Authenticity vs everyday life

There are two camps of literature consumers: Those who practice escapism (fantasy and science fiction to the rescue) and those who prefer stories that seek a high order of reality and authenticity: Feelings—good ones as well as bad ones—, situations you can identify with, which you even already might have experienced.

In the early days of filmmaking, there have been ideas now and then, that had the potential to be revolutionary. The idea, I want to talk about in this section, came actually into fashion in the last decades—but not quite the way it was intended. I’m talking about reality TV.

I’m not sure, if you can therefore actually consider him the father of reality TV, since reality was important to him—funnily, that was the reason, his concept was a flop. But let’s not put the cart before the horse: He wanted to follow a married couple around for 24 hours a day—unscripted, uncut, uncensored. But that turned out to be a little overkill: People felt bored watching it, even though in theory that sounded like an honest concept and the two people unintentionally provided a surprise moment—their son came out as gay. Yet, well-intentioned is the opposite of good. The project failed.

Even though reality TV strives for the opposite extreme today, it does what we talked about in the previous chapter: Deliver, captivate, include—and everything on command.

But that doesn’t have to mean that the product is the best that is the most far-fetched. Reality TV is called “scripted reality” for a reason—essentially, it’s closer to a motion picture than to actual reality. They have a script, are arranged by a director to ensure, we hang on the character’s every word, and cut by an editor so that we don’t have time to catch our breaths. But is that wrong? Do we feel like somebody lied to us? No, of course not. The dose makes the poison—the trick is to find the right balance.

The movie is worse than the novel—that is the law

Just like they say, the movie adaption is doomed to be worse than the novel it’s based on, you could assume, that the attempt to capture reality in a motion picture is destined to have the same desolate destiny. The problem with that assumption is, to think, the task was to copy reality in every possible aspect. Of course, that endeavor would most certainly fail. But the medium “movie” has its own way to express themself—just like a novel has theirs.

Let’s imagine, you were asked to adapt this scene from a novel to a movie:

Quote

 

The room had a planked floor and a table that looked like it had grown from the floor just like that. Mother’s dress seemed to be tailor-made for her; her smile as well. Father apparently didn’t go to these lengths: He wore what he always wore—and that was fitting. The children were less exhilarated, yet their hunger and the expectation not to be disappointed by their parents' cooking skills, connected them. Even though, the cooking skills lived up to these expectations, the parents didn’t always keep their promise to let their children grow up without fear.

“Have you taken care of your bike yet?” father asked and one could tell from his voice, that he was weary of taking care of his childrens' derelictions.

 

 

We see that this text describes plenty of things before there is action, let alone words spoken.

Of course, I could try to emulate the gaze with the camera and follow it by looking at furniture and clothing, but while this seems quite natural in the book, a viewer of the movie would assume, these things had a special meaning that will have significant importance later on. For the movie, I decided to place the children opposite their parents on the other side of the table, which is closer to the wall. Why? Well, in the novel, there is no indication of where each family member sits at the table. While in the novel, there is kind of a Schrödinger’s cat situation (everybody sits everywhere and nowhere at the same time; in quantum physics that is called a superposition), actors inevitably need a specific place to sit in. And so a director would make a virtue of necessity and do subtle storytelling with the characters' placements. We have the indication from the original text that the children sometimes fear their parents, and transformed that into an image because it wouldn’t have been possible to adapt that line par for par. The children sit with their backs to the wall and on the other side of the table are their parents, cohesively.

In comparison to explicitly looking at furniture and clothing, this detail is not that pushy and not spelled out for the viewer so that the viewer is aware of that but more subconsciously. In the novel, this scene takes several seconds to read; in the movie adaption, it’s not more than a blink of an eye.

