Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 53

The Villain Believes in “Reality”

 

It seems like a long time ago—pre-Trump, pre-Obama—but I remember vividly when Vice President Dick Cheney declared in the wake of 9/11 that to counter the threat of terrorism the U.S. was now going to have to start “working the dark side.”

Robert Redford in “Three Days of the Condor”

Cheney articulated this thought with barely-suppressed glee. I remember thinking at the time, “Wow, this guy is the ultimate movie villain,” not just because he was expressing a classic Dr. No/Dr. Evil/Dr. Strangelove sentiment but because his point of view contains more than a modicum of truth.

I’ve always wished that Dick Cheney would write a book. Not the typical self-serving, bullshit politician’s book but a straight-ahead, from-the-heart articulation of his brass-knuckles worldview.

Why? Because that worldview contains a lot of truth.

We should hear it.

We as Americans should debate it.

What I’m getting at is the “this is reality” school of villainy.

In Three Days of the Condor, Cliff Robertson plays senior CIA officer J. Higgins whose secret war plan for the U.S. to invade Saudi Arabia and capture its oil fields has been exposed by the movie’s hero, Joseph Turner (Robert Redford).

Does Cliff react with regret or shame over his nefarious deeds? (His operatives have also murdered seven Americans to cover up their scheme). Hell no. He doubles down.

 

CLIFF ROBERTSON

It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?

 

ROBERT REDFORD

Ask them.

 

CLIFF ROBERTSON

Not now—then! Ask ’em when they’re running out. Ask ’em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask ’em when their engines stop. Ask ’em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask ’em. They’ll just want us to get it for ’em!

 

ROBERT REDFORD

Boy, have you found a home.

 

Cliff remains unfazed. His position: “This is Reality. This is the way the world works. Only sentimentalists and weak-minded dreamers believe otherwise.”

Mike Myers as Doctor Evil.

How many villain speeches have begun with this phrase:

 

VILLAIN X

Oh come, come, Mister Bond …

 

How about his exchange from an interview between Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump? O’Reilly was questioning Trump’s often-stated admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin.

 

O’REILLY

But he’s a killer!

 

TRUMP

There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?

 

Villains love “reality,” i.e. the hardball view of the world, which declares that human nature is inherently evil, that left to their own devices people will always choose the selfish, the vain, and the expedient.

It is their role, the villains claim, to counter humanity’s innate wickedness. They will take it upon themselves to act preemptively to quash this evil for the greater good of the slumbering masses. Here’s Jack Nicholson, from Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men:

 

COLONEL JESSUP

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.

 

Remember what we said in an earlier post, that the villain doesn’t think he’s the villain?

To these “reality villains,” the believer in progress or human good is a self-deluded fool. Worse, he is a clear and present danger to the survival of the greater clan/community/nation.

Is there truth to this?

How much?

Does the arc of the moral universe bend toward justice, as Martin Luther King said?

Or was MLK, for all his greatness, deluding himself and the world with a dream that, however brave and kind and noble, will, given the reality of human nature, never come true?

Reality to a reality-villain is always zero-sum, dog-eat-dog. It is the world described by Thomas Hobbes in his book, Leviathan, where life without an externally-ordered structure would be

 

            solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

 

Is that reality?

Is he or she who believes this a villain or a hero?

 

 

Making Connections

So it’s the mid-1980s and as young men do, Malcolm Gladwell and his friend Jacob Weisberg throw a lot of parties at their Washington D.C. rental on Adams Mill Road and Kenyon Street.

At one such low rent Bacchanalia, Gladwell shoots the breeze with Jefferson Morley, an assistant editor and one of the supervisors along with Michael Kinsley and Dorothy Wickenden of the bright young politico Weisberg at The New Republic.

Gladwell brings up a story Morley wrote for the July 9 1984 edition called “Double Reverse Discrimination.”

In The Washingtonian “Gladwell’s Brain” profile by Chris Wilson on January 8, 2007, Morley recalls:

I remember Malcolm questioning me closely both about the sociology and the ethics of the story.

Morley’s reporting concerned the fate of Brooklyn, New York’s Starrett City, a federally subsidized, 1970s era middle-income housing project built on landfill between the predominantly poor black neighborhood of East, New York and the white working class bastion of Canarsie.

What’s fascinating is that in order for the development to get off the ground, the Starrett Company had to quell the protests of Canarsians who feared that their community would mimic the history of neighboring East New York.

East New York had gone from two-thirds white to three-quarters black between 1960 and 1970 and had deteriorated in the process, its property values plummeting and its crime rate rising.” (“Double Reverse Discrimination,” The New Republic July 9, 1984)

In order to get the New York City Board of Estimate to approve construction, which was under assault by Canarsie’s virulent protests, The Starrett Company agreed to maintain a 70% white occupancy rate. So if you were black or Hispanic or some other loosely defined minority looking to get an apartment at Starrett City, you were out of luck if the 30% quota for your kind was already filled. (President Donald Trump owned a 4% stake in Starrett City). No matter your income or your recommendations or your good-guy-ness.

