June 06th, 2024

                       Genre Brain: Some Reflections on Saving Cats and Pulling Ships Uphill
The other night a writer friend of mine said something that’s been sticking in my craw, ever since. I can’t remember the exact context of his comment, only that he complained that too many writers lately have “genre brain.”
I didn’t press him too hard on what he meant, probably because I think I knew. The formulae popular in screenwriting—especially the more recent “Saves the Cat” beat sheet invented by Blake Snyder—seem to have replaced former formulae, like those of Syd Fields. Fields, for those who don’t know, popularized the concept of three-act structure.
Some would claim that Aristotle in his “Poetics” pioneered the concept (and beat Fields by practically a couple millennia.) Strictly speaking, though, that’s not quite true, as Aristotle broke structure into two acts—consisting of complication and denouement—split by the triphthong-bearing peripeteia. My main objection to Aristotle’s method is that “peripeteia” is simply too unwieldy a word. After years of speaking German, Greek (as well as French) words seem to contain too many damn vowels to me. German probably has the opposite problem, with too many fricatives and glottal stops, but I’ve been speaking it so long that I don’t notice. Like the fish who’s been swimming all his life, I don’t know I’m wet or even what water is.
As for my problems with Fields and Snyder, they may differ from my writer buddy’s in their specifics, but in general I think we have the same gripe. There is something stifling about this cookie cutter approach to the creative act. Where is the organic? The spontaneous? Why, when I try to write using this format, do I hear Bukowski’s old lament echoed on the wind, about the modernist writers he found so unsatisfying? “It’s a job they’ve learned, like fixing a leaky faucet.”
If I wanted to fix leaky faucets, I would have become a plumber, and no doubt would have made more money with that than with this. Granted, wrangling feces from a toilet with an extended snake tool seems undignified, but it’s probably less humiliating than a long streak of getting nothing but form letter rejections. Yes, even after all these years, I still go months at a time without getting a “yes.”
Those who prefer the hard-fast patterns of Fields—or the harder and faster dictates of Snyder—would no doubt object to my objections. “Who,” they might say, “are you to gainsay centuries of storytelling wisdom? Nay, eons of the stuff?” And they might have a point. If there is some innate storytelling drive in humans, some symmetry in well-told tales that we all respond to, what makes me think I can buck the trend?
Indeed, if it’s all so innate—from cavemen painting mastodons on limestone walls to your uncle telling a dirty joke—why even try to fight it? Such a storytelling structure would be as much a part of our collective racial makeup as, say, fear of the dark.
Such narratological devices as “the rule of three,” seem to hint that storytelling is in fact more science than art. Pit Goldilocks against two bears and the story feels underdeveloped, missing something. Add in a fourth bear and a fourth bowl of porridge and it begins to feel more quantitatively top heavy.
How many times did Jesus claim Peter would deny him? Hint: it wasn’t two and it wasn’t four.
Fine and well, then, but then why would Snyder or Fields insist on writing books on the subject? If it’s indwelling and natural, then what’s to teach, learn, or even remind ourselves by taking a look at a “beat sheet” just to give ourselves a refresher?
I’ll stop with the rhetorical questions to point out a couple of things. First, one should always consider not only the source of advice, but the CV of the source. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but while Snyder (R.I.P.) may be regarded as master of popular diegesis, he also wrote “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.” Besides that, his only other feature-length credit is “Blank Check,” a sub-Nickelodeon affair about a boy who comes into possession of a million bucks while running from the mob. Imagine taking the script for “Home Alone,” putting it into a blender with “Brewster’s Millions” and adding a rollerblading tween from a Sunny D commercial and voila! You’ve got “Blank Check.”
I’m sure it entertained millions of kids at the time, and no doubt evokes nostalgic memories for those who saw it in its first run. But this is not William Goldman, who gave us “The Princess Bride,” and also gave us his own, very un-Snyder-ish maxim: “Nobody knows anything.”
