Screenwriting 101: What Fiction Writers Learn from Star Wars

Essays Screening Room
July 28, 2016 | 2 books mentioned 5 4 min read

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For the last twelve years I have taught fiction writing at Delta College in Michigan. For six of those years I have also taught Introduction to Screenwriting as part of Delta’s Film Production program. Arguably, screenwriters and fiction writers are going about the same thing, even if in different forms: they are trying to tell a good story. I certainly can’t say that the ways I teach screenwriting and fiction writing are universal, but I have noticed that, while the two courses essentially focus on storytelling, my pedagogical approaches for each are very different.

When I teach fiction, I usually focus on the “craft” of fiction. I use words and phrases like “conflict,” “character development,” “backstory,” “interior landscape,” and “dialogue.” When it comes to plot, though, I find myself saying something cryptic like, “Plot comes out of character. Whatever your protagonist does must be true to his or her character.” It’s good advice, I suppose, but it doesn’t really help students understand what makes for a solid plot. When I talk about fiction writing, the vibe is mystical: “You don’t need to know where you’re going. Just sit down and write. Discover what you have to say sentence by sentence. Let the journey surprise you.” Sometimes I’ll even quote E.L. Doctorow who said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” I love that simile, but the more realistic side of me notes that it’s also a perfect situation for crashing and going nowhere.

Screenwriting often seems so much more practical and story-oriented. Right out of the gate, I am talking with students about the importance of movie-mapping. Much more time is spent on the plotting of the story to make certain that “something happens” and that the movie is always escalating tension and conflict as it moves toward the climax. For such a modern form of storytelling – barely 125 years old – screenwriting seems to draw much more of its understanding of plot from Plato’s dissection of narrative structure.

Before my students begin to learn screenplay format, I first ask them to consider their film’s major dramatic question, or MDQ. In screenwriting, the major dramatic question is a yes-or-no question that is answered by the climax. For instance, in the 1977 classic Star Wars: A New Hope, the MDQ would be, “Will Luke blow up the Death Star?” Before ever writing, my students are encouraged to know their MDQ and to know the answer. They have to know what they are writing towards in order to make every scene lead the audience there naturally and believably. To understand how movie structure works, we talk about a movie’s Inciting Incident, Plot Point 1, Mid-Point, Plot Point 2, and Climax. Screenwriters are encouraged to know their ending before anything else, which seems very different from all of that driving blind in the fog business.

Star Wars: A New Hope provides a good example of the rest of the plot points. The inciting incident of a movie is the event that is necessary to get the movie going. Usually the first ten minutes of a film focus on character and situation introduction, but right about ten minutes in, something happens that calls the protagonist to his or her quest. In Star Wars, the inciting incident occurs when the droids escape Princess Leia’s ship with the plans to the Death Star inside R2-D2. (Notice how the inciting incident already alludes to the MDQ.) If the droids don’t escape Leia’s ship, then we don’t have Star Wars…or at least not the Star Wars that we know.

Right around 25 to 30 pages into the script, the screenwriter must begin to think about Plot Point 1. This is a moment in the movie that makes action on the part of the protagonist necessary. In Star Wars, Luke isn’t really sure what he’s doing with the droids. He’s chasing R2-D2 rather than making his own choices. Even when Ben asks Luke to join him, Luke says that he can’t leave his uncle’s farm. It’s only when Luke races back to the farm to find his uncle and aunt dead at the hands of the Empire that he can commit to his quest. Nothing is holding Luke back, and his hatred toward the Empire has been fueled.

About halfway through the script, screenwriters need to give thought to the Mid-Point. The Mid-Point often shows us a strength in the character that we have not seen up until this moment. In the first half of Star Wars, Luke takes a backseat to the much more interesting Ben Kenobi and Han Solo. It’s only when Luke is free of them that he can truly shine. Rescuing Princess Leia, Luke faces a daunting chasm. Storm troopers are slowly opening the door behind him. Across the chasm, stormtroopers fire upon him and Leia. Oh, and as you’ll remember, the bridge across the chasm is no longer functional. Probably unknowingly using the Force, Luke flawlessly tosses a grappling hook up to an overhead pipe and swings himself and Leia to safety. He does this on his own. That’s the movie’s midpoint, which helps the audience believe what happens in the climax because it reveals that strength of character that the audience had yet to see.

Finally, to escalate conflict and to make success that much more difficult, a screenwriter has to think about Plot Point 2, which is a major setback to the protagonist. In Star Wars, the setback happens when Ben is killed by Darth Vader. It’s a major blow to Luke, and it makes their entire mission against the Death Star seem that much more hopeless. Watch nearly any movie, and right around three-quarters into it, something really bad will happen to the main character. That event serves to escalate tension and keep the audience uncertain.

The rest of the movie now plays out toward answering the MDQ. If the movie has been plotted well, the climax is not only satisfying but believable.

It’s my belief that no novelist would be hurt by taking a screenwriting course or by studying a screenwriting text, not for jumping ship and becoming a screenwriter, but to understand storytelling from a new vantage-point. At Delta College, the students who take creative writing courses represent a small but passionate pool. They often take every creative writing course available. In Screenwriting, I will sometimes get students who want to adapt a novel that they are working on into a screenplay. More often than not, they actually end up learning what they have to do to make their novel work as a novel. It is the strict attention to plot involved with screenwriting that helps them see how they can make their story work better in prose form. At the end of the class they’ll tell me, “This class helped me understand my novel so much better, and now I’m going to rewrite the entire thing.”

teaches English at Delta College and writes poetry, fiction, and screenplays. His books of fiction include Emergency Stopping and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press), the novel Into the Desperate Country (March Street Press), the novel Landscape with Fragmented Figures (Bottom Dog Press), and Threatened Species and Other Stories (Whistling Shade Press). His third novel, American Poet, won the Stuart and Vernice Gross Award for Excellence in Writing by a Michigan Author and a Michigan Notable Book Award from the Library of Michigan. In 2016, Whistling Shade Press released his new novel, Detroit Muscle. He maintains a website at www.jeffvandezande.com.

