Thanksgiving having passed, we officially enter the Christmas season, which for Casa Crissie means Springoff the Fourth will settle in for his traditional Christmas movies: Die Hard, Die Harder, Oh Just Die Already, and Aren't You Dead Yet? (Only the first two are actual titles, but those two are set at Christmas, hence Springoff the Fourth thinks of the series as "Christmas movies.") John McClane is an iconic hero: the Motivated Everyman who overcomes impossible odds by dint of grit and willpower.
The Janitor Professor of Astrology is an equally motivated everyman, though he estimates the odds of the impossible by dint of looking up at the stars and grumbling about your weekend outlook.
More below the fold....
A Motivated Everyman (Plus Kossascopes)
We are a storytelling species, and Hero Narratives are probably as old as Og and Grog spinning a tale to entertain their clan - and entice a female or two - by exaggerating the dangers of their latest hunt. (Those roots and berries really were vicious.) Certainly by the dawn of recorded literature we find the Hero Narrative in place. The Epic of Gilgamesh might be the original buddy action thriller. Most of the best known heroes of ancient and medieval literature were gods, demigods, or kings - perhaps to enhance the esteem of monarchs - and not until the early modern period do we see the widespread emergence of that iconic hero so common today: the Motivated Everyman.
He's not a god, demigod, or king. He is an ordinary man who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances, often cut off from outside help, often with a loved one at risk. He meets those challenges through courage, willpower, and being on the right side of the story's moral scale. He is you on your worst day ever, when anything that can go wrong does go wrong, when everything you care about is at risk, when all you have left is your own courage, willpower, and moral rightness.
He is inspiration personified. If he can overcome impossible odds, perhaps you can too. He tells us to keep trying, keep thinking, keep looking for solutions no matter how impossible the situation appears. We need stories of ordinary people overcoming impossible odds, because we all feel as if we face those odds at times in our lives. He is a useful fiction, so long as we remember he's a fiction. The Motivated Everyman isn't really all on his own, after all. He gets a lot of help....
He has a writer.
As a novelist, I've written Motivated Everyman heroes, and I have a shocking revelation. Writers cheat. We often find we've written ourselves into a corner, having concocted a villain so skillful, a trap so devious, a crime so cunning that there's no way for the hero to emerge victorious. The only clue, technique, or device that would give the hero a way out would come out of nowhere. In literary terms, giving the hero that edge would be a deus ex machina, alluding to some early Greek plays where a god character is lowered to the stage by a pulley system - "god from a machine" - to resolve an otherwise irresolvable problem.
So we cheat. We go back to an earlier part of the story and lay the groundwork for that edge, writing in the extra clue, establishing that the hero knows that technique, or has access to and knows how to use that device. Or we go back and make the villain not quite so skillful, the trap not quite so devious, the crime not quite so cunning, so the hero can prevail without needing that extra edge. We writers change the past to ensure the problem has a solution that is within the hero's grasp.
After that, it's simply a problem of motivation. If we need the hero to do something for the story, all we have to do is supply a motivation that leads reasonably to that action. And likewise the villain and the other characters. So long as the the required edges are established before they are needed, and each action seems to flow reasonably from the characters' motivations, the story will seem plausible. If it's well-enough-written and the kind of story a reader enjoys, the reader will suspend disbelief and construct an aesthetic experience that feels almost "real."
We writers only create problems that have no satisfying solution when we write heroes who have conflicted motives. As it happens, many of us like to write those kinds of heroes. The hero wants this, but also fears that, and can't commit fully to either achieving his goal or avoiding his fear. Inner conflict stories resonate because most of us experience conflicting motives from time to time. If the hero can resolve his inner conflict, we get a complete solution to the outside problem. If he cannot, we get a less complete solution to the outside problem, but one that satisfyingly reflects the hero's unresolved inner conflict.
That correlation between resolution of inner conflicts and degree of completeness in solutions is possible in fiction because we writers can and do cheat on the problems in our stories. If we want a completely satisfying solution, we create heroes with no inner conflict or (better) make the hero resolve the conflict, and we go back in time to establish any necessary edges earlier in the story so none appears as a deux ex machina. If we do that well, the reader doesn't can't tell what bits were written out-of-sequence. The story flows as if it were happening as it is read.
Meanwhile....
Back in the real world, we don't get those cheats. We don't get to go back in time and insert necessary edges that allow completely satisfying solutions to problems. We sometimes express a wish for them - "people should have learned this in school," or "we should never have made that mistake to begin with" - but most of us recognize those are just wishes and not realizable options.
Still, our Hero Narratives have trained us to correlate less than complete solutions with conflicted motives. So we "psychologize" events, especially in politics. If a political process yields less than complete solutions, we're prone to attribute that to conflicted motives between or within our leaders. And sometimes that's true, or at least the story can be plausibly told as if that were true.
But often it's not. We get an incomplete solution, not always because a decision maker has conflicted motives, nor even because of conflicted motives between decision makers - as our media Hero Narratives suggest - but because no complete solution was possible. We can't go back in time to rewrite the past, and no god descends by a pulley to intervene and resolve the irresolvable.
We need fictional Hero Narratives to inspire us. But we need to remember they are fiction.
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Speaking of fiction, herewith the Kossascopes:
Sagittarius - You are the hero(ine) of this weekend. Now we need a villain.
Capricorn - We're casting for this weekend. Auditions begin now.
Aquarius - Your heroic act involved a pulley. Cheater.
Pisces - Remember to wear your Tank Top of Invincibility to that Christmas party.
Aries - If you'll be at the airport this weekend, bring bodyguards.
Taurus - Actually that ventilation shaft doesn't lead anywhere you want to go.
Gemini - Yes, the Professor of Astrology Janitor will help you at the airport.
Cancer - No, you won't need to solve riddles to get survive the weekend.
Leo - Unless you consider untangling strands of lights to be a riddle.
Virgo - You put away the lights carefully so they wouldn't tangle. That's annoying.
Libra - You should be safe from hackers out to destroy civilization. Probably.
Scorpio - But just in case, don't touch the Delete key.
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Happy Friday!