A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

There’s been a lot of buzz for at least a year now on The Foot Fist Way, a very low budget indie comedy about Fred Simmons, a supposed Tae Kwon Do expert and “master of the demo” who pretty clearly isn’t all he cracks himself up to be.  It’s been bouncing around and seeking theatrical distribution since premiering in 2006 at the Los Angeles Film Festival and screening at Sundance later that year, and word has generally ranged from positive to ecstatic.  So needless to say, I rushed right out to catch a Friday showing as soon as it finally hit my local theater, and, well… all I can say is I shoulda seen that coming.

Don’t get me wrong — parts of the movie are quite funny.  It’s not at all a complete failure.  But Fred Simmons is just so unlikeable, so utterly devoid of any detectable redeeming characteristics whatsoever, that by the time some even worse characters come along and show what a true punkass amateur bitch he is at being a dickhead (which could’ve created some rooting interest in Fred just by making him look better by contrast) it was too late.  I hated this guy.  He’s stupid and mean, he’s a braggart and a blowhard, he treats kids poorly, and you could even argue that he’s a con man, since he makes his living convincing people to pay him for instruction he doesn’t seem even remotely capable of giving.

That’s why The Foot Fist Way will always be a cult film with a tiny following.  If the writers had given Simmons some trace of decency and imbued his character with a detectable hint of inner conflict between the better and worse angels of his nature, then more people would have found a way into the story, a way to invest their emotions in the struggles and obstacles facing him, particularly if one of those struggles was to be a genuinely better man.  As it stands, though, the movie works only if you look down on the main character — way, way down — and that’s not the sort of comedy I’m especially comfortable with, and it’s not the sort that most audience members will pay for, either, so it’s no surprise that the film took so long to find theatrical distribution and never went wider than a couple dozen theaters or so when it did.

The Incredible Hulk, or rather, Bruce Banner and not the Hulk himself, is one of the greatest characters ever created. I can already hear the groans of undead snobs rolling over in their graves and preparing to claw their way up through the dirt and grass (and maybe concrete) just so they can sink their decaying teeth into me and eat my brains for daring to say something so sacrilegious, but bear with me. In his very conception, the Hulk has every bit as much to say about humanity as The Lord of the Flies or any other treasure of literature, because he’s a metaphor for the constant struggle we all face to reconcile our animal natures with the demands of civilization. Everyone has a raging beast of some sort within, whether it has humungous fists and a hard right jab or maybe just a really acid tongue, and everyone has to struggle to restrain that beast in order to get along with other people and fit into society. To borrow a term from Ursula K. Le Guin, the Hulk is just a literalization of the metaphor of that beast, and as such, you can do virtually anything with him. He’s a fantastic tool for writing stories that are not only exciting and larger than life, but also deep, emotional, philosophical, and universal.

The latest attempt at bringing the Hulk to a wide audience, though, The Incredible Hulk (starring the great Edward Norton as Bruce Banner and an unfortunate CGI creation as the Hulk) fails to realize most of that potential, because the creative team behind the film turned the struggle within Bruce Banner from a war between his two natures — and by extension, all our two natures — into a detached clinical problem involving pulse rates and some multicolored goop that can be viewed under a microscope. I’m not saying science fiction (or the trappings thereof) shouldn’t be involved in a Hulk story; that would be silly. But instead of Banner struggling with his own impulses towards anger, his own desire to smash, and his own very obvious need to civilize himself and maintain the restraint of civilization at all times, we just see him watching a heart rate monitor and trying to keep the number from getting too high when he runs. In other words, the writers turned the Hulk from a tragic flaw that arises from Banner’s very nature into an arbitrary problem that could have happened to anyone, and in so doing they stripped the universal, relatable metaphor out of the story and thus deprived the audience of an absolutely essential point of emotional identification — the very thing that makes a story work in the first place.

I imagine they did this to try to make Banner more “likeable”, since that’s one of the big watchwords in the studio system nowadays, and a guy with an anger management problem doesn’t necessarily seem “likeable” on the surface, but that’s what good writing is all about: making a flawed and very human person likeable anyway so that we all care about his struggle.