Essays

Particular Ways of Being Wrong

Essays
November 26, 2013 | 2 books mentioned 19 7 min read

All lazy book reviews are essentially the same: they reflect a reviewer’s inability, or perhaps refusal, to fully engage with the writer’s project on the book’s own terms. Lazier still is to not discuss the book but instead the author, to review not the project, to paraphrase John Updike, but the reputation.

Recently, I read Alexander Maksik’s 2011 debut novel, You Deserve Nothing, heralded by The New York Times for its “dazzling clarity and impressive philosophical rigor.” After the strong reviews and well-deserved attention, the online magazine Jezebel claimed that Maksik had allegedly based the story on his own experience as a teacher in Paris and his relationship with a student. Amazon and Goodreads readers retracted their stars and updated their reviews to show their disgust and moral outrage. I don’t mean to defend or attack Maksik’s alleged personal choices. But as a reader, a novelist, and a critic, I simply do not care what they were. These “violations of confidence,” as Jezebel noted them, should remain in Maksik’s private life, between himself and the young woman with whom he was involved. They unfortunately became literary gossip. They should never have become part of the literary conversation.

But of course they did.

This summer, Maksik released his second novel, A Marker to Measure Drift. This beautiful novel follows Jacqueline, a young refugee who, having fled Charles Taylor’s Liberia, finds herself homeless on the Greek island of Santorini. The novel weaves Jacqueline’s present life on the island with her past life in Liberia. Though the reviews were also strong, many reviewers, from Norman Rush for the NYTBR to John Freeman for the Boston Globe, felt compelled to mention not only the first book but also the real-life affair. Claudia La Rocco, an astute dance critic, reviewed Marker for the New York Times. Her anger about the book, or perhaps really about Maksik the writer, was clear from her opening.

La Rocco opens her review not by mentioning Maksik’s first book but of the scandal surrounding it, and when she finally gets to the book she is reviewing, her tone is incredulous: “Would a woman suffering from diarrhea, chronic dehydration, and malnutrition really be able to tramp around a sun-blitzed island, hiding in abandoned buildings, under trees and in a cave, with only a few fainting spells to show for it? Would she be so concerned with questions of beauty and choice?”

First, the premise of the book, of any book, is asking for a willful suspension of disbelief. That said, Jacqueline is not concerned with questions of “beauty and choice,” a reductive and unsupported claim, but of survival and staying under the radar. When she does allow her mind to drift toward the mundane it is a clear repression of the horrific memories that are threatening to rise to the surface and destroy her.

This, though, was my interpretation (I reviewed the book for the San Francisco Chronicle), and not everyone will share it. Fair enough. More disconcerting here is the way Maksik is first attacked for writing what he knows and then for writing what he does not, for attempting to “embody a character so divorced from his own experiences.” The review reads like a personal condemnation of Maksik, from his choice of subject to what the reviewer sees as his emotional avoidance; it amounts to a list of grievances. La Rocco also notes that Jacqueline “comes to resemble the protagonist of You Deserve Nothing, Will Silver, a damaged loner adrift in a haze of existential malaise.”

It’s clear that Maksik is interested in exploring isolation, loneliness, and the often devastating human desire for connection. Though I found the comparison between Will Silver and Jacqueline to be a bit of a stretch, it is indeed an interesting one, so I was surprised when La Rocco used this parallel as if exposing some little dirty secret, as if Maksik were somehow cheating the system.

Most writers would assert that certain philosophical obsessions consume their work, even if expressed in different ways. One of the pleasures of reading through an author’s oeuvre is to trace the way, say, Ian McEwan’s “malevolent intrusions,” as noted by Zadie Smith, play out again in and again in different settings and times and with different characters. This is not the same thing as writing the same novel over and over but a testament to the fact that some ideas might preoccupy a writer for a lifetime. This is the beauty of art: the intersection of our own particular way of being in the world with the way the world is.

Will Silver of You Deserve Nothing is a teacher at an international school in Paris. His tenure at the school was an escape from, or the delaying of, grief. The recent loss of his parents and his abandonment of his wife shape who he is: unable to love yet with a great nostalgia for it. Once Will understands that Marie, the student with whom he has been involved, has not been discreet, he anticipates the pain that will surely come. A beautiful, palpable tension emerges from what we know is inevitable. Marie has fantasies of domestic bliss: a baby, or coming up the stairs to the apartment when they are old, but Will doesn’t allow himself such delusions. His sadness shows he knows from the start that it will not end well.

And yet he chooses it anyway. This, to me, was heartbreaking and honest. The writer Rivka Galchen has said that character is “one’s very particular way of being wrong,” a brilliant insight into character and fiction as a whole. And You Deserve Nothing, though far more complex than just presenting ideas of “right” and “wrong,” does just that. Several acts of cruelty and inhumanity, whether acts of random violence or domestic abuse, deep-seated bigotry, or the aggression we inflict upon societies through war, go unpunished, and the book offers a provocative comment on our own selective moral outrage.

I admit I lose patience with the “I’m helpless to young female beauty” of the Rothian variety (though I did find beauty and truth in The Dying Animal, say, as well) or the sense of entitlement and power that strangely emerges from this hand-biting helplessness of male desire. I try not to dismiss books based on their premises or subject matter alone. But I didn’t find You Deserve Nothing to be overly familiar. And even if I did, as Adam Langer noted in the New York Times, it is “so rivetingly plotted and beautifully written that you forget its shopworn premise.”

The reviews of You Deserve Nothing, in fact, were excellent. Until we began to discuss what should never have been discussed in the context of criticism.

The role of the critic is not to argue over what is real but what has been created. If there are writers who don’t exorcise their demons and fears when they write, their failures and their shortcomings, I don’t know them. Most novelists will admit that bits of ourselves, some thinly veiled and some deeply so, are present in all our characters, both those who resemble us and those who don’t.

