Say, do you remember when you were a kid and embarked on what we’ll quaintly call a CCOA --- Certain Course Of Action? I’m talking about the type of CCOA which would cause the stone statues in the 1986 film Labyrinth to declaim in sepulchral tones, “For the path you take will leaaaad to certain destruction!” Yeah, that kind of CCOA. And your mom, God rest her soul, on learning of this CCOA --- as she always did, because most moms, mine included, had a kind of weird, omniscient knowledge of precisely what was going on in their kids’ lives, even in the Stone Age BC (Before Cellphones) --- would give you that patented sideways buffalo eye and say crisply, “You do know how this is going to end, don’t you?”
Either you genuinely didn’t… which, to be fair, did occur once in a while as you steamrolled on in blissful, idiotic ignorance… or waaay more often, you did, at least kinda, but employing that uniquely human trait of laughable, impossible rationalization, you’d been trying to convince yourself no, it wasn’t going to end that way. Except… well, yeah, you knew, deep in your black little pre-pubescent heart, just how it was going to end: badly. Very badly. Okay, catastrophically.
Many literary characters seem to share one or the other of those two approaches to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune we writers routinely hurl at them. I was reflecting on this truism in the wake of the latest Netflix offering my wife and I have been watching for our evening viewing pleasure, a moderately entertaining series called Suits (like much of what’s on offer on TV, it seems we’re late to the party yet again, as Suits originally aired from 2011 to 2019). It follows the adventures of a group of New York lawyers and their hifalutin machinations in the world of finance and crime. (I’m sure lawyers must view these series with the same kind of popeyed scepticism I experienced whenever watching a TV series about teachers in a school setting. Like, do screenwriters have the slightest idea how things really go?)
The protagonist of Suits is Mike Ross, a brilliant young guy with an eidetic memory who comes to work as a lawyer at a top-flight law firm which only takes Harvard grads. (Meghan Markle --- yes, that Meghan Markle --- plays Mike’s love interest. In her pre-Duchess of Sussex days, obviously. Not sure whether she and Harry have watched the show, which can get a bit… ahem… steamy.) There’s just one slight problem: Mike isn’t a Harvard grad. In fact, he hasn’t gone to any law school or passed the bar exams, which, of course, means he isn’t a lawyer. But in the first of numerous willing-suspension-of-disbelief moments, ace lawyer Harvey Specter hires Mike anyway to play Let’s Pretend for a nine-season run. Why a fully qualified lawyer would do such a boneheaded thing in the first place, opening up both himself and his firm to all kinds of later criminal charges related to fraud, does defy belief, but without it, we’ve got no premise for the series, so swallow thine unbelief, callous viewer.
Now, this is not to say stories about monumental cons can’t be successful --- the classic Robert Redford/Paul Newman 1972 film The Sting is a shining example of a brilliant tale about a successful con, meticulously crafted, layers built upon layers, with a smart plot twist at the end providing a genuine surprise. But if you’ll pardon the imagery, Suits has no sting, for it’s not nearly as cleverly written and, as viewers, we’re just left wondering when --- not if --- Mike and Harvey’s fraud is going to come crashing down. How isn’t it obvious to these two clowns the silliness they’ve constructed cannot endure indefinitely?
I suppose it’s a classic case of When The Obvious Isn’t. Writers utilize this all the time, bringing me back to our childhood example. Situations like this occur because readers/viewers become the mom figure: we know the plan isn’t going to work, but the characters involved either genuinely/naively think it will, or know it won’t and are deluding themselves into trying to believe it will. And they generally don’t have a metaphorical mom-figure to give them the buffalo eye. (Or if they do, they simply ignore it.)
I recently saw a comment on social media to the effect that characters in horror stories obviously live in a universe where there are no horror stories, because things which are completely obvious to readers and viewers of the horror genre, like tropes and plot devices and clichés, oh my --- just aren’t to the characters involved, bless their tragically innocent little trusting hearts. And I think we can extrapolate that to other genres, too.
I mean, everyone familiar with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings knows instinctively from the get-go that Boromir has an all-too-intense interest in the Ring, an interest which won’t turn out well for him or others destined to become collateral damage. (To be fair, Jackson’s film version amps this unhealthy desire up quite a lot more than the book does, with several very broad hints even the dullest filmgoer would be hard-pressed to miss. Pete can be pretty heavy-handed when he wants to be.) So the question becomes… why doesn’t anyone else pick up on this? Well… once more, in fairness, they do, sorta. You can see (again, more in the film version) Aragorn has deep misgivings about Boromir’s conduct, and Gandalf twitches those bushy eyebrows with a pretty fair buffalo eye look of his own… but neither of them does much of anything concrete to head off the eventual, inevitable disaster.