Five black applicants for apartments didn’t think this agreement was fair and so with the backing of the N.A.A.C.P., they filed a class action discrimination suit against the development in 1979, three years after it opened its doors to tenants. And as these things go, it took about five years for anything to happen after that.

And what happened then is really quite remarkable.

The two sides agreed to settle the case before it went to trial.

They both agreed that the quota controls would remain in effect. Just the percentages would be changed. Instead of a 70/30 white/minority split, they’d move to 67/33. And on May 2, 1984, the Federal District Court in Brooklyn approved the settlement.

Huh? Doesn’t make much sense does it?

Why would the N.A.A.C.P. approve of such a thing, essentially an imposed discrimination policy that shuts out black people purely based upon the color of their skin?

What’s even weirder is that the lawyer defending Starrett City’s White Majority quota was none other than Morris B. Abram, a guy who’d made his name representing Martin Luther King, Jr. And Abram had said himself on numerous occasions that race was an “absurd, unfair, and counterproductive” way of evaluating people. So why did he defend the right of a real estate company to do exactly what he felt was wrong?

What was the thing behind these counterintuitive stances? It sure must have been a powerful and convincing idea. The N.A.A.C.P. and Abram weren’t afraid of a good fight. And this seemed like a great one.

So what gives?

Gladwell probably noticed that Morley referenced the controlling idea ten times in his article without explaining where it came from. Hence Morley’s recollection that Gladwell was interested in the sociology and the ethics of the story…the thing behind the thing that made these formidable forces agree that in this case, and by extension other cases like it, a discriminatory quota keeping black people from living where they wished was in the long term in their best interest.

That’s not a knock on Morley. The New Republic was a serious magazine that fact checked and edited each of its pieces with vigor. It was known for that discipline until the whole Stephen Glass series of boners in the late 90s. But that’s another kettle of fish entirely.

The fact that Morley didn’t need to do a one or two-paragraph background write up about the idea only spoke to its prevalence as a incontrovertible and accepted fact amongst the players in the Starrett City drama. And for that matter, readers of The New Republic too.

So what was this idea?

It was an idea first put forth in 1957 by University of Chicago Sociologist Morton Grodzins in the October issue of Scientific American.

White residents, who will tolerate a few Negroes as neighbors, either willingly or unwillingly, begin to move out when the proportion of Negroes in the neighborhood or apartment building passes a certain critical point. This tip point varies from city to city and from neighborhood to neighborhood. But for the vast majority of white Americans a tip point exists. Once it is exceeded, they will no longer stay among Negro neighbors. (Emphasis mine)

But how did this theory result in what Morley refers to in his piece as “the generally accepted 30% ‘tipping point’” of black residents that caused whites to flee the neighborhood?

In the 60s and 70s, urban areas became less and less diverse. It became known as the “white flight” phenomenon. Attracted by the volatility of the issue and its blatant racial overtones, other academics climbed aboard Grodzins “tipping point” train, giving it more and more weight and eventually making it ubiquitous along the way. Repetition has a way of doing that.

Harvard’s Thomas Schelling, a future Nobel Laureate in Economics and renowned game theorist who contributed to Stanley Kubrick’s creation of Dr. Strangelove, picked up on the notion and theorized further in his papers “Models of Segregation” in 1969 and “Dynamic Models of Segregation” in 1971. Using elaborate game theories, Schelling’s conclusions in his 1978 book Micromotives and Macrobehavior gave birth to that 30% tipping point number.

And then there was Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, which challenged the whole “assimilation” model of American life. Americans don’t shed their ancestral identities.  They embrace them.  Morley characterized Glazer in his piece as the one “who most forcefully made the point in the early 1970s that whites’ fears of blacks were profound and in many ways justified.”

But geez, if behaviors are tipped so predictably one way, couldn’t they tip back just as predictably? Gladwell may well have thought or even put forth to Morley over a beer or two.

All of this Tipping Point stuff must have fascinated him back in the mid-80s and picking the brain of Jefferson Morley was cool too. But what could Gladwell really “do” with the idea? Especially when the next day he had to call Pfizer to check up on their progress getting a new pill approved by the FDA.

He couldn’t do anything with it.

So, he sealed it in a virtual sardine can and stuck it with the rest of the cans in the idea pantry in the back of his mind.

And then, over a decade later when Gladwell looked at crime statistics in New York City and discovered how drastically they had plummeted in just five years time, he made a connection. It was a connection that went all the way back to the conversation with Jefferson Morley at the party he’d thrown with his friend Jacob Weisberg.

Maybe Tipping Points are not just interesting explanations for physics, epidemiology, and sociology…perhaps they’re applicable to crime too? And if they’re applicable to crime, what other phenomena could they explain?

The Villain Embodies the Counter-theme

 

 If our hero’s object is to save the world, our villain’s object is to destroy it.

