FARGO and the “Hero’s Journey”
I often challenge people to prove me wrong about something. This isn't as much about "proving I'm right" but testing the position. If I ask people to mention a movie that won't relate to the Hero's Journey, which I did yesterday, that is about seeing what aspects of the writing process I've yet to factor in. Predictably, someone could mention a movie that is so minimalistic (structurally speaking) that it’s a little like saying "the world is round!" and having someone show you a snapshot of the horizon and saying "so why is the horizon a straight line?"
Because you are looking at a tiny, tiny, fraction of the complete arc. Still relates to the circle (in story or life, its more like a spiral. Nothing ever returns to the exact same place it started) but its difficult to see while standing on the ground. Get in a plane, fly up high, and you start seeing the curve.
ANY story structure is an attempt to take you up in that plane, or onto a space station, where you can really see that disk. Flat Earthers miss this entirely, and so can writers and readers if they don't find a perspective that works for them.
In that sense, it is an error to think I'm saying the Hero's Journey is "the best". Best for what? Not for writing stories per se. I think Robert McKee's structures are the most complete. But a little complicated. The simplest structure is probably "someone wants something, and something gets in the way." Working with newbie writers, it is amazing how many miss this, because they want to write "slice of life" stories. That's fine, and you can get as gentle and drifty as you want, as long as you can communcate your intent in a way the reader will say "ah. I'm reading a story" as opposed to "ah. This is an interesting description of a shopping trip." Can you write a story about a shopping trip? Absolutely. What si the difference between a simple description of someone making a shopping list, dressing, driving to the store, shopping, checking out, and driving home?
THAT is a fascinating question. I'd say that at some core level, the RESISTANCE to their efforts has to be expressed or sensed by the audience. Desire and resistance. A more certain story would include a crisis, a moment of greatest risk, and either failure or success.
Say…all that shopping, get to the checkout, and realize you've left your wallet. What do you do? Maybe you're just five dollars short. You don't have time to go home and get the wallet. You need every item in the cart. What do you do?
Steal the item? Go home for the wallet and be late? Forget the whole thing? Try to borrow money from someone in line? Convince the manager to give you credit? See a former boyfriend/girlfriend and, embarrassed, ask them to repay an old loan?
If the action relates to a lesson the character needs to learn, or an emotion they have stifled, the reader is likely to have that: "ah, a story" response.
So I could probably mention a dozen different patterns people use for story. The advantage of the HJ is that you can also use it in life itself, so if you master it, you have a hell of a tool. This matches my values, so I start with it. I KNOW that if I can get a student to understand it, we have an amazing way to leverage intelligence and heart.
Of all the movies anyone mentioned yesterday, FARGO was the most interesting. Because it is a master-class level of writing. Difficult to grasp exactly how the Coen brothers pulled it off, AND THEY DID. It was a great success. But trying to explain it in terms of the HJ was a challenge, and that was exactly what I wanted. MAKE ME THINK.
I was not satisfied with my answer: it was too complicated, even if totally sincere. But last night, going to sleep (ah, the hypnogogic state!) a much simpler way to look at it came to me, and it made me admire the Brothers even more.
So Fargo is a story about a Sheriff (Francis McDormand) dealing with a murder-kidnapping in town. She is also pregnant. She is much the same at the END of the story as she was at the beginning. It was not a story of transformation, it was an expression of her intelligence, emotion, tenacity, courage, and so forth. But there was no major crisis for her, nothing that emptied her out. So in reality, this was just another day or so on her "road of trials"--just "chop wood, carry water."
Stories with an unchanging protagonist are either placid, calm, "straight horizon" stories that generally attract much smaller (and more refined, often) audiences. They are acting master classes, with seriously talented performers subtly revealing depths. One might suggest that the meaning of her story is the final image, which I believe was her snuggling in bed with her husband. She is both protector of her community and the source of new life (pregnant). VERY rare in life or fiction. She tip-toed close to the danger line, saw terrible things, and is renewed and comforted by the simple comforts of home, the continuation of normal life.
Ordinarily, you would test her more. Place her in real danger: moral or physical. She'd survive and perhaps the last scene would be her in the hospital, having survived an ugly confrontation, IV drip in her arm, family at her side. Perhaps you place her marriage at risk, implying her husband is thinking of an affair, and have her courage and sacrifice knock him out of his destructive path, such that the sacrifice at the job heals the rift in her marriage. THAT would be typical storytelling.