A novel is an act of the imagination. To read it as anything but is a failure of the contract we enter when we engage with a fictional world. In his essay “What Is Real Is Imagined,” Colm Toibin writes: “The world that fiction comes from is fragile. It melts into insignificance against the universe of what is clear and visible and known… The difference between fact and fiction is like the difference between land and water.”

As critics our duty is to uphold that. Literature is not a recording of an experience but the creation of one. Fiction creates its own truths, its own histories. To paraphrase Auden on poetry, it’s “a way of happening, a mouth.” When we read we are creating a map in our minds of the book, and as reviewers we are to act as cartographers of this imagined space. A review is really a mapping of one’s intimate conversation with a book. It does not mean our personal tastes and perceptions about the world will not enter this conversation — they certainly will, and they will affect our experience with that novel and the ideas it brings forth.

But when as reviewers we ignore the created experience and instead focus on the author and his or her “right” to create, or not create, we never even enter the conversation. Nothing is revealed. The map is blank and therefore useless.

Can we write about anything we want, as fiction writers? I say, absolutely. But we have to make those difficult artistic decisions ourselves, to consider our material and the best way to approach it. A good review should be grappling with the complexities set forth by the work in question and not treating the author’s choice of material as suspect. The reviewer should ask: how is this done, what has been attempted, has it been delivered with freshness or skill or compelling insight? A lazy review is cruel, and a cruel review is lazy; both stem from a lack of imagination and empathy. Like cruelty itself.

And what to make of the responsibility of the reviewer? Can we say anything we want? Let’s look at John Updike’s oft-quoted advice on reviewing:
Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
It seems rather obvious, no? To review the reputation is to ignore or simply discredit the spell entirely.  It’s intellectually lazy and boring. We may have opinions about an author, certainly, but we should not have an agenda before even reading the book or writing the review. If we do, perhaps we should reconsider accepting the assignment. When we attack the author for his or her material, our approach is single-minded: not criticism but propaganda. We undermine the value of the enterprise that we as reviewers should be elevating: the conception of art and a discussion about not only what the art is doing but how it is constructed.

In her 1959 Harper’s essay, “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” Elizabeth Hardwick lamented that “a Sunday morning with the book reviews is often a dismal experience.” The tagline of Hardwick’s Harper’s piece reads: “The fates of authors and publishers — not to mention the reading public — depend on book reviews, but who reviews the reviewers?”

It’s an important question and a relevant conversation to continue, particularly now, with the proliferation of online reviewing. But those of us who are charged with talking about books professionally should work to maintain professional standards as to how we talk about them. Book reviewing need not be a laudatory, effusive enterprise, and I’m grateful that it’s not. In fact, often the most celebratory reviews expose the flip side of the same problem: the replacement of a critical engagement with literature with our emotions about and perceptions of the writer. Alexander Maksik’s case is not representative of all book reviewing but is representative of a certain ad hominem approach, neither rigorous nor intellectual. Investigations into whether we’d want to be friends with a book’s narrator or whether the author experienced some of the story’s events might be entertaining conversations to have over a round of beers. But such is chatter, not criticism.

Reviews like La Rocco’s do nothing more to deepen the literary conversation than do the scores of many amateur “reviews” on Amazon or Goodreads (to wit: many of these reviewers took back the five stars they awarded to You Deserve Nothing after Jezebel’s claim), and though an open democratic forum about literature is not without value it makes professional, sophisticated, rigorous book reviewing all the more crucial. When we begin a review, we should ask, what will this bring into the cultural conversation, and what we are doing for the world of art and ideas when we do?

Essays
| 2 books mentioned 19 7 min read
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5 comments:

  1. Ah, so THIS is why almost all the new novels I read (for 20-50 pages, then toss out the window), read like paper televisions!

    I think the article-writer’s formulae work best with Space Operas, Bodice Rippers and Dan Brown Books (which combine the former and the latter, sort of) but, well, let’s try this stuff out on a few of my favorite novels:

    1) Roth’s SABBATH’S THEATER. What’s the “MDQ”? Erm… will Mickey Sabbath live or die? Answer: YES. Inciting Incident: shit hits fan! Plot Point 1: more shit hits fan! Mickey Sabbath’s Mid Point Strength: huh? Plot point 2: shit/ fan. Climax: idem
    2) DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD. What’s the “MDQ”? Erm… erm. Inciting Incident: erm… erm. Plot Point 1: a baseball…? Sputnik… ? H-bomb…? erm…?
    3) Sebald’s AUSTERLITZ (shrugs)
    4) Nabokov’s LOLITA. What’s LOLITA’S “MDQ?” Will Humbert… erm… will he…?
    5) Miller’s TROPIC OF CANCER… yup. Climax? Yup.
    6) Vonnegut’s SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. What’s the “MDQ”? Will Billy PIlgrim… … will he… have stuff happen to him? Answer: YES! Inciting Incident: WW2. Plot Point 1: … he’s kidnapped by… Tralfammadorians… ?

    But so what? The character might just as well have fallen into a giant vat of butterscotch pudding and floated for a week while recalling high-points of his adolescence. Because, UNLIKE in a one-dimensional hardware-epic like Star Wars, in which ACTION is the essence of the attraction, what counts in Slaughterhouse Five (and all the above-cited books) is not so much what the character does or must do as what the writer says about what the character does or must do, and how the writer says it, and all the collateral details and quirks and jokes and clues with which the writer repays the reader’s attention.

    In a movie, the plot is an excuse for fireworks (explosions and/or boobs); in a book… a good book… the plot is just an excuse for good writing. It is the least-important aspect of the text’s mechanics and is often little more than a sop to conventional expectations; a pacifier for the literal-minded. A good book, like Life, is a jumble of colliding sub-plots fleshed out with enlivening particularities. What’s the “Plot” of *your* Life?

