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The Origin Story

1/29/2018

“In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

“Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.”

There you are: three beginnings (fairly innocuous beginnings, to be fair, that don’t really begin to hint at the wonders contained within) to three classic origin stories… from fantasy and/or children’s lit, depending on how you want to categorize them.

We really love beginnings. The freshness. The newness. The possibilities. (Once we’re into them, that is. Getting into beginnings is often more fraught with angst… because, ironically, most of us don’t like the uncertainties change frequently brings with it.)

And we really love origin stories. There’s something to an origin story that never again resurfaces in any and all sequels or continuations… a magic (if you’ll pardon the pun) that can only occur once:
-What is a hobbit and who is he and why does he live in a hole in the ground and what’s he like?
-Say what? Yer a wizard, Harry? And there’s a special school for people like you?
-Once a King and Queen in Narnia, always a King and Queen?

Speaking of Narnia… the interesting thing about The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is that the 2005 film, frankly, gives us a better beginning than the book does. Sorry, Jack! I know I speak heresy. But the film’s beginning is far grittier and more realistic: four English children evacuated from London during the Second World War to a rural manor house presided over by a formidably stern housekeeper would be… well, exactly what the film depicts: bewildered, frightened and desolate, wondering if their home --- and by extension, their mother --- will even be there when and if they return. Not treating the whole thing as a lark, which is how the book opens. And the film’s incredible, magical moment of Georgie Henley’s Lucy discovering the solitary gas lamp burning tranquilly in the middle of a forest --- where no lamp post should be --- and her first meeting with Mr. Tumnus is an unforgettable series of images. The sweet innocence is unforgettable. And while there are many magical moments later on, in the following stories, they never quite match the wonder of the origin story.

Why?

Because the origin story --- regardless of what genre you’re discussing, whether it’s mystery or horror or western or science fiction or fantasy or children’s lit or whatever --- deals with fundamental questions that have been very much on the collective human consciousness since the Beginning: What’s the story?
How did this come to be? And why? (We love asking the why questions, just not so much answering them). Humans have an insatiable need to understand the whys and wherefores, especially how something began. It’s why every culture has its own creation story, and explanations for things that were beyond human ken: weather and climate and other natural phenomena, as well as the behaviours of humanity and other living organisms.

And the origin story does that.

How do we wind up with Frodo at Sammath Naur, trying to summon up the will to hurl the Ring into the fire? Well, it all began long before. Do you want to start with another hobbit named Bilbo, or go further back to the forging of the Rings of Power? Your choice…

How do we wind up at the penultimate battle between Voldemort and Harry at the climax of book seven? Well, it all began under the stairs at Number 4, Privet Drive with a loathsome/pathetic family and their odd, unwanted relation…

Yep, we just love to hear about how these things get started. It scratches some sort of deep-seated itch most of us have located somewhere far down in our consciousness.

The origin story becomes even more important because many authors, past and present, have a tendency to begin things in media res, or in the middle of things. It makes events so much more dramatic when we start, not right at the very beginning, but somewhere along the story’s progression, so that going back and discovering the roots becomes that much more delicious when we’re finally given the Big Reveal. Ahhh. Scratch that itch! So that’s why the protagonist is such a [insert correct descriptor here].

So treasure the origin story and its strange magic, its ability to satisfy that deep desire to know why, and know that you’re in good company: just about the entire remainder of the race (bar the vacuous drones) that has ever looked around and wondered…

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Stranger Thing

1/22/2018

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So… here’s a stranger thing: Mike, Lucas, Dustin, Will, and Eleven/Jane are in their late 40s now… in fact, they’re set to hit the big five-oh imminently. Probably this year. Man, doesn’t that just blow your mind?

If you haven’t seen Stranger Things --- wasn’t that a clever pun in my lead paragraph? he asked in the pathetically neurotic way writers do when they seek approval/validation, which is most of the time, by the way --- the aforementioned lead paragraph means nothing, so allow me a word or six to explain:

Stranger Things is a Netflix series just finished its second season. Set in 1983/84 in the imaginary town of Hawkins, Indiana, it focuses on the adventures of five nerdy young teens who must deal with all sorts of unpleasant/horrific consequences when one of them unintentionally opens a gateway to another, malevolent dimension (well, actually, is forced to open it by a shadowy, nasty government agency of the sort we’ve become all too familiar with in film and literature, the last 30 years or so). While not a particularly original concept --- people who enjoyed The X Files or Fringe will find Stranger Things familiar --- it’s well told, the child actors in particular being both believable and excellent.

