This year saw the beginning of a new endeavour on my part, one that had been floating around the back of my mind for a while as a potential idea, that I've now finally put into effect. A boycott against Disney films. Now, the complete list of reasons behind this decision could probably fill multiple blog posts, and any long-time readers or close friends of mine are probably aware of some of them, so for sake of brevity, this key reason is that I feel Disney are gradually moving towards a monopolisation of the film industry, homogenising and perpetuating their intellectual properties until every penny has been wrung out of them, and basically, I don't want to support that.
Annoyingly for me, this is a surprisingly difficult protest to totally abide by, with Disney's constant acquisition of other companies and properties. I took my dad to see Ford v Ferrari the other week (known by the slightly weaker title of Le Mans '66 over here) since it has been getting decent reviews and my dad is very much a petrolhead. Not to mention, modern motorsport films in general have been reliably pretty excellent, with the likes of Senna and Rush both impressing me.
And while I imagine based on the timescale and the type of production Ford v Ferrari is that Disney's input on it was negligible, that still didn't comfort me much as I saw the 20th Century Fox logo blaring on the screen and the little critic voice in the back of my head couldn't help but exclaim, "ah, fuck."
Strangely though, with Disney occupying my thoughts in the background as I watched the film, this knowledge started to reframe my perception of the story and became suddenly aware of a deeper message lurking behind the film, one that seems incredibly apt in the year that Fox was bought out by Disney, and, with James Mangold in the directing chair, the same man who bought us Logan, a superhero film that revelled in its deviance from the other cookie-cutter Marvel films that preceded it, a message that I feel can't be completely accidental.
So without wishing to sound like a stuck record, here's my reading of the film.
For those who haven't seen it, the film revolves around the Ford motor company, in the midst of a sales slump and eager to find a new edge to regain their popularity. They approach Ferrari with a proposal to forge a joint racing team, but after a brutal rejection, they decide to build their own car instead to beat Ferrari at the next Le Mans race.
And thus begins the construction of the Ford GT40, spearheaded by car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) with loose cannon Ken Miles (Christian Bale) down as the driver. However, the duo are faced not only with overcoming the engineering obstacles but political ones too, as the Ford executives constantly meddle to maintain what they feel is right for the Ford brand, rather than what will get the job done.
Some of you may have worked out where I'm going with this.
The driving philosophy of the film (no, that wasn't deliberate but it's fucking staying in) seems to be that auteurism is essential for creating a product with a clear intention or ambition and that achieves it. A product is better and stronger as one cohesive vision rather than fiddled and tampered with by lots of grubby hands thinking they know what's best for the brand. Just because something might be better received from a publicity standpoint doesn't mean it's what's best for the product, and in fact, what might look better for marketing and what will actually work are often completely different from each other. A message that I can't help but feel is made in protest of Disney and their approach to their film franchises, if not the company as a whole.
Here's one of the most prominent examples from the film. After finishing the first prototype of the GT40, Ford decides to test it at one of the upcoming races, but the executives make the decision that Ken Miles cannot drive the car, as he is far too abrasive and unpredictable to represent Ford, and might damage their image. Shelby protests, but they won't listen. Unsurprisingly, without Miles's maverick attitude or passion behind the wheel, Ford lose the race, and Shelby is able to convince them to rehire Miles, provided he can win Daytona, which of course he does.
Now I'm not saying it's a perfect comparison, but to me at least this seems more than a little reminiscent of the debacle Disney and Marvel have had over the firing of more visionary directors, such as Edgar Wright from Ant-Man and Phil Lord and Chris Miller from Solo: A Star Wars Story, in both cases being booted for supposed creative differences. These are writer-directors known for their ability to deviate from genre norms and a self-aware approach to their comedy, so it's not a huge leap to think that Disney took one look at what these guys had achieved so far, got frightened that the films were deviating just a bit too much from the regime to nicely represent the Disney brand, and promptly booted Wright, Lord and Miller and brought in directors who will do it how they're fucking told to and we'll have a little less of that lip, young man.
