What is the writer's burden? It's
not getting people to read your work, or sustaining a career. It's
more fundamental than that. The writer's burden is our
responsibility as artists when it comes to subjects of race, sexism,
politics and spirituality, with emphasis on how these issues may be
interpreted in our story. Here is what the famed story expert Robert McKee had to say about this matter:
“Writers have an enormous
responsibility to make sense out of life. …. Not to make things
look good, it's not a question of being cheerful or optimistic or all
those awful euphemisms of talking about life's journey and all of
that. …. Life is a struggle and so writers who dramatize that
struggle beautifully and deeply enrich life and those who's stories
trivialize life, make us less civilized.”
McKee points out that people today are
not reading and discussing the old great books on philosophy and
theology; instead they go to the movie theater or turn on the TV. This was
an excerpt from an interview with McKee that you can listen to here. You can see a characterization of Robert McKee in Adaptation;
a film written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze.
I have had several conversations
about this lately and have dealt with it through my own work. So the
time is right to have this be said. I would suggest that a writer
should ask themselves that same question when they sit down to write
their next literary masterpiece; is this the right time to tell this
story? The answer is all around us; what is of interest to society? What has taken shape within our culture? Of course, the other thing
to consider is the time period that your story takes place. If it's
in the future the sky's the limit, but other than that it is an
aspect writers cannot ignore. For example, Quentin Tarantino
depicted the oppressive nature of slavery accurately in Django Unchained, but he did it his way. Race clearly became part of
who these characters were, their actions and how they interacted with
others. Leonardo DiCaprio played Calvin Candie; a wealthy plantation
owner who puts slaves to work around his property and even fight to
the death for his own entertainment. Yet Calvin Candie still spoke
in a way that are unmistakably the prose of Tarantino. The most
complex of all the characters in Django was Samuel Jackson as
Stephen. He plays the head of the slaves at the plantation who fully
takes Calvin Candie's side and supports his way of life, yet Stephen
is a black man who is also a slave. This character believes that he
and the others have a better quality of life as Calvin's slaves than
if they were free. Yes this is a highly controversial stance for
this character, yet history has shown that it no doubt existed in
some cases. Most importantly, this character was treated seriously
by the writer, it was not satire and Stephen was not glorified, in
fact he is clearly an antagonist. What was brilliant in Django
was the tactful way Tarantino made slavery funny. It was the
memorable scene where a large gathering of the Klu Klux Klan were
about to ride out for a night full of evil but are frustrated by the
masks that one of their wives made for all of them. Once they put
the masks over their heads the tone of the whole scene changes. The
holes are in the wrong place, they can hardly see through the masks
and with this, a symbol of hatred was turned into a source of humor. We are free to laugh at this because it makes fun of a group that is
hated throughout the world. Writers must keep that distinction in
mind when dealing with any controversial issues such as this.
Sexism is an area I have had to be
mindful the most in my own work. Cam-Girl; a feature which I
wrote and directed is a thriller about a stripper who is held hostage
in her home by an unknown stalker. If you take that description at
face value it sounds like an exploitation film with stereotypical
characters; well I assure you it is not. From the beginning I made
the story's protagonist; Gessica a loving single mother who does all
she can to provide for her infant daughter. This double life was
made clear in the log line for the movie while I raised the financing
and promoted the script. Gessica is also working hard to get through
medical school; her noble cause is to leave a less respected job for
one that will let her save lives. In this case we have a stripper
who is still a positive role model for woman.
Another example I can give from my own writing is a script Al Mauro and I were hired to write based on the true story of a rookie detective who put an end to a serial burglar who took Chicago by storm in 1968. It goes without saying that things were totally different back then. Not only were we in the throws of the Vietnam War, but the gender roles of men and women were still very traditional; or should I say old fashioned. Many women looked after the home and raised children while the men were at work. The co-writer and I were careful to not show this way of life as being right or wrong but just the way it was. So when it came time to write a scene set in a barber shop, our character walks in to see men wheedling the scissors and cutting female customer's hair. Being a barber is a male dominated profession, not only is this an interesting visual but it also reflects the time period of the story. Barbers specialize in cutting men's hair and facial hair yet women would go there to get their hair cut short. Barber shops were also much more common back in the 1960's. In fact, the man our protagonist ends up meeting in the shop was a barber in real life, so the truth wins out in the end.
Another example I can give from my own writing is a script Al Mauro and I were hired to write based on the true story of a rookie detective who put an end to a serial burglar who took Chicago by storm in 1968. It goes without saying that things were totally different back then. Not only were we in the throws of the Vietnam War, but the gender roles of men and women were still very traditional; or should I say old fashioned. Many women looked after the home and raised children while the men were at work. The co-writer and I were careful to not show this way of life as being right or wrong but just the way it was. So when it came time to write a scene set in a barber shop, our character walks in to see men wheedling the scissors and cutting female customer's hair. Being a barber is a male dominated profession, not only is this an interesting visual but it also reflects the time period of the story. Barbers specialize in cutting men's hair and facial hair yet women would go there to get their hair cut short. Barber shops were also much more common back in the 1960's. In fact, the man our protagonist ends up meeting in the shop was a barber in real life, so the truth wins out in the end.
