On Clarity, Set-Ups, & The Dirty Word of Movie “Manipulation” (Patreon)

So one of the great joys of the last couple years has been getting to do these monthly movie marathon streams over on Twitch for Patreon folks (anyone can technically watch, but I organize, notify schedule, and post about them here on the site, so feel free to clue in). Most of the time there’s a vague, overarching theme of like: chaotic movies! Love stories! Or Christmas settings! But within them, I like to show all kinds of films within every marathon. There’s usually a golden age Hollywood film,  70’s auteur stuff, dumb 80s action, beautiful little dramas, and plenty of gonzo midnight movie fare. But what I’ve come to love most about these marathons is two-fold: 1) getting to see the joy of people watching some of these films for the first time and have a chat community to simulate an audience experience, where OMG reactions fly when the big moments come and 2) how much I enjoy going back to films I haven’t seen in awhile and realizing some neat little thing about why they work so well. Specifically, what they execute in a way that modern blockbusters so easily seem to forget.

For instance, this last Friday we were watching Con Air, a film which is rightly regarded as a ridiculous, over the top Nic Cage vehicle that fed off producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s mantra of mayhem. It is perhaps THE peak unhinged 90’s action vehicle, which means it’s also full of all of the way too broken / dated sexist, transphobic moments, etc. But as we were all watching, there was this growing sentiment of “Huh… why do I actually care about what’s happening in this movie!?!?” And because you’re a bunch of smarty folks I adore, there was a lot of realization of “wow, these stakes are so well set up!” Because they really were so well set-up. Nakedly so! You have a lead character nonsensically imprisoned. A dream of getting a bunny to his daughter he’s never met. His best friend is in need of insulin. Are these elements ridiculous constructions? Yup! But do you still end up rooting for these things? Big time! Same goes for the set-up of the cavalcade of stupid super-villains. There’s the genius murderer, the white nationalist, the black nationalist, the serial rapist, and even a weirdly charismatic child murderer who sees the world for the joke that it is (and Buscemi makes it work!), all of whom hate each other with very direct intention as well. But all of this overt set-up speaks to something important. Because if you’ve read me long enough, you know one word comes up again and again and again. And that is clarity.

It’s precisely because everything is SO over the top and clear that you can’t help but end up feeling the tension of things once they kick into gear.. You yell “FUCK” when insulin crashes to the ground, “YES!” when the white nationalist gets shot, or “no no no no no” when Buscemi joins a tea party with a young girl (I was in the chat, this is PRECISELY what people did). We get to lean into the tension of all of this and genuinely fret because all the conflicts are so clear and overt. And it’s that tension which makes for the cathartic pay-offs that come later. Because it is not our basic understanding that “things will probably work out” that gives us feelings of relief. It’s the specificity of how. It’s finally getting his friend the insulin only to almost lose him a cruel second later. It’s finally delivering the bunny to his daughter, but having to make an about face about the grease and blood stains. And it’s seeing the most evil guy in Malkovich crash through glass, THEN get electrocuted, THEN get his head somehow hit by a pulverizer. Yes, it’s stupid. But it’s still damn cathartic. And the whole point is that if you ground everything in clarity and good set-ups, then you can do literally any buck wild thing with your story. You GET to be deliriously fun and stupid. You even get to turn up into down. You even get to make your audience root for a child murderer to get lucky at a blackjack table. We KNOW it’s absurd, but It all works within the world set up in the film. And more importantly, it’s a reminder that “oh yeah, even the stupidest movies used to work in a way that we’ve largely forgotten.” And it helps you realize one of the biggest problems with modern blockbusters.

… They’re really afraid to be clear.

I don’t know what it is, but somewhere along the line this switch happened, but now we’re in a blockbuster world full of things like the MCU, Star Wars, and Jurassics Worldszs. There are bright spots in all these enterprises, don’t get me wrong, but mostly you feel like this three part arc of clarity > drama > pay-off just went the way of the dodo. And it was replaced by fear. By which I mean the instincts to hide and delay, to get lost in lore, or to just try and surprise the audience with “pay-off! pay-off! pay-off!” repetition things that already had their dramatic arcs a long time ago. And worst of all, it’s easy to let the alluring nature of the IP itself do all the heavy lifting. There’s a Sam Raimi quote I can’t stop thinking about, which was recently paraphrased on an episode of Blank Check where he was talking about the responsibility of telling stories about Spider-Man and he said:

“You put this costume up on screen, you apply the world’s most expensive special effects to have him swing through the city, and you have Danny Elfman’s horns blaring. And immediately the character becomes iconic. And we imprint upon it. And we care about it. And we defer to it. And in a way that is unfair and we haven’t even earned… Because with most movies you have to work to make an audience care about your character, or be impressed by them, or get excited by them. And with Spider-Man… the iconography is there. You have it in the tank.” And to nail the exact point of what this means: “So my challenge in making these movies is to earn what we are being given for free.”

