Chris Csont

Almost There

How would you change the way you behaved if you thought your goals were within reach?

Would you get frustrated at fewer things? Would you be more mindful of your time? Would you be more eager to take action?

You could replace “I’ll get to that later.” with “I’ll make time for that today.” You could replace “I’ll never get this done.” with “What’s next?”

There’s a time and place for critical assessment of your work. It doesn’t need to be how you start your day.

So why not behave as if you’re almost where you want to be? Why not start each day choosing to believe you are closing that distance?

Pacific Rim and Picking Protagonists

One thing I keep reading and hearing in the discussion of Pacific Rim is this phrase: “Raleigh Becket, the protagonist.” I take issue with that description.

Raleigh is to Pacific Rim as Nick Carraway is to The Great Gatsby: He’s a point-of-view character and a catalyst. The voiceover used at the beginning of the film is from Raleigh. He welcomes us in to the world of the film and the initial events in the film’s present tense feature him. While not every scene comes from his perspective, much of the film involves his presence. However, by many measures of how a protagonist is defined, Raleigh doesn’t fit the bill.

The character with the greatest growth and development during the course of the story is Mako Mori. Mako goes from Stacker Pentecost’s ward and assistant to a full-fledged jaeger pilot. She steps out from Stacker’s shadow and reveals herself to be a capable fighter and strong-willed individual.

Consider the focus the film puts on revealing Mako, both visually and in her character. When we first meet her, she is hidden under a coat and large umbrella, distinguished by the two blue streaks in her hair. We only begin to understand who she is in these scenes as she tells Raleigh that she doubts he’s the pilot for this job. Later, during the drift compatibility test, she removes her uniform shirt and shoes. She is more visually exposed, and through her actions, we also see further aspects of her character expressed: The tactician and physical combatant. We see more of the internal fire pushing her to get inside the jaeger. Finally, during the test, we go inside her own memories. We see, mediated through Raleigh’s experience in the drift, the small child in that blue coat who ran from a massive kaiju having lost her family. The film slowly pulls back the layers of Mako, revealing them to the audience, making the development and exploration of her character necessary work toward getting her in a jaeger and achieving the goal of finally defeating the kaiju.

Mako and Stacker are two characters who must come to difficult decisions over the course of the film. Raleigh has no questions about what he needs to do from the moment Stacker comes to take him away from the wall. Mako’s development as a hero is stifled by her conflict with Stacker, and how Stacker needs to learn to respect Mako as an adult/a pilot/an autonomous person who can live without his protection.

Raleigh is a catalyst for this conflict, pushing it toward resolution. Raleigh may push for Mako to be given a chance, or for Stacker to change his mind, but his words are not the most important actions. Mako’s years of training make her capable of proving her drift compatibility with Raleigh, and her efforts as a teammate with him make Gipsy Danger a key part in the final battles against the kaiju. Raleigh doesn’t make Stacker’s mind up for him, but he doesn’t allow Stacker to close the discussion. Stacker’s choices about what actions he will take are his own, and the result of his long relationship with Mako.

Consider the other side of this argument. What does support Raleigh as a protagonist? At the beginning he’s a former jaeger pilot whose brother was killed while they were linked together. He’s suffering from that trauma and tries to disappear, going off to work alone on construction of the Alaskan wall. However, all it takes is one quick speech from Marshall Pentecost to get him back in the game. Yes, Raleigh does need to learn to trust a new co-pilot and learn to let somebody else into his head, but these challenges don’t receive as much focus and screen time as the conflicts surrounding Pentecost finally letting Mako out of his protection, or Mako’s fulfilling her vengeance against the kaiju and realizing her potential as a jaeger pilot.

Furthermore, this film acts in the mold of a decentralized war film/team-up film than a single “hero’s journey” style story. While Mako’s conflict provides a spine for the story to follow once we’ve been introduced to the characters, she isn’t the only one involved in this fight. While Raleigh may make the final, decisive actions of the battle, the themes of the film center around the idea of cooperation being stronger than individual effort. Raleigh closing the rift couldn’t have happened without the sacrifice of Stacker and Chuck, the intelligence gathered by Newton and Gottleib, or his partnership with Mako.

This film weaves the theme of cooperation over isolation into almost every major beat. For example:

Jaegers need two, mentally linked pilots.
Newton’s attempt to drift with a kaiju required him to team up with Gottleib, putting aside their individual differences to better carry the neural load.
Kaiju are more deadly because of their hive mind. Each new one has learned from the experiences of the kaiju before it.
When Raleigh is working on the wall, the stakes for the workers are on an individual basis instead of focused on a greater victory for all. Instead of the foreman talking about how this wall will protect people, he says that if they do this work, they can earn individual ration cards for themselves. And soon after, we see how weak these walls are.

These are all aspects of a deeply embedded theme that makes picking out a single protagonist difficult at best and missing the point at its most extreme. This is not Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, etc. This is a movie about teamwork. This is a movie about how great victories aren’t accomplished alone. Identifying Raleigh as the (sole) protagonist misses out on this complexity.

Choosing To Like Things

“I guess I just like liking things.”

-Abed Nadir

After two years of film school, my 20-year-old self had come to a conclusion: Modern blockbuster filmmaking sucked. Give me Criterion or give me death!

Film study is wonderful in what you can learn about how great movies came together. You get to peek behind the curtain and see how the great magicians do their tricks. You also become painfully aware of when a film doesn’t live up to its potential. That understanding of what could/should be happening makes you acutely not only aware of when a film is bad, but you can rattle off 34 reasons why. Couple that with youthful exuberance and, well…

I became a snob. Sometimes an insufferable one.

