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

Last time out, I talked a little about House of Cards, and in doing so, I mentioned Richard III and Profit. Later that night, I got to thinking about the three of them, and I realized that for all their similarities, there’s actually a very interesting difference between them — while Profit goes to great lengths to reveal Jim Profit’s backstory and explain (and even justify) his dark and twisted nature, House of Cards tells us just about nothing about the life story and origins of Francis Urquhart, its own scheming, amoral protagonist. (Richard III strikes something of a middle ground, so I’ll leave it out of this discussion.) Yet House of Cards still expects us to empathize with Urquhart enough to be captured by the narrative, and in fact the miniseries was so successful that it spawned two sequels and much critical worship, while Profit suffered abysmal ratings and tragically premature cancellation.

This seems to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom, which dictates that everyone’s problems and pathologies be explained in terms of abusive parents, traumatic childhoods and the like. Probably the best single example of this pop-psychology approach to writing is the upcoming Halloween remake, written and directed by Rob Zombie based on John Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s original. By all accounts, we’re going to see a ton of flashbacks to Michael Myers’ childhood, as well as a lot more material with Dr. Loomis, all in an attempt to make Myers understandable in contemporary human terms. Yet the original, with its faceless and incomprehensible villain, is a landmark, and made close to $50M in 1978, or over $150M in today’s dollars. The book hasn’t yet been written on the remake, but I doubt it’ll be nearly as successful.

Why the seeming paradox?

You could answer that House of Cards aired on the BBC while Profit was on Fox, and there’s certainly a lot of truth in that. Mainstream American audiences, and especially American broadcast networks, have very little patience for morally complex characters and low ratings, and in fact niche shows with deeply flawed protagonists (such as FX’s outstanding The Shield) have almost entirely flourished on cable, an option that unfortunately wasn’t nearly so available back when Profit debuted. But that’s not the whole story.

What’s really making the difference is something I alluded to in another recent blog post, that time about On the Lot: namely, how understandable and relatable the different stories’ protagonists are. House of Cards was successful not only because it found the right home, though that was undoubtedly very important, but because everyone watching the show could understand why Francis Urquhart, a man who spent his entire life behind the scenes making sure that other people’s careers stayed on track, would give into the temptation to sieze some power and glory for himself. And from the moment he made that initial decision, he found himself on a slippery slope, with each subsequent decision he made completely understandable given his circumstances — he had to do everything he did, almost as much to keep himself out of jail as to achieve his goal of becoming Prime Minster. Profit, however, failed because when you get right down to it, Jim Profit was a really weird guy, and very few people could find it in their hearts (or minds) to understand him. He had sex with his (step)mother, he slept in a cardboard box instead of a bed, he seemed to play games and manipulate people just for the sheer joy of it… None of these are traits that the average person can relate to even a tiny little bit. That doesn’t make the show any less brilliant, but it does mean it would’ve had a heck of a time finding an audience no matter when and where it aired.

In the end, I’m not sure what the lesson is in terms of craft. If you want financial success, obviously, design a protagonist who’s understandable and relatable even if he is antiheroic. Flawed and evil protagonists, after all, are a tough enough sell all by themselves. But Profit is probably my favorite show of all time, and I certainly don’t want to discourage anyone from trying to make something just as daring and inspired, so part of me hopes that at least some of you try to buck the system, if only just once.

It’s a cliche by now to observe that once you notice or remark upon something, suddenly you see it everywhere and it practically seems to be stalking you, but in this case, I think it actually may be true.

OK, not really, but it is pretty strange to blog about the awful and heavy-handed symbolism of the rat in The Departed and then to see the same damn thing just a few weeks later in an otherwise stupendously good BBC production from seventeen years ago. And when I say “the same damn thing”, I mean that literally. In The Departed, Scorcese put up a huge neon sign saying “CORRUPTION HERE!” with a big blinking arrow pointing right at the government by having a rat run up and across a railing with the Massachusetts State House in the background, and in House of Cards, Paul Seed did the same thing about a dozen times over by repeatedly cutting to rats cavorting through London, generally against the backdrop of one august and historic government structure or another. In fact, I have a very strong suspicion that Scorcese got the idea from House of Cards; he’s certainly very literate in film, and I’m sure he’s seen plenty of TV too.

(On a side note, isn’t it interesting (and depressing) that we have a variety of expressions for people who are conversant with literature — “well-read” and “literate” being just two of many — but none for people who have a great deal of knowledge about film? I was tempted to roll my own and call Scorcese “well-viewed”, but I thought people might think I was saying his films have been seen by a lot of people. We movie people need more respect!)

For those of you who don’t know what the heck House of Cards is, it’s a fantastic miniseries about a consummate back-room politician who decides one day that he wants to become Prime Minister of England (the ultimate front-room position) and goes after the job with every last bit of guile and venom he can muster. He regularly confides in us, the audience, but he keeps his hand carefully hidden from all the other characters in the story, and as his schemes unfold, we can only marvel at their ever-greater audacity — and, at least for awhile, at their continuing success.

Obviously, House has some clear similarities to Shakespeare’s Richard III, and also to the stellar but unfortunately short-lived TV show Profit, both of which I highly recommend. The beauty of Profit and Richard III — and of the vast majority of House of Cards, for that matter — is that they’re stuffed with magnificently-executed subtext, and understanding all the layers of meaning that unspool before us is tremendously rewarding, because we feel like we’ve accomplished something by figuring them out and putting them together. Furthermore, because we’ve drawn our conclusions ourselves, we take a sort of emotional ownership of them, accepting them as our own. That’s why preaching and overt messages rarely work; they’re finished conclusions people are trying to force on us, not deductions we’re allowed to partake in.

The rats, unfortunately, are the worst sort of preaching, completely free of subtext, and as such they stand in stark and unfortunate contrast to the rest of The Departed and House of Cards, both of which are otherwise written with great subtlety and skill.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled rodent-free browsing.