    Just as photography took over the chore of visual reproduction, freeing painting to do what photography *can’t* (no photograph gets closer to the core of its subject, or of the viewer’s subjectivity, than a Lucian Freud painting did or would have), TV is very good at bringing basic narrative to the narrative-hungry. Which should free The Novel to do what even cinematography (armed with CGI) cannot: read back to you the organized contents of a literary genius’ mind in your own inner voice. Miraculous.

    I can remember reading the “hooks” on the dust-jackets of the books in my grandmother’s library: “The shocking story of…!” “The inspiring story of…!” “The True Life story of…” Back during the last gasp of the novel’s high responsibility to Plot, before Character and Style (aka, how the Novel runs rings around Film) took over.

    Sure, an occasionally not-badly-written book comes along with a plot-driven Story to tell… but aren’t these usually examples of an amusing reversal of the old dictum that the Book is always better than the Film? In these cases, I actually wait for the film. In fact, ironically (speaking of Roth), Barry Levinson’s film of “The Humbling” took Roth’s uncharacteristically-thin book and rewired its Plot into something better. But that’s only, mind you, because the Novel wasn’t at its best there.

    Please, good Ladies and Fellows: stop diminishing the Novel by teaching it as “Plot”! Reducing it to “Story”! Very much like reducing any given painting by Modigliani to a matter of colors. The color is as much the point as plot is.

    Oh, and writing can’t be *taught*, anyway. It can only be *learned*.

    It’s about reading. Lots of reading. “Creative Writing Teachers” would do lots less damage if they pointed their students to 100 good books and then politely kept out of it. The Genuine Talents will take it from there and the rest will (thankfully) find something else to do.

  2. @steven augustine

    ‘“Creative Writing Teachers” would do lots less damage if they pointed their students to 100 good books and then politely kept out of it. The Genuine Talents will take it from there and the rest will (thankfully) find something else to do.’

    Do you seriously think you’re gonna get away with this? I may not know anything about curmudgeonly comments section submissions, but I know it when I see it.

    In fact, in one writing seminar I’m thinking of applying to, one exercise requires spending a week in fetal position in a vat of butterscotch pudding. When I requested “chocolate”, they told me, without apology, “chocolate is not in the spirit of our seminar.” And like second sun of the planet Tatooine, it was suddenly double clear to me that writing is about not compromising your values. Capote was just damn wrong: writing is almost always typing. And Star Wars vs Austerlitz? Am I *really* the only person who can never keep them straight?

  3. @il’ja

    “In fact, in one writing seminar I’m thinking of applying to, one exercise requires spending a week in fetal position in a vat of butterscotch pudding.”

    Okay, I admit that THAT particular writing seminar is pretty damn good (obviously)… but learning to write at what cost, Il’ja? A yeast infection…?

    (scratches)

  4. A yeast infection or watching a bunch of damn movies, apparently.

    THE CHOCOLATIER – MDQ? Is aspiring student/author sufficiently committed to hurdle every obstacle for the sake of his craft? Answer: YES! inciting incident: pudding immersion added to prerequisites for graduation. Plot point 1: Butterscotch ONLY! Plot Point 2: Author-student confronts anti-chocolate pudding prejudice, placing certain fame in jeopardy. Key Scene: Moving soliloquy before student disciplinary panel exposes institutional hypocrisy. Epilogue: future students create powerful internet meme involving being filmed while standing on head in bucket of chocolate pudding.resulting in a wave of pudding-themed literary fiction issuing from mid-tier MFA programs.

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Essays Notable Articles

Ban This Book: An Uncensored Look At The Lorax And Other Dangerous Books

Essays Notable Articles
March 1, 2012 | 2 books mentioned 7 8 min read

1.
The movie adaptation of The Lorax opens on March 2nd, Dr. Seuss’ birthday. His yellow-mustached crusader now appears on countless billboards and buses, and stars in environmentally conscious ads. I’m pleased that the grumpy guy is getting so much attention. He speaks for the trees (the Truffula Trees!), and the Humming-Fish, and the Swomee-Swans, and the Brown Bar-ba-loots. A good creature. An important message. A powerful ally in the fight against Gluppity-Glupp and smogulous smoke, the byproducts of Thneed overproduction.

So it upset me when I heard that in 1989 a group of parents tried to censor The Lorax. They took out a full-page newspaper ad accusing second-grade teachers of brainwashing students. Who would do that? Only someone who doesn’t understand the value of free speech, right?

Before laying into logger Bill Bailey of Laytonville, Calif., and his supporters, I’m going to ask you to consider a different book — Alfie’s Home, published four years after The Lorax came under fire. It tells the story of a boy named Alfie whose father is “working all the time, and when he’s at home, he screams a lot.” Into this paternal void steps Uncle Pete: “One night when he was holding me, he started touching my private parts. Over time, he taught me to touch and play with his. It felt very strange, scary, and a little good too.”

Young Alfie comes to believe he is gay, a “confusion” exacerbated by “the other guys” at school who call him names like “‘Sissy, ‘Faggot,’ ‘Queer,’ ‘Homo.’” But the book ends on what it presents as a positive note. Alfie seeks counseling and learns that he was merely looking for closeness with other boys to fill the need for “Dad’s love.” Everyone lives happily ever after, including Alfie’s parents, who, thanks to the same African-American counselor, manage to cultivate a loving relationship with each other and their son.

Needless to say, Alfie’s Home (by “ex-gay” Richard A. Cohen) does not appear in many libraries, much less on second-grade required reading lists (as The Lorax did for the Laytonville Unified School District). For me that’s far from a regrettable absence. But why? Am I a closet censor, ready to suppress repugnant ideologies while trumpeting the importance of Banned Books Week?

The short answer is yes. Fortunately, books I find disgusting simply don’t get purchased by libraries or required by schools, saving me, and other like-minded individuals, from the embarrassing and hypocritical task of challenging them.

