Conflicting Opinions: Between Barack and a hard place

That’s it; Barack Obama’s the presumptive Democratic nominee for President of the United States. He’s cutting himself in the JFK role, making big, ambiguous promises that are long on pledges and short on details. As a lifelong Democrat, Barack makes me nervous. His idealism is admirable, but I’ve just got a hunch that the boys in Washington are going to hand him his lunch. They won’t hit him head on, but he simply doesn’t have enough experience with playing their dirty game. His bills will get stonewalled, his policies will get mired down in committee and every time he turns around he’s going to be looking at another dead end. Meanwhile, they’ll smile and pat him on the back with one hand, while they stab him with the other. At least that’s my gut instinct. And as a small business owner in Chicago, where the clowns who run our government are taxing us to death to support rotten government contract deals and ridiculous and unsustainable pension and entitlement programs, I’m worried about just who Obama thinks is going to pay for all of this.

This isn’t a political blog; I’m here to write about writing. But stories are based on conflict and conflict is the very heart of politics. Here in the States we like to boil everything down to simplistic terms. Black and white, us versus them, right and wrong. Of course in every major story there are more shades of gray than colors in the rainbow, but that’s hard to package in a thirty second sound bite for the evening news. So we create two camps and you’re either in one or the other. Make up your mind.

Good stories are all about gray. You create the texture of good conflict in your work by making both sides accessible. There’s the knee-jerk impulse to give your hero all of the good qualities and motivations and his antagonist all the bad, but that just leaves you writing clichés. After all, even the villains are people; they were born, somebody, somewhere loves or loved them, they get up in the morning with hopes and dreams and fears. Creating good conflict means allowing both sides of the story to emerge to some degree, and then completing your argument by winning those of your audience who are sympathetic to your antagonist’s point of view over to your side. It requires subtlety, which is hard to come by in a world of Independence Day theatrics or Michael Moore’s lopsided excuse for journalism (and I like Michael Moore).

Sometimes it’s hard to reach that empathy. For example, I can’t see how any thinking person can really believe that this current war in Iraq is a good thing in any respect. We had the sympathy of the entire world on our side and Bush managed to turn that around into a ruined economy at a massive cost of human life and suffering. The initial attack against a clearly implicit Afghanistan? Absolutely, full speed ahead. But to segue from there into a petty fight to take a shot at your daddy’s old enemies while rewarding Cheney’s chums and co-conspirators with massive no bid contracts is criminal at best. Not to mention that with Abu Grebe and Guantanamo we’ve lost any pretension we might have had to being a leading moral force for human rights in the world. And let’s not forget the fact that the whole thing was born out of U.S. meddling in Iraq over the span of many administrations. If we’d kept our noses out of their business in the first place we wouldn’t be where we are today.

I choose that example because I know it’s a sore point. And I know that there are those people out there who are going to see red over that last paragraph. And their point of view is entirely alien to me. Yes, there are bad people in the world and they deserve to be dealt with harshly. Yes, probably Saddam Hussein was one of them. But you don’t burn down the barn because there are rats in the hay. And it’s more than a little disingenuous to then cry foul when the fire spreads to the house.

Say I was writing a screenplay about the Iraq War. How would I go about creating an empathetic point of view, in myself, that will stop the story from becoming a rant against the war? Because, if that’s what it becomes, then not only have I lost a large potential audience, but I’ve turned them off so completely that they’ll never listen to me again. I’ll have put myself neatly in to one of the two extreme camps and that label will stick. Then there are going to be a whole host of assumptions about where I stand on any issue, based on that one opinion.

I like to start by taking it from one single person’s perspective. If I create a life for that character, then I can start to listen to their voice, and not the chorus of inanity that adhering too closely to any ideology is going to bring. With listening comes understanding. Even if I still think they’re wrong.

Recent movies like Crash, Babel, or Syriana do a good job of opening up the story to different points of view. They make compelling viewing because they force the audience to lay down their stereotypical thinking and really think. And that, at base, is what art is all about. It makes us think about our relationship to the larger world and all the other billions of people in it.

The idea is that when creating your story’s conflict, be sure to include a dose of empathy for the villain. I really believe that that approach makes for a richer narrative and a more realistic environment. Don’t use your screenplay or your novel as a bully pulpit. That usually leads to hollow, one dimensional writing. Not that you have to go soft, but first construct a debate within your thesis. And then win that debate with logic and evidence, not emotion.

Of course emotion is what it all boils down to. It’s what makes us all tick. Emotion’s why we go to the movies – to be wowed, or awed, or to get all weepy. Think about the late, great Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie wherein even the title sets up a host of conflicting opinions about women and relationships and assumptions. In the end Dustin Hoffman gets the girl. But first he had to become a woman himself. That’s the sort of transformational arc that makes a compelling story. And offers a pretty dramatic conflict to boot.

— Ric Hess, Jun 4, 11:44 AM

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