When stories get hijacked
Last Friday I saw KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON. It's powerful, gorgeously shot, lavishly produced, and it portrays an extraordinary moment in history that hardly anybody has been aware of until now. So why didn't I come away feeling I'd seen a masterpiece? It took me a while to realize that the movie didn't affect me as it ought to have because the story is in the wrong place.
A story is set in train by a choice, and made up of actions based on that choice and subsequent choices. So here's my issue: the most mysterious, contradictory, intriguing choice in the movie slips by unnoticed.
As we learn later, the Osage are concerned that they are dying out because their blood is being diluted. The Osage women know that white men are marrying them for their money, and some of those women, and Osage men too, are being murdered with impunity. So why do Mollie and her sisters all marry white men? It's true that there don't seem to be many eligible Osage twenty-somethings, and if that's intentional, where are they? Dead on the battlefields of World War I? If so, isn't that a vital part of the story? If not, what's wrong with marrying an Osage man? And why don’t the elders give Mollie a hard time for the choice she’s making? They just all seem happy to have a fine old knees-up of a party.
My friend was annoyed by the movie on ideological grounds: yet another movie about women and minorities told with white men at the center. I agree that that's getting pretty old, but if the white men are the heart of a story, I'm fine with it. The problem is, in this case they're not. They're the least interesting characters in the movie, and they make hardly any choices at all, interesting or otherwise. The Leonardo diCaprio character just does whatever his uncle wants him to do—which could be interesting if we got a sense of the moral vacancy under all that scowling and jaw-jutting, but we don't. And his uncle is yet another Bible-spouting baddie—the biggest stereotype in the movie. If you want to see the iconic version, check out Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton in 1955.
So, why does Mollie choose to marry Ernest? Because the movie needs her to, and he’s Leonardo DiCaprio, and he cracks one moderately amusing joke? Plus, clearly, he’s as thick as a board. My son points out that many women fall for men who are as thick as a board, and that’s true, but it doesn’t make the story problem go away. Given the circumstances—which are the reason the story is being told in the first place—Molly’s choice is complex and dangerous, yet the movie just takes it for granted.
This is an example of writing what you know. The story demands that Mollie fall in love with Ernest, so she does. If the writers had asked more questions and written what they didn’t know, they might have discovered something that would have individualized her character, and also given us a more rounded picture of both the woman and the culture she is, not unwittingly (though unremarked upon), helping on its way to oblivion.
I have a similar issue with Saving Private Ryan. Who's the character who makes the defining choice in the movie? Private Ryan. Here comes Tom Hanks saying, "I'm taking you home," and Private Ryan says, "No thanks, I can't leave my buddies behind." I can explain rationally why Private Ryan might feel that way, but I don't feel it on my pulse because I didn't share the hell he went through with them. I shared the hell Tom Hanks went through instead.
The D-Day sequence is a tour de force—but the wrong character is in the center of it. In story terms, it should be Private Ryan. Or, so as not to falsify history, keep Tom Hanks on the Normandy beach, but show us Private Ryan and his comrades falling to earth with the 101st parachute battalion and going through their own hell too. I read the script of Saving Private Ryan before the movie was made, and I wish I could remember whether the script gave us more grounding for Private Ryan's choice. I know I didn't notice the imbalance when I read it, perhaps because the D-Day sequence only took up about five pages—way less, proportionally, than in the finished film. So, for me, the virtuosity of those opening 20 minutes hijacks the movie.
You know a story has been hijacked if your rational response and your emotional response don’t match up. Rationally, brilliantly made movie; emotionally, I’m ready for a taco. Stories get hijacked for good reasons as well as bad, and it's worth considering what went awry when a master storyteller misses the bull's-eye. Choices define character, action illustrates character. This is just to say, if you're telling a story, try not to let its defining choices go unsupported, or slip by.
For more on our approach to story, check out Write What You Don’t Know, the book of the Imaginative Storm method, also available as a self-paced online course.
