Story Killers - Characters Unwelcome (part 2)

(Read Part 1 of this article here first!)

I think that if we asked "what is the point of telling a story?", only someone with a really simplistic view would answer "to tell of a sequence of events". That is what a history book is about, perhaps, but isn't a story really about characters, and isn't the point of a story to either teach a principle of life or to portray a point of view so the listener/reader/viewer can understand it better? I would argue that that is the real point of storytelling. Hence, when a movie screenwriter or director messes with these aspects of a story, they are abusing the story for their own purposes. This is what really gets my goat. Let's talk about two ways that a movie maker can really screw up:

Changing the outcome or message of the story

Think of the old stories told to children by their parents and teachers. Think of fairy tales - think of Mother Goose or the Brothers Grimm. Many of the stories were gruesome or sad in their outcomes, mostly because they were morality tales - short parables to teach children some wisdom about life - don't trust strangers, don't wander off into the forest, don't obsess over something that you can't have, etc. Either they had negative examples, where foolish choices had bad consequences, or they were stories about human nobility, where the heroes made choices to do right and were held up as examples. In both of these areas the modern film industry hates to keep up this tradition. Just yesterday I heard an interview with a modern TV writer who expressed the thought that all good stories are about people being bad.

So in modern stories we find that the young, selfish person makes bad choices but gets what they want in the end, or we find that all of the characters are selfish and mean and everybody dies in the end, but for no really good reason. No nobility is expressed or implied. Look at Harry Potter, for example. He does develop some character as the story goes along, but in the beginning he is rebellious, sneaky, and never listens to anybody that gives him good advice, but it all works out in the end. (I wasn't bothered by the magic in the books but I was really annoyed that he was a hero even though he was so foolish - a bad example for kids reading the stories).

Now when a story has a noble character or a moral lesson, this is almost always the subject of screenwriting revisionism. As a set of good examples of this, take most Disney cartoons of the era starting with The Little Mermaid. In many of these, the original lesson is inverted. The original story for Mermaid, the silly, pining teen girl doesn't get the prince and hurls herself into the sea, becoming sea foam - which will cause all silly, lovesick girls to be reminded to stay unselfish and level-headed every time they look at the waves hitting the shore. Disney? Nah, too sad - let's have her get the guy even though she makes bad choices, ignoring her father, because it's "love at first sight". This happens in more than one movie but this is one of the more egregious examples. (For another, consider the happy nuclear family of Zeus and Hera in Disney's Hercules versus the actual story from Greek mythology with infidelity and Hera's persecution of Hercules).

In other movies, the director seems determined to take a happy story and make it a miserable one, evidently because his own life is empty and depressing and he wants to share it with everybody else. Another frequent example is a story that is patriotic in the book but made into some sort of liberal anti-war theme like The Hunt for Red October, where the original story was very anti-communist but the movie changed to an anti-first-strike-weapon movie (evidently at the prompting of Sean Connery, who thought that Clancy's motives for the captain's defection were not believable). This last example also deals with characters, so it's a good segue to the last movie sin that infuriates me...

Changing the character of the characters

Why do directors hate characters so much? It always amazes me that people who make books into movies (and claim that they liked the books) change the motivations and personalities of the major characters with such aplomb. I will illustrate with a few examples:

The book Patriot Games introduces the character of Jack Ryan to us for the first time. He is a hero because he does the right thing, for the right reasons. The terrorists in the book are not screaming, violent thugs but are instead scary figures whose very humanity seems to have been obscured by their evil ideology. One of the scariest scenes in the book is when Jack is in the British courtroom to testify gainst the terrorists, and he looks at the eyes of his nemesis, trying to see a common humanity there but fails to find any - just quiet coldness. In the movie, the terrorist screams death threats against Jack as he is dragged out of the courtroom. The end of the movie is worse. The high point in the book is when Jack gets the drop on this scary guy after he almost kills Jack's family. He wants to shoot this guy so badly, and knows that he will get away with it, but he decides not to take personal revenge by shooting this guy who is at his mercy and turns him over to the law. Jack is a strong believer in the rule of law. In the movie, Harrison Ford as Jack fights the bad guy in a flaming motorboat zooming out of control over the sea at night, finally impaling him on an anchor. Yeah, it makes a great action scene, but Jack Ryan as a character is lost.

An even more awful example (and why I hate Peter Jackson) is The Two Towers. That masterful book sets up for the final battle in the third book by telling of a series of important events that establish the moral qualities of the major characters. Big decisions rest on several rulers.

• In the book, Treebeard and the ents, who know very well the depredations of Saruman, decide (without much input from the hobbits) in the entmoot to take action. In the movie, the ents decide to be selfish isolationists and have to be tricked into fighting by Merry and Pippin. Huh?
  
• Theoden, who Gandalf heals from Wormtongue's lies by giving him the truth, shows his nobility by declaring (after Helm's deep) that he has every intention of honoring his age-old defense treaty with Gondor. In the movie, Gandalf heals Theoden by some sort of exorcism. Theoden basically says that Gondor can take their treaty and shove it until he is forced to change his mind later.
  
• In Ithilien, Faramir, when he determines what Frodo is doing, makes it very clear that, though he understands the temptation that had ensnared his brother Boromir, he has no intention of falling to that temptation. "I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo". In the movie, he goes "cool! I'm taking the ring so we can win the war!" and is forced to give it up mostly against his will.
• Aragorn in the book goes and helps with the defense of Helm's deep, cementing a deep friendship with Eomer which leads to a triumphant meeting in the battle outside Minas Tirith "though all the hosts of Mordor stand between us". In the movie, Aragorn never even goes to Helm's deep (Jackson instead has elves from Rivendell showing up there) so that he can have another soul-searching scene with Liv Tyler to convince him to be the king of Gondor after all.

All in all, this was a travesty of a movie. It is all the worse because there will probably not be another LOTR movie like that made in my lifetime. It makes absolutely no sense to me why Jackson did this, unless he was convinced that Tolkien wrote a nice story, but didn't do well on the characters. SORRY?? The hostility I feel about this is really hard for me to even express. Idiot.

Characters are (at least for me) the main part of a story. Change the motives and you change the story. The song in Gethsemane in Jesus Christ Superstar is another great example of a personality inversion. The real Jesus comes to lay down own His life to "seek and to save the lost". In JCS the Jesus character says "God you hold every card ... kill me, before I change my mind." Yeccch.

Somebody save us from film directors with an inflated view of their own storytelling skills. If you guys are so good, why don't you write your own stories and leave ours alone?