2.
My home town of Chicago does not have its public school library catalogue online, but a search of the New York and Portland catalogues shows multiple copies of And Tango Makes Three (and Tres Con Tango), a picture-book about two male chinstrap penguins who raise an egg together at New York’s Central Park Zoo. According to the ALA, And Tango Makes Three was the most challenged book from 2006 to 2010 (except for 2009 when it came it second). Tango is great as far as I’m concerned, but not everyone feels the same way. You know who I mean — the people, generally conservative, who rail against everything from Roald Dahl’s The Witches to Judy Blume. Religion is often in the mix — one group of censorial parents and students in Oceanside, Calif., was actually called the “God Squad.” (A classic battle: D.T. Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings was challenged in Canton, Mich., because “this book details the teachings of the religion of Buddhism in such a way that the reader could very likely embrace its teachings and choose this as his religion.”)

Alfie’s Home never made the ALA’s list of most challenged books. Not because liberals are happy to see it sharing shelf space with The Lorax, though, but rather because libraries aren’t willing to stock it, and teachers would never assign it if they did. For good reason, too. There’s an easy, non-ideological argument to be made against Alfie’s Home — aesthetically, it’s a disaster. To quote the School Library Journal review: “Everything about this book screams fake. The illustrations are flat and garish in their simplicity, lacking any personality or appeal. If the generic illustrations aren’t a complete turnoff, the saccharine tone of the writing gives further challenge to credibility. If readers were able to ignore the presentation, there is still the message of the text to choke them. A boy from a dysfunctional family who is abused throughout his childhood and into his teens sees a counselor and everything is suddenly wonderful.”

But what about a much, much better book, Regina Doman’s Angel in the Waters? Exquisitely illustrated by Ben Hatke (whose Zita the Spacegirl does appear in the New York and Portland catalogues), the book is a poetic paean to human development, starting at the moment of conception: “In the beginning, I was./I was for a long time. Then things began to happen.” Why don’t the Portland and New York libraries stock any copies of Angel? And why isn’t it on any school reading lists?

There are a number of plausible reasons: educators just aren’t familiar with it, or don’t think it is popular enough to purchase. Let me suggest an additional reason — many librarians and teachers don’t want young, impressionable children reading about anthropomorphized fetuses that have an “Angel” and talk in the first person. Nor do they want to reinforce the (false?) notion that babies somehow remember their early time in the womb: “Sometimes, when I am in my bath, I remember the waters, and swimming.” It feels too much like pro-life indoctrination, no matter how nice the writing and illustrations. (At least that’s how it feels to me.)

The fact is, when censorship fits with one’s values, even the staunchest defenders of free speech are willing to bend the rules. Take the ALA, perhaps the most vociferous opponents of censorship in America. Through the Association for Library Service to Children, they administer the prestigious Newbery Medal, awarded to countless banned and challenged classics. In 2007, The New York Times reported how the ALA cried censorship when some librarians foresaw pressure from parents and refused to purchase 2007 Newbery winner The Higher Power of Lucky. The reason? “Scrotum” appears on the first page of the book. Presumably requests to publish a bowdlerized version without the offensive word would have met with similar disapprobation. Conservative mores getting in the way of free speech yet again.

What’s strange, however, is that the Newbery award is still allowed on the cover of Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle. Both Dell Yearling and HarperCollins published Voyages in a highly censored form of the 1922 award-winning original (and the same is true of its predecessor, The Story of Dr. Dolittle.) Concerned with racially insensitive material, editors at each publishing house saw fit to expunge potentially offensive slurs, rewrite or delete stereotypical depictions of Africans, and replace illustrations of black characters.

None of this is described explicitly as censorship. In the afterword to HarperCollins’ The Story of Dr. Dolittle, the editorial changes are referred to as “gentle revision.” And in the afterword to the Dell Yearling version of Voyages, Christopher Lofting, the author’s son, writes: “Book banning or censorship is not an American tradition! To change the original could be interpreted as censorship. Then again, so could a decision to deny children access to an entire series of classics on the basis of isolated passing references.” There are references in both editions to the certain approval of Hugh Lofting, were he only alive to give it. (KSU professor Philip Nel has an excellent discussion of Dr. Dolittle, along with Roald Dahl’s Oompa-Loompas, who used to be African pygmies.)

Of course, if you worry less about racism or homophobia and more about anti-religious indoctrination or anti-capitalist sentiment, there will be an entirely different set of books you want off readings lists, and themes you want out of books. Which brings us back to logger (actually logging equipment manufacturer) Bill Bailey and The Lorax. According to People magazine, Bailey found out about the book when his son Sammy came home, distraught. “If you cut down a tree,” Sammy told his father, “then it’s just like someone coming in and taking away your home.” Ouch.

Now it’s clear to me The Lorax isn’t an anti-logging book so much as a plea for the environment. Theodore Geisel agrees: “The Lorax doesn’t say lumbering is immoral. I live in a house made of wood and write books printed on paper. It’s a book about going easy on what we’ve got. It’s antipollution and antigreed.” But that’s not really the point. Angel in the Waters might not be meant to convince young children that abortion is evil. Nevertheless, imagine a woman deciding whether or not to have an abortion. Her seven-year-old daughter comes home from school one day and tells her that, from the very moment of conception, babies can think and have angels. One of her classmates told her how some parents murder those babies. Is that true, she asks? Do people really murder their babies and their angels?

If I were that mother, I would be devastated. And if I found out Angel in the Waters was somehow behind my child’s questions, there’s a good chance I’d ask for it to be removed from a required reading list. Depending on how upset I was, I might even challenge its presence in the library. And I’d rationalize that challenge: “It’s not censorship. It’s separation of church and state. This is a public school, religion shouldn’t be taught here, especially not to very young children.” (I wouldn’t think too hard about the religious overtones of A Wrinkle in Time, and whether ecumenical spirituality still belongs in schools.)