Conrad Veidt as Major Strasser in “Casablanca”

Whatever the protagonist wants, the antagonist wants the opposite.

But it’s a little more complicated than that.

Every story must have a theme.

It must be about something.

The theme, as Blake Snyder so helpfully declares in Save the Cat!, is the case that the story is making to the reader.

 

Better to sacrifice oneself (or one’s personal happiness) for the greater good than to live a life of prosperous selfishness.

 

Or

 

We are defined by our past and cannot escape it.

 

These are the themes of 1) Casablanca, and 2) Shane.

(Please note that themes do not have to be universally “true.” A great theme can be completely debatable, even spurious or “wrong.” It is enough, for storytelling purposes, that a theme be a strong statement about some aspect of life or the human condition.)

The hero embodies the theme.

Rick in Casablanca (Humphrey Bogart) declares in the first half of the story

 

I stick my neck out for no one

 

And

 

I’m the only cause I’m fighting for.

 

In the movie’s climax, however, it’s Bogey who’s putting Ilsa Lund, the love of his life (Ingrid Bergman), on the plane to Lisbon and freedom …

“We’ll always have Paris.” Bogey and Bergman in “Casablanca”

 

BOGEY

Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon, and for the rest of your life …

 

while he himself heads off into the desert with his sometime adversary Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains) to join the Free French and fight for freedom.

 

BOGEY

Louie, this is the start of a beautiful friendship.

 

The hero embodies by his words and actions the “case” that the movie is making. He is the personification of the theme, in this instance, as we said,

 

Better to sacrifice oneself (or one’s personal happiness) for the greater good than to live a life of prosperous selfishness.

 

But what about the villain?

The villain in Casablanca is the idea that there is such a thing as safe neutrality, that it is possible to sit out a conflict between good and evil without taking sides.

The city of Casablanca itself represents this, being at that time (1941) the capital of a nation that was neither Allied nor Axis.

Bogey’s cabaret—“Rick’s Cafe Americaine”—represents this same idea, a little Casablanca within the greater city of Casablanca.

Every character in Rick’s place is trying to work some self-interested angle, to escape the Nazis, to profit off others’ desperation to flee, or just to hang on and survive in this transient purgatory on the Mediterranean.

The physical villain, SS Major Strasser, represents the personal force of evil—the Nazi thugs whose aim is to arrest and no doubt torture and murder Ilsa and her husband, the valiant Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid).

In other words, these elements constitute the counter-theme:

 

To defeat your enemies, make each of them reject solidarity with their fellows and instead strive only for their individual selfish ends.

 

When you and I as writers find ourselves struggling to make our stories vivid and compelling, it’s often because we haven’t truly defined the theme for ourselves and have failed to make 1) the hero embody the theme, and 2) the villain embody the counter-theme.

If we can lick these problems in our story, everything else will fall into place.

 

 

My Secret

(I read “this is stupid,” a post by Wil Wheaton, this week. I felt his pain. It reminded me of where I was last year when I wrote the article below. If you’re out there reading this, and think that the rest of us have “it” together, that we’re enjoying every bit of our work, that it all comes with ease, you’re wrong. It’s hard. It’s tiring. Often, all I want to do is head to the beach. But . . . Not even Kahuna stayed on the beach year round. He headed to work like the rest of us, and I’m pretty sure that the tough work made the summer waves that much more enjoyable. Some days the stuff we love comes to us like Ruth Stone’s train, but there are a lot of “this is stupid” days in between. Whether its a train day or a stupid day, we’re better for having both.  ~C)

When it was my publishing house’s turn to present its Fall/Winter line of books, I was introduced as the senior editor. One of the quick-witted sales reps quipped, “If she’s the senior editor, how old is the junior editor?”

I was 22 years old, attending — and presenting — at my first sales conference, and not yet a full year into being an editor.

My first job out of college was as a junior editor for a small publishing house in Florida. Within a few months, my boss said goodbye to the senior editor and I was promoted. This was a mom and pop operation, so I went from editing sales copy, sending manuscript rejection letters, and answering the phone, to acquiring and editing manuscripts, packaging books, writing marketing materials, negotiating author and vendor contracts, managing relationships with authors and vendors, and developing and implementing publicity campaigns — while still editing sales copy, sending manuscript rejection letters, and answering the phone.

No training.

Lots of time alone in the office, operating on instinct and a prayer.

It ended up being two and a half years of shooting the rapids, of going solo, of working from the gut.

I emerged on the other end confident in my gut’s instincts, but I also emerged doing PR, something that had never been an itch to scratch. I wanted out of Florida and a publicity job offer helped make that possible, so… I headed north.

Within the first month, the questioning started. I didn’t do what the other publicists did. Was I wrong? Was there a better way? The publishers my employer represented all expected top-tier media coverage — and when I advised a publisher that it was a waste of money to promote the book to the top-tiers, that the book wasn’t well written and wouldn’t be picked up by the outlets she wanted it pitched to, I learned that I had landed in a world where Reality was on permanent vacation. Publicists weren’t honest with publishers — and publishers believed the same approach could (and should) be applied to every book.