When it really boils down to it, Disney seems to be a company far more concerned with brand than content, making films seemingly more out of obligation than any actual artistic or creative drive. If the film isn't a smooth inoffensive slurry that can be easily poured down an audience's throat, then how will people ever bring themselves to buy up all the merchandise? And this is pretty much the indictment at the heart of Ford v Ferrari, as even in the film Ford's motivation for building the GT40 and competing in Le Mans is to inject more life into the Ford brand and get more people to buy their mass-produced factory cars rather than any real passion for racing, while the GT40 represents what can happen when a product is made with heart and passion and artistic vision. A final protest as Fox is swallowed by the amorphous mass of the Disney corporation.
And to clarify, I'm not saying that every Disney film is automatically terrible: there are always people involved with these projects that are at least trying to make quality cinema and they do often succeed. Love it or hate it, The Last Jedi was one of the more visionary tentpole Disney films of recent years and while there undoubtedly was studio meddling, the sheer divisiveness of it suggests that Rian Johnson probably had a fair amount of creative control and was able to do things how he wanted.
After all, this is only my interpretation of Ford v Ferrari; I'm just relaying what the film seemed to be saying. So if you've got a problem, take it up with James Mangold. Although, ya know, he ain't wrong.
There's also probably a lot more to this reading than I've been able to cover in this post, but I'll leave that for you to discover for yourselves. This is only Extra Rambles, after all: these are supposed to be shorter than the main posts...
Showing posts with label Extra Rambles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Extra Rambles. Show all posts
Saturday, 14 December 2019
Tuesday, 12 November 2019
Extra Rambles: When Does Context Matter?
Anyone who's ever studied screenwriting knows that character is key. Knowing who a character is, their background, who they care for and why they're doing what they're doing, are all essential for telling an engaging story. Right?
Recently, I watched The Shallows, a shark-based survival thriller from a couple of years back that threw this entire concept into a new light for me, by having a character's backstory and context feel unnecessary. Every scene that attempted to establish details about who the protagonist was and why they're here came off as incredibly uninteresting, and for once I don't think it's just bad writing. It's bad writing and something else. And I think that 'something else' is worth exploring to see whether there is some hidden intricacy of screenwriting here or if I'm just trying to over-analyse a mid-tier Jaws ripoff that the writer couldn't be arsed to redraft.
So here's the premise of The Shallows: a girl goes surfing on a hidden beach and is attacked by a shark, leaving her stranded on a rock a short distance from the shore. With her injuries worsening, the tides rising and no sign of the shark giving up the hunt, she must find a way to get back to safety before it's too late. That's it. Simple right? Could practically be a short, an interesting supposition considering how the story is structured: in a film that's under ninety minutes already, it takes the best part of half an hour before our protagonist even ends up in the above scenario.
Instead, the film opens with a flash-forward that hints at how the film will end, followed by a lengthy sequence where our protagonist reveals key details of who she is and why she's going to this beach and what familial connections she has as she speaks to a nice local who's driving her there. Albeit he, at least, is sort of important later. Then when she reaches the beach there's another long scene as she video calls her sister only for her dad to join and start lecturing her about her studies, and very unsubtly telling the audience most of her life story. This is what's called an exposition dump and it's generally agreed to be the worst possible form of explaining anything to an audience; the dialogue equivalent of just handing someone a textbook and instructing them to read it. But not only were these scenes lazy, and actually pretty laughable too, for all the wrong reasons, but they were also almost entirely superfluous.
The only things we actually need to know are thus: the beach is secret and thus mainly empty of potential help, and our protagonist is a medical student who surfs. That's it. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant to the scenario. We don't need to know she has a sister who's back at the hotel, we don't need to know she's got a dead mother who told them about the beach, we don't need to know this is a pilgrimage and we don't need to know her dad is concerned. None of these characters are involved in the plot or have any effect on the outcome of Nancy's plight (oh yeah, the protagonist's name is Nancy, by the way), and consequently could be comfortably deleted from the film with no repercussions.