3.
Stanley Fish likes to remind us there is no such thing as free speech, even in America, and points out that censorship in the colloquial sense happens all the time: “Censorship occurs whenever we don’t say or write something because we fear adverse consequences, or because we feel that what we would like to say is inappropriate in the circumstances, or because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. (This is often called self-censorship. I call it civilized behavior.)” When a library rejects a book, or a school deems material inappropriate for a reading list, it is a form of censorship that is widespread and inevitable, which Fish calls “judgment.” Such censorship can be based on aesthetics — this book is bad, truth — this book is wrong, or ethics — this book is Wrong.

(Interestingly, Dr. Seuss engaged in a bit of self-censorship based on truth and ethics. After pressure from research associates in the Ohio Sea Grant program, he acknowledged the clean-up of Lake Erie by removing the third of these lines from The Lorax: “They’ll walk on their fins and get woefully weary/in search of some water that isn’t so smeary./I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.” He also felt the need to remove racial stereotypes from And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street: “I had a gentleman with a pigtail. I colored him yellow and called him a Chinaman. That’s the way thing were fifty years ago. In later editions I refer to him as a Chinese man. I have taken the color out of the gentleman and removed the pigtail and now he looks like an Irishman.”)

Since the dominant ideology of the ALA, librarians, educators, and publishing houses lines up with my own, de facto censorship occurs via their judgments without any effort on my part, and I don’t have to risk looking intolerant or hypocritical. It helps, too, that most skilled children’s book authors are liberal (you’d think there would be more “pro-life” children’s books, given that over 50 percent of the population identifies as such.)

I still believe those of my own political persuasion are far less draconian in their intolerance. I would never call for the New York or Portland public school libraries to remove their copies of Left Behind: The Kids, a juvenile version of the best-selling series about the Rapture. But it is important to acknowledge the role that ideology does (and must) play in the make-up of library collections and reading lists, and the content of children’s books in general. Conservatives frustrated with the dominance of “liberal” children’s literature should tone down their censorial rhetoric, and instead start producing high-quality books that emphasize values important to them, like Angel in the Waters. If nothing else, it would force people like me to make tough decisions, instead of sitting back and dismissing bigoted trash like Alfie’s Home. What if there were a well-executed picture-book about a child who realizes society will collapse without strong belief in God? Or about a homeless man who deserved it, because he was lazy?

And for even-handed people who want to temper the message of The Lorax with the underrepresented perspective of Bill Bailey, let me recommend Terri Birkett’s The Truax, published jointly by the Hardwood Forest Foundation and the National Oak Flooring Manufacturers Association in 1994. It features a grumpy environmentalist named Guardbark, who asks tough questions of a good and decent logger named the Truax: “‘BIODIVERSITY. Now there is a word./A Science-y, Frogbirdy word I have heard.’/He thought for a moment and then he went on,/‘Will THIS still be there when the trees have been sawn?’” The Truax has answers, and if you read it with your child before watching The Lorax maybe you can do justice to the impossible ideal of free and neutral speech.

My friends who have children won’t let me read it to theirs, though, so you’ll have to tell me how that works out.

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Nobody Wants to Go Home: A Unified Theory of Reality TV

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January 26, 2010 | 2 books mentioned 10 11 min read

I.
In the 1990s, a scourge swept across the world of entertainment.  It threatened the livelihoods of those in the creative industry and presented a world where the average person, dwelling in obscurity, could be plucked from the masses and made a star.  It was equal parts thrilling and horrifying.  No, I’m not talking about the internet, I’m talking about its cultural predecessor, reality television.  Reality TV was supposed to devour television.  It was going to make writers and actors irrelevant, and single-handedly lower the national reading level by two full grades.  Reality television became shorthand for stupidity and quickly found a place as a scapegoat for one side or another of the culture war.  These shows, with their cameras hidden and seen, were Orwellian nightmares come to life, Jean Beaudrillard essays in pixelated form.  They were the beginning of the end of the world.  Except that they weren’t.  They didn’t really do any of the things they were feared to do.  And yet, though their overall presence on the airwaves is a fraction what it was at their peak, their influence remains enormous.

We can say this now, from our perch in the shiny new decade.  We’ve largely moved on to other fascinations, other distractions.  We’re scapegoating Twilight now, and we’re all terrified of the internet. Or we’re terrified of Twilight and scapegoating the internet.  Paris Hilton has moved on to Twitter.  We’ve all moved on to Twitter.  But it wasn’t too long ago when none of this seemed possible.  It was a time before Lost, before The Wire, before the end.  It was the glory days of reality television, and it all started on a cable network that had hours to fill, and little money with which to fill them.

II.
MTV wanted to make a soap opera.  Like all the new cable networks, they had to fill the hours.  America, it turned out, had an insatiable appetite for television, and the new cable networks were struggling to keep up.  Some of them turned to re-runs of programs that had been modest hits in their original network incarnations — the My Two Dads and Eight Is Enoughs of the world — while others made cut-rate game shows and aired Just One of the Guys four times a day.

MTV had tried a few different things to kill time — most notably, a twenty-year experiment in which they showed music videos in their entirety  — but had finally settled on a strategy of appealing to youth culture:  the eternal fountain of disposable income.  MTV’s dilemma, however, was that, while it recognized that a soap opera would likely be popular and would round out its lineup of oversexed game shows and quasi-journalistic news programs, they lacked the funds to produce such a show.  Their solution was brilliant — they’d simply make a show without actors or writers — two of the most expensive parts of any decent soap opera.

The result was The Real World, whose premise was neatly summed up in its introductory statement:  “This is the true story of seven strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start being real.”  That I can remember this sentence, awkward though it may be, with greater ease than I can The Pledge of Allegiance is testament to the incredible success of The Real World.  Not only is it the longest running program in MTV’s history (the network recently renewed the program for a 26th season), it created an entire category of programming and influenced some of the most successful shows on television today.

