the separation of church and state, and consistently implemented a faith-based political and moral mandate. And now that same policy has been passed on to our educational system. If schools teach ‘abstinence only’, they get federal funding. If they teach any other type of sex education, they don’t. And as a result, the students in these ‘abstinence only’ programs aren’t being taught the truth about that magnificent technological marvel, the condom.

“It’s not a dirty word, your honor: condoms. They first came on the scene some 3,000 years ago in Egypt. For centuries they went merrily along, in modified forms, warding off syphilis, gonorrhea, preventing unplanned pregnancies, until science and medicine eventually caught on, and the pill became a much more effective, less intrusive contraceptive. Penicillin and other antibiotics were miracle cures for gonorrhea and syphilis. The poor, humble condom languished.

“And then came AIDS. This terrifying new disease that panicked the world. For many years it has been fatal, gruesomely so in every case. There was no vaccine, no cure, no treatment. But there were condoms, and they worked. They were safe, time-tested, easy to use, and they protected both partners. The condom is arguably the single, most important invention of the past 2,000 years. In fact, it has been said, without exaggeration, that the health of the world depends on them.

“Now, one would think that the obvious choice would be for schools to tell their students as much. But Abby’s school, indeed all schools that have chosen ‘abstinence only’ have chosen to lie. They teach that condoms are ineffective at preventing pregnancies, which is a lie; they teach that condoms are ineffective at preventing diseases, which is a lie; some of the literature actually compares using a condom to playing Russian roulette, which is frightening, despicable, unforgivable lie.”

“Abby Holt has HIV which, in all likelihood, will develop into AIDS. We’ve sort of forgotten about AIDS in this country. Treatments have improved dramatically. Drugs are keeping people alive for many years after they’ve become infected. But the grim butcher’s bill for this pandemic still keeps growing and growing. Sixty-five million people worldwide have become infected. One time, unprotected sex can kill you. A condom can save you. It is inconceivable that every child in the world isn’t taught that. We should be in criminal court this very moment trying this obscenely duplicitous school for conspiracy to commit murder!

“But frankly, I have no stomach for that. I think of the horror that has been inflicted on this 15-year-old girl, and I’m just so profoundly sad. I can point out the evils of this corrupt system, I can tell you how effective condoms are, the lives they save, on and on and on and on, but words seem to be these hollow, useless things rattling around in this courtroom, because ultimately the lies this school told Abby Holt may... will probably kill her. They have certainly altered her life forever. And in the face of that, all I can think of is... Why?”

And, with that, he sits down.

So... who do you think won?

Planting an Idea

In the last example, Kelley did one more thing. He used the argument to create an idea in our heads that probably wasn’t there before: that 'abstinence only' is akin to murder. It doesn’t really matter who wins, now, because there’s an idea in our head now that wasn’t there before. And it’s an idea we probably won’t easily forget.

And that’s how writers try to change the world.

This Is America, When Ordering Please Speak English

2007-12-16T12:52:00.000-08:00

The Cheesesteak Sticker

It's been making the news rounds recently that Joey Vento who has a cheesesteak joint in Philadelphia put up a sign saying "This is America. When Ordering Please Speak English". Sure, you can look at the political issues of this, but we're here to look at words and what they mean about people.

The phrasing has been getting people's dander up, and the question is not only why but what's behind it.

The sticker has two parts, and the first one isn't really necessary. Mr. Vento could have easily phrased his sticker without it: "When Ordering Please Speak English".

Or he could have put a totally different first part to the sticker, like "Be Kind, When Ordering Please Speak English", or "Be Civil, When Ordering Please Speak English". He probably would have gotten better results, and certainly not have gotten on anyone's bad side.

Which means that the phrasing is not there to get people to speak English when ordering. The phrasing is not there to get people to comply with the idea it seems to suggest. Which means that the sticker was not put there to get people to cooperate. It was put there for a different reason.

"What Is It?"

In Storytellers we try to do what actors and directors and playwrights in the theater usually do. They look at human behavior that seems obvious and ask: "What is it? What is it really?"

A while ago, we talked about "what is it really" when people in an argument say things like: "I believe in the United States of America". We came to the conclusion that people who invoke this kind of argument care more about being right than anything else. You can't say that and be wrong. No one can tell you you're wrong when you say "I believe in the United States of America!" or "I support the troops!". And of course it has the added advantage of automatically putting the person you're speaking to on the wrong side of the argument.

But the sticker says something slightly different. "This is America. When Ordering Please Speak English". What is it? What is it really?

It seems, at least to me, that only a person who needs a lot of positive feedback from anyone, even strangers, a person who needs a lot of pats on the back, a person who needs to constantly be told how right and okay he is, would put up a sticker with that phrasing. If you don't see why, think about it about it backwards. Start off imagining a person who constantly needs positive feedback, who needs to be patted on the back by strangers. Then ask yourself, would that person not put out a sticker that says this? Would the sticker not then invoke exactly that kind of response?

The reason we do things? It's rarely the principle; it's almost always personal.

Patriotism

Speaking of patriotism, check out our old post about the patriotic and pro-military Donald P. Bellisario. We explored the idea that patriotism, as it is usually practiced now, has both limits and borders. Honor and truth have no limits and no borders.

The Comedy-Off: Colbert

2007-12-15T03:43:00.000-08:00

The Comedy-Off

After posting the last entry about humorous writing and timing, one Nir Yaniv asked me why I didn’t use excerpts from more popular sources, like Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. I said that I wanted to quote from things that the readers are less likely to have read, something that will feel new. But, I added, why don’t you do it on your blog? As the conversation continued, we decided to have a comedy-off. Here’s his first salvo.

So far there are only three rules:

1. Entries must be in English, so that both our readers can enjoy them.

2. There must be at least 4-5 excerpts. Anything less is cheating.

3. The loser’s name starts with ‘N’.

More rules may crop up as the game continues.

Timing

What Jerome K. Jerome did in the excerpts Nir brought is build a comic situation, which certainly requires great timing. The point in the last entry in Storytellers, though, was about a different sort of timing.

We’re going to get to it in a roundabout way.

Laughter, like humor, is a sure-fire way to weed the more intelligent from the less intelligent. This is how laughter does it: Laughter almost always starts off with a powerful ‘ha’, in which our diaphragm (read: stomach) hits the bottom of our lungs. Laughter clearly marks the milli-second you got the joke. There is never a doubt about who laughed first, who laughed second, and who laughed last if at all. Laughter shows us how fast someone understood something.

In the Jack Vance and Dorothy Parker excerpts I’ve quoted in the last post, everyone who does laugh (not everyone will laugh) laughs at the same time at the same word. To do that, the author needs to set up one set of expectations in a very clear way and then offset it in a surgically-precise manner to produce the same result in everyone’s brain with one word. Try reading those excerpts again, and see how you’re always surprised at the same spot and want to laugh at the same spot. Check out if you can see how we were set up one way then taken another.

In the Jerome K. Jerome excerpts, meanwhile, it’s the situation that’s comical. The comic situation builds and builds and becomes more and more absurd, and therefore more and more funny. People who listen to or read it will start laughing at different spots and their laughter will keep on rolling as the situation grows more comical.

“We’re at war, sir. How can you ask us to make sacrifices?”

Speaking of having one set of expectations, then being taken another way, there’s a subset of that category, in which the writer already knows what we think, so he doesn’t bother building up the premise, he just knocks it down. That is one neat trick, and one man and his writers do it time and time again on television.

Stephen Colbert

Colbert, in his program, The Colbert Report, makes it a point to again and again appear to say one thing but actually say another. He never tells you he doesn’t believe what he’s saying. He never tells you that what he’s saying is absurd. He is relying on the audience’s set of presumptions to already realize that he couldn’t possibly mean what he’s saying.

Here are a few examples:

“Folks, everywhere you look these days, there are signs our great American traditions are disappearing. Look at this,” he shows a newspaper headline, “ ‘The great American swing set is teetering’. The wear-a-helmet-first Gestapo would have you believing that playgrounds are dangerous. And they are. That’s exactly why we need them. To thin the herd.”

As before, explaining why something funny works really takes the punch of it. See if you can tell how he assumes you’re thinking one thing and preys upon it.

Here he continues his rant:

“Sadly enough, even the weather page is in a state of moral decay.” Colbert pulls out a colorful weather map from USA Today, filled with red zones, orange zones and red zones. “What’s wrong with red, white, and blue, USA Today? This rainbow weather map is just another example of the homo-meteorological agenda. Folks, I don’t care what their forecast is, I will not turn partly gay with a chance of a reach-around.”

Another time, he took on the policy of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’, by suggesting the Pentagon adopt an even stricter policy: “ ‘Don’t know, don’t think’. Under the new policy, it will be against regulations for a soldier to know what homosexuality is. If a fellow soldier tells you he’s gay, it’s your duty to assume he’s filled with joy. If you see two naked guys oiled up and rolling around, just assume they’re wrestling. And if someone starts soaping you up in the shower, say thank you and salute. Because the only way we can have a cohesive fighting force is if there is never a question about a comrade’s sexual orientation. And we can no longer count on gay soldiers refusing to answer the question we’re too afraid to ask.”

Colbert on competition:

“Competition improves everything. After Home Depot opened down the block, service at my local hardware store got a lot better!” He pauses a second, then feels a need to add, “Until it closed.”

Colbert takes on education:

“Oprah Winfrey recently spent over 40 million dollars to start a school in South Africa. She said Third World kids were more desperate to learn than our kids. Yes, Oprah, that’s exactly why we have to hold the Third World kids back!”

Later on, he adds:

“And, hey, don’t the liberals always say, ‘who are we to judge these people’? Maybe dysentery and guinea worms are part of their culture? I don’t know.”

Here Colbert takes a stand on capital punishment:

“Most disappointingly, my own Catholic Church is against capital punishment. Well, that’s pretty hypocritical considering they wouldn’t even have a religion if it weren’t for capital punishment.”

The danger, of course, in phrasing things like this is that some people will take you at your word. President Bush's people, for example, who invited Colbert to the Press Corps Dinner. Then again, maybe they were fooled by the red, white, and blue colors that pervade the show.

In a recent ‘meet the author’ that can be found somewhere in podcast-land, Colbert says that some of the people he grew up with tell him, Now we agree with what you’re saying.

On the other hand, of course, if you add ‘... Not’ at the end of every sentence, you won’t be as funny.

Over to you, Nir.

Some Dry Humor

2007-12-09T12:57:00.000-08:00

Timing

Sometimes dissecting things that are funny takes the fun out of them. I wanted to talk about timing and how timing is not just something musicians or dancers or actors have. Timing is something writers have as well.

Here are a few examples of some very dry humor. We’re not going to talk about them, because that will take the fun out of everything. But, if you can, after you read each excerpt, think about the author’s timing.

Jack Vance

Here’s what you need to know about Jack Vance for the purposes of this article: He used to write about the far, far future, in which mankind populated galaxies, and each planet was a social framework with its own characteristics and its own subcultures, each also with its own unique social framework.

The first excerpt is from the novella Freitzke’s Return, which I found reprinted in the book called Galactic Effectuator. ‘Effectuator’ is to the denizens of the galaxy what ‘private investigator’ is to us. Here, our hero is hired to investigate a case in which, a-hem, well, it’s like this: The bad guy is a jealous man who can’t accept the smallest failure. When the client ends up marrying the woman the bad guy was interested in, the bad guy kidnaps the client, knocks him out, and operates on him. The client slowly begins to suspect that his sperm-making ‘apparatus’ has been replaced by the bad guy’s sperm-making ‘apparatus’. Thus, if the wife gets pregnant, she gets pregnant by the bad guy. The client hires our hero to find the bad guy and have his original ‘equipment’ re-placed.

That is neither here nor there, because the quote from the novella is Vance’s explanation, in a footnote, how the Arsh race, which is now slightly different from the human race, came into existence:

The legendary starmenter Yane Cargus contracted with the all-male fugitives. He agreed to deliver one hundred young females for a fee of five hundred red sarcenels, the sarcenel being a jewellike object taken from a Flamboyard’s sensorium. Cargus raided the Convent of the Divine Prisom at Blenny, on Lutus, capturing two hundred and thirty novitiates. Upon delivering his cargo, he required a thousand sarcenels or nothing, emphasizing the volume discount. The fugitives in their turn pointed out that sarcenels were rare, that the Flamboyards ferociously resisted attack, that, for eighty-six men, two hundred and thirty females were redundant by more than a factor of two, and, more importantly, that the females were members of that ill-favored and swarthy race known as Gettucks: not at all what the fugitives had in mind. In the ensuing fight, Yane Cargus took thirty-four wounds from the sneezewood lances, but miraculously survived. The fugitives acquired two hundred and thirty females free of charge, and the Arsh race came into existence.

Notice that part of what makes it funny is the fact that Vance borrows a set of phrases from one world and uses it in the context of another that has nothing to do with the first (“emphasizing the volume discount”, for example, has nothing to do with slavery or rape).

He does it again in the following two examples, from Night Lamp. Here a schoolboy and a schoolgirl are talking.

It was Tatninka, rather than Skirlet, who bore the news to Jaro. “Did you hear what Hanafer called you?”

“No.”

“He said you were a moop!”

“Oh? What’s that? Nothing good, I suspect.”

Tatninka giggled. “I forgot; you’re really off in the clouds, aren’t you? Well, then!” She recited a definition she had heard Hanafer use only the week before: “If you come upon a very timid nimp who wets the bed and wouldn’t say ‘peep’ to a pussycat—you have found a moop.”

Jaro sighed. “Very well; now I know.”

“Hmf. You’re not even angry,” said Taninka in disgust.

Jaro reflected. “Hanafer can be carried off by a big bird, for all I care. Otherwise, there is no return message.”

Later, his mother sees Jaro moping and gets to the bottom of things.

“That is not acceptable conduct, and I shall have a word with his mother.”

“No!” cried Jaro in panic. “I don’t care what Hanafer thinks! If you complain to his mother, everyone will laugh at me!”

Althea knew that he was right. “Then you’ll just have to take Hanafer aside and explain in a nice way that you mean him no harm and that he has no reason to call you names.”

Jaro nodded. “I may do just that—after punching his head to attract attention.”

Of course, on different matters, the mother and the father, have their own disagreements.

From the first Hilyer had felt deeply suspicious of Maihac. When Althea scoffed, Hilyer claimed darkly that his instincts were never wrong. He felt that Maihac, if not a blackguard had much to hide, to which Althea said: “Oh piffle. Everyone has something to hide.”

Hilyer started to declare, “Not I!” in a decisive voice, then thought of one or two shrouded episodes in his past and merely gave a noncommittal grunt.

Dorothy Parker

In a collection of her book reviews which I found in The Penguin Dorothy Parker, she reviews a book by one Margot Asquith. It’s called Re-enter Margot Asquith – A Masterpiece from the French, dated October 22, 1927.

I think it must be pleasanter to be Margot Asquith than to be any other living human being; and this is no matter of snap judgment on my part, for I have given long and envious thought to the desirability of being Charles A. Levine. But the lady seems to have even more self-assurance than has the argumentative birdman. Her perfect confidence in herself is a thing to which monuments should be erected; hers is a poise that ought to be on display in the British Museum. The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.

In another review, The Professor Goes In for Sweetness and Light, dated November 5, 1927, she reviews a book by Professor Phelps in which he gives us his wisdom on the key to happiness. She is now in the middle of quoting from the beginning of the book regarding the definition of happiness.

We might just as well get on along to the next statement, which goes like this: “One of the best” (we are still on definitions of happiness) “was given in my Senior year at college by Professor Timothy Dwight: ‘The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.’” Promptly one starts recalling such Happiness Boys as Nietzsche, Socrates, de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Poe. One wonders, with hungry curiosity, what were some of the other definitions that Professor Phelps chucked aside in order to give preference to this one.

The Point

The point? The point is that writers have timing. That includes authors of prose, whose work is not meant to be read aloud, not meant to be heard, and when read in one’s head is not read to a rhythm. There are still authors with perfect timing.

If you disagree, please read the excerpts again.

I reserve the right to bring more examples, and I hope you may feel like adding a few excerpts yourself in the comment, if you feel like sharing.

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For more posts on humor, check out the one analyzing David E. Kelley's humor as well as the one that takes on racism. Then we've got some nice funny excerpts from Rescue Me and from the Gilmore Girls.

There's No Place Like Home

2007-12-05T14:16:00.000-08:00

A small, small thought about the last line in the first part of Tin Man, where the land of Oz is now called 'The O.Z.' (pronounced 'Oh-zee').

The last line is delivered by the evil sorceress to this story's 'Dorothy' (called D.G.), after D.G. and her friends have been defeated: "Welcome back, little sister. There's no place like the O.Z."

Now, couldn't the last line have been: "Welcome to the O.Z., bitch. There's no place like home."

I mean, you get a two-for-one.

I'm just saying.

The Problem with Pundits

2007-11-29T23:57:00.000-08:00

Comedy, satire and punditry all require a common denominator that is usually overlooked: the willingness to look stupid.

Comedy

When Tim Allen was at the Actors’ Studio, he was asked by a student the basic secret to being funny. That, of course, is a loaded question that can take years to answer by experts. Allen said (and I’m paraphrasing): ‘You have to commit. You have to be willing to commit and go all the way. Even if your joke tanks, even if you don’t get a laugh, even if you look stupid, you have to go all the way with it.’

That’s great advice. And if you take the time to imagine the comedians you like best and the moments of comedy you like best, you’ll see that in almost all those moments the comedian went with his joke/bit all the way. You’ll see that the joke didn’t have to succeed and that if it didn’t, the comedian would probably have looked very stupid. In fact, most comedy that does succeed comes first of all at the expense of the comedian. Comedy, by its nature, punctures bloated egos. It punctures stupidity, it punctures the unwillingness to bend (in behavior or logic or opinion). And if you have a bloated ego or an inability to look stupid or an unwillingness to bend, you can’t make comedy.

In puncturing other people’s egos you have to first of all be able to puncture your own. If you want to get people to laugh at their own stupidity, you have to be able to laugh at your own first.

Which brings us to satire.

Satire

In a talk a show a couple of weeks ago there was an interview with a playwright who’s famous where I live (which means you’ve probably never heard of him). He has a new satire out and he came to talk about it.

When he was asked about his last satire and about the fact that what he had said there had turned out to be not true, rather than admit it, he began to shift around in his seat and talk his way out of it, explaining, in a very roundabout way, why he wasn’t wrong even though the facts no longer back him up.

Now, satire asks of the audience something that’s very hard to do. Satire asks us to change our minds, to admit we’re wrong, to open our minds to new thoughts and new ideas. If you can’t change your mind, admit you’re wrong, and open your mind to new thoughts and new, how can you have the gall to ask that of your audience? How good can your satire be if you have an inability to open your mind?