It feels like they've attempted to make Nancy a more fleshed-out character by adding a load of extra character relationships, but these really don't tell us anything about her. We learn so much more about the kind of person she is from her interactions with an injured seagull than we ever do from her family. In fact, the only real addition offered by knowing about Nancy's family is that she has a motivation to live, but I assumed that much from the fact that she's trying to get back to the shore in the first place! She's not like Padme Amidala, losing her will to live as one loses a contact lens in a crowded locker room. You don't have to explain the motivation for something as inbuilt and universal as basic survival needs, and those are pretty much as complex as The Shallows' character motivations ever need. It just isn't the kind of story that requires in-depth character context.
In something that's more character-focused, like a romance or a drama, then this kind of extended backstory is more relevant since the story is pretty much pivotal on the very essence of these characters and their backgrounds and social relations. If we don't know anything about this hunky charming man or what he stands for, how can we empathise with the leading lady who falls for him?
While something like a horror film doesn't really need this because their stories operate on a more primal level. Here's a human, here's a nasty monster who wants to eat the human. Who will win? It doesn't matter if the human's from Stoke-on-Trent or if they prefer jam to marmalade because we already automatically sympathise with their desire not to be eaten by the nasty monster (I mean, unless you're into vore, I guess. No, don't look that one up, it's not worth it). The desire to not be killed is just naturally hardwired into our species and so as a character motivation, it not only transcends boundaries of race, class and taste in fruit preserves in terms of relatability but by the same metric, also transcends the need for an explanation since every human on the planet naturally understands it.
It's pretty much the same concept as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: the closer your protagonist's motivation is to the bottom of the pyramid, where all the universal needs like food, water and air are, the less you need to explain them. While if their motivations are higher up the pyramid, focusing on more complex things like self-actualisation or self-esteem, then the need to explain the motivation is much more pressing.
The ultimate question then is, is this a matter of genre or merely the format of the story? Is The Shallows' attempt at character context misplaced because of its horror-y trappings or because the story itself is just too straightforward to require it?
Midsommar, for example, is a horror film that's also incredibly character-focused, so even though its characters are still motivated by a desire to survive, they also have way more complex, personalised struggles which drives a lot of the horror they're put through. And so while it, too, spends a while establishing it's main characters' backgrounds, it is entirely necessary for the rest of the film to work, unlike The Shallows.
I imagine format is more likely the culprit, since The Shallows could have very easily been a thirty or forty minute short if it had skipped its waffly intro and started on the shark attack, and probably would have been stronger for it. "Arrive late, leave early", as the old adage goes. This issue of context could be as simple as trying to over-explain a story that has nothing to hide. But then while short films tend to gravitate towards simple characters to fit the restraints of the format, that doesn't make character context mutually exclusive: not all short films focus on inherent universal needs, and some will inevitably need to establish their character's background.
So what is the answer? I don't think there is one, or at least, not one that can easily be rationalised in a post of this length. Consider this instead, a starting point for a wider discussion: Is there a correlation between genres and character complexity? Can a story have too much context? Or is all this just the ravings of a lunatic who got bored during an exposition scene?
Yeah, that sounds a lot more plausible now that I've written it out.
Recently, I watched The Shallows, a shark-based survival thriller from a couple of years back that threw this entire concept into a new light for me, by having a character's backstory and context feel unnecessary. Every scene that attempted to establish details about who the protagonist was and why they're here came off as incredibly uninteresting, and for once I don't think it's just bad writing. It's bad writing and something else. And I think that 'something else' is worth exploring to see whether there is some hidden intricacy of screenwriting here or if I'm just trying to over-analyse a mid-tier Jaws ripoff that the writer couldn't be arsed to redraft.
So here's the premise of The Shallows: a girl goes surfing on a hidden beach and is attacked by a shark, leaving her stranded on a rock a short distance from the shore. With her injuries worsening, the tides rising and no sign of the shark giving up the hunt, she must find a way to get back to safety before it's too late. That's it. Simple right? Could practically be a short, an interesting supposition considering how the story is structured: in a film that's under ninety minutes already, it takes the best part of half an hour before our protagonist even ends up in the above scenario.
