My favorite film of all time is probably The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Why? Because it's uncompromising.
Also on my "top ten" list would be Pride & Prejudice. Why? Because it's uncompromising.
Also on my favorites list would be John Carpenter's The Thing. Why? Because it's uncompromising.
What do I mean when I say uncompromising? I'm talking about those stories that do not needlessly inject something into a story that IS NOT NEEDED for the sake of appealing to everyone.
Let me give you some examples. In The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the story is fairly simple. Three ruthless men are searching for buried gold in a desert during the most heated days of the Civil War. Clint Eastwood plays "the man with no name" or "Blondie" (the Good), Eli Wallach plays Tuco (the Ugly), and Lee Van Cleef plays Angel Eyes (the Bad). Throughout the film, these three men fight their way through war-torn desert lands to get to Sat Hill Cemetery, where Blondie has learned a great amount of war gold has been secretly buried. It's a fierce tale, filled with hard times, dusty scenery, lots of gun battles, sweating faces and grimy citizens. And NOWHERE in this movie is there a woman with a significant role, much less any indication whatsoever of a love story. In a word, the film is uncompromising.
In Pride & Prejudice, the story follows Elizabeth Bennett, one of five sisters that have a mother obsessed with getting them all married off to someone rich, so as to save the family. "Lizzie" meets with a man named Mr. Darcy, a seemingly insufferable rich fellow who is so taciturn he's never been seen to smile or even crack a joke. In this film (as in the book), Lizzie spends her time finding out just how wrong she might've been about Mr. Darcy, and Darcy finds error in his own assumptions of Lizzie and her family. It's a love story, and a good one. And NOWHERE in this film is there an action sequence, gun duels, or even a punch thrown. In a word, the story is uncompromising.
In John Carpenter's The Thing, a dozen or so men are stuck in the Arctic when a shapeshifting alien gets loose amongst them, shaping itself to look like any of them, creating paranoia and mass hysteria among the men. The film is about that claustrophobia, that fear of having nowhere else to go and no one you can trust, and how to handle yourself under that situation to do what must be done. And NOWHERE in the film is there a single woman, not even a sign of one. No love story, either, and not even any of the men TALKING about how much they miss their wife's cooking. In a word, the story is uncompromising.
When I talk about the virtues of being uncompromising in storytelling, people often don't know what I'm talking about. I rarely hear it mentioned in film or book reviews, and I know that I've never heard any of my friends bring it up, even as praise for a film that we both loved. I feel like this is very much an overlooked item when relating to someone why you did or did not like a book/film/TV show. An "unsung hero" of writing skills.
Too often, a writer (or film producers, or an overzealous editor) feels compelled to try and satisfy everyone with their story. To do this, they try to insert action sequences into a love story, or comedy in a horror film, or a love story in an already tense thriller. This rarely works. When a writer tries to introduce action, suspense, romance, philosophical insights, drama, comedy, and then some kind of moral to the story, it means each of these elements must share "screen time" with the other elements, usually to the detriment of all.
Decide what story you want to tell, and stray little from that. You can dab a joke in here and there with a horror story (The Thing), or have the hint of romantic interest in an action flick (the subtle romantic looks between Ripley and the soldier Hicks in James Cameron's Aliens), but go too far and watch your story crumble.
Sure, there are films, such as the Star Wars and The Matrix series, which seem to hit all those marks, but those are rarities, and even those have their decidedly BEST one (The Empire Strikes Back and the first Matrix film) while the others tend to fall on their face in many places, and some of them completely fall apart.
In writing, you need to get a fix on what you're trying to do with your story, and not try to stretch it in places in order to inject sequences that you hope will resonate to readers of other genres, as well. For instance, one of the problems I had with the Star Wars prequels was that, in the first film, young Anakin Skywalker was revealed to have TOO MUCH going on with him: the screenplay tried to sell us on the fact that little Ani was the Chosen One, and a boy missing his mother, and a slave struggling with slave issues, and a great mechanic, and a great racer, and a kid gifted in the Force who can see things before they happen, and setting the stage to fall in love with Padme. The problem is...that's WAY TOO MANY things for this kid to be.
And it's another reason I didn't like Lost.
Hold on, hold on, wait a minute! Calm down! I know there was good acting in it, and I know that, at least for the first two seasons, there was some nice writing. Nice--not great, just nice. Far, far too many things were inserted into this series to try and draw in every conceivable demographic or person with half an interest in mysteries. If you don't believe me, think about this. For the whole week following Lost's big series finale, the number one Googled search was "Lost series finale explained." Now, don't get mad at me (I've had Losties go nuts on me before), but all I'm saying is that if you need to check the Internet to figure out what you just watched...maybe it was too convoluted in the first place.
(Now, I'm only going to use Lost here so that I can reference and better demonstrate what I mean about the errors of compromising, while using a piece of storytelling we're all at least somewhat familiar with. That being the popular TV show Lost.)
In my humble opinion, Lost lost its way (seriously, no pun intended when I wrote that) the very instant that it felt it had to continually present mysteries, rather than present ONE GOOD MYSTERY (like where the hell they are, which alone is a good enough mystery to keep the series going) and then leave the characters alone on the island to fight for food, leadership of their clan(s), and searching for a way out while they WORKED TOWARDS THE ANSWER TO THE ONE GOOD MYSTERY.
Maybe one or two other "mini-mysteries" could have been introduced here and there, but there shouldn't have been any focus lost on the characters and the ONE GOOD MYSTERY. And for those who say that's exactly what the Lost writers did...see above where I talked about the most highly searched thing on Google the week after the finale.
And for those who say that the purpose was ambiguity to create controversy, all I can say is, "Well, I do, too. And you know what would've been very ambiguous? Just have them find a way off the island at the end and NEVER answer what it was, or where it came from." There you go, an enduring mystery, plenty of ambiguity and the ONE GOOD MYSTERY hasn't been compromised (there's that word again) by an endless parade of other mysteries.
Again, the fact that even the people who agree that the ending was good cannot agree at all on what the ending actually meant. I've yet to find any two people who can completely agree what it's about, and whenever somebody tells me, "Chad, that's the beauty!", I often reply, "Did you like the ending of No Country for Old Men, Inception, or 2001: A Spacy Odyssey?" They usually say "no" to at least one of those movies, and then I'm forced to point out, "Okay, so, you obviously don't feel that leaving a controversial mystery hanging as a loose end is always grounds for praise, so why do you feel Lost's mishmash of an ending is deserving of praise based on those grounds?"
(However, Lost had a high viewership and made its creators lots of money, so what the hell do I know?)
My point in all of this is that stacking things onto a plot you've already established (and one you've already found interesting enough to write about or else you wouldn't have started writing it) is typically only going to prove detrimental to your overall goals at the end. Keep a focus on what you want the story to be about, and don't cave to those voices (internal or external) that say that every single story MUST be like everything else.
When you do this, you only end up with something derivative...and I'll talk more about what I loathe about derivative things in my next post on writing.
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