I needed a paycheck, so I pitched cardio-kickboxing to Bill O’Reilly and Wiccan rituals to Howard Stern. I mailed dozens of books to the New York Times and Washington Post book reviewers — and I attended conferences, and conventions, and expos, where dinosaurs manned booths and roamed the aisles.

Here’s my secret:

I hated it then — and twenty years later, I still hate it. Every time I write a column for this site I feel like a fake, because I’m not passionate about everything I write about. I don’t enjoy learning about MailChimp or Google Analytics or following Twitter’s next move.

So why the hell do I do this?

It makes me better.

The stuff I don’t enjoy is the yin to the yang of my passion. One provides knowledge and thus the ability to self advocate, which allows the other to soar to greater heights.

Here’s how it plays out in the rest of my life:

This weekend includes replacing the flapper in a constantly-running toilet bowl, reinstalling a bathroom tile, replacing the hardware on two dangling cabinet doors, and removing the base of a broken lightbulb that’s stuck in a socket. I don’t want to do (or learn how to do) these things, but . . . If I know how to do them I’ll save money by doing the work myself — or if I hire someone else, I’ll know exactly what’s involved, how much the service should cost, and how it should be done.

There this, too:

I get high on seeing stories I’m passionate about take flight

So, that means focusing on things I don’t enjoy spending time learning about — and then implementing what I’ve learned, writing about what I’ve learned, and sharing what I’ve learned, because there’s a high in seeing others learn from my experiences, too.

Back to my secret.

I hate doing the same things I often suggest that you do. You’re not alone, mucking your way through all the crap that can be PR/marketing. I’m not a fan either.

Here’s what helps me move along:

On the other side there’s Joy.

 

The Villain is Not Always a Person

 

Or even a creature.

Julianne Moore in Todd Haynes’ “Far From Heaven”

Sometimes the villain is entirely inside the characters’ (almost always the protagonist’s) head.

The villain can be a fear, an obsession, a desire, a dream, a conception of reality, an idea of what “the truth” really is.

The villain in Blade Runner 1978 would seem at first glance to be the replicants, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and his team of Leon (Brion James) and Pris (Daryl Hannah), who have escaped off-world and come to Earth sowing destruction. But the real villain is an idea—the conception of creating faux-human slave labor.

The replicants are actually the innocent victims of this idea, which in fact has been deemed by the world to be brilliant, epochal, even salvational, and whose progenitor, Eldon Tyrell of the Tyrell Corporation, is universally lauded for his genius in conceiving such a notion.

But a slave by another name is still a slave, and the idea of creating soul-less, expendable creatures whose only purpose is to do the dirty work of the greater society (no matter how exceptional or beautiful these creatures may be) is still evil.

This is the same villain, by the way, as in Birth of a Nation (2016), Twelve Years A Slave, and The Help.

The villain in Blade Runner 2049 is another idea—the idea of the willing acceptance of one’s role as a soul-less cog in a greater machine.

Often these “idea villains” are embodied and personified by human or creature antagonists who have actual physical being in the story. In David O. Russell’s The Fighter, the idea-villain—the self-sabotage of the individual of talent and destiny (in this case Mark Wahlberg’s character of Micky Ward, “the fighter”—is personified by his family of mother, brother, and seven sisters. They’re undermining him and sabotaging his career at every turn.

But the deep villain resides in Mark’s own head, as it does in K’s (Ryan Gosling) in Blade Runner 2049 and in Nat Turner’s (Nate Parker) in Birth of a Nation.

In other words the villain in these stories is not sabotage, but self-sabotage.

The hero is enslaving himself by his own belief.

The turning point in all such stories is the moment when the protagonist snaps out of it and says to him or herself, “I am in control of my own destiny. I will no longer believe the lies that others have told me about myself and that I have abetted by repeating them and believing them in my own heart.”

In Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, the villain is 1950s suburban-American conformity. The hero is Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) who believes at the story’s start that she is one of the lucky ones, blessed with a handsome, successful husband whom she loves and who loves her, a beautiful family, wonderful friends, and a perfect, secure life in a prosperous, upwardly mobile community.

Suburban conformity is a great villain, not only because it is internal—existing entirely, as it does, in our heroine’s psyche as well as within the community—but also because it’s invisible. Julianne has no idea that this idea is evil. She believes in it like Stalinists believed in the Workers’ Paradise. To her it is the universally-desired state of being, i.e., what every human on Earth would aspire to if they had the chance. In Julianne’s mind, at the story’s start, she is living the American dream, and her family embodies this fantasy perfectly.

By movie’s end of course Julianne will have lost husband, friends, community, as well as her self-conception and self-assurance as a secure, happy wife and mother. The movie’s final image is Julianne with young kids in tow, driving off in her station wagon into a totally unknown (and probably for quite a while desperate) future.