Getting to my second point, relying on the beat sheet is probably far more justifiable for a film than for a book. A film, after all, is much more collaborative, and thus at least some sort of barebones skeleton needs to be available to reference for all involved. The great directors—your Leone’s or Tarantino’s—might have the whole thing visually in their heads (and with Tarantino, the dialogue’s also in the ear). But the crew needs to be clued in, and everyone needs to be on the same page, literally as much as figuratively.
Even a moderate-budgeted studio picture requires shelling out tens of thousands of dollars a day. Craft services for a writer is a burrito and a pitcher of black coffee (and a roll of toilet paper after that.) The logistics of feeding a bunch of people and lighting a set is quite another animal.
Yes, a movie, unlike a book, requires money, usually gobs of it, even in this era of digital filmmaking and easy-to-use editing software. If I sit down in front of this computer and type a novel that ends up being a piece of shit, it’s no biggie. I can simply crack my knuckles, walk the dogs around the block, bitch and moan about being a failure, and try again. The only thing wasted is my time.
It's completely different for a filmmaker. If a filmmaker creates an absolute piece of shit, they’ve not only wasted their own time. They’ve wasted the time and money of other people. They may, in the future, find it hard to secure financing for any other projects. There are no such limits imposed on a writer. You must secure no more money than is required to get a licensed copy of MS-Word or ribbons for the Underwood (for all you luddites.)
Thus it makes sense for the Hollywood crowd to play it safer, since sometimes the rule—as disheartening as it sounds—is to play it safe or don’t play at all.
Granted, there is a small corpus of roguish madmen and women—your Herzog’s, your Lynch’s—who are willing to pursue their visions over a cliff, if need be. But since any producer who gets involved with them knows this by now, they can’t complain if the thing only breaks even, or even loses money. Call it a prestige picture, write it off as an arthouse excess, and just make sure the capeshit tentpoles open big enough to subsidize the more rarified fare. That way Herzog can keep pulling boats over mountains and Lynch can keep unwrapping his plastic-covered muses as they wash from the rivers of his subconscious onto our benighted shores.
This brings us back to writing, though, and away from filmmaking. To my friend’s railing against “genre brain” and my own concurring with his grievance. I think the dude was right. Not only that, I think, as a writer, with less to lose, you owe it to yourself to risk more.
There’s something Willem Defoe said in an interview, some seemingly counterintuitive advice he gave that, in light of tonight’s post, now seems brilliant.
“Try to fail.”
Why not? There’s no consequence, and you can always hit backspace. Or, if the day’s work is really shit, hit CTRL+A and DEL and start over tomorrow. Or tonight. What else is there to do but get overwhelmed by the limitless number of choices available on Netflix, or to fall down a YouTube rabbit hole that starts with funny bloopers and ends with a two-hour documentary on the Illuminati that has you wanting to pull the fillings from your skull with a pair of pliers, lest “they” use the metal to send signals?
No one will be the wiser, and you’ll be left facing that blank pixilated canvas once more. Ready to begin again, and maybe even succeed without the goddamn beat sheet.
I’ll close with another quote, or rather a paraphrase, since I can’t remember who said it and thus can’t source it:
A work of art can either be complete, or it can be perfect. There’s something that results from floundering, without recourse to a net below them when one’s walking the tightrope. Genuine moments of spontaneity, real surprises, can only emerge when you let them. Too many techniques tend to put the Muse in a straightjacket.
How’s she supposed to favor you with her charms when she can’t even move her arms? Look at most of the best movies, and you’ll notice something. They have a messy, chaotic feel to them, a sense of unwieldiness, the pieces not quite fitting together. Apocalypse Now, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Once Upon a Time in America.
Read about the troubled production histories of these films, the frustrations felt by the filmmakers, the roadblocks encountered, the feelings of despair. Guns were drawn, murder and suicide contemplated.
But the work holds up, showing the pain and uncertainty were worth it.