The power of story

 

 
“Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway- its true religion? Wasn’t the theatre our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons- but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it. That summer, the one you’ll never forget, every movie house beamed the same set of thematic and narrative images…flickering pictures stitched in our minds that replaced our own memories, archetypal stories that become our shared history, that taught us what to expect from life, that defined our values. What was that but a religion?” – Beautiful Ruins

American filmmakers in 2012 turned out the best selection of movies we’ve seen in a while. That fact must be noted and not forgotten. And yet, at the end of it all, the uniformity of the Academy’s majority vote did anything but uncover the “best” film of the year and awards season itself once again did to art what should only be done to specific body parts, one has no choice but to feel dread as it all starts again.

For all of the greatness on display last year, there were the usual frustrations: no female characters of any worth (save one or two), the same type of story told and retold again and again. The past three Best Picture winners have kind of been the same movie: a nostalgic reach back with a light, easy resolution. In short: man makes good.

This state of affairs made me start thinking about what makes a really great story. But for a small handful of films this or any recent year, storytelling in Hollywood has all but died. With so many unquestioned sequels and reliable franchises, money talks, creativity walks. This might explain why two new reads have hit me so hard. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins.

Both wildly popular books, proving that the thirst for good storytelling isn’t as dead as Hollywood wants us to believe, these are the type of stories I hope work their way back into the collective conversation. For this to happen, they need to be read widely and discussed obsessively. While at least one of these books — Gone Girl– is currently “in talks” to be made into a feature film, the other isn’t yet, as far as I know. Both will be called “unfilmable” books — like Cloud Atlas and Life of Pi. Both will require giant balls to do right and an open-minded audience who can handle that. Someone will have to start chiseling away at the groupthink that has swallowed up blogger/film criticism of late. Can it happen? Do we really want to ask that question?

In Beautiful Ruins, Walter’s film producer character believes he has a knack for selling the dream because he knows “we want what we want.” He makes the point by saying if a thousand people pass by Michelangelo’s David maybe 300 of them will stop to take a good look. But if the same thousand pass by a car crash every one of them will feel compelled to look. We want what we want even if we don’t want to admit it or can’t explain it.

“We want what we want” pretty much sums up the death of originality and storytelling in Hollywood and no one much seems to care. Mass audiences want what they want and Hollywood gives it to them.

But there will always be a small group of people who do care, those 300 who stop to look at Michelangelo’s David.

Both Gone Girl and Beautiful Ruins are stories with characters written from the inside out; we come to know them in a way that would likely be flattened by a development person who has been told not to fuss with the details, or to make them more “likable” or segregated into the only way Hollywood screenwriters seem able to write them now: good girl, sexy girl, bitch, mother. A rose by any other name… as long as the thorns are trimmed from the stem.

But a beautiful bloom like Gillian Flynn’s Amy Dunne is more thorny than you could or would ever imagine a woman to be in a film, or even in most books. She’s not only smarter than everyone else — she’s everything more than everyone else. She’s taken every expectation of what a woman should be, chewed them up and spit them out. She isn’t Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, or Madonna — she isn’t “owning her own sexuality” because at the end of the day that still (mostly) feeds one purpose. No, Amy Dunne is in a different realm altogether.

It’s difficult to write about Gone Girl because it’s such a surprising book. To talk about it in depth at all is to risk revealing hard core spoilers and I don’t wish to do that. Reader should experience the surprises unprepared. Once you drill down past the spoilers, though, you’ll find a book about the darker inclinations of human nature. Amy Dunne, to a degree, is the end result of the last two generations of post-feminist female perfection gone wrong. We fought for equality, kicked doors down and then we built new traps we would never find our way out of — and we couldn’t blame men for that. Looking perfect, being perfect, having the perfect marriage, the perfect career — all borne out of a generation of parents who wanted to raise the perfect children and thought they could if they did everything “right.” The right books, the right schools, the right early childhood development classes. It’s a Stepford Wives world we women have built for ourselves and what do we have to show for it? Not a lot, ladies.