This is a happy ending. Why? Because Julianne has emancipated herself, however excruciatingly, from this villain that is only an idea.

She has seen it for what it is and seen through it.

This act puts Julianne light-years ahead of her self-enslaved neighbors/replicants/Stepford wives in Suburban Hell who are still “living the dream.”

We said in an earlier chapter that

 

Every villain is a metaphor for Resistance.

 

What this means is that the ultimate antagonist is not a man-eating shark or a monster from space. It is an idea carried in our own heads (we’re the heroes, remember, of our own lives) and as invisible to us as Julianne’s and K’s and Nat Turner’s self-enslavement was to them before they woke up.

The turning point for us too comes when we see through the Wizard’s curtain and reject this idea once and for all.

 

 

Combatting the “DQ”

How do you tune out dismissive quips about your work? Here’s an edited post from www.storygrid.com that explains and all too familiar event for anyone who has accomplished anything…

Ten years ago, I had knee replacement surgery.

As one is required to do after being made bionic, I imprisoned myself post-op at home. Rehab centers are strictly for the better insured. For the first two weeks, I remained doped up on Oxycodone in between grueling physical therapy sessions.

A charming older woman, an emigre from the Philipines, came to my apartment every afternoon at 2:30. And tortured me…but in the sweetest way possible.

I’m so excited today…we’re going for 130 degrees of motion! We’re going to crack apart that gunk stuck in your new knee once and for all!”

In between those medieval manipulations, I stared slack-jawed at daytime television.

As I was watching Power Lunch on CNBC one day, there was a wonderful argument between two talking heads brought on to kill a three-minute segment about some Advertising merger. There was an in-studio Donny Deutsch (Advertising muckety muck and cable show mainstay) on the left side of the screen and a remote Charles Gasparino (former Wall Street Journal reporter “Live from the New York Stock Exchange”) on the right side.

At first glance, I could tell these guys didn’t like each other. Or perhaps that was just their on-air shtick.

Deutsch said something about the stocks for each of the companies, and then closed his comments with a reference to his own advertising gravitas. He is associated with Deutsch Inc., a company founded by his father, and is worth a rumored $200 million.

And then it was Gasparino’s turn.

“Donny, being born on third base doesn’t mean you hit a triple.”

Now of course, Gasparino didn’t credit the man who first came up with that zinger (former Oklahoma and Dallas Cowboys football coach Barry Switzer) and neither do the scores of journalists today who use it to poke Jeb Bush or Donald Trump either.

What struck me about the put down then and still does today is that there is a endemic human need to discount others’ accomplishments, be they rivals, and sadly, even more so friends. The closer someone we hang with comes to realizing her potential, the more snarky we become.

This phenomenon gave birth to phrases like “she used daddy’s money to start her company” or “he brown-nosed the CEO to get that job” or “they just bought out the competition.”

When we hear these caustic asides that seemingly set the record straight, it gives us a momentary sense of relief. Like, Thank God they didn’t actually work to get where they are…they were handed what they’ve got. Hearing that someone got something because the fix was in, takes the pressure off of us.

We think that since we weren’t born with silver spoons in our mouths or that we don’t have access to the upper levels of management are the reasons why we’re getting nowhere. There is a certain comfort to the belief that corruption reigns. Even honest to goodness hardworking grinders like us just can’t get ahead in a world riddled with fraud.

Despite the extremely negative Weltanschauung necessary to maintain this POV, you have to admit that this sort of self-talk gives us satisfaction. Because it absolves us lickety split from the responsibility of finding the work we need to do and then just doing it.

As Steve Pressfield and Seth Godin like to remind me when I vent and spew bile—and they do it somehow without pissing me off—the only thing we are entitled to is the work…not the bennies from the work.

Needless to say, writers and artists are superlative practitioners of what I like to call THE DQ, or the “dismissive quip.” And just like the frosty treats at that more widely known DQ, Dairy Queen, verbal DQs taste great when first consumed, but later on leave one with dyspeptic emptiness.

One of my personal favorites among writers is this one:

Oh yeah, that article/book/review/poem by New Writer on the Scene was great…twenty years ago when Mr. or Ms. Real Genius first wrote about it. An obvious rip off from Ms./Mr. Flavor of the week.

The not so subtle subtext of this particular DQ of course is: What she or wrote wasn’t even an original idea. She or he stole it.

These are the very same arrows being launched at Elon Musk today. He didn’t invent electricity or rocket propulsion or pneumatic tubes. Musk just riffed on them like any of us could and brought forth Tesla, SpaceX and the potential for high-speed travel without burning up the atmosphere. So how come he did it and we didn’t?

Which brings me to the third longform—five thousand word-ish—piece Malcolm Gladwell wrote for The New Yorker for the June 3, 1996 issue called “The Tipping Point.”

First of all, “The Tipping Point” was not an original idea. Gladwell “stole” it.