III.
The first two seasons of The Real World contain the seeds of all reality television, as well some elements that would find their way into today’s most successful scripted programming.  At first glance, the first season of The Real World appears to be a collection of random, diverse twenty-somethings thrown together in Manhattan.  A closer look reveals that all of the cast members, from model/actor wannabe Eric Nies to writer/journalist Kevin Powell, aspired to a career in entertainment or the arts.  The casting logic of the show was fairly simple:  find some young people willing to try this experiment in exchange for some exposure.  In this way, the cast member’s situation wasn’t unlike that of today’s bloggers and vloggers — they worked for free in exchange for an audience, presumably with the hope that the experience would translate into a career.  For some it did; for others, not so much.

The first season of The Real World relied heavily on the pressures of their various careers for dramatic tension.  We saw the characters balancing the time commitments of practice, rehearsal and performance with their newfound quasi-family unit back at the loft, a situation the young audience for the show could begin to appreciate.  This balancing act — with help from some racial tension — blew up infamously when Kevin missed a group dinner meeting and was threatened with expulsion from the loft and the show.  In the end, Kevin remained, but one could see that this episode, easily the most dramatic of the season, would not be an isolated incident in future iterations of the show.

Season two of The Real World is, arguably, the single most important season of any TV show of the last twenty years.  It is one of those watershed moments that happens once or twice a generation.  The first season of The Sopranos was such a moment.  The third season of Mad Men, one could argue, was another. The second season of The Real World is so important because it revealed the flaws in the show’s premise and, more importantly, several ways to work around those flaws.  It provided, in a way, the template for all of the major reality TV shows to follow, though one could be forgiven for not realizing it at the time.

The second season took roughly the same premise as the first and moved it to Los Angeles, where it played up the aspirational angle a little bit more.  Again we saw characters who desired fame and success — singer Tami, comedian David, country singer Jon — and again there was a healthy dollop of racial and sexual tension.  This volatile mix exploded mid-season when David “assaulted” Tami, pulling a blanket off of her after she repeatedly asked him not to, revealing her in her underwear.  For this crime — something kids at camp do every summer — David was forced out of the house and off the show entirely.

Several aspects of the controversy are worth noting.  Firstly, the incident initially appeared to be a joke.  While the house was somewhat divided over how serious it was (from where I stand, it’s pretty clear that David was trying to be funny and, maybe, a little bit flirty), the general consensus, at first blush, was that it wasn’t a big deal.  It was only after the issue was rehashed several times in the confessional that each person seemed to realize it as a moment of great import.  One could almost see each cast member realizing that this made great drama as the issue built and built. In the end, the producers cited Tami’s request for safety and removed David.

Secondly, it’s no coincidence that the two characters at the heart of the major strife in seasons one and two were both black men.  The Real World aimed to be a microcosm of American society, and at least in this respect, it succeeded.  Black men would find themselves vilified and ostracized for much of the show’s run.

While the house may have been split on David’s departure, the audience ate it up.  Removing him from the show turned out to be the single most interesting thing to happen that season.  This speaks to both how dramatic the confrontation and aftermath were as well as to how boring the rest of the show was.  No character signified the stagnation of season two more than country singer Jon, who spent nearly every minute of his screentime watching television and drinking Kool-Aid.  The producers’ disgust with Jon must’ve been intense.  How does one build an aspirational story arc around someone who refuses to do much of anything?

If season two hinted at the potential that overt conflict might play on the program, season three confirmed it.  When the noxious Puck refused to play nice with his fellow cast members, particularly the saintly AIDS patient Pedro Zamora, he found himself voted out of the house by popular decree.   Here, long before the phrase “voted off the island” became a popular idiom, we see the template that reality shows would use for years to come.  If people tune in to find out if someone might get booted off the show, what if you kicked someone off every episode?

Additionally, season three marks one of the last seasons the cast members would be left to their own devices (Season four’s setting in London was interesting enough to generate drama on its own).  In subsequent seasons, Real Worlders would be asked to do a variety of tasks, including working with children (a disastrous idea, considering that alcohol was fast becoming a vital component of every RW season) to running a tanning salon (okay, spray tanning salon, but still).  The shows may not have lacked for drama, but they needed a scaffolding to hang that drama on, and it would have to come from outside the house.

IV.
It is difficult to remember how revolutionary that first season of The Real World felt.  Here were people, attractive people, yes, but regular folks (something that would become less and less the case as the seasons wore on) living their lives.  The emotion on the show seemed real.  When characters fought, the scenes became simultaneously difficult to watch and irresistible.  There was an untamed, unpredictable quality to these scenes that made them compelling.  Something might happen; this was the “real world” after all.  (The producers should be given some credit for simply getting out of the way.  One has to imagine the network wasn’t pleased when the season one cast decided to de facto endorse presidential candidate Jerry Brown by painting the number for his donation hotline on the wall of their loft, and yet they allowed it.)

In addition to its unpredictability, the show was a voyeur’s dream.  These people were fascinating!  Watching them do the most basic things — eat a bowl of cereal or prepare for bed — felt illicit, like we were privileged to something special and unique.  Nobody, it turns out, ate a bowl of cereal exactly like you did.

And when they revealed something unique about themselves — such as Heather B.’s infatuation with NBA all star Larry Johnson (“Larry Johnson is so fine!”) — it was revelatory.  Reality TV almost certainly created the now ubiquitous straw man argument “Why do I care what you ate for breakfast today?”  That this question is raised about so much that happens online is no coincidence.  It’s certainly possible that our 90s diet of reality TV validated our own solipsism, which bore fruit during the latter half of the 2000s, when web 2.0 made it possible for us to share our own lives with the world.

Whatever the case, the initial infatuation with “reality” didn’t last.  A few things broke the spell.  For one thing, The Real World started to seem less and less real.  Cast members knew the experiences of previous Real Worlders, lending the entire show a meta quality that it previously lacked.  The first episode of every Real World season now consists mostly of people waiting to discover exactly how awesome the house will be.  They also know that each season involves a trip to some fun, exotic locale, and they anticipate these trips, discussing where they might go.