Gone Girl starts out in a first person confidante fashion, as intimate confessions from the diary of Amy Dunne. She’s just gotten married but her perfect marriage soon appears to be falling apart. We then hear her husband’s side of the story as he relates his own problems with the marriage. As we alternate back and forth between the two voices it seems as if Amy Dunne is about to be murdered. But what happens and how it happens is the thing about Gone Girl that makes it great and the thing we can’t really talk about without ruining it for those who haven’t yet read it.

What Gone Girl did for me in the thick of awards season was remind me what a powerful thing great writing can be — what it illuminates within us, how it can feed curiosity, how much fun it is to be in the hands of a someone who knows exactly what she’s doing.

“Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $ 40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who’s lining up to see a sequel to Truth? If your story improves Truth, you will sell it in The Room. Sell it in The Room and you’ll get The Deal. Get The Deal and the world awaits like a quivering bride in your bed. (Beautiful Ruins, p. 145).

On the other end of the spectrum from willful manipulation is the magnificent Beautiful Ruins, which can be seen monument to personal failure. What are ruins but the remnants of decline, the evidence of what once was. Living the midst of ruination is awful. But once we’re past the pain devastation we able to look upon ruins as art. Looking back on past lives unfolding before us with such graceful drama we can hardly believe anyone would not see them as spectacular, exploding stars.

Beautiful Ruins is about how some people find a way to bridge the gap between irrational desire and doing the right thing. Much of it is set within the context of the film industry — a beast that thrives on feeding irrationality, inexplicable desire. If it feels sometimes that we’re moving out of the age of cinema as art and into one of cinema as fast food it might be because even our Oscar race now feeds on wish-fulfillment films where everything turns out all right in the end. These movies — Argo, The Artist, The King’s Speech aren’t films about “the truth.” They want to improve the truth. They are about romanticizing the past. The beautiful ruins we can now look at and feel good about. No cell phones, computers, movie franchises, target demographic-driven entertainment. In the past three years, the film industry has turned away from films that directly address our modern world and has embraced something simpler.

For many of us, these past three years have given us three suffocating Best Picture wins, despite acknowledging that each winner is, by everyone’s estimations good, maybe great movies. Why does they feel safe and tame? Because look at what’s happening in the world of books. Look at Beautiful Ruins and Gone Girl. Look at what’s happening in the world of television. Look at House of Cards exploding on Netflix, look at Girls and Enlightened on HBO. Why is every other area of storytelling and art moving forward except the film industry? On the one hand, the major basic cable networks have given themselves over to the lowest of the low — Honey Boo Boo and Teen Mom. On the other hand, films are becoming just what Robert Altman’s The Player predicted: Movies Now More than Ever. Sequels and franchises on rubber-stamped repeat sold to a branded worldwide population that wants what it wants.

In the middle of it all the awards race still has the opportunity to celebrate original storytelling wherever it can be found. And yet, each group of taste-makers always seem to default, these days anyway, to the least offensive “light” movie of the bunch. It won’t do.

Beautiful Ruins, like Gone Girl, switches narrative perspective throughout, following characters through their overlapping trajectories in closely observed third-person across six decades. It’s about a blonde movie star who is one of Liz Taylor’s ladies in waiting during the filming of Cleopatra. It is about a blue-eyed young Italian hotelier stuck in a forgotten part of the Italian coast. It is about a Hollywood producer who refuses to grow old and is in the business for one reason only: money. And it’s about his smart, idealistic assistant who is torn between wanting what she can’t have and be happy with what she gets. The folds in this fabric unravel beautifully, sometimes inexplicably, but all the while holding to the theme that life is about the moment and the moment is often defined by the eternal conflict between the right thing and the desired thing.

The worst fear is that we’re witnessing a era of decline in storytelling because that path leads to the death of movies. But our best hope are writers like Gillian Flynn and Jess Walter who are here to map out the good stories while Hollywood has all but given up on them.