Which brings us to punditry.

Punditry

Punditry is like satire in this respect: the pundits are asking people to change their minds, to consider a new idea or a new concept or a new opinion.

Too many pundits in all forms of the media are unable to admit mistakes. Not only are they not asked about their previous erroneous statements by their interviewers, they do not usually admit to such things on their own. Not all pundits are like this – and the best certainly aren’t – but certainly too many. (One good example jumps immediately to mind: Jeff Greenfield is a very smart ‘analyst’ who has no problem saying he was wrong or that he’d changed his mind. That’s one of the reasons he’s become hot property.)

When it’s your job to be right, it’s hard to say “I was wrong”. When it’s your job to be right, it all becomes about your ego and you feel you must maintain your status and the opinion of others. But it isn’t your job to be right, it’s your job to be intelligent.

Changing your mind isn’t evidence of flip-flopping (an accusation politicians are victims of); changing your mind is, at times, an ability to adapt to new information and new circumstances, an ability we usually refer to as ‘intelligence’.

But let’s change “I was wrong” to “Oh, that’s right”. The two statements mean the same thing, after all. If it’s your job to get the audience to say “Oh, that’s right”, you should be able to go through that process yourself. Lead by example. It’s not about your opinion, it’s about having the ability to think. And “Oh, that’s right” symbolizes that pretty well.

So here’s a proposition to pundits out there: Start saying, “Oh, that’s right.” People’s opinions of you will go up.

The World Must Be Peopled

2007-11-16T17:18:00.000-08:00

Women

So: Women. What’s that all about?

In the movie Switch, written and directed by Edward Blake, Ellen Barkin plays a sexist, chauvinist man who treats women as if they came in a PEZ dispenser. Three of his ex-girlfriends band together and kill him. Rather than send him immediately to Hell, God gives our hero a second chance: I’ll send you back, God says, and if you find one woman who loves you, you’ll get to Heaven. But the twist is that God sends him back as a woman, a really hot woman.

Edward Blake was a great writer and Switch is great both as a movie and as a comedy (and Ellen Barkin is great as a man in a woman’s body ,but we’re not here to talk about acting). Obviously, Blake tried to get men to understand what it’s like to be a woman, even for a day. Blake fails in two places and succeeds in a third in a really big way.

Here’s where he doesn’t succeed:

One: Men treat our hero like a piece of meat and constantly try to get him into bed, no matter the context of the situation or conversation. We see the situations are true and we know that men really behave like this and we hear Barkin complain about it with the same words women really use, but the men’s behavior only comes off as annoying. Men in the audience who would love to be hounded endlessly by women wouldn’t, on the basis of the movie, feel like complaining if they were a woman hounded endlessly by men. After all, it’s their fantasy to be attractive.

Two: Our hero’s best friend in life (before he died) is played by Jimmy Smits, who later learns the truth about his old friend’s new body, but because he’s now a hot babe, tries to sleep with him anyway. One day, the two of them get drunk and then fall asleep together in a bed. Smits, apparently, took advantage of Barkin while Barkin was asleep. Barkin says Smits raped him. Smits says Barkin cooperated. This part doesn’t work, either. Although Barkin’s words are all true, and though her character’s point of view is clear, we don’t feel bad for Barkin for what happened. The feeling of violation isn’t there. So if you didn’t care before you watched the movie, you wouldn’t care while watching it. That’s the writer’s fault.

Here’s where Blake succeeds in a big way. It turns out that from that one night with Smits, Barkin gets pregnant. He decides to keep the baby, and eventually he gives birth. And the second Barkin gives birth, something happens in the mind of the men watching the movie: a switch of the imagination, a real one. Men may entertain what it’s like to be raped or to be leered at or to be constantly hit on or to walk in heels, etc., but they never entertain what it would really be like to give birth. That’s a woman’s job. That is therefore the one big moment in the movie where the men actually entertain the thought of what it must be like to be a woman. By this I mean that it is the one instant in the movie in which the men watching actually imagine what it would be like to be different or other. That kind of imagination is not required for any other part of the movie.

Every time I watch Switch, the same realization hits me at exactly that time: Deep, deep down in their subconscious, most men – and it doesn’t matter if they’re liberal or conservative – still see women not only as sexual objects but also as baby-making machines; that deep, deep down we perceive this as women’s most important role. This societal imperative that has been ingrained into our society for thousands of years has not vanished, has not even been addressed since the pill was introduced and women started actively and effectively choosing not to get pregnant.

Abortion and God

It seems to me that the anti-abortionists (a position which, in the U.S., is called ‘pro-life’), has less to do with a baby’s right to life or even religion and more to do with the societal imperative that is revealed in Switch.

Here’s why it isn’t only about life for most anti-abortionists: People who would be actively against abortion because they care so much for life and for the sacredness of it would be out there helping the poor and the hungry in all countries, they would be against the death penalty, and they would be just as active against the many genocides and slaughters currently taking place all over the world. This is usually pointed out by liberals when they try to claim that conservative anti-abortionists are hypocritical, but calling the other side names takes nothing from the other side’s claim. The point is that because of this inconsistency, it can’t possibly be only about this. It must be about something else.

Here’s why it isn’t about what God says: There’s true belief in God and there’s belief in God. Here’s an example of the former: If God tells you to take your first-born child and kill him (as the Bible tells of Abraham), you take your first-born child and you kill him. That is true belief in God. Most people are not willing to go that far. Most people at the end of the day believe in things that are comfortable for them to believe in. Most people choose their god in little ways, what their god would accept and what He wouldn’t. Most people find the god that most agrees with what they want to believe God is. That is especially true when it comes to the big things. You may keep the Sabbath holy even if it’s uncomfortable for you, because it’s not that big a bother, but at the same time you will probably choose not to kill your first-born child even if your minister/priest/rabbi/etc. told you to.

Now, the Bible talks about many, many things which today people would not fight for (slavery, for example). People choose which parts of what God said in the Bible to care about and which not to. Not everything that’s in the Bible is reason to go out to the streets and picket. It is the person, not God, who picks and chooses.

At the end of the day, people need to care about something they become active about before they find that God agrees with them (and the more active they are, the more they need to care). But if God agrees with them, they feel morally justified and their fervor grows.

Objectifying Women

Why is it, then, that it is so easy to get people out to the streets to fight against abortion? Because we have an ingrained social imperative that is thousands of years old: Women are here to make babies. You thought women were being objectified as sex symbols? That’s nothing. Women should be mothers. Women should make babies. That’s why they’re here.

The thing is that although the abortion debate is not really about being ‘pro-life’, it also isn’t about being ‘pro-choice’. According to this instinctive belief ingrained into men, women shouldn’t get a choice. Some things are too important, too sacred. And it is men who write the abortion laws and men who decided Roe v. Wade, and it is men who will vote on the next piece of legislation that has to do with a woman’s right to choose anything.

Women are here to make babies. It is more important than their right to express themselves. It is more important than their right to vote. It is more important than any other right or freedom that they may get or deserve. Not only that, but their making babies is more important than whatever it is they want out of their own lives. It is the reason they’re here. The world, after all, must be peopled.

That is how most men, even liberals, perceive women deep down. And, truth to tell, that is how many women perceive themselves, too, deep down. And if on top of this your god happens to say that fetuses mustn’t be killed because they have souls, why that’s great, let’s use that.

I'm Back

2007-11-13T02:07:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm back, as you can see from the earlier post. I'm back, but there will be a few changes.

This will no longer be a weekly column. It will all depend on how much time I have and on whatever idea may strike that's worthy of a column.

Storytellers will still be a column, but will also become more of a blog, in which I'll post news and other things I think might be interesting.

Speaking of which, here's an update on the movie Cold, Cold Heart, which was the reason I stopped posting here a few months ago. In the meantime, we finished shooting and finished the rough cut. The rest of the post production process, however, will take a few more months than originally planned, but everything's proceeding apace. Such is the life of the independent filmmaker. I hope to have a website about Cold, Cold Heart in the upcoming weeks. I'll link to it over here when it's up.

By the way, I mentioned Erica Jong in the earlier post. She is one of our truth-tellers, and for you newcomers out there, a few months ago we had an entire column about truth-telling.

The Meaning of Words

2007-11-12T19:35:00.000-08:00

Back to the Beginning

Here’s a nifty fact which I found reading historian Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World (a mind-blowing read, by the way). It’s right in the introduction:

“In terms of our DNA we are, without a shadow of a doubt, one species, whose origins can be traced back to Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, and who began to spread into new continents only as recently as 60,000 years ago – in evolutionary terms, the proverbial blink of an eye.”

This is, of course, not new, but from a writer’s point of view, these numbers are fascinating.

We Are Not Genetically Built For Language

Think about it like this: The first human did not speak any language. S/he had the same genetic ability for language that we do today, but obviously s/he only learned to communicate the way the tribe s/he was born into communicated. And the way tribes communicated back then must have been no different from the way monkeys communicate today: grunting, pointing, screaming, and so on.

Obviously, the first human did not immediately invent a language. It is unreasonable to assume that the first human suddenly came up with something like English or ancient Aramaic, for example. Even if s/he had, s/he would have no one to talk to. And, of course, no one can invent a language out of thin air without first knowing a language.

It is more reasonable to assume that the first human communicated with the tribe in the way the tribe communicated before the human had been born, and that the new human did nothing more complicated than that. Then the first human bred, and the offsprings bred, and so on. And eventually, after a few generations, maybe one word formed that the humans – and even the ones with the more monkey-like brain – could learn to understand and use to communicate better. (Monkeys, research has shown, can learn a few hundred words.)

Over the generations, a few more words must have formed. A few generations later and maybe there were a few dozen words. Take a few more generations, maybe even hundreds or thousands of years, to form something remotely akin to syntax. And take a few thousand more years to form a basis for a language that had some kind of logic or reason behind it, as all human languages today do.

According to the numbers above, mankind had anything from 40,000 to 140,000 years to form out of nothing a basis, a common denominator, for what would later become all human languages.

We are so used to seeing babies and children learn the language, and babies and children are so good at it and the human brain is so clearly geared to absorb language in a faster and more thorough way than adults can, that it seems the most natural thing for the human brain to do. And yet if we think about it, it becomes clear that the DNA that gave this ability to kids, was not created when language, even rudimentary language, existed.

We ourselves need language so much, are reliant on it for everything, and our brains are clearly quite equipped and adept at using and learning a language, that it is almost impossible to conceive that we are not genetically built for language.

The mechanism through which babies and kids learn language, the mechanism we use to communicate, must necessarily have served a completely different purpose than the one we are using it for now. When mankind formed – with the same DNA as we have today – it must have taken thousands of years for a rudimentary semblance of a language to form.

We are not genetically built for language. And yet we are.

Symbolic Logic

It’s all about symbolic logic. That’s an ability to put something into a concept, which can be a word or a number or even a picture in our imagination. Once we can think about things without seeing them, we can put two of them together, imagine consequences of things we have not seen by creating a third avatar/picture/concept/word/number in our heads, and so on.

We can plan ahead, we can think about things that haven’t happened or did happen but are not happening now. We can think about people or animals that are not in front of us. We can see our own death. We can imagine entire scenarios in our heads, an ability that also allows us to imagine and understand and invent stories.

The more concepts for which we develop names or shapes for in our heads, the better we are at thinking ahead, relying on previous knowledge. Today it’s given us languages, mathematics, stories, and more. But the mechanism for all this is the same: the ability to separate one thing from all we see or imagine or feel and see it as one thing.

That one ability separates our intelligence from the monkeys to such an extent that it let us take over the world and even get to the moon and send probes to the far reaches of the solar system.

Back to Words

So what does that mean about words?

Words are either concepts or connections between concepts. I’ve put in bold the words in the last sentence that are concepts: Words are either concepts or connections between concepts. Here is the same sentence with the connections between concepts in bold: Words are either concepts or connections between concepts.

But words resonate. Poetry resonates. Stories resonate. Certain sentences by certain authors can lay you down and pierce you right through the heart.

The Meaning of Words

Erica Jong, in her book Seducing the Demon (also mind-blowing), writes about a choice she made before giving a speech:

“There was only one way to tell the truth. And that was to tell the kids and their parents and professors why I was there. I was there because I was a writer and a writer is someone who takes the universal whore of a language and turns her into a virgin again. I wasn’t going to coast on clichés. I was going to talk about the power of words—something I had been thinking a great deal about since the so-called war on terror dragged on and on, kidnapping the language and proliferating terrorists.”

When Jong writes about “the universal whore of a language”, she means two things: One, that language has been recently overtaken by Orwellian Newspeak and forced to tell lies and hide the truth; and two, that even without that, it is the writer’s job to create something new and true every time she puts old words on a page.

But as great as that line is, language is never a whore.

A writer uses two kinds of words: the words that are concepts and the words that connect concepts. The words that connect concepts are perceived in the same way in everyone’s minds (‘and’, ‘but’, ‘is’, ‘that’, ‘the’, etc.). But the words that are concepts are perceived differently in each and every person that hears them. ‘Chair’ isn’t the same for me as it is for you. Neither is ‘leader’ or ‘strong’. You know what I mean when I say these words, but the words resonate differently in every one of us.

Even our own understanding of words isn’t that clear. Do we know what we fully mean when we say ‘chair’? Can we define it properly? ‘Chair’, after all, covers all chairs possible, and that’s a hard concept to define. And yet when we see a new chair, we immediately know that it is a chair even though we’ve never seen another one exactly like it before. The word ‘chair’ also includes many memories of chairs, as well as, perhaps, certain experiences with chairs. The word ‘chair’ must necessarily carry with it the process by which we, as babies or kids, learned to tell chairs apart from things that looked like chairs but weren’t. The process of learning the word ‘chair’ is also included in our experience of it when we hear the word. The process of having been taught the word ‘chair’ (different from learning the word) must also be hidden there somewhere. The possibilities of what other chairs could be as well as the possibilities that were close but did not make it into the definition (back when we were kids) must also be subconsciously included in our experience of the word. I could go on and on and yet not cover everything.

That means that when we say the old word ‘chair’, things resonate in every one of us slightly differently. Different pictures, memories, associations are summoned within each of us, and usually we are not aware of this process. Even when we are aware of it, like now, we can’t be aware of everything that single word means to us.

Every word that is a concept is not a fully-formed concept. It carries with it memories, depths, associations to other concepts, possibilities, and who knows what else. Words that are concepts are like pillars on which you stand but that reach endlessly down, so that their bottom cannot be seen. A good writer uses that fact when putting together a sentence. A good writer would know that every one of us understands concepts differently. A good writer would subconsciously know that careful use of words-that-are-concepts resonates deep into unseen places.

In Conclusion

Language isn’t a whore. Language is made of bottomless pillars that go deep into the murky depths of our selves and reach into places we don’t fully know or understand. The words in language that are concepts rather than connections have, as far as we are concerned, endless depth, and if used properly, they will resonate in ways that reach into those depths.

____
Corrections: A certain evolutionary biologist corrected me on the following things (I'm paraphrasing).
1. "Every time you said 'monkey', you meant 'ape'."
2. "It is most likely that the brain evolved together with the language and symbolic thinking. Language advanced a bit, the cortex got more complex, language advanced a bit more, the cortex got more complex, etc."

It's Time to Say Adieu

2007-08-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

Hi, everyone. As you may have noticed, I’ve disappeared for the last couple of weeks and I am going to disappear for a much longer time. I’ve just finished shooting a 50-minute drama, which I wrote, directed, produced, and shot. The drama’s in editing and I’m starting to shoot a movie which I’m writing, directing, producing, and shooting. I thought I could do that, and, at the same time, keep writing the Storytellers articles. And I can’t. The water’s over my head. So it’s time to go.

These are the things we would have talked about during the next few weeks and won’t: We won’t talk about David Lynch and where emotions that have nothing to do with reality come from; we won’t talk about the Coen brothers and the way they describe human processes from the outside and never look from the inside to see what it feels like; we won’t talk about whether it’s good that Spielberg’s best movies are for kids or whether making scenes with The Hero and The Kids and The Dame rather than people with names comes from a dehumanized place; we won’t talk about Battlestar Galactica and the way everything in it fits the article I already wrote about Weeds; and we won’t talk about how David Mamet uses truth to hide the truth, even in the ending of his movies and plays.

Thank you, everyone. I hope you liked your stay. I hope you’ll like my movie. In the meantime, here’s a story I’m really proud of. Enjoy.

Guy

Oh, by the way, the movie’s name (for now) is Cold, Cold Heart. It’s science fiction. My executive producer says there’s going to be an IMDB entry in a few weeks. So if it pops up there, I’ll post a link to it as my last post (for you RSS-ers out there) so people can follow our progress.

Religion and the Origin of Science Fiction

2007-07-11T13:13:00.000-07:00

Where does science fiction come from? Since it is a form of art, and since it does touch many people, then it must necessarily touch something that was created long ago, when mankind came to be.

The origin of science fiction must necessarily start at the origin of mankind and not at the origin of modern technology (like electricity) or even ancient technology (like agriculture).

So where was science fiction when we came down from the trees?

Religion as Science

Some evolutionists have argued that religion is science without the scientific method. Religion, faith, beliefs, and superstition are all based on explanations of the world we live in. If you’re a caveman whose father is deathly sick, and after you happen to hit the wall three times or close your eyes and pray or tear your hair out, he gets better, you might assume that the events are connected. You would not test this theory as you would a scientific theory because you would not risk your father’s life.

If two months later your mother gets sick, you perform the same ritual, and it works, then your theory was right. If she dies, then perhaps you knocked on the wrong place on the wall or maybe you didn’t pray hard enough or maybe you didn’t tear out enough of your hair. You will find a malleable explanation that fits both instances rather than discard the original proposition as false.

If you’re a caveman who steals from his friend then almost gets hit by lightning, you might decide that the two events are connected. You would not test that theory, scientifically, to see if it would happen again or if the events were unrelated, because you would be afraid to be hit by lightning.

In trying to explain why there is rain or thunder, why there is a famine, a draught, a hurricane, a tsunami, or why people get sick or die, theories explaining these events are formed in our heads. When enough theories are formed, a belief system is created, what physicists call a ‘Theory of Everything’. Sooner or later a person believing strongly enough in this theory and persuasive enough to draw other people in creates followers and believers in this theory of how the universe works. From there on, rules are created that apply to the believers, and the road from there to organized religion is clear.

As a side note, this means that any life-form on earth or in space whose intelligence would be advanced enough to create science and overcome nature would also develop religion. In fact, it would develop religion first.

The Emotions of Religion

But religion also carries with it a few extras that science does not. It carries with it a few emotions that are easily classifiable.

