Work In Progress

It's not much of a spoiler to say that in Season 2 of Dawson's Creek, Joey leaves Dawson in order to "find herself". More about that later, but it reminds me of an exchange from The Thin Blue Line:

"It's an alternative culture now, Sir. People are asking questions. They want to know who they are."

"Then they should damn well look at their passports."

To the idea that a person is trying to find themselves, there are several tempting responses:

1. Go look in a mirror. There you are.
2. Look around. You're right here.
3. Check your driver's license. It's supposed to have a current address.

There's some validity to the idea of a person needing to find themselves, in that a person can be in a situation so overbearing that no decision that the person makes is ever their own; it's highly dubious, though, that people ever really fall into this. There's an idea that some people have that they can be so much in love with someone else that they themselves disappear. If this were ever to really be true, I suspect the relationship between the people would be more like a dog and its master than a relationship between two people.

But even so, I don't know that the one person would be truly subsumed in the other. To use the names from Dawson's creek (since they sound better than "Person A" and "Person B"), if all of Joey's interests were actually Dawson's interests, it means that the energy to enjoy them came mainly from Dawson. (Interest, like all good things, always requires energy. As Chesterton observed, "There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.") The nature of friendship is to look together at something else; even if it starts by Dawson providing all of the energy, the friendship could never last if Joey couldn't look at them herself. In the worst case, she would gain an appreciation of Dawson's interests that she could share with someone else. The great thing about knowledge is that it doesn't lose anything by being borrowed.

Stories require conflict; it's more or less a truism that in order to have a plot you have to have some challenge facing the main character; your hero must be in danger. In order to come up with conflict, many (screen) writers go for the easy way out: they have their characters make stupid or immoral decisions, and the danger ends up being whether they're going to pay for their sins.

(Drama is a separate category, of course. Drama is supposed to be about the repercussions of immoral actions. In its Greek origins it was largely about people paying for their sins, or the gods sins, or someone's sins. Occasionally for the sins that they would later commit.)

But with a little more skill, I think that something far less morally offensive would be equally as interesting, and really more so, since it would leave you with characters who you could care whether they survive their danger. In particular, the danger can be whether the character gives in to temptation. I don't mean this in the morality-play sense, but rather in a realistic sense. Let me give an example:

Suppose that you have a happily married man who has a life, and so meets women. Being an actually healthy man, he'll become friends with some of them, some of them will be attractive women, and some of them will be attractive women that he makes friends with. You could have quite a series of plots of the man nearly falling for the women he meets, and nearly cheating on his wife. Some people will object that unless he occasionally cheats, people won't believe that the danger is real. These same people rarely suggest that the hero of an action series should die occasionally to show that the danger is real. And besides, fiction is all about getting caught up in the moment. Believing the danger isn't about how many times people have succumbed before, it's all about story telling. In Serenity, several main characters were killed off, but I never for a moment doubted whether River was going to be killed by the gang of Reavers she was fighting. When the door opened to reveal her standing, the only thing that I doubted was whether she was going to be standing there alone, or finishing off the last Reaver. The story wasn't crafted in a way that would make any sense if River didn't win the fight easily, so I never believed that anything else would happen. Making danger believable is about crafting a story that would make sense either if the hero avoid the trap or if the hero falls into the trap. If the story would make (artistic) sense with the bad ending, it will feel dangerous. If the story has only one conclusion in which the story isn't a steaming pile of crap, no one will expect the story to go anywhere else. If you craft a police drama in which nothing supernatural has happened for the first 15 seasons, and there's a character that the hero grows fond of who claims to have been abducted by aliens, it's true that the most likely explanation is that the character is crazy. But if you write the story so that it would make sense if the aliens really existed — if you really give it emotional reality and somewhere to go — the audience will wonder if the character really was abducted by aliens.

I pick the example of possible infidelity because it's an example where you can really dwell on the temptation. The temptation can be interesting, and in some sense shared. You can almost start to root for the character to do the wrong thing, and then share in the triumph when they don't. And to some degree in the regret, too; someone who is tempted will always be tempted to wonder what it might have been like if they had given in.

There are other possibilities, of course. Most other sins have fairly ugly or esoteric temptations, or the temptations are very short lived. If you show a person tempted to murder another, the immediate temptation of having both strong motive and opportunity are not likely to last long. Stealing would be very difficult to examine simply because the temptation is generally too petty or too pathetic. The damage done is also less obvious, since what is stolen can always be restored. Still, it might be possible to come up with a story about nearly stealing. At least a few good stories have been told about rehabilitated jewel thieves, now that I think of it. (To Catch a Thief.)