Most of us have a peculiar blind spot in our life journeys… When The Obvious Isn’t, at least to us. (It can be quite obvious to those around us.) It’s not particularly efficient in real life, and is mostly downright disastrous most of the time, but makes for a useful foible in our literary endeavours.
“Why doesn’t the character see what we see?”
“Because, old boy, it’s a classic case of When The Obvious Isn’t.”
“Ah, of course. Obviously.”
Either you genuinely didn’t… which, to be fair, did occur once in a while as you steamrolled on in blissful, idiotic ignorance… or waaay more often, you did, at least kinda, but employing that uniquely human trait of laughable, impossible rationalization, you’d been trying to convince yourself no, it wasn’t going to end that way. Except… well, yeah, you knew, deep in your black little pre-pubescent heart, just how it was going to end: badly. Very badly. Okay, catastrophically.
Many literary characters seem to share one or the other of those two approaches to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune we writers routinely hurl at them. I was reflecting on this truism in the wake of the latest Netflix offering my wife and I have been watching for our evening viewing pleasure, a moderately entertaining series called Suits (like much of what’s on offer on TV, it seems we’re late to the party yet again, as Suits originally aired from 2011 to 2019). It follows the adventures of a group of New York lawyers and their hifalutin machinations in the world of finance and crime. (I’m sure lawyers must view these series with the same kind of popeyed scepticism I experienced whenever watching a TV series about teachers in a school setting. Like, do screenwriters have the slightest idea how things really go?)
The protagonist of Suits is Mike Ross, a brilliant young guy with an eidetic memory who comes to work as a lawyer at a top-flight law firm which only takes Harvard grads. (Meghan Markle --- yes, that Meghan Markle --- plays Mike’s love interest. In her pre-Duchess of Sussex days, obviously. Not sure whether she and Harry have watched the show, which can get a bit… ahem… steamy.) There’s just one slight problem: Mike isn’t a Harvard grad. In fact, he hasn’t gone to any law school or passed the bar exams, which, of course, means he isn’t a lawyer. But in the first of numerous willing-suspension-of-disbelief moments, ace lawyer Harvey Specter hires Mike anyway to play Let’s Pretend for a nine-season run. Why a fully qualified lawyer would do such a boneheaded thing in the first place, opening up both himself and his firm to all kinds of later criminal charges related to fraud, does defy belief, but without it, we’ve got no premise for the series, so swallow thine unbelief, callous viewer.
Now, this is not to say stories about monumental cons can’t be successful --- the classic Robert Redford/Paul Newman 1972 film The Sting is a shining example of a brilliant tale about a successful con, meticulously crafted, layers built upon layers, with a smart plot twist at the end providing a genuine surprise. But if you’ll pardon the imagery, Suits has no sting, for it’s not nearly as cleverly written and, as viewers, we’re just left wondering when --- not if --- Mike and Harvey’s fraud is going to come crashing down. How isn’t it obvious to these two clowns the silliness they’ve constructed cannot endure indefinitely?
I suppose it’s a classic case of When The Obvious Isn’t. Writers utilize this all the time, bringing me back to our childhood example. Situations like this occur because readers/viewers become the mom figure: we know the plan isn’t going to work, but the characters involved either genuinely/naively think it will, or know it won’t and are deluding themselves into trying to believe it will. And they generally don’t have a metaphorical mom-figure to give them the buffalo eye. (Or if they do, they simply ignore it.)
I recently saw a comment on social media to the effect that characters in horror stories obviously live in a universe where there are no horror stories, because things which are completely obvious to readers and viewers of the horror genre, like tropes and plot devices and clichés, oh my --- just aren’t to the characters involved, bless their tragically innocent little trusting hearts. And I think we can extrapolate that to other genres, too.
I mean, everyone familiar with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings knows instinctively from the get-go that Boromir has an all-too-intense interest in the Ring, an interest which won’t turn out well for him or others destined to become collateral damage. (To be fair, Jackson’s film version amps this unhealthy desire up quite a lot more than the book does, with several very broad hints even the dullest filmgoer would be hard-pressed to miss. Pete can be pretty heavy-handed when he wants to be.) So the question becomes… why doesn’t anyone else pick up on this? Well… once more, in fairness, they do, sorta. You can see (again, more in the film version) Aragorn has deep misgivings about Boromir’s conduct, and Gandalf twitches those bushy eyebrows with a pretty fair buffalo eye look of his own… but neither of them does much of anything concrete to head off the eventual, inevitable disaster.
Most of us have a peculiar blind spot in our life journeys… When The Obvious Isn’t, at least to us. (It can be quite obvious to those around us.) It’s not particularly efficient in real life, and is mostly downright disastrous most of the time, but makes for a useful foible in our literary endeavours.
“Why doesn’t the character see what we see?”
“Because, old boy, it’s a classic case of When The Obvious Isn’t.”
“Ah, of course. Obviously.”
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