It allays fears – Religion allays fear of death, as much as possible, by telling us that death isn’t the end and that there is something good afterwards. It also allays fears during hard time, telling us that things will be better or that god has a plan, etc.

A feeling of unity – Many religions provide its community a feeling of togetherness that can’t usually be found in other communities. Everyone knows everyone else is likeminded. Everyone gathers in the same place at certain times to celebrate the same things. A feeling of unity is a powerful thing, and both democracy and science stay away from them.

A feeling of the divine – When you believe in certain gods, you feel like you can touch something that is beyond you and above you. For a few short instances, you feel what true grandness must feel like. It’s a feeling of majesty, of a grand plan, and of your place in the universe.

Science Fiction and Divinity

A large part of science fiction and its allure is the feeling it gives, that grander things are possible, that majesty bigger than what we know exists. Technology we haven’t dreamt of, races the likes of which we’ve never seen, mysteries we haven’t conceived of, societies more advanced than our own that are now dead - all these things hint at things that are bigger than us, at a majesty to a universe of which we are but a cog. Many stories are based on a grand plan to the universe. It could be that laws of physics are introduced or supposed that make us see a more logical Theory of Everything. An alien race or advanced technology may give us a hint of things grander than ourselves.

A good chunk of science fiction tunes into that basic human feeling that existed when we came down from the trees, the feeling of majesty, of awe, of things greater than what we know, of a big plan that might exist - things that are found through science... and religion.

Science fiction comes from religion. And religion comes from science.

What Does Cronenberg Find Weird?

2007-07-04T09:21:00.000-07:00

We’ve already talked about the top four storytellers in TV today. Now, slowly and sporadically, we’re starting a four-article series about the top four storytellers in cinema today.

Storytellers in Cinema

In television, the storyteller is the writer. In cinema, the storyteller is the director. There are many kinds of directors: an actors’ director, a visual director, a lyrical director (Greenaway, for example), a storytelling director, and so on. In this column, we care about those who tell a story best. There are four storytellers in cinema whose power to captivate us when telling us a story, even a crazy story, is unmatched. They are, in no particular order: Steven Spielberg, the Coen brothers, David Lynch, and David Cronenberg.

Cronenberg

Today we’re going to talk about Cronenberg. He is the director (and, often, writer) of The Fly, eXistenZ, A History of Violence, Naked Lunch, Videodrome, Scanners, Dead Ringers, and more. Cronenberg tells us dark and strange stories, sometimes disgusting, at best weird. And yet we sit there and take it, not because of the subject itself, but because Cronenberg can tell a story.

There are things we can tell about people who tell stories, facts we can deduce by the way the story is told. It would be the easiest thing in the world to try and deduce something about a mind that invents such eerily dark stories. But let’s take a different tack. Let’s put aside the content of the story, and try and learn things about Cronenberg simply from the way he positions the camera.

Cronenberg’s Frames

Take A History of Violence, for example. Leaving the story completely out it, most of the frames in the movie give us a feeling that something is very very wrong. And yet these frames are usually of one or two people, just standing there, in front of a completely ordinary background. But that nagging feeling that something is wrong does not leave us.

That nagging feeling is not our imagination. Cronenberg put it there for us. He put it in the frame.

But where is that wrongness found? It isn’t in the background, because the background’s normal. It isn’t that the shot is framed in a particularly freaky way; it isn’t. It’s that somehow a bigger emphasis is given to the character’s head. Everything that’s wrong in the picture is in the character’s head (and it doesn’t matter what character we’re talking about). But, look hard as you can, you won’t see what’s wrong. Cronenberg doesn’t tell you what’s wrong. You have no idea what possibly could be wrong. But you do know that something is very wrong.

What’s Behind Those Eyes?

If we look even more closely at the way the frame is positioned, we’ll see that the picture is framed in such a way as to make us look not exactly at the person’s face, but at what’s behind it.

Cronenberg is focusing out attention not at the person’s face, but at their intent, that murky, intangible thing which causes us to act and think.

There is something behind a man’s (or a woman’s) eyes. Something lies behind that normal shell, behind the skin and bones that nature gave us. Something lies behind our thoughts. Something inexplicable that brings about those thoughts. Something beyond what we understand, beyond what we know is there and Cronenberg obsesses over it.

When he looks at a person, and when we look at a character through his eyes, what we see is: intent. A Cronenberg character looks at someone or says something, and there is intent in those eyes. And behind the intent, there is... something.

What Cronenberg Finds Weird

Cronenberg doesn’t know who we are really. All he sees when he looks at a person is ‘intent’. But he knows that there is something behind that intent. He feels it in his bones. And he feels that he doesn’t know what that thing is or where it comes from or who it belongs to. He doesn’t know why that intent is there, what it really wants. And he fears that our intent may come from a dark place or that it may not actually come from us.

Look at his movies again, and you’ll see how he frames the shots in such a way as to put intent as the most important thing in almost every shot. There is something mysterious behind those eyes, his work screams. If the shot is about two people talking, you’ll see that very often, they get equal treatment in the frame, taking the same space and equally interesting to the eye. That is because they are both human, both have intent, and both are therefore equally mysterious. Cronenberg doesn’t care who is in the shot, as long as s/he’s human. It’s the intent he’s trying to catch; that’s the real hero and villain of his stories.

And that’s where his darkness comes from.

Why Did Evolution Leave Us the Artists?

2007-06-27T01:05:00.000-07:00

Why do we even have artists? Do we really need them, from an evolutionary point of view?

Artists should have died off

Who needs artists, anyway?

Most of them, historically, are not very good at the productive stuff, which makes them a burden on society. The thing that they are good at is not very useful for society and all other animals have done well without pictures or stories or music. We don't really need movies or music or dancers or poets to survive, do we?

Not only that, artists are usually a destabilizing influence on society. They keep trying to break rules (usually), they keep living a wild and sordid life (overall), their art keeps pushing boundaries that disturb the careful balance of society (mostly).

It would seem to make sense that a society that succeeded in eliminating its artists would survive better and therefore have an evolutionary edge. Its people would work better and longer, would not dream of better things, and the rules of the society would be less threatened.

Why didn't artists die off and leave our societies more stable?

Art increases people's intelligence

Most stories are good for our intelligence. When small kids listen to stories, they experience in their minds situations they haven't been in and learn how to cope. They listen again and again to the same stories, and imagine what it feels like to be in that situation. The same is true with grownups. Some stories help us prepare for future situations and/or understand past situations better.

Imagination also helps increase people's ability to think, seeing as it breaks old forms and helps imagine new ones. Imagination is a very good surviving tool. The better your imagination, the better your ability to cope with change, to win wars, to advance in society, etc.

Being able to think outside the box promises a more intelligent society, even if the person who first thought outside the box was one of them artist types. Being forced to push back when somebody pushes your boundaries or buttons, magnifies your ability to justify the boundaries, and also helps you move them should the need for it arise. If change becomes necessary, the fact that your boundaries were already in question, makes it easier to change them. An ability to bend under changing circumstances is a mark of intelligence.

But these things don't exist in all pieces of good art.

Art crystallizes ideas and emotions

What every piece of good art does is crystallize ideas and emotions.

The better the art the more precise the expression of emotion. Artists make solid emotions that are fluid and that don't have a name. If you hear a piece of brilliant music and it captures the way you feel precisely, you are then able to look at some of your emotions in a more precise manner. If a painting captures a feeling you never knew you had, now you know you have it. Your emotional intelligence increased somewhat. If a brilliantly constructed building shows you a relationship of the spaces around you that you saw but couldn't place or that brings some enlightenment to a place in your mind you didn't know was there, you are now a slightly wiser person. If a dance tugs at your heart in a place that has no name, if a play makes you feel like you experienced something bigger than yourself, then your world is richer and your ability to handle it has marginally increased.

So. Turns out artists are good for us. Take two a day before each meal and you'll be fine.

What Is It That Peter Jackson Really Does?

2007-06-20T03:58:00.000-07:00

Peter Jackson, director of, most notably, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong, can’t tell a story. Sound odd? Let’s take a look.

Peter Jackson can’t tell a story

Remember the scene in King Kong in which Naomi Watts (Kong’s blonde love-interest) gets kidnapped by a bunch of aborigines who try to sacrifice her? Supposedly, she’s going to die any minute. Jack Black is on her heels and an ominous threat in the jungle (Kong) appears to be getting closer.

The mark of an interesting story is that it keeps the audience glued to their seats or that it keeps the reading audience turning one more page and one more page after that. That thing which glues us to the page/screen/chair is brought on by tension, a small fear in the audience of what might happen next. In the sacrifice scene there was absolutely no tension whatsoever.

On the one hand, the scene looked exactly as a sacrifice scene should appear, all those crazy angles, tens of shots cutting quickly into each other, plenty of shadows, tense music, etc. And yet the potential sacrifice in mid-movie of the movie’s heroine provoked yawns in the theater that I had attended.

That’s... unbelievable.

How bad do you have to be at telling a story if threatening to kill your heroine doesn’t evoke the least bit of tension?

It’s not that Jackson is bad at telling a story – I don’t think he even tried – it’s that he’s not interested in telling a story.

Peter Jackson doesn’t want to tell a story

Peter Jackson doesn’t want to tell a story. What he’s really interested in, if we look at his last four movies, is taking an imaginary world he must have had as a child and making it real. He took the fantastic and hugely-encompassing world of Lord of the Rings and made it real in front of our eyes. He basically said, “Look! It’s real! I knew it could be real!”

In King Kong he took New York of the 30’s and made it real in front of our eyes. He took the unrealistic monsters and worlds shown in old Godzilla and King Kong movies and made them seem real in front of our eyes. And in that – that thing which he sought to do – he did a fantastic job.

Jackson doesn’t want to tell us a story. He could care less about the plot. In fact, the plot is an onerous chore he has to go through to get to the part he’s really interested in.

The faults of a new world

When George Lucas wrote and directed the first Star Wars movie way back before the technology for it existed, he realized that reality is dirty. To make his spaceships real, he always made sure that they would be dirty or broken or messed up in some way. The audience understands that on a subconscious level. And therefore if something is too clean, it doesn’t ‘feel’ real to us; it feels man-made. But if it’s messed up in some way, it ‘feels’ real. That’s just how our mind works.

Jackson should take that to heart in the next world he creates. Not every sunset is amazingly, unbelievably beautiful; not every vista is magnificent; not every detail is perfect. Imperfection adds to reality, and the feeling that a view exists in reality makes a beautiful vista more beautiful.

In the same way, real symmetry is rare in life and frequent in Jackson’s movies. The realistic New York cabs in King Kong drive in both directions with flawless symmetry. Nowhere is there a bump or a cab stopping for no reason causing a momentary, imperfectly-spaced jam with the cars behind it. The fleeing dinosaurs in the same movie run symmetrically just before they get trampled. Reality isn’t symmetrical and lack of symmetry adds to a feeling of reality.

Seeing as Peter Jackson is wildly popular, and that the opinions of most of you must differ greatly from mine, I’d love to hear what you think.

Meme Roundup - June 2007

2007-06-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

As you may recall from our last meme roundup, when writing an article I try to put in at least one meme that may be new to most readers. Here's what we talked about over the last couple of months:

* Kids are scared of monsters in closets; grownups are scared of an overabundance of possibilities.
* The best-laid plans are planned and laid ahead of time. We pitted Lost's mysteries vs. Babylon 5's mysteries.
* When asking if The Daily Show is patriotic, we learned a different meaning to an old question: 'What is it?'
* Good stories are, by their nature, liberal. Good stories have conflict, and good storytellers need to be able to write (and understand) both sides of a conflict well. They therefore find themselves on the humanistic side of most ideological battles throughout history.
* Patriotism has its limits; honor and truth do not.
* Loss of stability is a feeling.
* Gods aren't heroes.
* The dangers of cockiness: Just because you're one of the best writers around doesn't mean that what you wrote today was any good.
* Of truth-telling and truth-tellers.

Apparently, we're old enough to start news items. Here's one: Rescue Me is back for a fourth season. In this article we talked about how its writers put a soul in a TV show.

Hope you enjoy the articles.

Truth-Telling

2007-06-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

If the truth is uncomfortable, the American audience would much rather not hear it.

Truth that’s uncomfortable? Truth that’s unseemly? Truth that’s ugly? I’d prefer a story with a happy ending, thank you.

The two top TV writers over the last couple of decades, David E. Kelly and Aaron Sorkin, have had unique relationships with truth-telling. Let’s take a look.

Sorkin and truth-telling

Sorkin had Toby. In The West Wing, Toby was the truth-teller. And quite early in the series, he justly calls himself “the kid in the class with his hand raised that nobody wants the teacher to call.”

Toby was the guy who said the bad things out loud, because he couldn’t stomach lies or self-delusion. Toby stared the truth in the face even when it hurt him.

The first time we saw Toby’s inability to keep his mouth shut was in the middle of a basketball game with the president of the United States, “Oh, this is perfect, you know that? This is a perfect metaphor. After you're gone, and the poets write, 'The Legend of Josiah Bartlet,' let them write you as a tragic figure, sir. Let the poets write that he had the tools of greatness, but the voices of his better angels was shouted down by his obsessive need to win.”

How many people in life do you know who will tell you your faults to your face? Are they loved? Are they shunned?

When Toby’s twins are born, Toby shares his feelings with Leo.

“I don't know,” he says. “For nine months, you're hearing how this is gonna change your life, and ‘You've never loved anything like this’, and ‘My God, the love’ and ‘Nothing's gonna be important any more.’ It just never really felt to me like I was someone who had the capacity for those feelings. Plus, you know, I like what's important to me. I want it to stay important. I want to be able to do it well.”

Leo says, “What do you mean, you don't have the capacity? Of course you're gonna be a great father. Of course you're gonna love your kids the way you're supposed to, the way other fathers—”

Toby interrupts him, “My God, Leo, we look around, we see that's not true. It's not automatic.”

Some parents don’t love their kids, and Toby knows that. Some parents treat their kids horribly, and Toby knows that. Some mothers feel bad that they don’t love their kids right away, not knowing it’s a process, and that it takes time. Toby doesn’t fall for that and even dares to admit that he is very different from what a father is supposed to be.

Another time, the president and Josh were shot. The president was all right, but Josh’s condition was critical. It was iffy if he would make it out of surgery.

Donna, Josh’s assistant who cares deeply for him, rushes in to the hospital, only knowing the president’s been shot. In a room full of friends, only Toby speaks, and says, “Donna. Josh was hit.”

“Hit with what?” Donna says.

Toby: “He was shot--in the chest.”

C.J. adds, “He's in surgery right now.”

Donna is in shock. “I don't understand. I don't understand, is -- is it serious?”

And the truth-teller gives it to her straight, without sugarcoating it, “Yes, it's critical. The bullet collapsed his lung and damaged a major artery.”

How many people do you know who don’t – and won’t – sugarcoat the awful truth for us?

Sorkin, of course, also knows how to make fun of it when he wants to. Because Toby isn’t only a truth-teller, he is a pessimist. Andy, Toby’s ex-wife, now pregnant with his child, says that she’s worried about how Toby will raise the kids.

“I do worry about the kids,” she tells him. “Because instead of showing them that the world is for them, you're going to be telling them that they have to work hard in school so they can bone up for a life of hopelessness and despair.”

Toby, not backing down, responds, “Wouldn't it be ironic if our kids were the only ones who were properly prepared?”

When Sorkin left the series after four seasons, Toby stopped being the truth-teller.

Kelley and truth-telling

Kelley’s palette of truth-telling is greater than Sorkin’s. Whereas Sorkin, in writing The West Wing, Sports Night, and Studio 60 only had Toby as a truth-teller, almost all of Kelley’s characters are truth-tellers at quite a few points of their lives.

But Kelly does us one better than that. He doesn’t let the need for everything to be resolved well get in his way. Whereas Sorkin ended the scene quoted above (in which Toby shared his worries about his being a bad father) on the best side possible (Leo tells Toby, “I’m not talking about everybody. I’m talking about you and I’m telling ya, it’s a mortal lock. It’s guaranteed”), Kelly tends to do the opposite.

One time, in Chicago Hope, Alan Birch, the hospital’s lawyer, appears before a committee that holds the future of Chicago Hope in its hands. It doesn’t go well. He gets blindsided and his ass is handed to him. When he comes back to the hospital to prepare for the next session, Dr. Phillip Waters, his boss, reads him the riot act. Later on, Birch appears before the committee prepared, legally beats the aggressive committee to a pulp, and wins the day.

That evening, Dr. Waters comes to Birch’s room, to mollify matters (as usually happens in most American shows). Birch is busy working. I get it, he says. I’ve proven myself a hundred times before, and yet every day I have to prove myself to you as if I’m starting from zero. I get it. You would never have treated any of the surgeons this way. I get it. I’m not one of the guys. I get it. I’m just your lawyer.

And as Birch says these things, he leads Dr. Waters out of the room. For a second, Waters is standing with his back to the open door. He opens his mouth and turns around, only to find the door gently closing in his face.

He then leaves.

Birch was right, and David E. Kelley wouldn’t write a sappy ending just because it's the expected thing to do. Any other writer on any other show would have let Walters come into the room again and ‘explain’ things and show how everything is actually okay. But it isn't. Kelley leaves the painful truth hanging there, for us to see and feel.

Kelley in his truth-telling, does us even one better than that: He goes out and seeks the truth, showing us what really exists behind our actions.

Here are a couple of secrets that Kelley outed during his run on Picket Fences.

One time, Jimmy Brock, the sheriff, and Jill Brock, his wife and a doctor, are having Jill’s father over along with Max, one of Jimmy’s deputies, for dinner. Jill’s father, a professor, keeps making jokes at Max about the ineptness of policemen. The great career as a surgeon that Jill had given up to live as a doctor in this town is also mentioned in passing.

Spirits are heated and things are said. Jill’s father accuses Jill of having grown distant from him, of never calling, of never talking the way they used to. When things get more heated, Jimmy tells him that it’s all his fault. The second Jill met Jimmy, she started to feel her father’s lack of acceptance. Jimmy’s not the intellectual she deserves; he’s a stupid policeman; she could do better. And that, says Jimmy, is why Jill grew distant from you.

Jill’s father is shocked. He turns to Jill and asks her, Is that true? Did you feel that way?

Jill, feeling like a little girl, nods.

Jill’s father then turns to Jimmy. I can’t argue with what she feels, he says, but she didn’t get it from me. I think you’re the exception to the rule, he continues, you’re one of the bravest and smartest men I’ve ever met. Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t come from me.

Jimmy’s eyes move from Jill’s father to Jill. He’s right, he says. It does come from you. It’s always come from you.

