Raised by Puzzleboxes
Or: Why every story doesn't have to be complicated to be compelling viewing
I have a lot, and I do mean a lot, of problems with some of the narrative tics television shows over the past five or ten years have fallen into. For the sake of brevity we’ll stick with just the one for today: The idea that making your story less a story and more a series of interlocking puzzleboxes somehow makes your work smarter or more meaningful than something that ops for a straightforward path. In this mode of storytelling the characters and their emotions and motivations always come secondary to the all-important Art of the Twist. How else will you keep people watching if you don’t layer mystery upon mystery on top of the surface of your worldbuilding? Why else would they tune in if not to keep being surprised by endless revelations that feed into further, deeper revelations, like some sort of hellish Moebius strip that will eventually end with a miserable limp thawpping sound when the show is either cancelled or the creators get tired of drawing mazes on graph paper?
I’m thinking about this again because over the weekend I more or less forced myself into watching the entire first season of Raised by Wolves, the latest drab gray and brown rumination on God, the universe, and everything from Ridley Scott. If you adored Prometheus and everything he’s done since Prometheus then congratulations, this Bud’s for you and will provide you with all the milk-filled androids questioning their existence on a hostile planet in the far-far-far-flung future your heart desires. This time the robots are raising human children after a war between atheists and a Mithras cult (yes, really) ended up rendering Earth uninhabitable, as these things are wont to do. The planet, she is very mysterious. There are beasts that live there, and they too are extremely mysterious. The origins and purpose of the androids? Might not be what they seem! Does anything become clearer as the episodes trudge on towards one of the most ridiculous finales I’ve seen in recent memory? Not on your goddamn life.
I struggle with how to classify this show. It’s Not Good in precisely the same ways Prometheus was Not Good, up to and including the part where the narrative goes completely off the rails and flies into some kind of bizarre batshit fever logic that also wants to double as terrible hamfisted religious allegory. I saw someone dub Scott’s recent work ‘dour camp’ and that is precisely what it is: It’s all the outsized gestures of camp without any sense of humor, colour, or vibrancy. It’s not all bad—some of the acting is solid, the worldbuilding could be interesting, the opening credits are absolutely gorgeous and coincidentally the most interesting thing about the series—but it is also definitely Not Good and by the end I was mostly just watching to see how wacky things could possibly get (read: extremely). Characters don’t particularly want anything, they just careen from mystery to mystery as the hands of the writers load them into the narrative slingshot and take aim. Which is the major problem with much if not all of these recent puzzleboxes: The characters are twisted along by the whims of the worldbuilding, as opposed to it being the other way around.
… Okay. Time out. Let’s jump back twenty years to The X-Files, and what made the X-Files good and what made the X-Files occasionally terrible and what people seem to have taken from its success.
A few years ago I decided to show my partner The X-Files, because I was as madly obsessed with it as anybody back in the day and it is a huge part of my creative landscape. Did I show him the entire series? Hell no. I pulled him aside before we started and explained what I had planned.
”We’re going to skip most if not all of the mythology episodes,” I said. “You don’t need ‘em. There are maybe five of them that are worth sitting through. They don’t fucking matter. It ends poorly and messily and you can get everything good that people loved about the series from watching episodes that had fuck-all to do with the overarcing plot.”
So that’s what we did. We sat down and watched all the good episodes and yea verily, there were maybe five or six episodes in that ‘best stuff’ run that had anything to do with the vast global conspiracy to mess with Mulder’s head. Because, see, that was never what actually worked about the show. What we were all really watching for was to see how said vast global conspiracy affected Mulder and Scully, because we loved the characters and wanted to ride along with them as they wrestled flukemen and murderous incestuous rednecks and their own feelings about one another. The show’s core was always that this guy lost his sister when he was twelve and how that loss fucked him up so badly he basically had no other choice but to hunt little green men. Along the way he gets a friend and partner and his mad quest affects her as well. It was never primarily about the Syndicate or alien colonization or what it all meant, and the more it focused on that stuff and not the characters the more off the rails it eventually went.
(I know there are many of you who DID watch it primarily for that, and good for you, but at this point I think you can readily admit that that worked out poorly, right?)
That is NOT what the media and television execs took from the show’s massive popularity. They saw a show with an overarcing plot full of mysterious questions opening into even more mysterious nonsensical non-answers and decided THAT was the big draw, not the characters. Unfortunately for everyone, so did JJ Abrams. He made LOST. LOST was a hit, despite aping every bad decision the X-Files ever made with very few of its redeeming qualities. It was all downhill from there.