But here’s the rub, as Will would say: if these kids were 14 or so in 1983… in real life, they would be, as I said, 49 in 2018. Well into careers, marriages, kids of their own, joys, sorrows --- you know, the Whole Damn Thing. Which is, if you’ll pardon my saying so, a strange thing and really ties in to Will’s quote: And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale. Ain’t you just a bundle o’ joy today, Will.

And thereby hangs a tale i.e. it got me thinking: how should writers portray characters aging?

(Assuming we simply don’t make them immortal, of course… which is, frankly, cheating a bit. Why? Because we immediately lose part of our connection to immortal characters. How could we not? They’re gonna be around long after us mere mortals have turned to dust, so they can’t appreciate the mayfly nature of our lives --- the slings and arrows of our passing existence until it’s “out, out, brief candle,” to quote Will again. For example, Elrond is an interesting character in Lord of the Rings --- he’s also, by the way, Aragorn’s multi-great uncle --- but being immortal, he doesn’t have the same investment in Middle Earth’s problems that folks like Frodo do. It’s the same thing with Wonder Woman’s immortality: I’m glad Gal Gadot doesn’t age a day in the 100 years between Wonder Woman’s main events and the conclusion that takes place in modern times --- it’d be a crying shame to see that beauty wither --- but it does mean Diana Prince will neither know nor ever really comprehend our lives and the aches and pains of getting old. And even if romantic interest Steve Trevor hadn’t conveniently died at the film’s climax, he would have long since bought the farm due to old age… so a long-term relationship with Diana wouldn’t really be in the cards. Like I said, think mayflies.)

In many stories, because the plot focuses on one pivotal period in a character’s life, aging isn’t an issue. When we look at events ranging from hours to a year or two, it’s generally not a big factor. It only becomes so if the story in question spans years or decades. But there, it can seem creepy or awkward when writers bring it in. In the final Harry Potter book, for example, we’re treated --- if that’s really the word --- to a conclusion where adult married couples Harry/Ginny and Hermione/Ron are at the train station, sending their kids off to Hogwarts. The book scene was awkward enough, but the film version is truly creepy… seeing Harry et al transformed into these fleshy, middle-aged mums and dads… a little less lithe, a little more used up by the vicissitudes of life… eww. Yeah, I know it happens to us all: I see it daily in the mirror, and as Miracle Max said, “thank you so much for bringing up such a painful subject. While you're at it, why don't you give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice on it?” My point is, yes, we all age. But do we have to be/want to be reminded of it in story characters? Interesting question… and personally, as you can see, I’m a little conflicted by it.

Sometimes, writers ignore the issue altogether. In Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, the two protagonists, Jamie and time-travelling Claire, are separated at book 2’s conclusion, and at book 3’s beginning, it’s been 20 years since they saw each other last. Ms. Gabaldon doesn’t exactly spend a lot of time dwelling on how the two have aged --- it certainly doesn’t seem to have affected their libidos at all, he said, rolling his eyes --- and I was curious to see how the Starz TV series would address the matter. To my amusement… essentially, they don’t. They make a half-hearted attempt to age the characters before they reunite, but since then, have pretty much ignored the inconvenient fact that the 30-something Jamie and Claire of the first two seasons are now 50-somethings --- at a time where most humans didn’t live to see 50-something… or if they did, looked a lot older than 50-something.

Does it matter? Should it?

Well, as the old saying goes, the reader must decide. And the writer, too, I guess. In the meantime, since he’s a little more upbeat than Will on the subject, maybe we should leave the final words to Jack Lewis: Autumn is really the best of the seasons; and I'm not sure that old age isn't the best part of life.

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Biff! Kapow!

1/15/2018

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When Batman premiered on TV in 1966, I was all of eight, and like so many others before and since, fell in love with the superhero genre. I was too young and naïve to realize the show was a campy comedy; I just saw the earnest heroism of the Dynamic Duo, and I wanted to be a superhero, too. Biff! Kapow! In fact, my precocious eight-year-old self was supremely confident I could be on the show, too. All I had to do was get in touch with Burt Ward, who played Robin, explain the situation, and that would be that. It would mean moving to Hollywood to do the show, of course, but that was a sacrifice I was willing to have my parents make. So I screwed up my courage and dialled ‘zero’ on our rotary phone to inquire of the operator just what Burt’s number was and how much it would cost. (There was always, instantly, a real person --- without exception, an older woman --- at the other end of the phone in that golden age of customer service.) I blithely assumed everyone knew Burt Ward --- after all, how could anyone not know Robin? --- but probably sensing my innocence, she let me down gently by pointing out it depended on his address --- which, of course, I didn’t know, and, it turned out, neither did she. So, alas, Batman was forced to limp along without me until its cancellation in 1968. But it introduced me to the superhero genre.