And he’s right. The disapproval Jill ‘picked up on’ came from her and from her own judgments of Jimmy, the man she eventually married. And she kept feeling like this all these years. And that’s an ugly and terrible truth for a married couple to learn. (And if you want to know what happened next, watch the series.)

Another time, Jimmy’s ex-wife comes to town with a surprise: She wants to have another kid, and she’s been trying to get pregnant for quite a while. Unfortunately, it turns out that she has a special genetic disease that allows her to conceive only with genetically-compatible men - only one out of about 75,000 men is a viable candidate (“And how many have you tried?” asks Jill.) And so it turns out that by a freak coincidence Jimmy is one of those men (since they have already had a daughter, Kimberly, who is now a teenager). And she wants his sperm.

Jimmy’s ex doesn’t even want to have sex with him. A few years ago, they had frozen his sperm. She just wants his okay.

When Jimmy says no, she looks at him, squints her eyes, and says, You know what, I don’t need your approval, I’m going to do it.

As you can guess, a big brouhaha ensues, at the end of which she decides not to go through with her plan. But then, standing by her daughter near her car, she admits her true motive: With Kimberly going to college soon, she won’t have a reason any more to come and be in Jimmy’s life. And she wanted and needed a reason to still be around. She is, after all those years, still in love with him.

Now, who else would tell you such truths?

Eli's Coming: Why 'Studio 60' Fell

2007-06-06T11:13:00.000-07:00

So Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip fell. What happened?

Sorkin Got Too Cocky

Aaron Sorkin, writer of most Sports Night episodes, the first four seasons of The West Wing, and Studio 60, got too cocky. It’s easy to understand how he got cocky. In his last gig, writing and creating The West Wing, he had made a drama about issues one of the most popular shows on TV. It had seemed like everything he touches turns into gold.

Matthew Perry, playing the writer on Studio 60, seemed to be saying things that the writer writing him now believed.

Time and again, Perry told other writers that if you’re really good, you’ll make it in Hollywood, so why don’t you get your act together. This is not true, but hard to disprove. It is easy to prove with actors, though. There are droves of supremely talented, past actors that have proven themselves in Hollywood but can’t get a gig today for various reasons. If it’s true with actors, it’s probably true with other artists, like writers.

Time and again, Perry’s character seemed to think that if you’re really talented, then whatever you write is good. That is not true, either. There are many styles, and even talented writers can be terrible at other forms of writing. But at the end of the day your story’s good only if you write about something you really care about.

In addition, Sorkin was sure that his writing was working because he was so freaking talented. Unfortunately, just because you’re better than anyone else in Hollywood (but one), that doesn’t mean that what you wrote today is any good. In fact, the more cocky you are that your craft is good enough, the less you search your soul for something good to write about.

The Show Wasn’t About Anything Important

Shows have volume and weight.

An hour-long show has to carry more volume and heft than a half-hour show. Otherwise, something feels wrong and out of balance.

The West Wing had appropriate volume for its length. Even CSI has appropriate volume for its length. Sports Night was appropriate for a half-hour show. Studio 60 had enough volume to justify 15-minutes of TV or, at most, 30 minutes. It wasn’t actually about anything.

Sorkin had a chance to talk about every subject in the world. He had set up an SNL-like environment that can take on any issue in the world, in the same way the west wing in The West Wing could tackle any issue in the world. Instead, he’d made it a dating show. An hour-long drama about relationships is great, but then you have to get elbow-deep as, say, Thirtysomething or My So-Called Life did.

Sorkin and Decadence

The show was about decadent people. Although in the pilot, the show’s leading men fought for their morals, in later episodes the decadence of Hollywood had spread to them.

One time, Lauren Graham was a guest on the show. Matt insults her, deeply, then asks for her phone number. Which he gets.

Danny, Matt’s friend, gets some extremely stupid girls to come to a party so that Matt can get over the woman he loves. Even though none of them can grasp the idea of what ‘writing the show’ means, Danny still tries to schmooze them.

Sorkin wrote those things because that’s what happens in Hollywood. But are those the people you want us to root for? Sorkin’s characters were never like this before.

In addition, the Hollywood norm of judging people by their salary, of people with lesser salaries not having the complete right to talk to people with higher salaries or, god forbid, date them, was rampant in the show. Hollywood’s decadence got to Sorkin.

The Actors

Although we don’t usually talk about acting, a bit of Studio 60’s problems goes to tremendously horrible casting choices. (Sorkin’s choices, no doubt.)

Bradley Whitford, Steven Webber, and Timothy Busfield gave virtuosic performances. And Merrit Wever, who had a small part as Suzanne, Matt’s assistant, was great.

Matthew Perry should have given a great performance, too. He was hired to play a man who knows he can be funny whenever he wants to be, but usually chooses not to, a role we all know he can do. But Perry took the dramatic side of his character, and magnified it so much as to overshadow everything else, bringing down his own character’s pace and rhythm, the overall mood, and the occasional comic lines.

Next, Amanda Peet may be hired to play many parts, but she shouldn’t be hired to play an alpha female. She isn’t one, and there are many strong women who don’t have to raise an eyebrow to be one of the strongest people in the room (Christine Lahti, for example, who had a small role in the middle of the season). In addition, Amanda Peet isn’t secure enough to try anything new. In the beginning, she chose to play an alpha female by getting a sexual ‘zing’ every time she manipulated and/or got her way. That’s not how it works in reality and it destroyed the believability of her character.

Next is Sarah Paulson. Every scene she is in has crap timing, which to the audience translates as “something’s wrong here but I can’t put my finger on it.” Now, for some reason, Sorkin kept giving Perry lines about how, although she is the famous star of a sketch show, only Perry knows how good a comedian she is.

This never happens in reality.

You can’t be a star comedian and not be appreciated for comic talent. No one needed to be told that Robin Williams is a comic genius because when he first burst on to the scene in Mork and Mindy, people couldn’t stop laughing. No one needed to be told that Eddie Murphy is a comic genius when he first appeared in SNL because people were too busy rolling on the floor. The test for comedians is immediate, and if you’ve passed it you’ve passed it. Sorkin’s reality test here was off.

And lastly we have the other actors playing the actors on the Studio 60 live sketch show. They occasionally had to play only two or three lines in the middle of an SNL-like sketch. That means that your mission, as an actor, is not to be funny, but to know what it’s like to be in a sketch after you got a laugh. You need to know how to get a laugh in the middle of a sketch, when things are going well, and not just how to be funny. These are roles that have to be played by comedians with vast comic experience onstage, and of them only D.L. Hughley fits the bill.

Sketch-Writing

Back to Sorkin. There are different kinds of comedy, and the fact that you’re good at making someone laugh doesn’t mean you can write any other kind of comedy well.

Sorkin writes very funny throwaways. That means that he can insert really funny lines into serious conversation as a throwaway - if someone in the audience got it, good; if not, they never noticed it. The conversation is never broken, and no one waits for a laugh. Here are a couple of examples:

In The West Wing, the staff is debating what to do about a group of Cubans who are at this moment making their way in ramshackle boats towards Florida.

Toby says, “Oh, for God’s sakes, forget about the journey. The voyage is not our problem.”

“What’s our problem?” asks C.J.

Toby says, “What to do when the Nina, the Pinta, and the Get-Me-The-Hell-Outta-Here hit Miami.”

If you got it, you got it. If not, who cares. You still understand the story and what he was trying to say, and you didn’t feel Sorkin was talking down to you.

In Sports Night, Dan picks up on the fact that his friend, Casey, likes the scheming and conniving Sally. He urges him not to go for it: “Don’t do it, Casey,” he says. “She’s got an agenda.”

Casey asks, “You think she wants a job on Sports Night?”

“No, I think she wants to rule all of Metropolis.”

And this discussion goes on. If you get all the jokes, it’s great. And if not, the gist of it is very clear.

Casey: ”You’ve seen the job she does on West Coast Update. She’s a very skilled producer.”

Dan: “Of course she’s skilled, she’s Satan’s handmaiden.”

Casey: “She’s not Satan’s handmaiden.”

Dan: “On the entire planet, have you ever seen anyone with eyes like that? She’s a Stepford producer.”

Casey: “I say she’s a very nice person.”

Dan: “I say she has no reflection.”

Another time, Sam and Toby get lost trying to find their way in the country, in order to solve an embarrassing incident with their Supreme Court nominee. Even after they find the police station, where the judge had been placed under arrest, Sam still kibitzes, “Let me tell you something. If we’d stayed on the Merritt parkway instead of getting off at Exit 29 and going east to Greenwich, I don’t think we’d have wound up in Bridgeport so many times.”

Sorkin also writes situational comedy (comedy that arises from the situation) very well.

One time, Casey came back from the doctor temporarily blinded, and Dan was having a field day getting him to duck, crawl, and scream by shouting at him about things that weren’t there.

Then there are the Cheese Day episodes on The West Wing, which you just have to see to believe, the fact that Josh was manipulated by the press to admitting the president has a secret plan to fight inflation, the Thanksgiving pranks, the Thanksgiving pardon of the other turkey, the Star Trek holiday, and Josh’s horrific encounter with people in the internet. And that’s just to name a few.

Sorkin, however, does not write good sketch comedy. That requires a different set of skills. He assumes that he can do it because he knows he can be funny. There are, unfortunately, many forms of funny, and being good at one doesn’t mean you’re good at the others.

The Good Old Days

Only once in all the episodes of Studio 60 did Sorkin write about the things that really matter to him, from his gut.

There are many things that matter to Sorkin, and one of them is clearly: The freakiness of happenstance, the junctures in life caused by coincidence. Sometimes unrelated events seem related while events that seem related aren’t that at all.

When President Bartlet explains the Latin phrase, Post hoc, ergo procter hoc, he says, “ ‘After, therefore because of’. It means one thing follows the other, therefore it was caused by the other. But it’s not always true. In fact, it’s hardly ever true.”

Take, for example, an episode of Sports Night called Eli’s Coming. Our heroes are having a very weird day. Rebecca, the woman Dan was in love with, was having conversations with her ex-husband. Isaac, the boss, was supposed to have returned from London already, and yet wasn’t there. Bobby Bernstein was coming to guest-host, and every time she would come, she would blame Dan for not having called her after he’d slept with her in Spain. Dan, meanwhile, believed she was a crazy woman, seeing as he’d never been to Spain and had never slept with her.

Dan says to Casey, “Rebecca isn’t here, Isaac isn’t here. There’s a strangeness about this day.” He looks around, and says, “Eli’s coming.”

“Eli?” Casey asks.

“From the Three Dog Night song. Eli’s something bad. A darkness.”

Casey doesn’t get it, “ ‘Eli’s coming, hide your heart girl.’ Eli’s an inveterate womanizer. I think you’re getting the song wrong.”

“I know I’m getting the song wrong, but when I first heard it, that’s what I always thought it meant, and things stick with you that way.” He looks around again. “They say it’s always calmest before the storm. That’s not true. I’m a serious sailor. It isn’t calm before the storm. Stuff happens.”

Sorkin is blindsiding us here. Because almost immediately, Bobby Bernstein finally enters, and Rebecca returns. Rebecca, it turns out, isn’t really divorced, she’s just separated. And the husband that used to abuse her now wants to reconcile, and she doesn’t know what to do. Meanwhile, it turns out that Dan actually was in Spain and did sleep with Bobby, and didn’t call and didn’t remember. But none of that is the storm. Because soon they learn that Isaac has had a heart attack in the airport, and no one knows how serious it is.

Another time, during their hour-long Sports Night show, everyone is freaked because this is the anniversary of the ghost of Thespis, who likes to slap people around who appear in front of audiences. Everything that can go wrong does: There’s a mysterious drip on the desk, a thawed turkey falls down on the desk right as they head to commercial, they forget text, they miss cues, and they go off the air for a minute or so. Are these things connected? No, but they seem to be. It’s the freakiness of happenstance, and Sorkin loves it.

In fact, it’s in the little things, too. One day, simply because things happen that way, Casey is kicked out of two or three rooms, for reasons that have nothing to do with him. It’s the freakiness of happenstance.

A while ago, we named Sorkin the second-best writer in TV today, and in another article, we talked about why. Here’s hoping he takes a long vacation and writes with a less cocky attitude about things that are important to him.

Spider-Man's Story

2007-05-30T13:10:00.000-07:00

We’re not going to talk about the movie.

These columns are all about sharing the fun of stories. If you know Spider-Man through the movies, then you haven’t been let in on the fun.

Comic-book writer Stan Lee made his name by turning superheroes into people and showing their human side and their frailties. Of all the popular comic-book superheroes he had created, no one is more human and more fragile than Spider-Man.

While Superman was an all-powerful god who could turn back time, lift entire continents on his shoulders and could not die (until, just to keep the stories alive, he had to be given Kryptonite as a weakness), Spider-Man was the eternal underdog.

Peter Parker was a thin, wiry geek, whose parents were dead, and who had to live with his aunt and uncle. He was picked on at school by the bigger bullies, and his social life was pretty bleak. When he unexpectedly turned into Spider-Man, he suddenly became stronger than anyone else in school. Still, to keep his secret and his family safe, he let the bullies kick him around. The villains he was fighting at night haunted his mind, so much so that the girls thought he was a snob and shunned him. With only his aunt to support them, and her health being rocky, he was constantly worried about money.

When he did get dates, frequent dangers forced him to run off and be Spider-Man. Which meant that he kept standing up the girls he liked, disappearing in the middle of a date, or appearing to run away when faced with danger.

And when fighting the bad guys, he was, more often than not, outmatched by superheroes a lot more powerful than he was.

Spider-Man was the ultimate underdog, in real life and with the villains. But he had chutzpah and guts and a brain. He beat superior villains with a superior wit and a superior mind. He used his abilities as Spider-Man not to defeat the bad guys, but to keep out of harm’s way while he thought of a way to defeat the bad guys. And all that time, he cracked jokes.

Spider-Man was human, and every high-school kid wanted to be like him: The underdog that won the day, who proved smarter and funnier than the bullies; the guy who got kicked around in school but knew what no one else did, that deep inside he was a superhero and better than any of them.

Over the decades, two writers wrote Spider-Man the best because they understood him the best. The first was Stan Lee, who had created him, and the second was Chris Claremont, more famous for reinventing the X-Men and making them what they are today. (Again, nothing to do with the movies.)

Stan Lee initiated Underdog Man, and concentrated more on Peter Parker’s social dilemmas with girls, bullies, lack of money, and protecting his Aunt May. Spider-Man always interfered in Peter’s life.

Chris Claremont concentrated on Spider-Man’s heroic nature. One time, Claremont had Spider-Man chase an all-powerful, unstoppable living god, knowing he can’t win, knowing he’s fighting an unbeatable foe, knowing there was nothing he could do about it but ultimately die, but also knowing that there was no one else to do the job.

Another time, Claremont had Spider-Man kidnapped by an evil sorcerer from the dawn of humanity that he had defeated once before. Now, the sorcerer was back, more powerful than ever, and he was out for revenge. The sorcerer turned New York City into a barbaric nation, wiped everyone’s memories (including all the big superheroes like the Avengers or the X-men) and replaced their identities. Everyone’s memories, that is, but Spider-Man’s, whom he nailed to a cross and tortured.

While the other heroes, whose memories and identities were replaced, found their true heroic nature again, Spider-Man had to watch his friends fight each other and die, as he was being tortured by the sorcerer. And all that time, Spider-Man cracked jokes in the sorcerer’s ears.

Nothing Spider-Man said to anyone who was around mattered, since they all spoke a different language now thanks to the sorcerer's spell. Only the sorcerer understood him.

But it was Spider-Man who saved the day. Fighting the nails that had torn holes in his body, he managed to show the other heroes the sorcerer’s new source of power (a thing he had deduced while watching the events). He did that with his last breath, and then the sorcerer gestured and killed him.

The heroes, of course, saved the day, now that they had a way to defeat the sorcerer. And with his source of power gone, everything he had done, including everyone’s deaths, was now reversed.

Spider-Man is a hero because he overcomes adversity. Superman is not a hero, he’s just a god.

'Weeds': Shifting Ground

2007-05-23T03:24:00.000-07:00

Stability

Most people are used to some sort of stability. Some things in the world don’t change, ever. Gravity doesn’t change. If you jump up, you’ll always land. But there are also some elements in our lives that we take for granted, that we are certain they will always be there the way they are.

What happens when there is absolutely no stability? What happens when the ground itself, that thing people hold to be most solid and unshifting, keeps disappearing beneath your feet?

Loss of Stability Is a Feeling

Loss of stability is not only a set of circumstances. Loss of stability is also a feeling.

Don’t believe it? Try it out for yourselves, with a few examples from Weeds.

Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker) is a recently-widowed mother of two, whose husband unexpectedly died. To survive, she sells pot to the friendly and spoiled people of Agrestic, California. Stability has been taken from the entire family.

In the pilot episode, her older son’s girlfriend suddenly asks Nancy, “Can we have sex in your house?” Later on, when Nancy has a heart-to-heart conversation with the girlfriend, she finds out that she’s not a virgin. Only then to find out that her sixteen-year-old son isn’t, either. How does that make you feel?

At a certain point, Nancy no longer has any money. She can’t pay for the phone, can’t pay utilities, and can’t pay to get more drugs so that she can sell them and get more money. Her dealer agrees to give her more drugs, taking Nancy’s car as collateral. Nancy sells the drugs, but then Shane, her younger son, breaks his arm, and she has to pay for the hospital with the cash she’s just earned. She returns to the drug dealer, begging for more drugs. This time she is forced to leave something else, something more, and the chasm underneath her feet deepens. She leaves her wedding ring (from her deceased husband).

How does that make you feel?

Dissolution of Order

Nancy has no control over her life. Things happen to her, and she can’t really cope, she just stumbles on, trying to survive. Lack of stability leads to a total dissolution of order in her life (also a feeling).

When Nancy’s dead husband’s brother comes over, he has cyber-sex with her son’s teenage girlfriend, following which he gives the son advice on how to get the girlfriend into bed. Then the brother-in-law gets the younger kid in trouble by selling t-shirts in school that make fun of Christianity. He closes the deal by blackmailing Nancy into letting him stay when he finds out how she makes a living. All this in one episode.

Constantly Shifting Ground

Lack of stability is also shown by the constant shifting of ground we’d previously thought of as solid.

Out of nowhere, a plane accidentally drops bags and bags of Cola bottles on the roof of Celia’s (Nancy’s friend) house, right on her side of the bed. The husband wakes up, horrified, not understanding what’s happening: the ceiling’s missing, the room filled with exploding Cola bottles, and the other side of the bed is crushed.

Celia then walks into the room: “I have cancer.”