The other thing that stood out during our rewatch was just how many of the unskippably good episodes—the episodes that saved the series, the ones we pass around as must-watches now, twenty long years on—were written by Vince Gilligan, who always seemed to have an uncanny knack for focusing on the characters first and how their reactions drove the story in weird and wonderful ways. That knack has since gone on to give us two of the best television series of the past two decades: Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. In both, the actions of the characters are responsible for ever domino that falls and every tragedy that descends (sometimes literally) from the heavens. There’s no vast and shadowy hand yanking their strings to make them dance. Everything that happens happens because they make a decision that leads them to that point in time and that outcome. It’s as simple as a domino toppling, as complicated in the end results as a Rube Goldberg contraption, and it all comes from the characters being themselves. The worlds they inhabit absolutely influence who they are and the decisions they are driven to make, but that never matters as much to the story as how the characters deal with the hands they’re being dealt. I think really great writing understands that while worldbuilding absolutely shapes story and character response, it should never eclipse the characters themselves. The characters in Fury Road are absolutely in the situation we find them in because of how their world works, but they are also the thing about that world that that story is about, and we care about them because we want to see them fucking escape.
The endless obsession with puzzles and mysteries & the shuffling of character to a distant third in narrative concerns behind The Plotty Plotty Plot and Worldbuilding is still primarily a genre issue, but as the lines between what’s considered ‘genre’ and what isn’t have blurred it seems to be seeping into the groundwater. Simplicity doesn’t sell. Where are the twists?! Where’s the big surprise, the catch, the big elevator pitch?
This has all been an extremely lengthy, longwinded, rambly way of getting to how much I love the other show we watched this weekend, and why: Genndy Tartakovsky’s PRIMAL.
PRIMAL is as simple as a fairy tale. It’s also vibrant and ridiculous and bloody and extremely metal, but since I’ve been nattering on about storytelling for a gajillion paragraphs let’s focus on that aspect first. It’s the story of one caveman and his t-rex companion as they traverse a world seemingly ripped from the side of a panel van where dinosaurs and cavemen and killer apes and giant snakes and hellish humanoid bat-creatures all live together in the absolute opposite of harmony. Brought together by mutual tragedy, Spear (the caveman) and Fang (the t-rex) forge an alliance that grows from wary dislike to mutual affection over the course of several gorgeously animated episodes.
There is no dialogue outside of grunts and roars. There is no plot past what the characters make interacting with each other and the world. There is no mysteriously hinted-at reason as to why dinosaurs and humans are inhabiting the same timeline, no secret conspiracy to blame for why their families were taken from them. Life is harsh, their world is harsher still. Most of the time there isn’t a conspiracy to blame when bad things happen; sometimes you make what seems like an unimportant choice and life just turns out that way. The most important thing is who you end up getting through it with and the choices you make. PRIMAL understands this. It takes its time building up the relationship between its protagonists, because it has nowhere else to be and is in no particular hurry to get there and the joy is in the journey, not any kind of destination. Last night’s new episode was a beautiful example of how simple storytelling can blow needlessly complicated worldbuilding out of the water and into the far distance: Fang is seriously injured. She’s helpless and exposed in a world where that almost certainly means death as soon as the sun goes down. Spear has to figure out a way to move his four-ton pet to a safe place so she’ll have time to recover.
That’s it. That’s the entire twenty-five minutes. It was more compelling and emotionally satisfying than all ten episodes of Raised By Wolves combined. Watching them back to back I was almost annoyed at how easy it is to craft a compelling story when you aren’t busy climbing up your own ass in a desperate search for self-importance and Meaning with a capital M.
Now, am I saying that every single story has to have no twists, no surprises, no worldbuilding shocks that jump out to Confuse and Delight? Hell no. I love a good twist! I love narratives told slantways, stories that break apart how our brains expect a story to be structured. They are one of my favourite things; I love to read them and I love to write them. I also personally think the only way they end up mattering in the long run is if you give people something to fucking care about somewhere in there down at the bottom, after all the layers have been peeled back and the onion’s been reduced to a pile of mince. Usually that starts with giving them compelling characters to ride along with. When character is sacrificed on the altar of The Plot and the World, you end up with a lot of very bland, forgettable narratives spinning their wheels in the mud.
And then I write 3,000 words about why they’re bad, and nobody wants that.
God, now I have to find this PRIMAL show. Having not watched RBW yet, you are giving me worrisome ideas it’s everything hamfisted I dislike about Scott’s modern oeuvre.