It is a phrase that has been widely used in Physics to define the moment in time when the addition of any unit of mass to a balanced object “tips” it over. We all remember doing those cheesy experiments in High School. Finding the center of mass in an irregular object and then positioning that center out of equilibrium. The exact moment the gravitational force pushing the “top” of the object to the earth exceeds the mass at the “bottom” keeping the object static or “up,” is when the thing falls over. It tips.

The Tipping Point is also a term used in epidemiology when an infectious disease moves from contained (staying in one particular population at an equilibrium state of infection, i.e. one guy gets the disease at the same rate as one recovers from it) to an epidemic—infection moving in a geometric progression…an n+ 1 increase in infection.

Okay so physics and epidemiology speak of Tipping Points, that’s interesting. But it’s not something that will burn up five thousand words and still make Tina Brown happy.

Gladwell knew that.

In fact, he’d been sitting on this Tipping Point notion since 1984. That’s twelve years of inside his mind marination before he thought he’d found a phenomenon counter-intuitive enough to make for an interesting story.

Here’s the thing about newspaper journalists who leave their particular “beat” and become longform piece creators. They don’t forget about their past work and start “thinking Big Original Thoughts!” They don’t abandon all of the stuff they learned as crime reporters and start writing about how Pret-a-Porter fashion influences the Tokyo Stock market.

Instead, they go to their brain pantry that they’ve lined with idea-stuffed sardine cans over the years.  Then they key open something that hasn’t exceeded its expiration date and gone bad and see if they can use it. They dig through all of the stuff they had to cut to make deadlines long since past in search of connections.

Remember that Gladwell was at The Washington Post for ten years before he went to The New Yorker. He first covered business for deputy editor Steve Pearlstein before he moved over to the science desk, which meant that if there was some FDA hearing on the hill, he had to show up and “write up” what happened and file that story for inclusion in the next day’s newspaper. Whether he liked it or not.

Every now and then, and at his editor’s discretion, a beat writer earns the latitude to go outside the wire of his/her particular niche. But not often. Pearlstein spoke of how it’s done for Chris Wilson’s profile Gladwell’s Brain in the January 8, 2007 edition of The Washingtonian magazine.

You have to develop a reputation…when you do that sort of thing, editors like it and print it and give it good play, but you don’t ask permission beforehand. It has to come in the back door.

Gladwell didn’t go to J-school so he had no idea of where the front door was, let along the back door.

So he wasn’t clued in to the fact that the typical beat writer hired out of Columbia keeps his head down and minds his knitting… He doesn’t inject “personality” into the 500 words he files on an FDA hearing. And he certainly doesn’t compare the FDA commissioner to a famous historical dullard like Gladwell did in 1991, “(David) Kessler broke from his Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge impersonation just once…”

So Gladwell was not your average Washington journalist dreaming of one day getting promoted to an office off of the newsroom floor. In fact, Gladwell is so enamored with the din of the newsroom that today he prefers finding a table of a noisy restaurant to work. Simulating the chaos of the Post in the late 80s comforts him.

But what of this notion that he’d been sitting on the idea for The Tipping Point since 1984?

The thing about Gladwell I think is that he understood a fundamental life truth much earlier than most of us do. Finding something interesting to do and practically applying the craft of doing it over and over again to feed yourself and put a roof over your head while you take every opportunity to push yourself to get better at it…is the recipe for a happy life.

So after his College graduation and failure to get a cool job in advertising and after a stint at the American Spectator, Gladwell took a job in 1985 at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. The EPPC is a conservative soft-lobby/think tank that dedicates itself to having its scholar/writers create articles that can be featured in its own publications as well as op-eds in other more mainstream papers. Gladwell could keep writing and pay for his ramen noodles too.

The EPPC is what Edward Bernays would call a Propaganda outfit with a mission to shape public opinion to its core mission—increasing the influence of Judeo/Christian morality on public policy. I’m not really sure what that means beyond a desire to reduce big government while simultaneously increasing government’s upholding of the EPPC’s definitions of fundamental moral principle. It’s complicated…on purpose. Because unfortunately manipulating human behavior for the “better” is dependent upon one’s definition of “better.” And when we try and define “better” we find ourselves dealing with ambiguity.  And no one likes that.  Especially in Washington.

As Gladwell himself said, “I was Canadian, so this was all very unfamiliar.”

In Washington, Gladwell came to share a four-person house with an intern taking a year off from Yale at The New Republic named Jacob Weisberg, a macher from a long line of machers who is now editor in chief of Slate. Weisberg became his “connector” and a lifelong friend. As Gladwell admits in the book The Tipping Point:

My social circle is, in reality, not a circle. It is a pyramid. And at the top of the pyramid is a single person—Jacob (Weisberg)—who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the relationships that constitute my life.

As is typical for a unique thinker like Gladwell, the most critical introduction wasn’t the chain of people who led him to meeting his eventual literary agent Tina Bennett. She was the newbie agent at the powerful Janklow and Nesbit Agency in 1996 who masterfully worked with Gladwell to position and sell The Tipping Point for a big advance.