But somehow the thing that somehow keeps getting lost is that clarity > drama > pay-off is how you earn it. And look, my worry is less that this lazy stuff exists and is consumed. That’s inevitable. My worry is that it instills the wrong lessons. I mean, it feels like LOST genuinely messed with the heads of an entire generation of TV writers. And I don’t want it to keep happening. But that also leads to a pertinent question: Why do writers go for this?

The truth is, like most things, because it’s easier. It’s easier to tease something. It’s easier to delay and string the audience along. It’s easier to replicate the surface-level of the thing that already exists. It’s easy to repeat prior beats from the IP and milk every free thing the audience gives. But it costs the storyteller (and the property itself) in the long run. But this isn’t just about big popcorn movies. At every level, from big studio works to aspiring independent filmmakers, there is this fearful approach I see again and again. On the film festival circuit I watch so many movies aim for “complex” and “interesting” when really they’re just vague, muddled, and unmoving. Meanwhile, there’s a semiotic-driven reason that films like Mulholland Drive and Under The Skin are hypnotic. They use abstract language, sure, but their abstractions are clear, compelling symbols. And while Godard can eat my butt for several reasons, he rightly said: “there is no point in having sharp images when you have fuzzy ideas.” The point is to communicate intentionality. But! I say all this with full admission that I think there’s another reason that is a more understandable part of that fear…

… Which is the fear of “manipulation.”

Now, it is one of those words that, cinematically-speaking, is treated like a dirty word, but I think it’s deeply misunderstood. Or at least misapplied. Because, yes, there is a good reason to fear manipulation (which we’ll get to in a second), but I think most people fear it for the wrong reasons. A lot of which has to do with this arc of our cinematic experiences. Because when we’re young, we don’t think about the construction of movies at all. They’re just these seemingly-real things we watch on screens and feel like we’re peaking into another whole existence. But when you grow-up and enter stages of adolescence, you begin to see the seams of traditional movie construction. I feel like this period always comes with a little bit of sadness because it lessens the emotional effectiveness. But people react to that sadness in a few different ways. Sometimes it comes with resentment. I can’t tell you how often teenagers will scoff at something and be like, “let me guess, the good guys win!” and it’s like congrats, you have a basic understanding of why people like watching stuff. You hacked the system! But the other thing that happens is people start reaching out for things where the seams of storytelling are less clear. We’re talking about art films, weird films, and adventurous films, all of which often play with more forms of subtlety, surprise, and uncommon pacing or structures (for instance, I recently watched and loved Memoria). I want to convey that this is a hugely important moment in the artistic evolution of any cinema watcher. But the ultimate understanding that should come with it is two fold:

1) Those adventurous films are successful NOT because they’re vague, it’s that they’re just operating with less-obvious seams. Because all movies have seams and methods of construction that you can notice with time, which means that…

2) Even the most straightforward movie in the world can still be rousing when you understand that the joy and catharsis rests in the specifics. It’s not just okay to be manipulated by a film’s construction, it’s the entire point.

Look no further than the recent phenomenon of RRR. While there’s so much cultural and political elements that I’m just beginning to understand (whether it’s this much shared essay making the rounds or the or this Willems video essay co written by Siddhant Adlakha), there are very clear reasons that american audiences are going bonkers for this film. It’s not just the great action and anti-British Colonial sentiment (though both or great). It’s that it is absolutely unafraid to use the most blatant and “manipulative” storytelling methods of old school storytelling that modern Hollywood is “too cool for school” to use. It sets up the most evil people, along with the most amazing, open-hearted heroes, all while establishing the perfect conflicts in order to milk the drama for all it’s worth the process. I know people talk about the core friendship of the movie like it’s a feel good hang out movie, but it’s not at all! The reason you care is that it’s full of clear conflicts! You’re yelling NO YES NO YES NO YES on the roller coaster the whole damn time!