Flash forward (pun intended) fifty years (!), and there’s a glut of superhero films from DC and Marvel. This reality was forcefully brought home (quite literally) over Christmas, when my 20-something son managed to convince his mother she needed to see all the Avengers films. If one views the entire series, complete with side trips to marginally related stories, it’s somewhere in the vicinity of 1000 films. Well… okay, 14 or 15, really… it just feels like 1000 to me. Some of these films, I watched with my wife and son --- whom I privately started thinking of as the Dynamic Duo (I know… wrong comic franchise); others, I found too silly for words and decided I just couldn’t sit through, realizing each meant giving up two hours of my life that I’d never get back. But perhaps I shouldn’t be too dismissive/sarcastic, because here’s my own admission: for reasons still unclear to me, I decided I finally wanted to see Wonder Woman starring Gal Gadot. I did, enjoying it immensely --- in fact, parts of it deeply moved me, and I wrote of that experience in my last post (I’d include a hyperlink to it, but since you’re already at my blog, just scroll down one entry to read it).

But these films got me wondering: why is the superhero genre Such A Big Thing right now? Why are there so many of them? With more to come? Including Sequels Galore, not to mention Sequels Gadot? (Sorry. Awful pun.)

Well, the facile answer is because they’re making money for the studios. Serious money --- enough to pay Robert Downey’s exorbitant salary and still make a profit. Even today, movie studios appear to like perpetuating the myth that filmmaking is Ars Gratia Artis, but most of us stopped believing that when we stopped believing in the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny. So, yeah, these films wouldn’t be made if they weren’t making money. The demand is obviously there, seemingly insatiable, and apparently not limited just to 12-year-old boys (no comments on my maturity, please). So, again: why are these films so popular? I think there are three main reasons:

First, we look to fantasy to take our minds off the awful reality we commonly face, especially when things are extremely rough in real life. (Like alcohol and drugs, stories are escapism, but generally less self-destructive.) Even without the current crop of hell’s own herd of turkeys now running the planet, most of us live what Thoreau depressingly but accurately called ‘lives of quiet desperation,’ and fantasy takes our minds off our cares, at least for a while, from the safety of an easy chair at home or in the theatre.

Second, they’re generally straight-forward, simple morality tales: good defeats evil. Period. Yes, nowadays, most superhero films feature protagonists dealing with private angst, but it’s not enough to paralyze them into inaction the way it frequently does with ordinary folk. And yes, superheroes usually have to endure pain on their way to the climax (some more than others), but it’s a comfortingly foregone conclusion they’ll defeat the villain. Biff! Kapow! Take that, Ares!

Finally, superheroes are effective. They kick ass in a way we desperately want to… but most of the time, most of us can’t. They’re what I call “traditional heroes” as opposed to “non-traditional heroes,” meaning they’re larger than life and instinctively inclined towards heroic acts, either because of natural factors imbuing them with supernatural abilities (it’s easy to be Wonder Woman when your dad is Zeus, the head Greek god), or because their intellectual/scientific/spiritual prowess allows them to develop marvels (pun intended) like an Iron Man suit --- without it, Tony Stark is just another arrogant rich guy with a talent for snappy one-liners. In other words, they’re not Frodo Baggins or Katniss Everdeen, ordinary schleppes forced into situations they would never, in their wildest dreams, undertake if given the choice. But when Wonder Woman/Diana Prince decides she’s going to do something about those nasty ol’ Germans on the other side of no-man’s-land, she does so with justifiable confidence she’s not going to be cut to shreds two seconds after she climbs out of the trench… which would be the fate of pathetically normal wanna-be heroes like you and me.

So, despite the occasional --- sometimes constant --- silliness in these stories/films causing me to roll my eyes, there are redemptive qualities to them.

Which, I guess, in the end, is all that really matters. Biff! Kapow!

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Three Minutes of Redemption

1/8/2018

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Recently, I finally got around to watching one of the bumper crop of superhero movies Marvel and DC are deluging us with nowadays (we can talk about why that’s probably occurring another time). The film in question? Wonder Woman. But strangely, I came away from it feeling powerfully impacted, to my own puzzlement. I mean, it’s just another superhero film, right? Yawn.

No. The weird thing is, at least parts of it were more --- much more. I found myself drawn back to one sequence in particular, over and over. One that had the capacity to bring tears to my eyes. Say what? Why. Is. This. Happening?