No Discipline

With the loss of order and stability, the ability to discipline or keep discipline flies out the door.

Nancy’s older son is caught doing ecstasy. The next morning, once he comes down, she reads him the riot act. But then he accuses her of being a hypocrite, and she finds out he knows she’s selling drugs. He storms off, basically telling her to stay out of his way till he’s old enough. How does that make you feel?

Another time, the older son says, as he heads out the door, “Mom, just to let you know, next year I’m dropping out of school and moving to New Jersey,” and exits. How does that make you feel?

Nancy can’t fix these things, she just keeps getting slammed with balls coming out of left field. And the feeling of eternally shifting ground continues.

Feeling of Impending Doom

Lack of stability also brings about the constant feeling that bad things are always around the corner. In fact, it becomes a given.

Watch how this feeling has seeped into the younger son’s psyche so much that he brings it up time and again in dinner conversation. When asked for a topic for conversation, he exclaims: “We could talk about bird flu! It’s gonna kill everybody!”

Later in that same dinner, he says, “There’s this kid in my school who always picks his nose, and he says that if you don’t pick your nose, that your boogers could back up and block your airway and you could die.”

Sure, it’s not true. But the feeling for the son is. Death is always so close.

Inability to Cope with Rejection

The constant lack of stability is also the reason Nancy’s sons can’t cope with rejection and can’t hear ‘no’.

The older son, who is faced with a breakup with his girlfriend, who is a year older than him and in a few months will move to an Ivy League school, thinks he found a way to be with her always: When they have sex, he first sticks pins in the condoms, hoping to get her pregnant. (Which he does, thus causing the earth to further shift under everyone’s feet.) How does that make you feel?

Talking About Our Feelings

Lack of stability is a feeling. Shifting ground is a feeling.

Weeds isn’t about breaking us out of our suburban, middle-class convictions. Breaking us out of our suburban, middle-class convictions gives us that same feeling of instability and shifting ground that the plot does.

Jenji Kohan, the creator and main writer of Weeds has these feelings all the time. When she writes these plots, she creates situations time and time again that bring about these feelings. With Weeds, Kohan makes us feel for a few seconds a week what she feels every day in her life. Weeds is about sharing feelings.

JAG: Is Patriotism Wrong?

2007-05-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

Is patriotism wrong? Is patriotism dark? Is it Neanderthal?

If we took a cold, detached look at it, then at first glance it would appear to be completely Neanderthal. The process behind it is the same process that has people rooting for their home teams and curse the other teams’ fans. Had the cursing fan not been born in this city but in another one, he would have cursed this team’s fans with just as much fervor and felt just as justified.

When we grow up, we feel the same towards our country, especially in war time. You root for your own country in a war. In fact, most people (when push comes to shove) would give their lives or their kids’ lives for their country. That is, after all, how a military force is created. Wars are usually against an evil country or an evil enemy (look at your country’s last seven wars, whichever country you come from, and check whether at least six out of seven were not against an evil enemy). But had you been born and brought up in one of the countries you or your parents or your grandparents were fighting, you or they would just as willingly have given your lives and your/their lives for that country, calling your current country evil.

Where is the logic? Where is the reason?

Adding flame to the fire, patriotism in art seems to run contrary to the subject of last week’s post. There I claimed that any good story has a conflict, that a conflict has two sides, and that the better the artist, the better he understands both sides. Supposedly, this puts the artist on the side that sees the enemy (whoever that might be in whatever war one is currently fighting) as equal and, perhaps, just as justified. What, then, of artists that tell stories with a conservative bent, that are pro-us, pro-army and perhaps even pro-war?

Two weeks ago, in a post about patriotism, we also saw that artists who deal with human nature (like actors, writers, and directors) often look at things we know well and ask “What is it? What is it really?” Well, then: What is patriotism? What is it really?

Let’s take JAG as an example. JAG was far from being a masterpiece of any genre, but it was fun and well-done and clearly had a conservative agenda as well as a patriotic one. So let’s ask the question: What is JAG’s patriotism all about? What is it really?

JAG comes from the house of Donald P. Bellisario, producer, creator, director, and writer of many things, most notably: Magnum P.I., Quantum Leap, and JAG. In all three shows, he was the one who wrote the most momentous and important episodes. Not coincidentally, he also wrote the best written ones. These days, he is also responsible for NCIS, but its stories do not come close to the Big Three’s.

In all three shows there is a heavy military bent. Magnum was a Vietnam vet, while the older Higgins, who kept the mansion, turned out to have been an honorable and brave soldier in the British military. Quantum Leap had Al, a Viet vet and prisoner of war, now an admiral. Al was a macho womanizer, but on the bigger issues, he was always a man of honor.

Magnum and Quantum Leap had a system that worked well for Bellisario: the younger man has the adventures, and the older, wiser, slightly ridiculous man was his companion. Bellisario broke that pattern in JAG, when he paired the young, good-looking JAG lawyer (ex-fighter pilot) with a young, good-looking JAG lawyer of the female persuasion. Where before it was manly camaraderie, now we had sexual tension.

Bellisario loves the army, and so do his characters. They love the army, love war stories, love heroism, and yet they are scarred by them. His heroes would sacrifice everything for what their country tells them to do. Magnum, for example, had to give up the woman he loved. JAG’s Harmon Rabb was haunted by his father’s disappearance during Vietnam after having been shot down. Harm was the only one who still thought his father might be alive somewhere.

This trauma shaped Harm’s life. In fact, the father complex appears again and again in Belissario’s stories. Harm chose his father’s profession (fighter pilot) even though it had led to the father's death and/or horrible life as an MIA, while the wife was left widowed and the son orphaned. In one episode, Harm’s fighter friend dies. When he comes to console the family (and to investigate the incident), the widow wants Harm to be kept away from her child. Already, the boy wants to be like his father. In fact, his father’s death only makes him want it more.

Wanting to be a soldier is an honorable thing in Bellisario’s world, and this is the only time I recall the choice was even questioned. And even then, the problem had at least two sides, both with merit.

Where Magnum was also a con-man, and Al was a relentless womanizer, Harmon Rabb was faultless. He was everything you imagine a hero to be. He always made the right choice, never faltered, was completely patriotic, followed his orders even when he disagreed with them. And yet...

Harm was a patriot and followed orders. At the same time, he was a hunter, and he hunted after the truth. When truth rarely happened to crash against his orders or his superiors, he opted for truth. Sometimes his superiors were corrupt. Sometimes they even sacrificed soldiers for their own petty purposes. When that happened, Harm flushed out the truth and restored honor to the U.S. Harm so loved. Truth roots out corruption. Truth, to Harm, is patriotism.

Truth, to Harm, is honorable as well. Being a soldier is an honorable thing. It is honorable to fight for one’s country. It is honorable to die for one’s country, even if the cause is not always clear. But honor - and the honor of being a soldier - transcends borders. Having honor has nothing to do with a country of origin, and honorable soldiers recognize honorable soldiers on the other side and salute them (sometimes before drawing guns on them).

In Bellisario’s world, real patriotism is honor and truth (values that are without borders).

Patriotism has its limits; honor and truth do not.

Why Are Most Artists Liberal?

2007-05-09T01:10:00.000-07:00

Boy, it’s a weird coincidence that most artists are liberal, isn’t it?

Is There a Conspiracy?

Over history, most artists have been state-sponsored, which means that the less liberal the artists, the more they would have been welcome. Since most artists (like Shakespeare and Moliére) still found a way to get their liberal licks in, one can only assume that there weren’t any other really great conservative artists to be found.

Today, the driving force behind publishers and movie studios is money, not politics. One assumes that if a product was good enough, it would be published or produced nonetheless. Disney can attest to it, since even its Jewish executives supported Mel Gibson after his anti-Semitic ‘incident’, because they had to sell Apocalypto.

In fact, hundreds of conservative non-fiction books are being published today, some of which become best-sellers. So if there was a lot of really great conservative fiction, some percentage of it would have found its way to publication.

And yet it hasn’t.

It’s almost as if you have to be a liberal to be a good artist. But that can’t be true, can it?

Well, it can. And it is. Here’s why.

(One exception: Storytellers limits itself to the storytelling arts (movies, TV, theater, prose), as opposed to the other arts (sculpture, photography, painting, architecture, poetry, etc.) about which I know very little.)

Stories Are Liberal

Stories, by their nature, have some sort of conflict. Otherwise, they would be boring. Conflict, by its nature, has at least two sides. To be able to write these two sides well, the artist has to understand, deep inside, that both sides are equally human. The more he portrays the other side as human, the better the story. The less human the other side, the more flawed the story.

That puts artists on the humanistic side of most ideological battles throughout history: against racism (the other race is people, too), against slavery (slaves are people, too), for feminism (women are people, too), for the rights of children (children think and feel just like adults), against child labor, for gay rights (homosexuals are just as human), for the downtrodden, for the poor (they are just like us, only poor), against most wars (because the other side bleeds red, too, and mourns with the same pain), and against most religions (in particular, against the religions that claim its followers are ‘the chosen’ and those who are not will not get into heaven and/or are inferior in some way).

Oddly enough, this little rule does not necessarily put artists on the side of animal rights, since animals may be many things, but they are not human. This rule also does not put artists automatically on the green side of the debate. Earth, after all, is not a person and does not feel. What it takes for a person to fight for these issues when they were not popular isn’t really a ‘requirement’ for someone to be good storytelling artists.

Mark Twain in many of his stories and books shows us how slaves are just as human as you or I. In fact, he uses his stories to show his white readers that if they had been born with slightly worse luck, they would have been born slaves. And that they would have then acted just like slaves, too (and the fact that slaves acted like slaves made it easier for the white people to treat them as slaves).

SF author Jules Verne (1828-1905) was asked once why he doesn’t have more women characters. He answered that when his plot needs a romantic interest, he puts a woman in the story. As you can guess, if you’ve never read his books, his characters, both male and female, are cardboard cutouts. To take nothing from the many great things that he has done as an author, that little thing, that inability to understand human nature, made him a worse artist than he could have been. Had he been more liberal (not as a pose, but in truth), his books would have been even better.

Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee wrote in an introduction to one of their Rama II novels, that to write this book they had to understand women. And so they had sat down with their wives, had many long talks, and “now we understand women” (I quote from memory). Needless to say, anyone who says “now I understand women” doesn’t understand women. In addition, of course, anyone who does not understand women does not understand people. You would not be surprised, I suppose, to find that their characters in this book and in the others each of them had written were also cardboard cutouts. Again, not to take anything from Arthur C. Clarke’s great achievements (read his true classics, Rendezvous with Rama, Childhood’s End, and 2010), he would no doubt have been a better artist had his characters been more human.

Dickens wrote many books about the plight and hardships of children. One couldn’t read Oliver Twist, for example, without getting the feeling, deep inside, that children feel just the same as us adults and that many of the ways in which society treats children are unjust. Dickens’ women are just as human as his men. Even his most ridiculous characters (and there are plenty of those) are ridiculous in a human way and feel love and pain just as any of us do. In fact, they are ridiculous in the same way we are ridiculous.

We’ve previously examined how David E. Kelly uses our inherent racism to get this same point across.

In conclusion, then, you don’t have to be a liberal to be a good storyteller. But the better your story is, the more of a liberal you are. (Unfortunately for aspiring writers, that does not work the other way round: you cannot aspire to be liberal and hope that will make you a better artist.)

So, yes, most good artists are liberal. And it is not a coincidence.

Is 'The Daily Show' Patriotic?

2007-05-02T01:41:00.000-07:00

“What Is It?”

Actors and writers and directors have to understand human nature so that they may convey truths about it in their work. That forces them to often ask the question “What is it” about things which normal people don’t usually give a second thought to. What is it, they ask themselves, what is it really?

We’re going to take a look at patriotism this week and ask that question a couple of times.

Declaring Your Patriotism

A few weeks back, Bill Maher in his New Rules on Real Time, said: “You know, not to generalize, but the 29% of people who still support President Bush are the ones who love to pronounce themselves more patriotic than the rest of us. But just saying you're patriotic is like saying you have a big c**k. If you have to say it, chances are it's not true.”

Now, that’s funny, because it has a ring of truth to it. But is it really true? Are the people who are pronouncing their patriotism so loudly really the ones more likely to betray their country or to reveal secrets under torture faster than others? Probably not. There seem to be no indications that these people are either more likely or less likely to betray their country faster than anyone else who would be randomly chosen.

So the question is, since this behavior is everywhere, What is it? What is it really?

Imagine yourself arguing with a man who punctuates his argument with you with “I believe in the United States of America!”

What is that? That is a winning argument, because it has no counter-argument, and it puts the other side on the defensive, no matter what was being said. Notice that it is not a true argument, it is just a winning argument. It is not a fair argument, it is just a winning argument. A person who feels the need to resort to this sort of shtick, wants to win more than anything else. A person who resorts to this sort of argument wants to never be wrong.

And that’s the answer to the question. The people who resort to these arguments are people who want to feel safe in their rightness. They don’t want to think or to argue, they want to be considered right more than they want other things.

The Daily Show

The Daily Show: What is it?

What is it that The Daily Show actually does? Is it a left-wing mouthpiece or does it attack both sides equally and the Republicans simply happen to be in power? A revealing one-week ‘diary’ in Slate by Allison Silverman, one of The Daily Show’s writers, shows that The Daily Show’s writers look for the inherently illogical, for the absurd, and then they take that and make it more absurd and more illogical.

(Small detour: Note that she differentiates between jokes that get the audience laughing (which are funny) and jokes that get the audience clapping (which are not funny, the audience claps because it agrees). Now apply that to compare The Tonight Show to Letterman. Jay Leno gets a lot more laughs. Letterman gets a lot more claps. Letterman isn’t as funny as he was. People just want to feel that they’re included, that they ‘get it’, that they’re in the Letterman clique. Detour ends.)

So, taking an illogical argument or behavior and exaggerating it: What is that? It is in actuality an appeal for logic by showing that something is illogical.

Observe:

When talking about the president’s refusing to have his aides testify under oath, Jon Stewart, interviewing correspondent John Oliver, says: “John, the president right now is suggesting that the only reason he’s doing this is to preserve his ability to get good council from his advisors.”

Oliver responds, “Look, Jon, if Karl Rove knew he’d one day be forced to testify under oath about advice he gave the president, he’d have to limit that advice to things that weren’t shameful, illegal, or spectacularly bone-headed.”

Do you see how they are making a logical point using humor?

Here’s another example:

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton went on The Daily Show. A day later, Stewart plays a bit of his tape back.

Bolton: “The president has a responsibility to be true to the people who voted for him and to put people in office who are sympathetic to his positions. Otherwise, what’s the point of having elections?”

Stewart: “Now, this is something I also didn’t realize about a democracy. The president is only the president of the people who voted for him.”

Stewart takes Bolton’s statement one step further, thus showing it as silly. He did not make it silly, he showed that it was already silly. He forces us to think better.

Moving on to the Gonzales scandal:

Stewart: “Meanwhile, returning to the Alberto Gonzales saga, he remains embroiled in the scandal over eight fired U.S. Attorneys, threatening to make him the first Hispanic Attorney General... to resign in disgrace. Of course, we know he’s not to blame.”

He then cuts to footage of Gonzales saying “... Was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on. That’s basically what I knew as the Attorney General.”

Back to Stewart: “Well, I guess Alberto Gonzales is the Attorney General kind of like the homeless guy is mayor of the park.”

Stewart took something unreasonable and exaggerated it to show how unreasonable it is. Stewart made a logical point.

However, it soon turns out that “Gonzales did, in fact, participate in a meeting concerning the firing of the attorneys, and signed off on them, according to statement released by the Justice Department. But I’m sure that he has an explanation for this rather enormous discrepancy.”

Cut to footage of Gonzales saying: “When I said on March 13th that I wasn’t involved, what I meant was that I have not been involved, was not involved in the deliberations. [...] I don’t recall being involved. Let me be more precise.”

Back to Stewart: “As the parent of a two-and-a-half-year-old, I routinely hear more convincing explanations of how feces got in my DVD player.”

The Daily Show not only takes on the absurd and makes us think, it also holds the politicians accountable for their lies (something that journalists should do and for some reason don’t). When Bush recently said that this new plan is working and what we should do is give it just a little more time, The Daily Show showed Bush a year before saying that the new plan is working and what we should do is give it just a little more time. Then it showed a video of Bush a year earlier saying the same thing, then another video from a year earlier, and so on, all the way back to the beginning of the war, where Bush says that the war has been won.

The Daily Show is holding the politicians accountable to their statements, thus protecting the people from those in power.

In the same way, when a politician makes a statement (something along the lines of “I never said” or “I never knew”) that contradicts an earlier statement, The Daily Show actually goes through the trouble of finding the conflicting statement and exposing the lie.

Is The Daily Show Patriotic?

Is what The Daily Show doing an act of sedition? If you act to improve, if you criticize to make things better, you act out of patriotism. History has shown that men in power who have not been held accountable for their mistakes tended to make bigger mistakes. So The Daily Show’s actions would seem to be a positive thing. Wanting this not to happen to your country would be a good thing.

On the other hand, if you use patriotism to stifle criticism, that brings us back to the original question: what you want to do is be understood to be right at the expense of everything else. It’s about you, not your country.

(When a government lies to the parents of a dead soldier, as the U.S. government did recently, trying to make his death more heroic, what is that? It is an act of a guilty conscience. It knows that it comes out looking badly, and so it would rather appear to be right at the expense of everything else like its soldiers or their honor.)

Exposing lies, exposing weaknesses of those in power, encouraging logical thinking, these are all acts of patriotism in a democratic country. Lying to the people, thinking that a power change would be a proof of weakness, thinking that thinking and/or changing one’s opinions is proof of weakness rather than intelligence, are all markers of the countries which the U.S. is fighting.

So let me ask you this: ‘Stay the course’, what is it?

The Mysteries of 'Lost'

2007-04-25T23:59:00.000-07:00

Does it matter that the writers and creators of Lost came up with mysteries to which they had no solutions at the time?

Does it matter that the writers and creators of Lost came up with solutions to the mysteries only after they saw that the show actually had a future and that people would, you know, really like to know what's going on?

There is a difference between mysteries that are planned ahead of time and mysteries that are unplanned. There is a difference in the solution we eventually see, there is a difference in the way the suspense of the mystery keeps building up, and there is a difference in the rewarding feeling the audience gets when each step of the puzzle is revealed.

In short: Dang it, we’ve been bamboozled. Here’s how.

