Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
A tale of two crucibles
Just a quick comment about two movies which are structurally similar, but one of which I liked well enough to watch twice, while the other made me flee the room in about 10 minutes.
They both involve obvious crucibles. I can’t recall which book on writing this came from, but the author argued that a good drama requires a crucible. The author defined this as an inescapable problem: seven shipwreck survivors on a life raft, a fortress that must repel the barbarian invasion against all odds, a ring that must be destroyed else a giant eye will, um, keep staring at us. You get the idea.
The good movie: 1408, with John Cusack starring as a writer who debunks ghost stories, and who spends a very, very long night trapped in a haunted hotel room.
The crappy movie: Devil, a story about four or five people trapped in an elevator. (Honestly, I can’t remember. Let’s see. There was Old Lady and Annoying Man and Mystery Man and Young Lady and Black Man. Okay. Five.) And one of them is the Devil!
Honestly, WTF? I remember when I saw this previewed in a theater, I asked myself, how could you possibly create a feature length movie about people trapped in an elevator and keep it interesting for all 100 minutes? Answer: they didn’t. It took me three tries to even get through the Wikipedia summary, and after doing that, all I can say is, thank heavens I didn’t waste a couple hours of my life on that.
It’s easy to say that one movie works and the other doesn’t based on “good” versus “bad” writing, but that answer is too general to be of much interest. What’s good about the good writing, and what’s bad about the bad writing? I think it comes down to characterization. Cusack’s character is interesting (if not completely likable) from the start, and he does become more and more likable as the movie proceeds. In contrast, the five people trapped on the elevator in Devil are either irritating or invisible. Please, can’t we have at least one likable or interesting character?
I’m sure it’s not the story that’s to blame. Both are legitimate crucibles. Trapped in a hotel room that is itself murderous, or trapped in an elevator with a Devil willing to kill, machts nichts. It could have been the other way around — Devil might have been the spellbinder and 1408 the snore-fest. Which tells me authors probably obsess over plot far more than they should. Characterization, that’s where it’s at.
I’d blather on but I have this summer cold, dig? And I still have a bit of a headache.
D.
I’m with you – there has to be at least one character for the audience to care about, or the story won’t resonate. If you don’t care who lives or dies, what’s the point in reading/watching?
And yet, aren’t there a slew of books published every year as “serious adult fiction” that are populated by nothing but shits?