Instead, the film opens with a flash-forward that hints at how the film will end, followed by a lengthy sequence where our protagonist reveals key details of who she is and why she's going to this beach and what familial connections she has as she speaks to a nice local who's driving her there. Albeit he, at least, is sort of important later. Then when she reaches the beach there's another long scene as she video calls her sister only for her dad to join and start lecturing her about her studies, and very unsubtly telling the audience most of her life story. This is what's called an exposition dump and it's generally agreed to be the worst possible form of explaining anything to an audience; the dialogue equivalent of just handing someone a textbook and instructing them to read it. But not only were these scenes lazy, and actually pretty laughable too, for all the wrong reasons, but they were also almost entirely superfluous.
The only things we actually need to know are thus: the beach is secret and thus mainly empty of potential help, and our protagonist is a medical student who surfs. That's it. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant to the scenario. We don't need to know she has a sister who's back at the hotel, we don't need to know she's got a dead mother who told them about the beach, we don't need to know this is a pilgrimage and we don't need to know her dad is concerned. None of these characters are involved in the plot or have any effect on the outcome of Nancy's plight (oh yeah, the protagonist's name is Nancy, by the way), and consequently could be comfortably deleted from the film with no repercussions.
It feels like they've attempted to make Nancy a more fleshed-out character by adding a load of extra character relationships, but these really don't tell us anything about her. We learn so much more about the kind of person she is from her interactions with an injured seagull than we ever do from her family. In fact, the only real addition offered by knowing about Nancy's family is that she has a motivation to live, but I assumed that much from the fact that she's trying to get back to the shore in the first place! She's not like Padme Amidala, losing her will to live as one loses a contact lens in a crowded locker room. You don't have to explain the motivation for something as inbuilt and universal as basic survival needs, and those are pretty much as complex as The Shallows' character motivations ever need. It just isn't the kind of story that requires in-depth character context.
In something that's more character-focused, like a romance or a drama, then this kind of extended backstory is more relevant since the story is pretty much pivotal on the very essence of these characters and their backgrounds and social relations. If we don't know anything about this hunky charming man or what he stands for, how can we empathise with the leading lady who falls for him?
While something like a horror film doesn't really need this because their stories operate on a more primal level. Here's a human, here's a nasty monster who wants to eat the human. Who will win? It doesn't matter if the human's from Stoke-on-Trent or if they prefer jam to marmalade because we already automatically sympathise with their desire not to be eaten by the nasty monster (I mean, unless you're into vore, I guess. No, don't look that one up, it's not worth it). The desire to not be killed is just naturally hardwired into our species and so as a character motivation, it not only transcends boundaries of race, class and taste in fruit preserves in terms of relatability but by the same metric, also transcends the need for an explanation since every human on the planet naturally understands it.
It's pretty much the same concept as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: the closer your protagonist's motivation is to the bottom of the pyramid, where all the universal needs like food, water and air are, the less you need to explain them. While if their motivations are higher up the pyramid, focusing on more complex things like self-actualisation or self-esteem, then the need to explain the motivation is much more pressing.
The ultimate question then is, is this a matter of genre or merely the format of the story? Is The Shallows' attempt at character context misplaced because of its horror-y trappings or because the story itself is just too straightforward to require it?
Midsommar, for example, is a horror film that's also incredibly character-focused, so even though its characters are still motivated by a desire to survive, they also have way more complex, personalised struggles which drives a lot of the horror they're put through. And so while it, too, spends a while establishing it's main characters' backgrounds, it is entirely necessary for the rest of the film to work, unlike The Shallows.
I imagine format is more likely the culprit, since The Shallows could have very easily been a thirty or forty minute short if it had skipped its waffly intro and started on the shark attack, and probably would have been stronger for it. "Arrive late, leave early", as the old adage goes. This issue of context could be as simple as trying to over-explain a story that has nothing to hide. But then while short films tend to gravitate towards simple characters to fit the restraints of the format, that doesn't make character context mutually exclusive: not all short films focus on inherent universal needs, and some will inevitably need to establish their character's background.
So what is the answer? I don't think there is one, or at least, not one that can easily be rationalised in a post of this length. Consider this instead, a starting point for a wider discussion: Is there a correlation between genres and character complexity? Can a story have too much context? Or is all this just the ravings of a lunatic who got bored during an exposition scene?
Yeah, that sounds a lot more plausible now that I've written it out.
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