5/3/23
Newsletter #325
The Crack of Dawn
In 1998 the internet was new and just catching on. My buddy, Bruce Campbell, who has always been a technological step ahead of me – he got his first computer, an IBM PC-Junior in 1982; I got my first computer, an Apple 2C, in 1983 – had just recently started his website. Bruce browbeat me – “It’s a floating resume” – into starting my own website, Beckerfilms. Actually, Beckerfilms already existed as a fan site, but had almost nothing on it. I was helping the fellow who started it, Gerry Kissell, by supplying him with photos. When I asked Gerry if he would help me start a website, he said, “You can have this one. You pay the server and I’ll be the webmaster.” And thus it was. Unlike Bruce’s site, however, I included a Q&A that I ended up answering every day for the next 20 years. I answered thousands upon thousands of questions.
Ostensibly, though, my website had a greater purpose than just being a floating resume, or a place where Xena fans could come and bitch. On my website I would happily share my hard-earned knowledge about screenwriting with anyone who was interested. I had been studying and practicing the craft for 20 years at that point – had actually made some money and gotten a couple of feature films made – and the first things that were posted on the site were five essays I had written, entitled, The Need For Structure (Parts 1-5). This is how I began many acrimonious relationships with wannabe screenwriters. It also gave me kind of a front row seat to observe the death of classical storytelling techniques in screenwriting. Many folks have defended this development to me as, “The form is growing and you’re not growing with it.” I say, “The form is dying, and I’m not dying with it.” So I stopped writing screenplays. Hell, I wrote about 40 of them, and 5 got produced. That’s enough.
This is a follow-up on my recent newsletter about irony, which I extolled as a higher form of storytelling. It’s like being a juggler and adding extra balls. Yet another extra ball, if you will, is allegory – where you tell a smaller story that is in fact an example of a bigger, more universal story. Americans, who can’t handle irony, were never interested in allegory. This was the domain of crazy, oddball, foreigners like Luis Bunuel, Jean-Luc Godard or Alejandro Jodorowsky. I made one allegorical film, If I Had a Hammer, and it remains unreleased. I like it, but then I’m Rosemary and it’s my unholy baby.
Unlike what a number of people would like to have me believe (and have hornswoggled themselves into nearly believing, but not quite), movies have not progressed as a form; movies have digressed to their present form, which is encapsulated in the title of 2022’s Oscar-winning Best Picture, Everything Everywhere All at Once. I guess this is the modern, Tik-Tok version of a story: throw everything, including the kitchen sink and the toilet, at the audience as fast as you can. As long as it’s unrelenting, it doesn’t matter where it’s going.
But here’s the misunderstanding: technology is an ever-changing, hopefully improving, thing; storytelling, if you do it right, is an unchanging formula concocted to achieve a specific outcome. That definition is, I believe, what frightens away the young and the stupid. Unchanging? Nothing is unchanging. Everything is changing everywhere all at once, you old school, Baby-boomer, stick-in-the-mud.
Alas, the ingredients of water are unchanging — hydrogen and oxygen — and they don’t change with the times. The speed that objects fall remains constant, as do many things. Life may seem like a fashion show, but it isn’t.
Here is why a narrative story is more important than whatever story it’s telling: in a narrative story, the author is God. If the author knows the character’s fate, and has tailored the characters actions to logically bring them to that fateful conclusion, then during the course of that story God actually exists. Most people, I think, would like a nice, solid confirmation that God actually exists, and is in fact watching over them (like the sparrow), and will make sure that they get their just reward in the great by and by. Except most humans doubt the existence of God, no matter what they say, how often they attend church, synagogue or the mosque, or how many times they get down on their knees and pray. If some people call God Jehovah, while others refer to it as Allah, or Krishna, or Zoroaster, or what have you, maybe it isn’t exactly what I think it is, or possibly it doesn’t exist at all.
But not during the course of a well-told tale. Everybody gets exactly what they deserve, either directly or ironically, but most assuredly, and inevitably.
In Unforgiven (1992), at the end, William Munny (Clint Eastwood) has his pistol stuck directly in the face of Sheriff Little Bill (Gene Hackman) and sure looks like he’s about to kill him. Little Bill says, “I don’t deserve this. I’m building a house.” William Munny replies, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it,” and shoots him in the face. Guess what? Deserve has got everything to do with it. Little Bill doesn’t think he deserves it, but he does. And because he deserves it – he’s a sadistic, unfair asshole – it’s incredibly satisfying when he gets it. In a world that actually has a God, Little Bill gets a bullet in the forehead, and William Munny gets away.
Stories told well perform an important function for human society: they reassure us of something we’re unsure of – that our right (or wrong) actions actually do matter, and that maybe we really do get what we deserve. That’s why I love good stories.
So, one guy says to the other, “If you get attacked by a bear, reach down, pick up a pile of shit, and throw it at it.” The other guy says, “How do I know there will be a pile of shit there?” The first guy says, “Oh, you take my word for it, there will be a pile of shit there.”
Meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs, Ladies and Gentlemen! Do you feel good?
I bet you do!