The same construction lessons are at the heart of the recent mega success of Top Gun: Maverick, which is absolutely unafraid to use clarity, stakes, and naked rooting interests to make you go THIS IS INCREDIBLE AND I’M SO INVESTED IN THESE PILOTS. THEYRE SO GOOD AT FLYING WHEEEEEEE. The manipulation of the drama is so damn rousing… But this is also what brings us back around to the very good reason to fear manipulation. Because movies ARE damn powerful. And as the essays above show, there’s very real fears of how movies like this can be used to stoke nationalism and militarism. Again, there’s a reason propaganda works. But it’s so important to clarify that it’s not merely about using the manipulative capacity of film...

It’s about what you’re aiming for - and how.

For instance, in the very same stream we watched John Carpenter’s classic film They Live, which is probably one of the most blatant and scathing indictments of capitalism (and the Reagan era on the whole) ever made by a major director? But I could absolutely picture the proverbial teenager scoffing and being, “pssssh, not subtle, is it!” Nope! But that’s exactly why it rules. The clarity and the conflicts allows the film to be blunt, funny, and nihilistic all at once. It highlights the horrors the underclass face and the allure of humans collaborating with “aliens” just to get ahead. It’s “simple,” but thoughtful. You get to relish in the movie’s joy of specificity in wording, like when it points to the money’s hidden message of: “this is your god!” But clarity, specificity, and manipulation isn’t just about making films that are devoted to one singular idea. If you want to be more complex, then it’s still this “simple” conflict approach that precisely allows you to make something with more complexity.

For instance, in that same stream we watched Game Night, which is one of my favorite studio comedies of the last 5 years. Given the dueling nature of action and comedy plots, it seems like such a tough premise to make work. But it works spectacularly because it understands exactly how to manipulate the audience with “you need to be feeling or thinking X right now.” Because it understands precisely when to use the audience’s confusion, or when to set in the stakes of reality in order to create tension, along with how to play up that tension with more action, or alleviate it for a laugh. Again, a laugh and an action beat come from the same exact set-ups (just with different results). Thus all the actors get to play such amazing levels of ignorance precisely because the movie’s construction is so capable around them (but Rachel McAdams honestly should have been nominated for an Oscar, please only watch this clip if you’ve seen the movie). But if it wasn’t trying to “manipulate” you in these specific moments, virtually none of it would work.

Likewise, so many people have found themselves marveling at the endless inventiveness of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. Even me! There’s no way I could come up with the specifics of those galaxy brain gags. But the reason those crazy ideas work is because every little tangent is still its own well-built mini-arc with set-ups and pay-offs. There’s nothing subtle about any decision. It’s just reaching for a million little stories and stuffing them in the larger story, which helps tell the bigger story of these character’s internal hopes, fears, and discovery of needs. Especially with things that seem like jokes. The Raccacoonie “aside” isn’t an aside at all, it symbolizes what that movie is doing at every damn level and realization of needing a kind of empathy to heal other relationships. These things are also clear manipulations, they’re just feverishly stacked on top of each other with hot dog fingers and anal trophies… that is one sentence I never thought I’d write.

The ultimate point is that, whatever movie you are making, you don’t have to be afraid of the core of “simple” dramatic storytelling, nor manipulation if you’re aiming at the right thing. One of the reasons I like the new Sonic The Hedgehog movies is that they feel like a throwback to the kinds of 90’s movies that were willing to be outright silly. Yeah, half the jokes might not land with adults, but half of them really do (I still say “oh, they are stairs” under my breath anytime I see stairs). And underneath the kid-friendly texture, there is that commitment to the most baseline function. It’s not disaffected. It is not running from its own premise. It is nakedly willing to make you care about the idea of Sonic getting to have cute, brightly colored animal friends. But by the end of the film I’m left realizing, “huh, I guess I care about Knuckles then! Never thought that would happen!” As silly as it sounds, it’s everything that matters to me about storytelling. Which is something I’m going to keep talking about again and again.  Because I don’t want the fear to win. I don’t want storytellers to coast on what audiences give them for free. I don’t want the lazier forms of IP manipulation to take hold versus the more cathartic forms. After all, It says something when you watch the patent absurdity of Con Air and actually think to yourself:

“Oh hey we can learn something from this!”

<3HULK