Rather it was Weisberg simply introducing Gladwell to his mother Lois that proved indispensable.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Where did “The Tipping Point” as Big Idea really originate?  That’s up next.

The Villain Drives the Story

 

I sometimes get asked, “Why does Resistance exist?”

Stefan Gierasch as Del Gue in “Jeremiah Johnson”

It’s a good question.

Why did Creation include this monster? For what purpose? Just to screw us all up and make life difficult?

(When I say “Resistance,” I mean in story terms “the Villain.”)

Isn’t Resistance entirely negative? What possible evolutionary purpose could it serve?

Here’s my answer. It might not be anybody else’s answer, but it’s mine.

 

Resistance gives meaning to life.

 

Or to put it in narrative terms:

 

The villain gives meaning to the story.

 

Think about it. If there were no villain, there’d be no story. If there were no Shark, no Terminator, no Alien … if there were no Coriolanus Snow, no Noah Cross, no Hannibal Lecter, we writers would be up a tree with no way down.

The villain drives the story.

The villain gives meaning to the story.

The snake (actually “the serpent”) in the Garden of Eden saved Adam and Eve from a life of picking fruit and hanging around naked and happy.

Is that Edenic life really human?

I mean seriously. Is that the noblest destiny our race can come up with?

It was supposed to be seen as a calamity when God kicked our original Mom and Pop out of the Garden. Maybe it was. But it was the greatest thing that ever happened to you and me as writers.

 

Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

 

Call this myth if you like, but I daresay there’s no truer depiction of life-as-we-live-it anywhere in literature.

The human condition is the ultimate villain, as it is the consummate blessing. The Almighty cast us forth into the Land of Nod, east of Eden, because we dared (no doubt blindly and obliviously, but dared nonetheless) to steal a share of His nature, that is, free will, the knowledge of good and evil, the capacity to create.

In our path He set evil, villainy, Resistance, that indelible, indefatigable aspect of our nature that craved despite everything to destroy itself.

How do we measure a hero in a story, except by the obstacles she faces and overcomes.

 

“‘Mongst Injuns,” Del Gue declares in the movie Jeremiah Johnson, “a tribe’s greatness is measured by how mighty its enemies be.”

 

Actors love to portray villains because they sense, even if they might not always be able to articulate it, that the villain drives the story. The villain gives meaning to the story.

If there were no villain, there would be no story.

Spend Your Time

I. The patient took the pain medicine as prescribed and didn’t understand why the doctor was upset.

Patient’s point of view: He was in pain and followed the instructions on the bottle.

Doctor’s point of view: The pain medicine was prescribed by the patient’s veterinarian, for the patient’s dog.

II. The drug rep walked into the doctor’s office dressed as the Grim Reaper and didn’t understand why the doctor asked him to leave.

Drug rep’s point of view: It was Halloween, he was having fun.

Doctor’s point of view: He had patients with life-threatening diseases/illnesses. The last thing they needed was to be met by the Grim Reaper upon a visit to their doctor’s office.

III. The office manager put examination table paper on all of the doctor’s examination tables and didn’t understand why the doctor asked him to remove it.

Office manager’s point of view: It was free paper provided by a drug company and would save money.

Doctor’s point of view: It was flat out wrong to have a young teenage girl sitting on examination table paper that advertised a drug for erectile dysfunction.

These are true stories (well true, but with a few tweaks . . . ).

They make me laugh because they are real examples of real people doing what real people often do best—fail to fully think through their actions in advance.

I value the stories because they are real examples of real people, taking real actions that I never would have been able to make up on my own.

To obtain these stories I had to 1) experience them myself or 2) lift the stories from the doctor to whom they belonged. I went with the latter.

I’ve been working out of my home office since 2001. The upside of working alone: No other people. The downside of working alone: No other people.

I’ve never wished myself back into a traditional office, but at the same time, I often feel the walls around me becoming more comfortable and harder to leave.

I have everything I need—and if I don’t have it, I can order it online—except for great experiences.

With a few exceptions, all of my great stories occurred pre-2001—or when on vacation from the home office.

We talk a lot on this site about keeping our time safe, not wasting it, doing the work instead of becoming distracted by the rest of life and the people within it. But… We miss a lot if we go too far.

As the end of 2017 approaches, and so many of us think about the changes for the next year, I want to encourage all of you to get out of your office.

The sounds of the streets help inform musicians. The colors of the sky speak to painters. The actions of everyday people inspire the writers.

It’s important to save your time, but you’ve got to spend it, too.

“Keep Working”

 

[I’m gonna interrupt this series on Villains for a quick “Bulletin from the Trenches.”]

 

When I first came out to Hollywood from New York and I was scuffling around desperately for employment, I wound up doing a couple of small writing jobs for the director Ernie Pintoff. Ernie was a seasoned pro (he had actually won an Oscar for a short subject, titled The Critic). My frantic state was very clear to Ernie and, one day after we had finished work, he drew up and gave me a look that told me he was about to impart some serious wisdom.