The thing about relevance

When the mother returns home from work, it takes her forty minutes. That’s inevitable. During a movie or novel, we wouldn’t always explicitly show her driving home unless something interesting or important happens while she’s underway. If we omit her way home, it’s called “time compression” (see story time vs plot time vs screen time). In the reality TV documentary, I talked about two sections earlier, they would have shown us all her way home, leaving nothing unseen and us bored. Sure, in reality, there is no shortcut to this. We have to accompany ourselves on our way home. But even though, we might like stories to be realistic, this is most certainly not what we want to see. We still want to be entertained. It’s enough to see her heading home and arriving. We can imagine the rest.

In a story, I wrote, I provided the protagonist with a cute yellow lab—cool, isn’t it? Well, so it might feel for you readers. Fair enough, maybe not even for you, since you might have noticed that it is nice to have a dog but considerably less appealing to see the protagonist walk the dog in almost every scene just like in Groundhog Day. The dog became a burden—and it wasn’t even his fault. That’s how pets might feel when they were brought home from an animal shelter and after the initial excitement, nobody wants to take care of them anymore, so they are eventually returned to the shelter. I realized that I’m not fit to be a literary pet owner. One or two nice scenes with a dog—be my guest—but besides that, I’m just not creative enough in this aspect to keep the dog around while at the same time finding interesting scenes with him. Initially, I didn’t want to tell a story specifically with a dog, but I mean, it's not like it hurts anyone, does it? Spirits that I've summoned …

The evil protagonist

Who does not know it? In movies like James Bond, viewers want the hero to win; when we, on the other hand, watch shows like How to sell drugs online (fast), we usually want the bad people (drug dealers) to win. So one could argue, it’s less a matter of morals but a matter of who’s the protagonist. Why is that? Well, the protagonist is naturally the character we spend the most time with for the duration of the story and get the best insight into the inner workings of their mind. Many villains are provided with a backstory that explains their actions and maybe even rectifies them. Often times that’s enough to make us hope for the villain to eventually succeed. And who knows, we might get a sequel then.

Sure, there are shows like “Money Heist”, where the heroes (the police) act quite stupidly or are prone to corruption and/or infiltration by a third party. Also, their credo “The end justifies the means“ might actually enable them to enforce law and order, but might conflict with our attitude to morality. Even in movies like “Joker” where the protagonist is actually a homicidal maniac who would kill us without turning a hair, we consider him “cool” since we are not his target (see NIMBY). Then, there is the show iZombie, where the seemingly evil protagonist (a zombie) is only considered evil by society. Would we do it any differently?

I had an interesting conversation with my flatmate lately. Let’s imagine a man whose children had been kidnapped. Police start looking for them, arrests a subject, and release it after some interrogation. Impuissance washes over the father. “Why doesn’t the police do anything!?” he keeps asking himself. Of course, the police do everything in their power and what they are allowed by law to find the children. On the spur of the moment, the father ambushes the subject, handcuffs, gags, imprisons, and tortures it, to prize the information where the children are out of the subject. Classy thriller plot. Sure, we side with the father. The police are only doing their job, but in this case, we are okay with lynch law. Because at this moment, we are the father. In Germany, we had a case like that (see The murder of Jakob von Metzler). What would we say if the subject turned out to be innocent? Do we still side with the father, who just broke multiple bones in the other man’s body? Or how would we react if the father realized that he’s too late and because he can’t bear the loss, he wants to fire an atom bomb, to kill all humankind?

I observed that it is everything but easy to not identify with the protagonist per se because we see the story from their perspective and so their perspective becomes our perspective. That’s what they are made for: We might question their actions, but we offer a shoulder to cry on when needed. Just like good friends. Or like court-appointed legal defenders represent a remorseless, dangerous criminal. Like partners in toxic relationships.

That’s why I once wrote a short story: Because I wondered if it was possible that readers identify more with the antagonist than with the protagonist. I think this is only possible if the reader isn’t able to relate on any level. Only when they push us actively away.

See also

What is an Antagonist — 7 Types and How They Work

Here’s Why Writing A Screenplay Is Harder Than Writing A Novel - Dr. Ken Atchity