But then, something happened. Friends dragged me to see the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. And I had fun. I cut down on the snobbery and thought about how any film that finds an audience must have some value. To connect with one person is hard enough. Imagine what it takes to connect with millions.

But once you’ve peeled back the curtain and looked at what’s there, you can’t undo that. The desire to point things out that don’t work, or tear things down if they’re particularly offensive, can rear its ugly head at any time. The reasons can range from failures of narrative clarity to issues of representation. These feelings become even more acute when you add in your hopes, and there have been many times (this summer, especially) where I’ve had hopes dashed.

A well-argued post that champions something on its merits has a greater potential for value than a negative post working to tear something down. Even if that argument is sound.

I’d rather like things. I don’t want to remain silent about things I see as destructive or offensive, but I don’t want to engage them here. I’d rather talk about what works. The spectacular things. The times when narrative challenges without becoming inscrutable. Where films bring us real, dimensional humans instead of an amalgamation of tropes and stereotypes. Where the audience gets to witness a true spectacle.

I’ll leave you with a clip. This is the scene that I saw for the first time when I was… maybe 12? My dad sat me down to watch the PBS affiliate’s weekend movie: The Third Man I was already enjoying it, but then this scene happened, and it gave me ideas about what I needed to do for the rest of my life.

That’s the kind of movie I want to spend my time talking about.

On not knowing what it is

Per my previous post on avoiding writer’s block, I’m working on more than one project right now. One of these scripts is brand new, though some of the ideas have been percolating in Evernote and a previous script for a while now. And it’s at this point, where I’m making the transition from idea to actual pages that I’m running into an issue:

I don’t know what this script is for.

It could be something low-budget. Possibly even something I’d want to produce myself. It could be a little more action-packed and blockbuster. It might not even be the story that I thought it was when I committed to figuring this one out.

This is the part where I bring up the fact that I’m bad at Buddhism. This kind of thinking is focusing on the end result and not on the act of writing. It’s a less mindful approach than working to discover the story and see where it needs to go as opposed to figuring out what kind of box I’m trying to place the finished script in.

Coming from a film school background, there were plenty of late nights working with specific limitations. “We only have 15 seconds worth of film left.” “What do you mean we can’t shoot on the shoulder of the freeway?” “How can we show that in a way that doesn’t involve 1,000 animated paper cranes?” These were concrete obstructions imposed by the need to have something to turn in by the end of the semester.

Sometimes a lack of constraints can be a frustration. I need to be reminded that in this draft I can write literally anything, and that’s OK. It’s all wide open. It’s a time to remember that if the first draft shows promise, external constraints will come soon enough.

What We Do When The Sky Falls

Consider these four films that all start from the same basic place: When Worlds Collide, Armageddon, Melancholia, and Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World

All of these movies have a big thing in common: Something large is headed toward Earth and will obliterate it. That’s it. Half a log line. But the characters the narrative focuses on, the degree of agency they have in the chain of events, and the tone the film chooses to take make each one unique.

When Worlds Collide focuses its story on a group of scientists and survivalists who discover that a star named Bellus is moving toward Earth and will consume it. They propose to build spaceships to take settlers from Earth to Zyra, an Earth-like body orbiting Bellus. With no hope for the Earth to survive, the movie puts its focus on the scientists, pilots, and engineers involved in the escape effort. The core conflicts involve the construction of the rockets to take people to the new planet, deciding who will be able to make the journey and who will be left behind, and the gamble of whether or not the escape from Earth will succeed.

Armageddon has a slightly smaller object hurtling toward Earth, but one that will still wipe out all life. Like with When Worlds Collide, the focus is on people whose efforts impact more than just themselves. NASA recruits a drilling team to go up and detonate the asteroid before it can hit Earth, and the conflict of the story focuses on whether or not this mission succeeds (since this movie offers the possibility that Earth may survive).

Melancholia opens with a flash-forward, showing that the Earth is definitely going to be crushed by a giant planet entering its orbit. There is no hope of escape. No chance of averting extinction and destruction. And then it cuts to a wedding. The movie focuses not on people who have any particular connection to astronomy, the government, or the military. These are people whose understanding of what’s happening is filtered through reports that they hear and strange events that they witness. The movie focuses on how these people deal emotionally with the certainty of impending doom; people who have no position or ability to alter the larger course of events. Because of their lack of agency against the large object hurtling toward them, their story comes from the way they interact with each other, and how they work toward resolving their interpersonal conflicts before the inevitable collision.

Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is similar to Melancholia in that its main characters lack the ability to stop the inevitable extinction of life on Earth (For example, Steve Carell’s Dodge is an insurance salesman). However, the tone is different, and the focus more hopeful. Instead of waiting out the end, this is a movie where the main characters are looking to reconnect with others before the end: a long lost love, an estranged father, distant family members, etc. Despite the certainty that by the end of the movie all these characters will be dead, the movie plays out as a romantic comedy.

Doubts will come up about your writing, sometimes about whether or not you’re saying anything original, or if you’re doing anything different enough to get noticed. Similarities to other stories or conflicts don’t necessarily mean that you’re telling the same story. Elements like giant asteroids/planets hurtling toward Earth, vampires, terrorists, or the breakup of a marriage are jumping off points. Unique storytelling is all about who and how.

Who do we focus on in this situation?

How do they tackle the obstacles presented to them?