The first element of a good mystery is that there has to appear an underlying logic to it. The audience doesn’t know what that logic is, but the feeling that one exists has to be clear to the audience or it simply loses interest and fails to suspend its disbelief. Last week, I mentioned the importance of this when talking about Medium. Now let’s see the slew of mysteries that got Lost’s ball rolling:

A haphazard group of people on a normal flight from Australia managed to inexplicably survive a plane crash in which half their plane was literally ripped up in mid-air. They shouldn’t have survived, and yet, here they are. Now, that could easily have been a fortunate coincidence. But maybe there was something behind it? Maybe there was a guiding hand? Maybe there was some logic behind it, a force we know nothing about that had to do with the island, the plane, the people in it or maybe even a specific person that hadn’t been born yet?

Next, there was John Locke. Of the survivors, he was certainly the most competent, with great survival skills. But then, around episode 4, we found out that this man had lost the use of his legs quite a few years ago. And yet, right after the crash, he stood up, and then began to walk. A medical miracle that cannot happen. There had to have been a reason for it, right? There has to be an underlying logic to this supernatural phenomenon. Why him? Why now? For the audience to buy into this mystery, it has to believe that there actually is a logic behind everything.

Next up, the mystery of Hurley’s numbers. Back in normalsville, Hurley won the lottery by guessing a few numbers. Once he gets the money, bad things begin to happen to him and all those dear to him. A strange feeling begins to creep in that perhaps there’s some kind of ‘curse’ behind those numbers. Now, it turns out that he hadn’t actually come up with those numbers, but got them from someone. When he checks out the origin of those numbers, it turns out that anyone’s who’s been in possession of those numbers had suffered from an awful spate of bad luck. Now Hurley is stuck on some unknown, uncharted island. And then he finds out that a certain bunker in the ground has these exact numbers etched on the outside of it...

The obvious implication is that there is a logic to this. The more certain we are that there is a logic there, the better the mystery.

So, the first steps of the mysteries of Lost are actually pretty good, but now the writers have to take the next step in the mystery. And if the puzzles aren't planned, things begin to fall apart. Rather than look at how things slip and get away from the writers, let’s take a look at puzzles that are actually constructed well and ahead of time, and compare. The ultimate puzzle-construction was in a show called Babylon 5.

Babylon 5 was a ground-breaking SF show in the nineties, created and mostly-written by J. Michael Straczynski. Straczynski wrote the show in the heyday of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which it was the accepted thought that everything SF had to look like Star Trek. Straczynski created a show that originally fit the Star Trek frame and slowly and diligently changed it. Babylon 5 broke many barriers and opened the door for everything that had come later, including the current version of Battlestar Galactica. Sadly, Babylon 5 is now outdated by everything it had opened the door for.

Babylon 5 was about something. Straczynski is a history buff, and so he created a show on an historic scale. The price of secrets was a motif that kept appearing in the show (“How many lives is a secret worth?”). The real-life motion of politics was the show’s blood. Babylon 5 was a station with ambassadors of all known races. And so, every little motion important to one race caused ripples in all other races. And, as in the nature of ripples, the waves came back to their source, changed. Another attempt to make the story ‘real’ was Straczynski’s attempt to show that in history, even though one story's done, the story always continued (It wasn't 'the end of history' when the Soviet Union fell). Continuing a story after it was done and starting everything anew didn’t really work in the last two seasons of the show. But it was an impressive try.

We’re going to concentrate on the first two and a half seasons of the show, which include the best-built puzzle in TV history yet. Straczynski planned the puzzle in such a way as to make almost everything you saw part of the puzzle whether you realized it or not. The fact that the puzzle was planned obviously helped the first step in a good mystery: there was a logic and a reason behind every piece of it.

But then, Straczynski made sure that when he ‘solved’ one piece of the puzzle, he actually revealed that it was all part of a bigger puzzle and that the mystery goes deeper than you think. Whenever he solved something, he actually left you with more questions than you had before. In addition, the fact that he planned everything ahead of time, allowed you to see that everything you had seen from the beginning and thought was par for the course was actually a clue and/or part of the bigger picture. That is a rewarding mystery.

Let’s take a look at two examples from Babylon 5. We’ll tackle a few steps along the way, but won’t show you the solution of the puzzle.

In the pilot, Commander Jeffrey Sinclair hunts down a rogue Minbari (the Minbari is an ancient alien race that once, in a war, almost defeated the entire human race, then, in the midst of complete victory, suddenly and mysteriously surrendered, and now the two races have a peace treaty). When the Minbari commits suicide rather than get caught, he looks at Sinclair and in an F-you fashion, says to him, “There’s a hole in your mind.”

Later it turns out that there is, indeed, an inexplicable ‘hole’ in Sinclair’s mind. He was one of the soldiers fighting the Minbari in that final battle for Earth. Somewhere along the line, he lost a few hours which he does not remember. And when he came to, the war was done. He has no recollection of that time, and thought it was his own little secret. But now, how would a rogue Minbari know about it? How many Minbaris know? Why would they know? What happened? Sinclair decides to investigate.

A few episodes later, we find out that, just as they were winning the war, the Minbari decided to take and examine a human. They took Sinclair (and later wiped his memory). But what they found during his examination caused them to stop the war. What could they possibly have found? What happened during his imprisonment? What is his importance?

We won’t go any further with this puzzle, so as not to spoil it. But you can see that each step opens more doors than it closes.

Let us look, now, at the mystery of the Vorlons. The Vorlons are an even more ancient race and are treated as gods by everyone, including the Minbari. No one has actually seen a Vorlon to best of human knowledge. They walk around with armor that hides their entire bodies, and it is rumored that people who get to see Vorlons go insane.

As the episodes go on, we learn that the Vorlons have taken an interest in human affairs, because there is a war coming for the sake of the galaxy itself, a war of good versus evil, they tell us. And they are the good, the Minbari assure us.

Then, one day, in an emergency, a Vorlon is forced to reveal himself to save one of the main soldiers in the upcoming war. The Vorlon sheds his armor, revealing the body of an angel that takes flight and saves the soldier. Finally, we know what the Vorlons look like. This is mysterious enough. But later on, we learn that where we saw a kind of human angel, other races present saw angels that fit their legends and their races. Everyone saw something else. In addition, Londo (a character who to the ‘evil’ side) saw absolutely nothing although he looked straight at it.

Are the Vorlons gods? Or are they somehow manipulating us to make us think they’re gods? Did they visit all our planets way back when so that they would be able to manipulate us? We thought we finally learned who they are, but now we’re not so sure.

Again, that isn’t even half the puzzle as far as the Vorlons go. And all the puzzles in the first two and a half years of Babylon 5 fit together like a glove.

When puzzles are planned ahead, they can be done well and become rewarding. One puzzle will lead to a bigger puzzle. When they are created by whim and are solved on the fly, then, dang it, we’re being bamboozled.

Why Are We Scared?

2007-04-18T13:18:00.000-07:00

Medium is the scariest TV show we’ve seen in a long, long while. The question is: Why?

Let’s get rid of the obvious: It’s not the music, since there is no scary music. It’s not the dark lighting, the shadows, or the fact that most things happen at night, since most of the show happens during the day. It’s not because people are constantly screaming or are found in panic, since no one hardly ever screams in the show. It’s not because characters are confronted by killers or scary ghosts or any other allegedly-frightening unnatural phenomenon, since that doesn’t happen in Medium, either. It’s not because we meet scary beings or masked actors or CGI – there’s none of that in the show, either. And lastly, it’s not because of the gore, since there are no slashed bodies, dismembered heads, or whatever else you might find in the usual horror flicks.

So everything that is found in abundance in other horror flicks or even in current supernatural shows like Supernatural or Ghost Whisperer is not found in Medium. And yet these first two, which have all the elements mentioned above, are not scary (except when the music is scary), and yet Medium is. So the question is, what is it really that really keeps us scared?

The same thing that scared away our sleep when we were kids scares us today.

When we were kids, there were monsters in the dark, hiding in closets. Sometimes the monsters were hiding under our beds. We did not know what these monsters looked like. We simply knew that we did not know everything there was to know about the world (and so some form of monsters could exists) and that there are dark corners in our bedroom that we knew nothing about, either.

“What could possibly be there?” was the basic thought that led to many intangible possibilities in our minds. The possibilities didn’t have to be fully realized or fully imagined. In fact, the very fact that they weren’t, kept more possibilities alive. We were faced with an overabundance of unknown possibilities, and therefore an overabundance of scary possibilities.

It’s the unknown that scares us. And the unknown exists in a wealth of possibilities (That’s why realized monsters, like the ones in Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and most horror movies are simply not scary: their unknown nature has been stripped from them). Wealth of possibilities doesn’t necessarily exist in the dark, not when we’re grownups. Wealth of possibilities exists in a truly original story. That is because in an unoriginal story we can more or less guess the overall gamut of the nature of events that are going to take place. In a truly original story, we have no idea what might be happen next or where things are leading or what might be driving these events. And that might be scary.

Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Medium is about Allison Dubois, who happens to possess psychic powers, which are not in any way under her control. Occasionally she can see ghosts. Many times she has dreams which foretell events in the near future, the far past, or even the present someplace else. Allison is haunted by these powers, and yet she does her best to use them to help. She advises the DA, keeping her abilities a secret from the public. Her husband is a scientist. And their three young daughters are... well, three typical young daughters.

One day, Allison, who hasn’t slept in a long while, takes a break from work and goes home to sleep. Later, it’s discovered that she had gone to the bank and taken out all their savings: $15,000, which she then put in a bag. Allison doesn’t remember any of it, and yet that’s her signature, and the money is in her bag.

Her husband tries to take the money back the next day, and in the bank they tell him that she’d originally asked for 15 million dollars, and only after exasperating explanations, did she agree to change it.

Allison is sleepwalking, and her husband is afraid that she’s going to do very strange things. Since during last time she drove the car to the bank, he hides the keys when she sleeps.

Late at night, he wakes up to some strange noises. Allison is turning the house inside out, looking for the keys. And her voice, when she says that she must have the keys, is primeval and guttural (that’s called acting, not special modifications).

Later on, her husband will see that there’s no other solution. Another night, when she sleepwalks again, he lets her in the car as he drives to see where this would lead them.

Allison, in her primeval persona, tells him to stop in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of a cliff. She walks out of the car, and tries to walk off the cliff. Her husband stops her. She then leaps at him, without reason, trying to get past him. Saying he loves her, he tackles her, trying to wake her up.

I won’t tell you any more about what happens in the episode. But note how the possibilities are open before us. We don’t know what’s going to happen next. We’re not certain at all where things are leading the characters or the story. And we’re not certain what the driving force behind it is. As long as the driving force behind everything is written with consistency and logic, that is enough of a recipe to scare the pants off the viewers.

Let’s take a look at another example from an episode that came rather late in the series. The importance of that is that we, as an audience, have already learned to trust Allison’s dreams. And we have also learned that many of the episodes begin with something we soon discover is a dream that ends with Allison waking up with a gasp.

This episode begins with a normal family breakfast. The girls, Allison, and her husband all talk about how the two parents had met way back when, and how they had actually almost met a couple of years before that, but had missed each other. They start talking about what if things had been different... when one of the girls disappears. When Allison panics, no one understands what she’s talking about. And then another girl disappears. And then the last one disappears. And then the husband.

And then Allison wakes up. Except, that it’s not the Allison we know. It’s the teenage Allison, who has just had this dream about her future. This episode is about her. She had not yet met her husband, and the first meeting that ‘almost happened’ originally is but a few days in the future. In this episode her dreams keep warning her of the future we know her to have, and it seems that her dreams are guiding her to change this future, and make sure she never hooks up with her husband and never has the girls...

Again, look at the possibilities that are wide open before us. How many TV series offer you such an open plot? Originality of story and the fact that there always seems to be a logical and consistent reason behind everything is the way to freak out an audience.

Another episode begins in a normal family morning, with normal morning dialogue, except that all the characters are inanimate kids’ dolls. The characters’ voices are heard, but the dolls are dolls. Allison claims that things seem somehow different, but she’s not sure why.

Allison comes to the conclusion that they’re all dolls, and the entire family (of dolls) thinks she’s overreacting. Everything is as it’s always been.

Then one of the daughters says, “Mommy, you’d better be quiet. If you make too much noise, he’ll hear you.” And when Allison asks who ‘he’ is, a kid’s hand comes from above and takes one of the girls. Then we see a four year old child pick up the rest of her family. Last, he picks up Allison and begins to shake her.

Allison wakes up, normal as always, and to the same morning dialogue that took place in the beginning of the dream. Later that day, she’ll see the kid from the dream in the supermarket...

Do you know what’s going on? Don’t look now, but there’s a monster in your closet.

Meme Roundup - April 2007

2007-04-18T03:12:00.000-07:00

One of my criteria in writing a Storytellers column is that there should be at least one new meme per column that, perhaps, is new to most readers. If a person has read the column, a single sentence should be able to evoke the entire theme in the reader’s mind.

For the convenience of those who have read the columns and for the convenience of those who hadn’t yet, here are our memes so far.

* David E. Kelley’s humor makes us marginally smarter.
* The ‘domino effect’ exists in writing, too.
* Nostalgia vs. science fiction.
* The nature of evil.
* Showing us how things should be done is constructive satire.
* You can put a soul in a TV show.
* Racism can be served hot or cold.
* How to write politically and avoid both spin and political fallout.
* “You! Are! Fired!”
* Racism is to the adult mind what poop is to a child’s mind (a.k.a.: Racism is poop.)

Enjoy.

Racism (3): Racism Can Be Fun

2007-04-11T14:12:00.000-07:00

Racism is poop.

I do not mean by this that racism is a poop-y thing, although it certainly is. I mean that racism to our sophisticated adult minds is what poop is to the minds of five-year-olds.

As any parent of young kids above the age of three will testify, poop is very very funny. It is hilarious. If someone just says ‘poop’ or ‘ass’, that is comedy that can make a kid roll on the floor laughing for an hour. Hitting someone on the ass? Comedy gold.

Poop stops being funny the older we get. For the most part. Still, the mere mention of poop is certainly not as funny as it used to be. But although the subject has changed, the mechanism has remained the same. And the mechanism is all about the forbidden, the taboo, that which shouldn’t be mentioned but causes no harm if it is.

Let’s take a look at a recent example from the writers of The Daily Show (who like to throw poop a lot), and see if you notice how they keep saying aloud that which society believes shouldn’t be said.

A couple of weeks ago, Jon Stewart turned to the camera, and said: “Here with more on the Obama candidacy is our senior black correspondent, Larry Wilmore. Larry, thanks for joining us.” After the intro, Stewart got to the question: “I am also hearing that the African-American community is not supporting him because his father is Kenyan and not American.”

Wilmore: “It’s true, Jon. American blacks love African art, African clothes, African music, we’re just not that crazy about Africans. [...] So, for blacks to support Obama, he’s got to make up his mind: Is he African or American? Because he can’t be both. That doesn’t make sense.”

Stewart: “But, obviously, an American of African descent, wouldn’t that just make him...”

As Stewart trails off, Wilmore finishes his line for him: “...Some kind of unspeakable hybrid? Exactly, Jon.”

Stewart stares at Wilmore, uncomprehending. Then, “So, you really believe this affects his chances?”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Right now, only 20% of black voters support Obama. That’s bad. But, is it bad enough for him to win?”

“I’m sorry, bad enough to win?”

“Yeah, look. The last thing a black candidate wants is to be seen as the black candidate. [...] Look, it works like this.” As he speaks, a visual goes up, sporting the headline ‘VOTING RACIAL PATTERNS’. The visual has five white men and three black men. “For every three black votes,” explains Wilmore, “you scare away five white votes.” And, indeed, as he speaks, the white drawn men vanish off-screen, screaming. “Do the math. Black support is really worth three-fifths as much as white support.”

Recognize that little statistic? Ever think you would hear someone say it with conviction? As the audience laughed during this bit, it couldn’t believe that it was hearing what was being said. And it laughed harder because it couldn’t believe someone was actually saying that. That’s poop for ya.

Let’s look at another piece from The Daily Show. A recent “investigative report” by the team of Wilmore (“our chief black correspondent” again) and Oliver (white and British), had the two sit down to talk with New York City Councilman Leroy Comrie who wants us not to use the N-word.

Oliver (who is white): “So, Leroy, you want to ban this word... um... Larry?”

Wilmore (who is black): “Nigger.”

Oliver: “Thank you. What he said. Is the word, um...”

Wilmore: “...Nigger...”

Oliver: “...Offensive to everyone or just to...”

Wilmore: “...Niggers?”

At which Oliver jumps, “No, no,” and explains that he paused for effect.

It’s funny because it’s wrong. But at the same time, it easily makes a point of how ridiculous it is to be offended by poop. It may stink, but it does no harm.

Here is another way in which Stephen Colbert (who is white) from The Colbert Report made a similar point. His guest was the author of a book called The N-Word, Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why.

Says Colbert, “Alright. First question. Did you want to name the book The N-Word, and they said, no, you gotta call it The N-Word? Or did you say, I want to name this book The N-Word and they assumed you meant, you know, The N-Word, when in fact, you meant The N-Word?”

After receiving an answer, Colbert asks, “This raises another interesting subject to me, is that the N-word has become so synonymous with the N-word. Is saying the N-word pretty much like saying the N-word? Because I would never say the N-word. But I don’t want somebody to think I’m saying the N-word by saying the N-word.”

To poop or not to poop, that is the question. Colbert was being both naughty and nice, and the sharp-eyed readers will also note that he and Stewart used a tactic mentioned in the previous article about racism and brought to the fore questions and issues we’ve closed the book on, leaving it to us to think about them without any spin.

Last and certainly not least is the funniest racist of them all, Archie Bunker from All in the Family. Archie, a sweet white racist, has learned that Mike, his son-in-law, a.k.a. Meathead, is eligible for a position on the other coast of the U.S., which means that Archie will be far from his daughter, Gloria. Archie has also learned that competing for the same position is a black man. Archie suddenly finds himself fighting for the rights of the black man.

Archie stands in Gloria and Mike’s living room, and accuses Mike of being a bigot.

“He’s a bigot?!” Gloria is on her feet.

“A bigot, yes. And that’s the same guy that used to be marching in all the peace riots. That’s right. That bigot over there won’t give an even break to a spade.”

Mike then learns that he’s probably got the job. That’s when Archie really gets going: “Listen to this. I can’t believe my ears. A white guy standing there, bloating over taking a job from a colored guy. That ain’t the American way, buddy. No sirree! Listen here, professor, you’re the one that needs an American history lesson. You don’t know nothing about Lady Liberty, standing there in the harbor, with her torch on high,” and as he says it, he mimes it, and his voice goes up, “screaming out to all the nations of the world: ‘Send me your poor, your deadbeats, your filthy!’ And all the nations send them in here. They come swarming in like ants. The Spanish PR’s from the Carriboo there, your Japs, your Chinamen, your Krauts and your Hebes and your English fags!”

