It’s become clear to me that at some point, my idea of what makes a good story has diverged from the mainstream. I have a hard time with many movies these days, where it seems that no matter how interesting it is in the beginning, the end degenerates into twenty minutes of blowing things up, mayhem, or chaos that rises to the level of absurdity. Take the ending of the recent remake of “3:10 To Yuma,” with its never-ending gunfight and ridiculous, concluding “moral” choice which defies all logic. Now contrast this with the climax of “Gone, Baby, Gone” which is a conversation between two people where the outcome will alter many lives.
I guess what I’m trying to get at it that a conversation can be more interesting, more dangerous, more fraught with peril that any action sequence.
And while were on action sequences, I’ve come to regard most of them as little more than pornography.
Now, I’m not anti-porn. But porn’s purpose is to titillate. Any time a story stops to titillate us, the narrative progression has stopped dead in its tracks. Yawn.
In the aforementioned “3:10 To Yuma,” what that story wanted to be was twenty minutes long. Four conversations between the two main characters, as each of their positions, feelings and choices change. Everything else is just fluff and porn.
I realize I am out of the mainstream here. And that our current industrial narrative manufacturing system does not allow those kinds of stories to reach the mass audience. How did I get here? I started out as a normal, geeky film buff. What happened to stick me so far beyond the pale?
I’m going to try to answer that with a series called The Stories That Ruined Me. Most of them will be movies and TV, since those are the main narrative marketplaces of our era. But there will also be theater, radio plays, music and who knows what else.
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