Ernie Pintoff

Ernie said he knew that at my stage of the game, most of the gigs I could attract would be pretty low-ball, non-remunerative, and even in some cases a little dubious ethically. But, he said,

 

          “Keep working.”

 

What Ernie meant was don’t turn your nose up at paying (and even non-paying) assignments. “Yeah, a lot of ’em are gonna be pretty lousy and you’re gonna be saying to yourself, ‘This is really for the birds.’ But keep working. You never know who you’ll meet on a job, what contacts you’ll make, what opportunities may present themselves. Stay in the action. Keep perfecting your craft. You’re acquiring experience. You’re learning all the time, even if you don’t think you are.”

I’m taking Ernie’s advice right now, and it’s saving my life.

My “Trenches” book is done. Shawn loves it. I love it. It’s out there now, looking for a publisher.

Now the waiting begins.

Now Resistance appears, big-time.

Now the temptation arises to hold your breath and attach yourself emotionally to an outcome.

That attitude is bad news.

Bad luck.

Bad karma.

 

            “Keep working.”

 

If you’re reading this, I know you know what I’m talking about. We’ve all been in this place, some of us multiple-multiple times. It never gets any easier. The mind never gets any stronger.

Dark thoughts obtrude.

Distraction looms.

I repeat to myself all the psych-up mantras I know so well. But they still ricochet around in my head, seeking purchase and often not finding any.

 

          “Keep working.”

 

I’ve started the next book. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m doing it every day. I have to.

The Muse tests you and me 24/7. She flies over and peers down on us. What she wants to see is that we are dedicated to the journey, to the process, that we are in it for the long haul and in it for keeps.

What she doesn’t want to see is that we are attached to the real-world outcome of one specific project.

The goddess hates that because it shows that we have misapprehended the nature of her alliance with us and of our apprenticeship in her service.

 

            “Keep working.”

 

The pro athlete who gets cut from his team, the ballerina who is let go by her dance company … both must go home and IMMEDIATELY begin training for their next job. The sent-down wide receiver must head over to the local college and recruit one of the young quarterbacks to work with him, alone and at night if necessary, throwing passes on the practice field, letting him run routes, helping him keep his technique sharp. The ballet dancer must sign up for class at once, continue her strength training, keep up her barre work.

For you and me, finishing Book #1 (or #21) means only plunging in immediately on #2 or #22.

We have to.

That’s the law.

 

            “Keep working.”

The Difference Between Heroes and Villains

 

We’ve seen in prior posts that villain and hero are often opposite sides of the same coin.

Villain or hero? Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in the 1978 “Blade Runner”

Hero believes X; Villain believes Opposite-of-X.

Hero seeks Outcome X; Villain seeks Outcome Opposite-of-X.

Does this mean the Good Guy and the Bad Guy are equivalent?

Is the hero really no “better” than the heavy; he just happens to believe something different?

What separates the Good Guy from the Bad Guy (at least some of the time) is the Good Guy is capable of sacrificing himself for the good of others.

In fact, the climax of many great stories is exactly that.

Bogey puts Ingrid on the plane to Lisbon.

Huck Finn tears up the letter that he believes will save himself while condemning his friend Jim.

The 300 Spartans die to the last man at Thermopylae.

There are exceptions. “The Guru” (Eduardo Cianelli) in Gunga Din, knowing he can’t escape his captors, steps to brink of the pit of vipers and turns back to face the three British sergeants (Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.)

 

GURU

You have sworn to give your lives if necessary for your country, which is England. Well, India is my country, and I can die for it as readily as you can for yours.

 

And he leaps into the pit.

Which makes us think, “Hmm, maybe the Guru is not the villain after all. Could the villain be England’s unjust colonial domination of India?”

Another seeming villain who sacrifices himself is Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), the replicant leader in the 1978 Blade Runner. Roy’s choice in the climax on the rooftop of the Bradbury Building is to save the man who is trying to kill him, Blade Runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) while he himself expires of the wound he knows is mortal. [P.S. Here’s the story of Rutger Hauer changing the dialogue the night before the scene was shot.]

 

ROY BATTY

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

 

That’s not a villain speech, is it? It’s a hero speech. It tells us (though the filmmakers themselves may not have realized this at the time) that the villain in Blade Runner is not Roy or his fellow replicants Pris (Daryl Hannah), Leon (Brion James) and Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), whose only aim is to survive the four-year life span they’ve been doomed to by their creators, but the idea of manufacturing human-like slaves in the first place. In other words, the villain is Mr. Eldon Tyrell of the Tyrell Corporation—and all those who went along with this concept.

The Seven Samurai are willing to give their lives for the villagers.

Clarice Starling enters Buffalo Bill’s den in pitch blackness to save the killer’s captive, Catherine Martin.

Sydney Carton takes Edward Darnay’s place beneath the guillotine in A Tale of Two Cities.

Those are heroes.

The hero is capable of the ultimate sacrifice.