And he’s not done: “And all of them come in here. And they’re all free to live in their own separate sections, where they feel safe, and they bust your head if you go in there. That’s what makes America great, buddy!”

This great speech is funny because it crams in many varied forms of poop and because while Archie tries to take the equal-opportunity side, he only proves how big a racist he is. And lastly, it is funny because as he tries to prove how great America is (in that last bit) he shows how far it still has to go. And there lies the statement of the writers, delivered to us through all those jokes.

We all have our own taboos to contend with that are actually harmless when mentioned aloud. Three-fifths of a person and curses such as the N-word are only a few. We have many, many more.

So as I leave you this week with a question: What’s your poop?

'300': A Tale of Three Hundred Girly-Men

2007-04-04T10:55:00.000-07:00

What Does a Strong Man Look Like?

Imagine with me a strong man, a virile man, a manly man. What would he look like? How would you recognize a real, powerful man walking down the street? If you imagined a man standing on the street shouting “I! Am! Strong!” then 300 is the movie for you.

If you had actually met a man shouting “I! Am! Strong!” in real life, would you think he is strong? If you see him on the street, you would probably think him a madman. Let us change the scenery then, to the gym, where it is legitimate to be strong. Does anyone at the gym stand and shout “I! Am! Strong!” as proof of his strength? Doubtful. Does anyone in a grown-up brawl or in a high-school fight shout “I! Am! Strong!” as proof of strength? Would a godfather, when we imagine mob bosses, shout “I! Am! Strong!” to keep his soldiers in check?

And yet, the muscular heroes in 300 shout “This! Is! Sparta!” or “We! Are! With you!” in exactly the same way the man on the street would unrealistically shout “I! Am! Strong!” The entire movie revolves around that kind of behavior and those kind of men.

When people have power, they don’t need to claim that they do. The more someone has power, the less he has to show it. The more someone blusters about his power, the weaker he believes himself to be.

Does Sigourney Weaver in Aliens need to shout and bluster? No. And yet, she’s a remarkably strong woman (in all her movies). Cate Blanchett in The Good German and in Elizabeth plays some of the strongest women we’ve ever seen in cinema. Does she ever need to resort to claiming it? Harrison Ford, playing Indiana Jones magnifies his weaknesses rather than his strengths. In Air Force One he did what was necessary, and no more. Bruce Willis in Die Hard shouts only after he wins or when he loses. Does The Terminator ever need to assert his strength? Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, the list of strong men and women is long. For that matter, does Trump shout: “You! Are! Fired!” No, he does not. Even he doesn’t need to.

The men of 300 are all muscular girly-men. They are wusses, pussies, weaklings, and crybabies. They are two-year-olds. And now we get to the disturbing part: What does it say about an audience who believes their behavior is heroic? Or even remotely believable?

300 was imagined, created, written, directed, and made popular by men (young and old) who had probably never met or seen a real man in their lives. Women wouldn’t create this fantasy, because women would fantasize about, well, real men. How spoiled and out-of-touch is a society , when its men’s fantasies of being real men look like this?

What 300 Could Have Been About

The movie could so easily have been good. Here are a few options:

The movie could have been about what a hero is. We would have seen how real men become real heroes, by showing us how much they overcome hardships and sacrifice. And then, as the plot progressed, and as the heroes overcame unbelievable obstacles, they would actually achieve superhuman feats. There really have been superhuman feats in history – even in the last few decades – in which real people did the impossible. But if you don’t show real people doing something real to achieve something heroic, then you’re not showing heroes. Had the movie been done this way, it would have been a true epic yarn about heroism.

The movie could just as easily have been about the bad side of being heroic. There are times in human history in which it became necessary for a group of good men to become inhuman monsters, efficiently programmed with the fight and nothing more. Although people actually do this to survive, once it is done, it cannot be easily reversed. In addition, if you release the testosterone monster in men and make it all-important, there would be an immediate price to pay (more in-house violence, rape, and so on). Had the movie been done this way, it would have punched its audience in the gut.

The movie could have been an examination of what it is to be a man lost to war. It would have taken a normal man, and seen how each human part of him must be put aside so that the fighting machine can exist. Had the movie been done this way, it would have been tragic.

The movie could have been about real men who had left real lives behind, and then were killed on the battlefield. Had the movie been done this way, it would have been heroic (sacrificing yourself so that your dear ones can go on living) and tragic (showing men who had full lives back home die).

The movie could have been about how men choose how to die. Knowing they would lose if they fought and lose if they didn't fight, real decisions would have to be made. Had the movie been done this way, it would... well, it would have been a great movie.

The movie could have been about the power of women over men. If the queen had sent the king to a war he didn’t want to go to using her womanly wiles, that would have made a good movie, too. In 300, he wanted to go before he was convinced by his wife.

There are, of course, dozens and dozens of more options. The common denominator would necessarily have to be that they all deal with real people who are in a position that is, today, not real. Another common denominator would also have to be that each of these options reveals something to us about our own nature and our own emotions. Another common denominator would also have to be that all these options evoke emotions in the audience. The only emotion this movie evokes is nostalgia, and it evokes it only in people who have not been exposed to the real world and therefore imagine it to be so different from what it is.

I believe the question bears repeating: How spoiled and out-of-touch is a society, when its men’s fantasies of being real men look like this?

Racism (2): Law & Order and the Problem with Racism

2007-04-04T05:55:00.000-07:00

There’s a problem with racism. Most people would agree that racism is bad, and yet most people are racist. It’s always the other guy who’s a racist, you see.

From the writer’s point of view, it’s too easy to go for the cheap shot at racism, the basic point of it being: racism is bad and racists are assholes. Most people would agree with the writer, and he’s achieved nothing but a self-congratulatory feeling in those watching that it’s the other guy who’s wrong. Nothing maintains the status quo better than having people feel good about themselves. This kind of writing doesn’t fight racism, it maintains it.

There are different ways of tackling racism.

For one, you can ignore the problem, fearing, perhaps, that talking about it only exacerbates it. But monsters don’t go away when you don’t look at them. Problems like racism fester, in fact, and come to a boil in race riots and other fun and exciting endeavors.

(See how easy it is and how nice it makes you feel? The last half-sentence in the previous paragraph was an example of a cheap shot, the point of which you already knew: race riots are not a nice thing. The real point of the sentence was, though, that ignoring problems only makes them bigger.)

On the other hand, you can try and tackle racism head on. This leads to other problems. Here’s a selection:

Lingering problems like racism – some of which goes back hundreds of years to the time white people had to convince themselves that black people were so inferior and inhuman it was just to treat them as property – do not go away just by meeting them head on. Lingering problems take lingering solutions;

Sometimes, people are simply too uncomfortable facing the fact that such issues exist;

Sometimes, the problem is too close – people don’t want to face the fact that their parents, grandparents, or best friends are/were so wrong;

Sometimes a solution that is reasonable ten years later seems too extreme to too many people at the time;

And sometimes writers know ahead of time that if they talk plainly to the audience, too many politicians will take the chance to make a headline for themselves by turning it into political hay in their favor (like the Survivor brouhaha a few months back).

So, the writer who wants to tackle the problem, and does not want to either sweep it under the rug or to face it head on will go for the indirect option. And here’s when we get to Dick Wolf, the many writers who work for him, and Law and Order. Law and Order usually tackles current issues, and it’s taken on racism and racists more than once. And almost always, its writers use this third option. Let’s see their two main tactics when tackling racism.

Tactic #1: Taking it out of the spin machine.

As a rule of thumb, most politicians want you to agree with them, while most writers want you to think for yourselves. There’s a big difference there, because if one thinks for oneself, one could adopt an opinion significantly different from yours. For politicians, that’s sometimes a death-knell.

The oldest political trick in the book is being in control of the premise of the question through its phrasing: You’re either with us or you’re against us; America, love it or leave it; the spin stops here; talking about racism only perpetuates a problem; and so on.

A way of diffusing that tactic without stirring any ruffled feathers is to make the audience look at the problem again without giving an answer in either direction. Sometimes taking another prolonged gander at a situation you’ve already defined, a gander that’s free of spin in either direction, allows the audience to find new complexity, new solutions, new problems, reconsider their opinions, see that things are not cut and dry, and come to new realizations.

Here are a couple of examples.

Remember the Mel Gibson incident? Within a week or two, it was either the booze talking or his secret opinions; he had been in rehab, which either helped racism or didn’t; he had sincerely apologized, and many Jews forgave him. And so the incident was remembered, but closed.

A few weeks after that incident, in an episode of Law and Order, cops stop a drunk driver, played by Chevy Chase. Chase has blood on his shirt, and so he’s arrested. Chase is drunk, belligerent, and certain that the cops arresting him because they’re Jewish. Later on, he calls one of the mainstay characters “Sugartits”. It turns out that Chase’s character, unlike Gibson, is a has-been actor who actually is a victim of a Jewish conspiracy. When his career began, Chase made many anti-Semitic remarks, the rumor of which passed from one Jewish producer to another, and so very soon he found that he couldn’t get a job. Unlike the Gibson incident, the episode is about murder and dangerous racism that Chase passed on to his son.

The point is that the writers of Law and Order dredge this up from the well-packaged place in our heads in which we’ve stored the incident, and let us take another look at many aspects of it, without saying one thing about Gibson, without taking a stand in either direction, and without any spin doctor to explain things to us as we think about these events.

In another recent episode of Law and Order, Jennifer Beals plays a famous actress, who, a few months ago, had gone to Africa to adopt a black baby. The baby’s real father stirs up trouble and kills Beals’ husband in the beginning of the episode. The deal he makes with the D.A. is that he would confess if he just got to see the baby. Eventually, the baby is brought for him to see. And he, shocked, claims that’s not his baby. And it turns out that he’s right.

The detectives check and see that one of two things happened: Beals returned from Africa with the child, accidentally killed him, went into rehab while the assistant found a replacement black baby, or: Beals returned from Africa, went into rehab, while the assistant accidentally killed the kid and replaced him with another; and when Beals came back from rehab a couple of months later, she never noticed that’s a different black baby.

Now this situation remains in question, never really commented on, no politician or writer’s mouthpiece there to speechify on the horrible situation and put it into a neat little explainable package for us. It’s just there, for ten or fifteen minutes, in front of our faces. And, inevitably, we think about this for ourselves, and who knows what we come up with.

Tactic #2: Giving us new thoughts and taking no position.

Another tactic the Law and Order writers use is to make a logical leap we may not have made, and perhaps even a politically dangerous leap, and not insist that it’s right. Sometimes, just planting the idea and making sure it sticks is better than planting it and insisting that it’s right. Any parent knows that insisting doesn’t usually work. On the other hand, if I were to find a child and, out of nowhere, tell him that there are no such things as monsters that suck kids’ blood during sleep when the moon is full, it won’t matter how much I deny it. The idea is there, and it’s there to stay.

In an episode a few years ago, a female abortion doctor was shot to death by an anti-abortion zealot. The episode is naturally filled with people of all kinds on the sides of ‘the right to life’ or ‘the right to choose’ (yet another example of a question neatly-framed for our convenience). Jack, the ADA, and Clair, his second chair, are walking down the street, talking about the subject, heatedly.

Jack, Claire says, a woman’s dead because she believed in a woman’s right to choose.

No, Jack says simply, a woman’s dead because someone put a bullet in her head.

And in one second, he has snapped us all out of the ideological framework we’re so used to, and into the personal. A woman is dead, not for her ideals, and not for the murderer’s ideals, but because a man decided to take a life. In an instant we see that most of the ideological war is a cover for something else and is a smokescreen for the real issues. It’s not about politics; it’s all personal.

In another episode, a black woman kidnaps the baby (also black) she had given up for adoption when she was a drug addict, and is caught red-handed trying to leave the city. The case looks sewn up, completely black and white. But then Paul steps into the fray. Paul, a black man, used to be the A.D.A. when Law and Order began. Now, apparently, he’s protecting guilty people. His defense is this: The adoption of the child was racist, and therefore wrong. It seems crazy to everyone, including to a majority of the audience at home. We’ve seen the people in charge of the adoption agency, and everyone’s nice and reasonable.

But when the woman of the agency in charge is put on the stand, Paul gets her to admit that black kids are put in with black families, and white kids with white families. Which means that, on the whole, statistically, white kids get into families that are better off financially and so have better opportunities.

When the audience is faced with that idea, and for a moment it seems that Paul’s point of view is legitimate, then it doesn’t matter what happens afterwards in the story. The idea is in our heads. We’d thought of it as crazy, and now it seems logical.

And here’s an example from Deadline, another Dick Wolf series that was, unfortunately, short-lived. Wallace Benton, an intrepid columnist, does a follow-up about the current condition of crack babies today. He follows a mother, who’s just been arrested after having had her kid, to jail, and from there to court. She has accepted a plea agreement in exchange for a reduced sentence. The judge, however, accepts the guilty plea, but not the sentence. He sentences her to three years in jail or – and here’s the kicker – no jail time at all if she agrees to get herself sterilized. The judge, apparently, is having his own private war on drugs, by keeping more crack babies from being born.

When Benton digs deeper, he finds that the hospital that had admitted the pregnant woman tested her for drugs, something that sounds absurd. He then finds that the hospital routinely checks for drugs in pregnant women and that 200 women have been prosecuted for using drugs while pregnant. Legal precedent leads him to believe that it’s not the health of the babies that worries the judges that had sentenced the women and that “These women aren’t being prosecuted for using drugs,” rather “They’re being prosecuted for being pregnant.” Which leads us to: “It’s a war. It’s a campaign of sterilization against poor, young black women.” And then: “Wars are usually coordinated efforts. You should find out who’s coordinating this one.”

And that one line, that is absolutely true, about wars being coordinated efforts, leads Benton to discover how deep and how high this goes and how long it’s been going on. The concept of wars being coordinated efforts is the concept that sticks in our minds. It teaches us a new logical pattern of thought about the world around us without anyone there to spin it for us.

And now that we’ve seen how the writers of Law and Order do it, we can safely say that the spin stops here. Right?

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(This is the second of a three-article series about racism. Next week, we’ll take a break from the heavy stuff and see that racism can be fun.)

Racism Served Hot or Cold

2007-03-28T05:11:00.000-07:00

How would you like your racism served to you, sir?

First on the menu, we have William Monahan’s The Departed, which won him this year’s Oscar for Best Writing. Let us see how he serves us our racism.

The Departed begins with Jack Nicholson saying the following lines (and since this is a family-friendly column, I’ll bleep the least offensive word in there): “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me. Years ago, we had the church. That was only a way of saying, we had each other. The Knights of Columbus were real head-breakers, true Guineas. They took over their piece of the city. Twenty years after an Irishman couldn’t get a f***ing job, we had the presidency... May he rest in peace. That’s what the niggers don’t realize. If I got one thing against the black chappies, it’s this: No one gives a deal. You have to take it.”

So the audience hears this. Is it then outraged? Do some people walk out the way they did on Michael Richards? Probably not.

That’s because Monahan does two things, and he does them simultaneously.

First of all, he’s blunt as hell right off the bat. He slams those expletives right in our faces, getting us to prick up our ears. But at the same time, he does something else. The lines are written in such a way as to signal anyone who hears or reads them that this is the way the character speaks and not the stance of the writer. In fact, the text is written in such a way as to make us say “Yes, that’s right, that’s how he’d say it” almost as soon as the expletives are uttered. So with the first punch, Monahan gets us to stand up, then immediately sucker-punches us, getting us to sit back down.

Monahan forces two thoughts into our brains: ‘This is wrong’, followed immediately by ‘This is how people like the Nicholson character speak’. And then we’re left to ourselves to combine those two statements into one conclusion.

Later on in the movie, Nicholson and his Irish gang have a ‘business meeting’ in an abandoned warehouse with an Asian gang. The two gangs face each other, and Nicholson says, “I’m concerned about a Chinaman who thinks it’s wise to come to a business transaction with automatic weapons.”

The leader of the Asian gang answers in a foreign language. Before listening to the translation, Nicholson says, “For his own good, tell Bruce Lee and the Karate Kids that none of us are carrying automatic weapons. Because here, in this country, it don’t add inches to your dick. You get a life sentence for it.”

It’s the “in this country” that’s actually racist in those two lines. It carries with it a truly superior air. In this country, it implies, we do things like civilized beings; in other countries, you do thing like chimps.

Monahan does it to us again, because as we read/hear these lines, we also immediately think: “This is how Nicholson’s character would, in real life, say it,” Getting us to sit back down again. And getting us to think that pesky third thought again. If you didn’t catch yourself thinking the second or the third though as you read the last two lines from the movie, test yourselves as you read this exchange:

A minute or two later, as the two gangs are still standing opposite each other in the warehouse, Nicholson says: “If these Chinks want to nuke Taiwan any time in this century, they better shape up and show me one million dollars.” When the rival gang fails to react, he continues, “What we generally do in this country is one guy brings the items, and the other guy pays him.”

Catch yourself thinking those thoughts Monahan tried to put in your brain? In any case, the story still continues, and what happens next is not about racism. But that meme, that pesky, intangible, wordless third thought is still somewhere in your head. And something later on, in the real world, will remind you of it. And what you’ll do with that... Well, that’s your business. That is the thinking, conscious or otherwise, of a writer who puts words and concepts together in this manner.

In these examples, only our brain was employed, not our hearts. Monahan went after our thoughts. And so he gave us a dish of racism, served cold.

Let’s see how racism would be served hot.

Conveniently, Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco give us the perfect example in the script that won them Best Writing for the previous year. In a scene in Crash, Matt Dillon, who is white, is a cop talking on the phone to Loretta Devine, who is black, trying to get his father the medical care he needs. Devine explains it isn’t an emergency and asks him to make an appointment in the morning (it is now dark). When he asks for her name, she says “Shaniqua Johnson”. “Shaniqua?” he says. “Big f***ing surprise that is.” Upon which, she hangs up on him.

Matt Dillon makes his way to the car, with his new partner. Over the radio, they hear about a truck, stolen by two black men. A similar truck just passes them, with two black people in the front, and they speed after it. As they compare license plates, they see that this is not the stolen truck. But Matt Dillon turns on the siren and forces the truck to the side of the road.

He walks up to the driver, played by Terrence Howard, who is black, and asks for a driver’s license and registration. He and his wife, played by Thandie Newton, also black, are clearly upper-middle class, if not higher, and not only had she just ‘satisfied’ him as he was driving, the two are clearly amused by the situation. Howard gives Dillon the registration, and he goes to check it. The two are left behind, laughing.