Having watched Season 1 and most of Season 2 of Dawson's Creek, and having read the episode synopses for the remaining 4 seasons, one of the things which really struck me is that a drama — written like Dawson's Creek — is fundamentally cruel. The same people need to be fodder for drama all the time, and so they must be constantly tormented. Everything given must eventually be taken back, and it often is before long.

This is the fundamental weakness of television — it can't tell love stories. Television doesn't end, so it can't have a "happily ever after"; it must go on, and it must be entertaining.

I think that dramatic series are fundamentally stronger when something good is permitted to last. I occasionally think that television is largely written by sadists who can't stand there to be anything good. It's very difficult to find a television show with an arc which isn't all about destruction. (Another thing which television suffers from is that actors often move on, making television character's lives even more unstable.)

The exception, I think, are comedies. The Nanny was about a romance between Miss Fine and Mr Sheffeild; eventually they were married. There are, surely, other examples of this, though they don't come to mind at the moment. The reason, if I'm correct about this trend, is that comedies get their primary material from the small things, whereas drama takes its main material from the big things. Thus comedies can have happy characters, whereas dramas are always mean to their characters.

In literature, characters are never interesting for their flaws. They're always interesting for their virtues.

Opinions to the contrary stem from the fact that when writing it's often easier to show a person's virtues by way of their flaws. Heroes don't need burning buildings, it's just easy to show them off as a hero when there is a burning building.

Incidentally, there's a really great song by The Mountain Goats, called "Love Love Love":

King Saul fell on his sword
when it all went wrong
and Joseph's brothers sold him down the river
for a song
and Sonny Liston rubbed some tiger balm
into his glove
some things you do for money
and some you do for love love love

Raskolnikov felt sick
but he couldn't say why
when he saw his face reflected
in his victim's twinkling eye
some things you do for money
and some you'll do for fun
but the things you do for love
are gonna come back to you one by one

love love is gonna lead you by the hand
into a white and soundless place
now we see things
as in a mirror dimly
then we shall see each other
face to face

way out in seattle
young Kurt Cobain
snuck out to the garden
put a bullet in his brain
snakes in the grass beneath our feet
rain in the clouds above
some moments last forever
and some flare out with love love love

You really need to listen to the song. It's got a beautiful melody and the singer really sings it with a pretty voice. But the point is the singer/writer's explanation of the song:

the point of the song is we are very well damaged by the legacy of the romantic poet, that we think of love as a thing that is with strings and is this force for good and then if something bad happens thats not love...I don't know so much about that I don't know that the Greeks weren't right, I think that they were, that love can beat a path through everytihng, that it will destroy alot of things on the way to its objective which is just its expression of itself. You know my stepfather mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us and well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing aot of what I percieve is terrible damage, yet we talk about love as this benign comfortable force: it is wild.

Love doesn't always mean romantic love. In English, love doesn't always even mean love. Sometimes it means desire. Sometimes it means need. Sometimes it means a gaping hole in a person's soul that they're desperately trying to fill. Sometimes it means slave-like devotion to some ideal gone mad because it was taken in isolation. In English, the word love can mean nearly anything at all.

You can show how much a character loves something by how willing they are to be immoral for the sake of their love. Most of the time*, writers use characters' flaws in order to show their love for something.

*When the flaws aren't simply a crutch to move the plot along, that is.

So, I'm watching Dawson's Creek, which is a drama full of, well, drama. Anyhow, one of the characters is writing a love story, and an ex-girlfriend of his offers him the advice not to give it a happy ending, because they're unrealistic. Now, this is largely supposed to be a highly cynical comment (the person saying it is drunk towards the end of a spiral out of control). Yet it actually contains a rather insightful metaphysical point, though it's in the words that the person said, rather than in the meaning that she had for them.

There are no happy endings, there are only happy middles.

Happiness comes from something real, something that is, something that has being. Endings are a transition from existence to nothing; when the end is over, there is nothing. (In the physical world in which we live, there are no complete endings; all endings are also beginnings. In the spiritual world there are, presumable, complete endings.) And nothing can never bring happiness.

Discussions of movies always muddy this, because the movie's ending is (if you take the fictional reality seriously) not an end to the events in the movie, but only an end to the viewer's glimpse into it. Movie endings are almost universally ambiguous: "And they lived happily ever after" doesn't mean that the characters were henceforth immortal. In most cases it means that nothing very remarkable happened to them. They did at some point die, and few deaths are completely without suffering. What "happily ever after" means is that the characters never again had the same sort of troubles that made them interesting to us. It doesn't mean that they were free from all human cares.