https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgR_ByXnV6c

Transcript

Let me start off by admitting that the title of this video is a bit hyperbolic. Of course there are writers out there who are capable of creating good original fiction, but I don’t believe I’m just indulging the cantankerous old man within me when I say, most fiction in all its various mediums is bad and getting worse.

The fact that so many new movies coming out now are all remakes that fail to surpass the originals in critical reception is just one noteworthy indication of what I’m talking about.

Another is the fact that comic books are what inspires the most successful cinema today and I have nothing against comic books but when they become the primary source of literary inspiration for our story telling, I think it’s a safe to say we’re suffering a state of decline in our story telling ability.

And this is an ongoing debate within the film community – whether or not comic book movies are true cinema because the effect of this decline and loss of a once great story telling medium is felt even among those who have a vested interest in keeping the machine running.

Even among genres and franchises that should be a sure thing, we find controversy over the critical response with deeply polarized opinions. The ongoing attempts to bleed profits from the Star Wars and Harry Potter franchises is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.

So in the reluctant admission that we seem to be losing our ability to tell good original stories it got me wondering about what it is that is essential to a good story and what is lacking in today’s crop of film, stage, and literature.

To understand what makes a good and complete fictional story, with a beginning, middle, and end, I think it’s important for us to understand the origins of this kind of story telling.

And since I don’t have the historical chops to lay this out in much detail, I’ll rely on the wisdom and knowledge of GK Chesterton who said that romance stories are the invention of Christians. And by romance, he wasn’t talking about romance in the way we use that word in a sub genre like romantic comedies. Romance, in this sense, means like a fantastical adventure story.

These kinds of stories find their origins in medieval Christian Europe and this helped me understand what key ingredients we should look for in a good story because Christian civilization introduced something entirely novel to the consciousness of humanity – and that was the importance of mercy and compassion.

We’re conditioned by these concepts and because of the language of secular politicians who want to portray themselves as benevolent and compassionate overseers, it’s easy to disassociate these concepts from their Christian origins, but it’s important to understand how foreign these concepts were to a pre-Christian world.

A good example of this is found in the efforts of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate who is so named because of his departure from Christianity and his attempts to rehabilitate paganism in the Roman empire.

One of the problems Julian ran into in his attempts to encourage the populace to re-embrace the old roman cults was the fact that Christianity found a great deal of appeal in large portions of the citizenry because of its elevation of the common person and the poor.

No other system of religious devotion or law saw any use in the poor and the sick and so would treat them as a burden to be discarded. But Jesus taught us to regard the least and the last as the first in his kingdom and that great care should be taken in loving and providing for such souls.

This made Christianity extremely appealing to the poor and the middle classes which always constitutes the majority of people.

Julian’s response was to try to compete with the charitable work of the Church with his own state welfare system in the hopes that people would turn their affections to his pagan state and away from the Christian Church.

So this collective concern for compassion and mercy really was a novel thing introduced by Christianity and I think it helps us understand what is an essential ingredient in a good story – which is that it should arouse our compassion.

Because compassion doesn’t come easily to us. For example, you could hear about some tragedy on the news and maybe acknowledge it as a tragedy, but not be personally and emotionally affected by it. Simply knowing that someone has faced adversity isn’t usually enough to provoke our empathy.

In order to really care about someone else’s story, you have to spend time learning about them and getting to know their situation and then, because of that personal investment, you may begin to experience actual compassion.

Because compassion, etymologically, means to suffer with someone else. It means their suffering and pain becomes your suffering and pain and on the face of it, why would anyone want to do that? We want to avoid pain and suffering so why would we want to become personally and emotionally invested in the life of someone who is suffering so that it unavoidably becomes our own?

Looking at it from that angle should help us understand why mercy and compassion were seen as irrational and undesirable before Jesus told us to make them a moral priority.

And since experiencing the pain of others is, on the surface, so unattractive to us, we need something to reproduce the experience of caring about someone else’s struggle without it costing us too much.

And this is what the romantic novel accomplished. It distracted us from our self centered preoccupations and fixed our attention on someone else’s story for a change and as it did so it awakened the conscience of each person, each reader, with an awareness that caring about someone else’s struggle, even if that person isn’t real, makes life a lot more interesting than if you spend all your time caring only about your own struggle.

It’s like a laboratory experiment with compassion wherein you feel the effects of it without having to experience the full cost of that investment and if it is effective, it should teach us the lesson that if caring about the struggles of fictional people can awaken us to our truest appreciation of our own humanity, then learning to care about the struggles of real people will be even more fulfilling and enlightening.

And this is why character development in any story is absolutely essential. We need to spend some time getting to know the characters and they have to be believable ones, before you dump them into some exceptional conflict.

This is why you’ll often hear movie critics who didn’t like a movie say things like, I just didn’t care about what happened to the characters. We have to care about them as if they were real people because this is what reproduces this experience of compassion.

This is also why remakes and reproductions of stories that we are already familiar with are ineffective. We already know that story and we’ve already invested ourselves in it. Retelling it doesn’t produce the experience of compassion in us the way an original story does.

Characters also can’t be mere accessories to some catastrophe or cosmic struggle. They can’t be implements of the author to provide exposition or to advance the plot. They have to be realistic and their humanity has to be authentic.

That’s why writers like Dostoyevsky was so effective in his craft. He had a deep understanding of human psychology and he could portray that in the characters that he rendered in his stories.

So it’s not enough to make a movie that features lightsabres, wands, or superpowers and expect it to be wortwhile. Those things have to be secondary to the realistic composition of characters that we are able to spend enough time with that we begin to care about their story so that when conflict arises, we are emotionally and compassionately invested.

We want to be able to experience what it’s like to have someone else’s pain become our own and then discover that this communicates something to us about our deepest identity as human beings.

So, all of this does raise the question, why is it so important for us to suffer the pain of someone else’s suffering. Why is that a profound lesson in our own humanity? Well, I’d argue that it reveals something about the deepest mystery of the universe which is that the ground of all being and existence, the uncaused cause, and the unmoved mover, is one who takes the suffering of others upon himself.

It is an experience of the nature of God who is love – love being absolute concern for the good of the other at the expense of self. It’s a complete abandonment of self and the greatest summary of this essential truth is the cross of Jesus the Christ.