The Coens were much, much smarter than that.
When you have a protagonist who doesn't change, you contrast them with other characters, or a world, that does. And boy oh boy, does FARGO have 'em. The crooks. Kidnappers.
I remember a writing coach who taught a pattern as follows:
Character in a situation with a problem where
Their efforts to solve that problem
Are a series of revelatory increasing FAILURES
Leading to a precipitating event
Making necessary a solution
Followed by a reward.
Get it? The character tries and fails, tries and fails, until it seems all is lost and they have an epiphany, and succeed.
But then the teacher flipped the script. There was a VILLAIN'S version of this. The villain, or antagonist is:
A character in a situation with a problem where
Their efforts to solve the problem
Are a series of revelatory increasing SUCCESSES
Leading to a precipitating event
Making necessary a FAILURE
Followed by PUNISHMENT
Now, these are clearly in strict terms. In a great story there will probably be a "dance" between success and failure, not quite so stark. Most James Bond films fall right into this pattern (with "dance added. Both Bond and Goldfinger have their successes and failures, and its nerve-wracking!). But Bond's greatest moment of success is Goldfinger's greatest moment of failure, and vice versa.
These are merely light and shadow, sound and echo. EVERY character in your story really as their own journey. And every one of them is the hero in their own story.
Back to FARGO. The two dumb-dumb criminals have big plans, and we watch them screw up at every turn, causing pain, fear and death--all played for laughs. It is a black, black comedy of two incompetent criminals spiraling down into defeat and death. Played against the back drop of a fairly deadpan "slice of life" with the Sheriff simply plodding after them.
The Sheriff is just "road of trials"
The criminals are experiencing a TOTAL failure to reach their goals. And whether viewed as their short term goals ( get the money and escape) or their REAL deeper goal, the one underlying almost all crime stories: the failure to become good citizens, productive adults finding love, building family, finding wisdom and aging with dignity, dying at peace..
The sheriff is in the flow of life, and life is an inexorable force. The thieves tried to "hack" that system: sex instead of love, partnership instead of friendship, violence instead of peace, theft instead of honest commerce. They are TOTALLY off the healthy path, and there is an obscene, rather guilty pleasure in watching them flounder, as we in the audience, identifying with the sheriff, reinforce our often unspoken confidence that slow and steady and honest is the way to live. They ran the red light and got T-Boned by fate.
So. Much. Fun. But to clarify: from the perspective of the HJ, the Sheriff is just on the road of trials, a tiny fraction of her life arc. The villains are off the path, fail the challenge and instead of rising to the next level (the student becomes the teacher) they fail utterly, and become a bad example: teaching the audience "crime doesn't pay" in the same way Luke and Han showed the audience that courage, faith, and friendship were the key to overcoming tyrany.
A tiny few degrees of arc on one hand, and the whole enchilada on the other. Fargo is the placid community living life, the criminals are interjected into that situation. By choosing which perspective or journey to follow, the film makers could have made a horrifying crime story (I mean, a woman in a burlap sack? Bodies in wood chippers? Oh my god!) and make it somehow absurd and funny, by juxtaposing "normal" life (home, family, love, pregnancy, duty, honor, intelligence, community) with the human bacteria invading the system.
A little "pore" looking in on a horrid event, guiding audience emotional response with funny dialogue, odd characters, and little scenes that don't advance the story but DO deepen the context and express character.
This is really, really advanced popular film-making. And there are many, many ways to analyze it. I'm not even saying what I just came up with is the best approach. I think its pretty good, and enables us to deepen our understanding of storytelling and life itself, in a useful way.
Anyway…yeah, I'm talking the Hero's Journey on FIREDANCE LIVE tomorrow at Noon Pacific, and how it relates to
Story structure
Story creation
Building a writing (or any other) career
Life itself in general.
That's a hell of a lot for one tool, and I don't think we have to torture it too much to make it fit. I appreciate the person who mentioned "FARGO"--that was an EXCELLENT test!
NOTE: We're BACK AT NOON this week! Thank you all the people who were flexible enough to join us at a different time last Saturday.
Steven Barnes is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Firedance LIVE!
Time: SATURDAY Apr 15, 2023 12:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
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