The sequence is very short --- less than three minutes. But what a powerful three minutes. Let me give you a writer’s perspective of what occurs in that span. Then I’ll give you the YouTube address and you can watch it yourself:

Diana (Wonder Woman) is with an undercover group making their way through the World War One trenches of the front lines in Belgium. She has just spoken to Flemish refugees in the trench, who tell her a horrific tale of massacre and enslavement, and her first response --- which should be everyone’s first response, by the way --- is “we have to help these people.” Unbridled, clear-eyed altruism.

Except… her response is met with stony indifference. Captain Steve Trevor, her world-weary go-between and colleague who is, like many of us, just a little too cynical for his own good, dismisses her. Steve’s seen much evil and malign indifference, probably starting well before the war even started, and he’s seen a boat-load more since then, horrors and evil no person should have to witness. And he’s… well, he’s jaded. We’ve got a mission to undertake, he says, that doesn’t include this. Besides, there’s no way we can get across no-mans-land to the affected village. Going over the top is suicide. It’s just not possible, and we can’t save everyone. That’s not what we’re here to do.

(Sigh. Oh, Steve. I understand your cynicism, your warped perspective. I really do. Many of us do. We live it daily in what Thoreau called our “lives of quiet desperation,” because that’s what this flawed world we live in tends to do to us. But dammit, Diana’s right, Steve… and fortunately for you --- for us all --- she’s going to do something about it. And she won’t waste time trying to persuade you over to her perspective --- because she instinctively knows how close-minded we humans tend to be.)

So she turns away. There might be half a second of indecision as she does so, but if it exists at all, it really is a split second or less. And within the space of that moment, she’s made up her mind. She lets down her hair, dons her tiara, turns back to Steve, who’s conferring with other colleagues, and says, “No, but it’s what I’m going to do.” Translation: stay here if you want, you emotional cripple. But I am not going to stand idly by and let this atrocity continue.

Immediately, she climbs the ladder leading from the relative safety of that muddy ditch into a pretty good earthly approximation of Hell, shucking her long coat in the process. Both actions shock the crap out of the troops cowering around her, and there are some truly great reaction shots of their collective appalled disbelief at this nearly naked woman (by 1918 standards, anyway) apparently committing suicide by going over the top.

She stands --- upright! On a First World War battlefield! --- and starts walking across a barren landscape reminiscent of the moon. A bullet rockets towards her, and she deflects it with the metal cuff/bracelet running from her wrist towards her elbow. As the startled Germans realize someone apparently has the insane temerity to walk alone towards their lines, they scramble to begin firing on her. A small smile crosses her lips as the realization comes to her: I can do this. And she starts to run, deflecting bullets as she does so. Her confidence is nothing short of inspiring… and there’s something unbelievably hopeful in what she’s doing.

The Germans fire a trench mortar, and still running, she unslings her shield, using it to bat the offending shell away. Then the Germans get their machine gun going, and she is forced to crouch behind the shield as a hail of lead hits her. But her posture is not that of a defeated, terrified woman; it’s a fighting crouch demonstrating she is by no means beaten. (More amazing camera work, especially an overhead view of this firestorm of lead ricocheting off her shield.)

Then her colleagues race up to help her… and they do… the trench is taken so she and they can move on the town… and the moment is over. But what an incredibly inspiring moment. Watch it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKKHwNPRBck

(By the way, the soundtrack is a marvelous accompaniment to this entire sequence --- in fact, hugely responsible for magnifying the atmosphere of the events. It is uplifting… hopeful…determined. A perfect complement to the events we watch. Music can so often be that.)

So… what affected me so much about this tiny sequence? I’ve thought about it, finally concluding it’s related to some of my favourite poetry, lines I like so much I’ve included them in my novel Gryphon’s Heir, lines I like so much I’ve made them favourites of my protagonist, too. They’re by Tennyson from his poem Ulysses, universally well known: To strive, to seek, to find… and not to yield. The sequence from the film is a truly marvelous representation of them.

Because, you see, it’s a testament to all that is good within us: it’s about striving, about standing up for what’s right, even when those around you are disinclined and disbelieving. It’s about refusing to give in to apathy and the forces of darkness in our world, remembering, as Edmund Burke said, that “all that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

And ultimately, it’s about redemption… which, my God, this battered world of ours could use a little of as we come to the dawn of another year.

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D.R. RANSHAW

The Origin Story

Stranger Thing

Biff! Kapow!

Three Minutes of Redemption

D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

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