I have always been a huge fan of
the film Hurlyburly; an adaptation of the play written by
David Rabe. This is the story of two Hollywood agents who share a
house, do drugs and drink heavily while competing over woman and
trying to make sense out of life. Hurlyburly has been accused
of being misogynist in how the female characters are represented and
treated. Within the first act, right after our protagonist Eddie was
dumped by his girlfriend, a friend by the name of Artie drops by the
house to deliver a young woman that he found riding around in the
elevator all day. The men talk about this woman; Donna, as is she
was an object. While she is in the same room Artie refers to her as
“a care package” and as he leaves her there he says “She worked
the last time I checked Eddie; If you have any more questions talk
with the manufacturer." Sounds sexist right? Let's dig a little
deeper into this story and how gender roles are portrayed. The men
in Hurlyburly; especially Eddie are not glorified or positive
role models. Eddie is a manic depressive who regularly abuses drugs
to dull the pain. His friend Phil is a violent brute, he has been
known to hit his wife and eventually head butts Donna because he is
sick of how she has taken over the house. As an audience we feel bad
for these women who are around these reckless, self destructive men. We know the women should not be treated this way; in doing so we
empathize with them. I must be clear about what is going on here;
the characters in Hurlyburly are sexist, but the story itself, the
way it is told and interpreted is not. That is the important line we
as writers should not cross. As long as you do that, you should feel
free to explore controversial themes because that is how we grow as
storytellers and actively engage an audience. And for those who
claim Donna is a one-dimensional, poorly conceived female character;
they must have stopped watching before we see her return to the house
at the end of the story. Here Donna finds Eddie at his lowest point;
he is in business attire and fully submerged in his pool while he mourns
the death of his friend. Donna is above Eddie, talking with Eddie
from the side of the pool and bluntly tells him that he looks like a
mess and then gives Eddie the sage advice he needs to get through
this. By the end of the story Donna takes the moral high ground and
proves that she is a smart young women who is in control of her life
and how she lives it. The lesson here is that female and minority
characters can have an arc like any other.
Ever since Ripley in Alien
proved to the film industry that a strong female protagonist is
something people would like to see, it has brought upon changes and
has been a talking point for feminist. It is important to note that
in the original script for Alien; the character that became
Ripley was written as a male. At the time, making a female hero the
center of your story was unheard of, well, things change. Since then
we have seen Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, Sarah
Connor fighting off The Terminator and Imperator Furiosa in
Mad Max: Fury Road grace the screen. Recently, many have criticized the portrayal of Claire
in Jurassic World as
being a female stereotype because she continues to stomp around in high heels while she is being chased by ravenous dinosaurs. My reply
to this is that Claire was given heroic moments in the story, like
when she leads a T-Rex to fight a genetic hybrid dinosaur to the
death. These people are watching a movie about cloned dinosaurs yet
some are focused on a woman's footwear? It seems like a nit pick to
me, or maybe things are just Lost in Translation;
which I must say is another movie with a well written female lead
that also had a female writer-director Sofia Coppola at the helm. Of course
there is also Lena Dunham's brutally honest portrayal of women in her
TV series Girls. There are countless examples of well written female protagonist in
independent films such as The One I Love,
While She Was Out, TheSkeleton Twins, In aWorld.... and then there's the
character of Tank from Crawl or Die;
which is a micro budget science fiction movie largely inspired by the
tunnel sequences from Aliens. It is however, rare for us to see
female driven stories in these big budget blockbusters that fill the
multiplexes.
This
brings us back to Mad Max: Fury Road. Not only was this an action
packed masterwork of cinema, but it bravely made the movie's hero a
female. Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa is the driver of a war
rig who decides to free the female sex slaves from the male tyrant
who rules a gang in a post apocalyptic world. Furiosa is simply a
bad ass; she holds her own and eventually starts telling Mad Max what
to do in the heat of battle. Beyond that, the movie shows a rival
female gang who are surviving on their own without a man in sight. I
laud this as being one of the best female protagonist we have seen on
screen. So naturally when I spoke to a woman who criticized this
point by saying “Yeah, but the movie is still called 'Mad Max',”
it fueled a mad max sized explosion in my brain. What? This was one
of the highest budgeted movies of the year; I'm sure it had to have
“Mad Max” in the title in order to get green lit. Would you
rather not have this spectacular movie with a strong female
protagonist because of a title dispute? How is it the movie's fault
that it is part of a franchise that has not had another movie in the
last thirty years? I guess it goes to show you the one thing we all
can agree on is that we as artist cannot please everybody, and if you
try to that is a recipe for some watered down storytelling my friend. So we as writers should not be afraid to be bold, but we must always
remember that what we have to say has cultural value.