Dillon returns, asking Howard to step out of the car. Howard turns more serious and says he hasn’t been drinking. His wife says he doesn’t drink. “He’s a Buddhist, for Chrissake.” Howard says it’s all right, and steps out of the car. Dillon gives him the full treatment, checking him for intoxication. Howard follows all the steps, but Newton opens the car door and says, “I told you, he doesn’t drink.”

“Ma’am, I’m only gonna tell you one time: Stay in the vehicle.”

Newton, who is a bit tipsy, steps out of the car, saying “Don’t you ma’am me.” Howard tries to calm his wife down, and Dillon says “All right, both of you, turn around, put your hands on top of your heads and interlock your fingers.”

Now Howard begins to argue, though still calm. Dillon asks them again. And again. And then, just as Howard says he’s a television director, Dillon slams him against the car, then asks his partner to pat Howard down.

Dillon then moves on to Newton. She curses her husband, who tells her to do what the cop says. Newton turns to the cop, “And you keep your filthy, f***ing hands off me,” hitting him on the chest. He overpowers her and pushes her against the car, holding her hand behind her back. Her husband, more excited now, tells her to stop talking.

“That’s quite a mouth you have,” Dillon says, then winks at Howard, “Of course, you know that.”

“F*** you,” she says. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You thought you saw a white woman blowing a black man, and that just drove your little cracker ass crazy, didn’t it?”

Howard shouts: “Will you just shut your f***ing mouth?”

Dillon says, “I’d listen to your husband, ma’am,” and begins to pat her down. He tells her to open her legs. And as he feels her dress, he asks her about whether she has any guns and knives on her. “I’m wearing a cocktail dress, what do you think?” she says. “You’d be surprised at some of the places I’ve found weapons,” says Dillon, continuing to pat her down.

Dillon’s partner, also white, pronounces Howard (called Mr. Thayer) clean. Dillon’s hands move down to Newton’s ass, squeezing it hard, as he asks Howard, “What do you think we should do about this, Mr. Thayer?” His hands continues to feel intimate places. “My partner and I just witnessed your wife performing fellatio on you, while you were operating a motor vehicle.” His hands have moved down her legs and are now moving up her dress, as Howard watches, thinking what to do.

Dillon continues, “That’s reckless endangerment, which, incidentally, is a felony. You will be charged with your wife here with lewd conduct and performing a sexual act in public. Now you say you’re a block from home. Now we can use our discretion,” his hand goes up and up her legs, “and let you go with a warning, or we can cuff you,” and we hear by Newton’s reaction that he has now touched a place he shouldn’t have, “and put you in the back of the car.” Howard and Dillon’s partner look on, uncomfortable.

Dillon asks, “What do you think we should do, sir?” And he waits for an answer, with his hand up Newton’s dress.

Now Howard has to make up his mind.

After a few seconds, he says, “Look, we’re sorry, and we would appreciate if you just let us go with a warning. Please.”

Dillon decides to let them go with a warning.

Now, that’s racism served piping hot. It goes for the guts because it comes from the guts and then churns our guts. We feel the outrage, we feel the woman’s violation, and, most of all, we feel the anger. We feel the husband’s anger, the woman’s anger, but we also feel the cop’s anger. We’ve felt it before. We’ve felt the anger that gets people angry enough to abuse their power, even if we’ve never actually done it.

As we watch this scene, we see – and think – how fast things can get out of hand, that this is how innocent people get sent to jail. It’s so easy, as a racist, to throw someone into jail. And just as easily, just as simply, if things would have continued, race riots could form. We also think that as successful as Mr. Thayer is, at the end of the day, he’s a black man, he’ll always be a black man, and because of that his world can crumble any time.

But at the end of the day, this is not a scene about racism. Matt Dillon’s character isn’t doing this because he’s a racist – he’s doing it because he’s frustrated that his father is sick and he can’t help him. He’s taking it out in this way.

There almost isn’t a scene in Crash, which doesn’t have racism. And each and every time, at the end of the day, people are only using racism as an excuse, because it’s so easy. Hispanics, blacks, whites, Asian – everyone in the movie uses racism as an outlet, but everyone also sees everyone else as people. Matt Dillon’s character is later redeemed, when he has to save Newton from a burning car. He doesn’t see race, then, he only sees a person he can save, even if he has to risk his life for her. That’s a statement from the head to the head.

But the major statement in the scene described above is from the gut to the head. This is how Haggis and Moresco did it: Our anger thudded in our ears like drums as the cop’s hands went up the woman’s legs. And we felt how easily that anger becomes racism. And then our heads kicked in, understanding how racism is formed. Dillon faced frustration and injustice, and he did this. Now, this couple had an injustice done to them, they can easily turn it into something mean and bad. We felt racism form inside us.

Which is a better tactic for the writer? Hot or cold? Which convinces more? Which lingers more? Which gets the audience to spring into action?

And how would you, the audience, like to view your racism? Hot or cold?

Where the Soul Is

2007-03-21T03:12:00.000-07:00

Hollywood has a bad reputation for quality. And, more often than not, it’s justified. But the truth is that there are gems out there, and there are writers whose every line should be studied by us in the same way that Tennessee Williams’, Eugene O’Neill’s and Edward Albee’s lines are studied and scrutinized.

We begin Storytellers with a four-article series, of which this is the last, concentrating on the top four writers or writing-teams working in television today. Most of their scripts are certainly worthy of study and re-examination, and yet the episodes we watch get old in our minds faster than yesterday’s newspaper.

The Top Four

In the top spot: David E. Kelley.

At number two: Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin maintains high quality more often than Kelley. But when Kelley’s good, he has an even wider range, sharper claws, and better drama.

In third place we had Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, writers of most of the first six seasons of Gilmore Girls.

And this week we get to talk about the writers in fourth place: Rescue Me’s creators and main writers, Peter Tolan and Denis Leary.

All these writers or writing-teams can write heart-wrenching drama; can have more laugh-out-loud comedy in a drama than can be found in most sitcoms; have a clear view on life, which they convey through their stories; can deliver stories that feel as intense and intensive as a two-hour movie; do not look down at their audience and do not talk down to it; and all four put their heart in their hands when they write well, and let us watch it bleed.

Peter Tolan and Denis Leary deserve special attention, because they created something rarely found in television or movies these days: A show with soul.

Apart or Together?

Leary and Tolan are not the same apart as they are together. We last saw them on separate shows.

Peter Tolan is best remembered for The Larry Sanders Show, a brilliantly-written show that was as cold as ice.

Denis Leary, meanwhile, wrote The Job, where he played, much like in Rescue Me, a macho, alcoholic cop who cheats on his wife and can’t handle life. But at the end of the day, The Job wasn’t about anything, and its plots were all over the place. Although Peter Tolan was around, his presence was not felt in the writing. This was Leary’s show.

A few years later, when the two collaborated in writing and creating Rescue Me, it seems that each gave the other what he lacked. Tolan gave Leary structure, while Leary gave Tolan the soul he needed. Together, they created a show that’s actually about something.

Tough Guys and Tortured Souls

Rescue Me is about people who hold it in and what they go through when life gets tough. It is about the virtues and faults of holding it in. But mostly, it’s about what happens to people who don’t break when they finally do break.

Before we get to the stuff that breaks the characters down, let’s meet them.

Tommy, played by Leary, is an alcoholic, chain-smoking, pill-popping New-York Irish fireman who cheats on his wife, Janet, and comes from a long line of alcoholic, chain-smoking, pill-popping Irish firemen who cheat on their wives. He has three kids and when we meet him, he’s going through a divorce, and is spying on his wife, unable to let her go.

Here he is, in season 1, explaining why the guys at work don’t know he stopped drinking: “I quit drinking in front of family, so that Janet would think that I really quit drinking so I could get back together with her, but I didn’t tell the guys at work I quit drinking because I didn’t want them to think it’s a sign of weakness, or that, you know, I was having some kind of sudden change, like I was losing it. Plus it allowed me to keep drinking while I was going to AA.”

Tommy’s firehouse is filled with men who are the archetype ‘tough guys’: macho, homophobic, and emotionally unavailable. Firefighters are heroes to Leary and Tolan, but they are as flawed as any of us. For example:

Tommy is talking with Franco about last night’s escapades. Halfway through, Tommy says, “What I can’t believe is you making a move on a chick with sideburns.”

To which Franco replies: “Hey, Tommy, it’s getting slow out there, pal. All that pussy I was getting after 9/11? Now nothing. People forget.”

“Yeah,” Tommy says. “Sad commentary.”

Acerbic, cynical people. And real.

Here’s another example of how Leary and Tolan write their tough guys:

Someone anonymously posted a poem they wrote in the firehouse.

Tommy reads it allowed, then ridicules it.

The author says, “I don’t know, it’s not that bad. It rhymes.”

“So what,” says Tommy. “My ten-year-old can make stuff rhyme. It doesn’t mean he’s the next, uh... Name a poet.”

“Angie Dickinson,” says one firefighter.

“Angie Dickinson? From Police Woman?”

Franco, puffing on his cigarette, says, “Nah, I think you mean Emily Dickinson, from the Belle of Amherst.”

Tommy looks at him, surprised, “You know poetry?”

“Nah,” he puffs on his cigarette again. “I jacked off to a picture of her once, when I was eleven.”

But it’s not the comedy that gives Rescue Me its soul, and not the dialogue. It’s the broken, shattered people. The show is populated with tough people with tough lives who don’t know what to do when things get too tough. One of Tommy’s firefighting friends has a gay son with which he cannot talk and a wife with Alzheimer who forgets she’s married. Another firefighter's daughter is rushed to the hospital because she took his pills, but that's not enough for him to be able to quit taking them. Tommy’s wife takes the kids, sells the house, and all four disappear.

Jimmy, also a firefighter, was Tommy’s cousin and best friend, and he died on 9/11. His wife, Sheila, can’t stop crying and can’t find a man. She gets drunk and hits on Tommy: “I can’t meet anybody. I can’t get Jimmy out of my mind. He’s always there. You are the closest thing I have to him. You’re sweet. You’re funny. And you’re here. Right now. Right here. Christ, you lost Jimmy, you just lost Billy Warren, I mean how long do you think all of us have?”

Tommy is haunted by the ghosts of the people he didn’t save, including Jimmy’s. The dead people follow him, talk to him, and haunt his dreams as well as his waking life.

When Tommy’s mother dies unexpectedly, his father begins to cry: “You know, my father cried a lot towards the end of his life. He never cried before then. Probably not even as a baby. But near the end, you looked at him cross-eyed, and he’d bust out bawling. It’s the ghosts, Tommy.”

Tommy suddenly takes a greater interest in this, “It’s the what?”

“All the people you’ve hurt, all the meanness you did. You get old, you stop moving a million miles a minute. It all comes back. It really shows up again. All you can do... All you can do is cry.” And he does. Too embarrassed, he waves Tommy off, “Go on, get out of here! Make your suck-ass coffee!”

Tommy and all the men in the firehouse and their families don’t know how to break. Leary and Tolan throw at their characters everything they can, making their lives as hard as possible, to see how they would react. To teach us, to teach the characters, and to teach themselves something more about human nature.

Three extreme examples of how tough things get and what happens then:

After his wife kidnaps the kids, sells the house, and disappears, Tommy hits rock bottom. He soaks himself in vodka, and lights the lighter, inching it closer towards his body.

Halfway through the show, just as his life is getting back in order, and as everything with his wife is good again, their son is killed in a mindless hit-and-run. How do you deal with something as horrible as that? And how does someone like Tommy, who can’t deal with anything, deal with something like that?

Another unbearable, unforgettable moment of television comes a few episodes later. His own brother is secretly sleeping with Tommy’s ex-wife. One episode revolves around the fact that one of the firefighters in Tommy’s firehouse is secretly sleeping with Tommy’s crazy sister, constantly telling us how Tommy beat her last boyfriend within an inch of his life. This helps set up Tommy’s mindset and, at the same time, blindside us to the main event. Towards the end of the episode, in a family event, Tommy sees his brother and his ex-wife touching under the table.

In an amazing piece of acting, Tommy completely loses it: We see the wires snap inside his brain, as he just looks at them. Then, with absolutely no warning, he leaps across the table, no longer entirely sane, and beats his brother. He throws him all over the place, then into the street, throws his head through the car of a window, kicks him, and, spitting on him, leaves him half-dead on the road.

There is a difference between this drama in Rescue Me and the dramatic turns that appear in shows like ER and Third Watch. The last two have drama for drama's sake, because it keeps the audience glued to the set. Something is burning inside Leary, and he and Tolan keep writing situations that return to the same thing: breaking the unbreakable people. And during that process, Leary makes us feel for an hour what he feels all the time, and we all learn something about human nature.

Aaron Sorkin, the Nature of Friendship, and 9/11

2007-03-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

When Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip first came out a few months ago, Matthew Perry was making the talk show rounds. More than once, he referred to Aaron Sorkin, the creator and writer of the show, as a genius, and to monologues and dialogues he’s had to perform as “Another Aaron Sorkin genius monologue”.

When someone is referred to as a genius, it too often also means that everything he does is genius or that if I can’t see what’s good about something that person did, I must be the stupid one. The latter statement, in fact, is how directors like David Lynch and Lars von Trier get actresses to do crazy things for them.

Aaron Sorkin is a genius. But let’s ask the real question: What’s in it for us?

We last saw Aaron Sorkin in a The West Wing episode, a show he had created and had written all but one of the episodes in its first four seasons. With Bartlet’s daughter kidnapped, the Democratic President resigned temporarily, ceding power to the Republican Speaker of the House, played by John Goodman. In that meeting, Goodman chided Bartlet’s staff, and Bartlet stood up for them. Cutting Bartlet short, Goodman looked at him, and said, “You’re relieved, Mr. President.”

It was certainly among the top ten most memorable television moments.

With that, and with Bartlet’s daughter still kidnapped, Aaron Sorkin left the series, which ran for four more years.

In The West Wing Sorkin coddled us with great actors, characters who are unabashedly intelligent and well-read, an unpredictable plot that makes us think we just watched a two-hour movie, good drama, good comedy (there are usually more funnies in a Sorkin drama than there are in a half-hour sitcom), all with a fast-paced intelligent dialogue, usually about things that actually matters.

Dialogues like that are hard to find in any Hollywood product, since the prevalent wisdom is that it’s a turn-off for the audience. But the truth is that Sorkin’s writing was ripe with talk about policy even as the ratings got higher and higher. The reason it didn’t get old was because Sorkin made sure that even a discussion about the census was, at the end of the day, about people.

The most extreme example of something prevalent wisdom says should never work on television was in an episode called ‘Arctic Radar’, when Toby and Will Bailey had a write-off. Yes, that’s right, a write-off! Can you imagine two people sitting down and silently reading each others’ scripts as compelling TV? Sorkin made it work.

In fact, he chose a venue that was perfect for it: every subject in the universe could wind up on the President’s desk. What it comes down to is something as ancient as the Greek tragedies: Big events are happening somewhere off-screen or off-stage, while our characters sit in a room and talk about it, debate, and decide what to do – all in a compelling way. When the story is done right, talking about the action is as powerful as seeing the action. That’s why the special effects were cheaper back in 500 B.C.

Not only did Sorkin not resort to special effects in The West Wing, he insisted on talking about problematic issues intelligently, while never resorting to sex, violence, or even a mini-skirt. And he still got good ratings. Imagine that.

Now imagine something else. Imagine a writer who believes he can change the world by showing us the beauty of what he sees. Take, for example, the power of friendship. The two main characters in Sports Night were best friends, who supported each other through tough times. In The West Wing one recalls the time Bartlet was about to reveal the fact that he had lied to the American people and everybody’s life was about to turn into a living hell. Bartlet sat his aide Charlie down, and said: “I’m confident in your loyalty to me. I’m confident in your love for me. But if you lie to protect me, if you lie just once, if you lie just a little, if you lie because you can’t stand what’s happening to me and the people making it happen, if you ever, ever lie... you’re finished with me. Do you understand?”

That is how you write love.

In the first episode of Studio 60, we see the friendship of Matt Albie and Danny Tripp (played by Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford respectively) two friends who know each other from forever-ago, know their faults and worship their talents. Now here’s the trick: What does a friend do to lift a friend when he is completely on the ropes? He gives him responsibility.

After he hears that Whitford had fallen off the wagon for the first time in 11 years, after listening to his friend, after offering to help, to go on a vacation, after making sure he’s fine, Perry brings him back by gently laying the responsibility on his friend’s shoulders: “Forget that. But it’s going to be our show now. And only one of us can screw up at a time. And I think we both know that most of the time it’s going to be me. You’re the big shoulders.”

A friend says ‘Save me’, and the other friend now has to put on the human mask, get off the floor, and save him. And that’s how he is saved, as well. It’s a male-friendship thing, because men like to pull themselves out of trouble by putting on masks. And, boy, it works. In real life and on television, when written by someone who has experienced it more than once. It’s a motif that appears throughout Sorkin’s writing, and now that his two characters are such good friends, perhaps we’ll explore it again and again.

There is one more element to Sorkin’s writing that is revealed in everything he does: He wants to do some good, and he believes in his audience’s ability to achieve it. When he tackles things he thinks are wrong, he does not simply criticize, he criticizes constructively. He does not just topple, he helps us build, by showing us how things could be done.

Sorkin seems to believe he can fix at least part of the world. Not through hubris, but through persuasion, and by showing us that we are capable of something better and more beautiful than what we have achieved so far.

There are many examples, but certainly one of the most touching is his 9/11 speech. In the second episode of the West Wing’s fourth season, terrorists put some bombs under bleachers in a university, and the bombs go off. Everyone is horrified, of course, and the President gives a speech that day. And I’ll be damned if this isn’t the speech Sorkin wishes Bush had given after 9/11 about the tragedy and about the firefighters. Sorkin uses his supreme talent to find exactly what the American people needed to hear then and probably still need to hear now. He is giving us his version of the 9/11 speech with Martin Sheen’s delivery:

“More than any time in recent history, America’s destiny is not of its own choosing. We did not seek, nor did we provoke, an assault on our freedom and our way of life. We did not expect, nor did we invite, a confrontation with evil. Yet the true measure of a people’s strength is how they rise to master that moment when it does arrive. Forty-four people were killed a couple of hours ago in Kensington State University. Three swimmers from the men’s team were killed and two others are in critical condition when, after having heard the explosion from their practice facility, they ran into the fire to help get people out. ... Ran into the fire. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. They’re our students and our teachers and our parents and our friends. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels. When every time we think we’ve measured our capacity to meet a challenge we look up and we’re reminded that our capacity may well be limitless. This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great. This is a time for American heroes and we reach for the stars. God bless their memory. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America.”

Sorkin believes that writing can affect change, that writing can move mountains. That it can blow the roof. That it can make us better people. That it can make us cry and make us laugh. That art, when done right, makes us better people.