This acknowledgment of the conceit is present in any long-running reality show.  It can’t be that the women of The Bachelor all came up with the phrase “here for the right reasons” on their own, can it?  Rather they learned that phrase through watching previous seasons of the show, just as the girls of America’s Next Top Model learned to scream “Tyra Mail!” every time the show’s producers drop off one of their cryptic missives.  In fact, the dialogue of the shows is often so codified as to seem scripted.  They may not have employed a writer to produce such gems as “Nobody wants to go home,” and “I’m not here to make friends,” but the result is the same.

For these programs, built around elaborate elimination rituals and repetition of formulas, this self-awareness is both inevitable and even desirable — if someone follows the show enough to know its every twist and turn, to be able to trace the patterns of the show, then the show must have truly reached a place of importance.  It’s affirming for the product to be emulated in this manner.  And when that emulation includes asserting, repeatedly “This is real, okay?”, all the better.

For other shows, the effect is less desirable.  Certainly The Hills struggled to maintain its veneer of “reality.”  It was difficult to convince the audience that Lauren Conrad was living anything resembling a normal life, even by the bizarre standards of an affluent LA party girl, when she was simultaneously the Teen Vogue covergirl and an intern at the magazine.  It’s no wonder that the show’s “characters” seem to burn out after a few seasons.  It can be difficult to keep up the illusion.

At some point, even the people on The Real World began to seem less real.  Gone were the mildly overweight, the slightly odd looking.  Each cast began more and more to resemble an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog.  The show lost its ties to the artistic world (always tenuous at best) and became primarily about clubbing and hot-tubbing.  It ceased to be a mirror into the everyday lives of its characters and became more the document of a long vacation.

The shift in focus from reality to fantasy isn’t unique to The Real World.  Reality TV is no longer about reality, not the world that any of us live in, anyway (if it ever was).  Most reality TV shows are just game shows containing reality TV elements.  Survivor, Big Brother, The Biggest Loser, America’s Next Top Model, and The Bachelor are all long game shows in which the contestants play for a prize much larger than anything they might have won on The Price is Right (Indeed, on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, they compete for a spouse). No game show has made more of The Real World’s great revelation than American Idol has:  that being real is all well and good, but what people really want is blood (metaphorically speaking).  Idol was among the first shows to take the next step of involving the audience in the fate of its cast members, upping the ante just that much in the process.  In fact, the show makes entire episodes out of the elimination ceremonies.

The only non-game show reality shows left are about people who were most decidedly unreal.  Somewhere along the line, somebody decided that we only wanted to watch people do nothing if we’d already watched them do something.  Today, the only reality shows that simply follow people around in their daily lives are celebrity-based shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians (Featuring Kim Kardashian, a celebrity famous for appearing in the 2000s version of a reality show, the internet sex tape).  The lone exceptions to this rule are what might be called “anthropological shows,” programs that aim to show us a life we will never lead.  Jersey Shore, The Real Housewives of Wherever, The Hills, and the myriad shows about bizarre families are exemplar of this.  Equal parts curiosity and incredulity attract viewers to these shows.  Reality TV has ceased to try to show us normalcy, perhaps because it no longer needs to.

Around the time The Real World drifted into the land of fantasy, the internet emerged from its awkward adolescence to become a platform for personal expression that made anyone who so desired into a kind of quasi-reality TV character.  One could write an online journal (they called them blogs) or video themselves doing… well, anything.  With that kind of capability, reality TV was free to explore the less commonplace aspects of modern existence.  Occasionally, the mundane still has the power to amuse — think about the craze created around The Situation’s summertime Jersey Shore regimen of G.T.L. (Gym, Tan, Laundry) — but it’s not like it was.  For a few years there, watching people’s lives was all we really wanted to do.

V.
Reality TV still has a massive footprint on television, but all but the biggest hits have moved back to cable, where they help fill the endless hours.  That isn’t to say that reality TV’s influence isn’t felt in a variety of programs.   The confessional, perhaps The Real World’s most important innovation, plays a key role in a new breed of sitcom.  The casts of The Office, Parks and Recreation, and several other shows often sit alone in a room and confess their thoughts to the camera in a direct address.  These shows revel in the mundane, appropriating the reality of The Real World and adding to it the perfection of scripted drama.  They bring back some of the imperfections of the early days of reality TV.

It’s difficult to say exactly why we retreated from reality television.  My own theory is that the watershed moment was the 9/11 terror attacks, a media event that was just a little too real.  After we’d seen that, reality was dead, so to speak.  We needed something other than ourselves, bigger than ourselves.  HBO had already begun the counterrevolution, airing The Sopranos in 1999, and continuing with Six Feet Under before finally reaching its apex with The Wire.  These were long-form narratives the likes of which a television audience had never seen.  Where television had seemed hopelessly shallow a few years earlier, suddenly it was entering a golden age.  Soon the networks were following suit, bringing out a series of expensive, indulgently fantastic dramas, most notably Lost, Heroes and 24.

It might seem like a stretch to call the late surge of “quality” scripted dramas a direct reaction to the glut of reality TV that permeated the networks in the late 90s, but it appears to be the case.  Television moves in a somewhat cyclical manner, with each new generation proclaiming the death of the sitcom.  Perhaps each subsequent generation will proclaim the death of reality TV.

If they do, they will be wrong, as the reality shows are proving as durable and adaptable as the sitcom, and it’s no surprise that MTV leads the pack in innovation.  Just when it looks like The Real World is running on fumes, The Hills emerges from the ashes of Laguna Beach to become a phenomenon.  As The Hills wanes and Lauren Conrad decamps the more lucrative world of young adult fiction, Jersey Shore arrives, tanned and fist pumping its way into the zeitgeist.  In the world of reality, Ecclesiastes was right:  “There is no new thing under the sun.”

[Image credits: MTV]

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