The movie is actually both more successful and somewhat more sadly flawed than I’ve let on, though, because in other areas, the writers did take some advantage of the metaphor. With the exception of true, dyed-in-the-wool, no-exceptions pacifists, most people probably agree that anger and even violence have their place and are sometimes appropriate. Killing someone in self-defense when he’s trying to cut your heart out with a chainsaw, for example, or defending a child from a marauding priest with a raging hard-on, would probably seem appropriate to most people. The key is deciding where and when violence and anger are appropriate, and using them only in those times and places — and then only in appropriate measures. With Emil Blonsky, the villain of the film (played wonderfully by Tim Roth) we get the perfect foil for the twin characters of Banner and Hulk: someone who wants to be all id all the time and has no use whatsoever for restraint. In fact, in turning himself into the Abomination, he completely and utterly repudiates civilization and thus creates the ultimate justification — indeed demand — for Banner to let the Hulk loose: to defend ordinary civilized people from monsters like Blonsky.

As far as it goes, this is absolutely terrific writing.  Banner and the audience both get to see the consequences of embracing anger (e.g. the Hulk) without any kind of limit, and Banner is also forced to learn that sometimes the Hulk (i.e. anger) is actually a necessary and good thing.  The problem is that Banner’s decision to willingly become the Hulk and fight the Abomination hasn’t been set up as the culmination of a struggle within himself between his desire to be peaceful and his very human urge to lash out. It’s not the resolution of a character arc in which he finally realizes he’s been trying to make a false choice and he suddenly has to look at everything he thinks he knows in a whole new light. It’s not even a particularly meaningful character arc point at all, because Banner has been so sanitized and stripped of depth that the choice doesn’t actually mean very much at all.

Instead, Banner just sits around sulking about how bad it sucks to be him and how he can’t be with the woman he loves and everyone’s chasing him and it’s just not fair, and then some shit happens, the end. There’s some good, fun stuff in the movie, but overall, it’s a big missed opportunity, and the money folks could’ve made a heckuva lot more money off their investment if they’d just paid more attention to the script.  It’s understandable that they didn’t, because they’re money people after all, not script people, and script people need money people just as much as money people need script people, but the problems in communication between the two are a subject for another day.

Last night I watched an interesting little Italian thriller called The Backwoods.  (Well, actually, it’s called Bosque de Sombras, but it stars Gary Oldman and Paddy Considine along with actors of various other nationalities, so I’m going to stick with the English title.)  Anyway, it’s not bad, though it also has some pretty serious flaws, but one scene in the latter half of the story got me thinking about a common problem in movies: Mexican standoffs in which one character just arbitrarily gives up.

Without spoiling anything significant about the movie (which isn’t good enough to recommend, but also isn’t bad enough to recommend against) there’s a scene in which a character, we’ll call him Arygay Oldmanay, has a gun drawn on another character.  He’s got the other guy dead to rights, no question about it, but then a third guy sneaks up behind Arygay and points a gun at him.  Now, in the broader sense of the term, this is a Mexican standoff, because neither side has an advantage, so the situation is deadlocked.  Yes, the third guy can shoot Arygay, but only if he doesn’t mind Arygagy shooting and killing his friend.  (OK, screw this “Arygagy” stuff; he’s just Gary from now on.)  So you’d figure that Gary would realize that the gun in his hand, which he has pointed right at the third guy’s friend, is his only piece of leverage, the one thing keeping him alive, right?

If so, you’d be wrong.  As in a really startling number of other movies, Gary lays down his weapon and gives up.  Why?  I can only guess that he’d seen too many movies, and he just thought that this was what he was supposed to do in situations like this, because it sure doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to me.  Now, if I were in Gary’s position and some kind of expert marksman had a high-powered sniper rifle with a laser sight trained right on my skull and the marksman assured me that he could turn out my lights the instant he saw me even think about pulling the trigger and long before I actually did it, meaning that the deterrence value of my weapon was genuinely neutralized, then maybe I would lay down my gun.  Otherwise, not on your life.  I’d threaten, I’d bluster, I’d bluff, I’d bargain — I’d do whatever I could to stay alive, but the one thing I wouldn’t ever do is conclude that surrender is the only option.  So when Gary gave up, it yanked me right out of the movie, which up to that point had at least created a pretty effectively creepy atmosphere.

I realize it’s hard to come up with a creative solution to a problem that’s already been put up on screen a million and a half times, but at least don’t just punk out on the problem — do something that makes sense, both narratively speaking and for the characters in the situation you’ve created.  Otherwise poor saps like me will continue to waste valuable rental dollars on disappointing movies, and then we won’t watch anything else you do in the future!