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Alan Ball’s Academy Award-winning screenplay American Beauty focuses on ...
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In all great stories, each major character is altered somehow by their interpersonal encounters.
Story time is compressed time. An entire life can be told in the space of just ninety minutes and still somehow feel complete. It’s this compression that’s the secret of arresting dialogue.
Some of the most famous lines of dialogue in film history derive their power from the fact that they’re so dense with narrative information it’s as if the entire story is packed into just a few words:
All the principles of storytelling combine into the art of dialogue.
Dialogue should be changeful, it should want something, it should drip with personality and point of view, and it should operate on the two story levels – both conscious and subconscious.
How did they control each other’s self-interested behaviour so fantastically, without the help a police force, a judiciary or even any written law? They’d do it with the earliest and most incendiary form of storytelling. Gossip.
Gossip is a universal human behaviour, with around two-thirds of our conversation being devoted to social topics.
Gossip exists to teach us about other people, to tell us who they really are. Most concerns moral infractions: people breaking the rules of the group. Such stories maintain pro-group behaviour by triggering moral outrage, which pushes us to act, either against the ‘characters’ in gossip or in their defence.
When a character behaves selflessly, and puts the needs of the group before their own, we experience a deep primal craving to see them recognised by the group as a hero and hailed. When a character behaves selfishly, putting their own needs before that of the group, we feel a monstrous urge to see their punishment.
We’re wired to find selfless behaviour heroic and selfish deeds evil.
An analysis of ethnographic accounts of ethics in sixty worldwide groups found they shared these rules: return favours, be courageous, help your group, respect authority, love your family, never steal and be fair, all a variation on ‘don’t put your own selfish interests before that of the tribe’.
The mythologist Joseph Campbell describes the hero’s ultimate test as selflessly ‘giving yourself to some higher end . . . When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.’
It doesn’t have to be a strictly archetypal pattern of selfless hero versus selfish villain.
In the opening sequences of The Grapes of Wrath we feel outraged not about a human, but a terrible drought that drives the noble, hardworking Joad family out on the perilous road.
Brain scans reveal that the mere anticipation of a selfish person being punished is experienced as pleasurable.
heroes and heroines of narrative are those who pay the costs of defending the innocent and who punish defectors,’
Heroes in archetypal stories are selfless costly signallers. In the face of great personal peril, they kill dragons, blow up Death Stars and rescue Jews from Nazis.
They satisfy our moral outrage, and moral outrage is the ancient lifeblood of human storytelling.
In many of our most successful stories, moral outrage is triggered in the early scenes. Watching a selfless character being treated selfishly is a drug of enchantment for t...
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we have two wired-in ambitions: to get along with people, so they like us and consider us non-selfish members of the tribe, and also get ahead of them, so we’re on top.
It’s the conflict at the heart of the human condition and the stories we tell about it.
‘Humans naturally pursue status with ferocity: we all relentlessly, if unconsciously, try to raise our own standing by impressing peers, and naturally if unconsciously, evaluate others in terms of their standing.’
people’s ‘subjective well-being, self-esteem, and mental and physical health appear to depend on the level of status they are accorded by others.’
Humans are interested in the status of themselves, and others, to an almost obsessional degree.
This status flux is the very flesh of human drama: it creates running narratives of loyalty and betrayal; ambition and despair; loves won and lost; schemes and intrigues; intimidation, assassination and war.
At the happy ending of an archetypal story, Booker writes, a ‘hero and heroine must represent the perfect coming together of four values: strength, order, feeling and understanding.’
But if a protagonist learns these four values of heroism at the end of the story, and is therefore rewarded with the ultimate prize of tribal status, that’s not how they begin.
When we meet them, they’re frequently low in the hierarchy – vulnerable, reluctant, trembling in the shadow of Goliath.
A common feature of our hero-making cognition seems to be that we all tend to feel like this – relatively low in status and yet actually, perhaps secretly, possessing the skills and ch...
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no matter what our level of actual privilege, everyone seems to feel unfairly lacking in status.
No matter who we really are, to the hero-making brain we’re always poor Oliver Twist: virtuous and hungry, unfairly deprived of status,
Status play, like moral outrage, permeates human storytelling.
200 popular nineteenth-and early twentieth-century novels found the antagonists’most common flaw was an ineffably chimpish ‘quest for social dominance at the expense of others or an abuse of their existing power’.
Shakespeare’s King Lear
nothing more likely to make a person mad, desperate and dangerous than the removal of their status.
King Lear is a canonical example of a story in which the right external change strikes the right character at the right moment
its ignition point and subsequent causes and effects are the seemingly inevitable consequences of its protagonist’s flawed model of the world.
We can’t simply toss aside our flawed ideas as if they’re a pair of badly fitting trousers. It takes overwhelming evidence to convince us that ‘reality’ is wrong.
When we finally realise something’s up, breaking these beliefs apart means breaking ourselves apart. And that’s precisely what happens in many of our most successful stories.
the psychological torments that can be unleashed by such a loss of status. In its most dangerous form, this is experienced as humiliation.
Psychologists define humiliation as the removal of any ability to claim status.
It’s thought to be a uniquely toxic state and is implicated in some of worst behaviours the human animal engages in, from serial murder to honour killings to genocide.
In story, an experience of humiliation is often the origin of the antago...
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Because humiliation is such an apocalyptic punishment, watching villains being punished this way can feel rapturous.
‘We may hate the villain, but our hatred is meaningless. We want him unmasked to people in his world.’
Babylon, 587 BC. A group of 4,000 high-status men and women were forced out of Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzar II.
Stories are tribal propaganda. They control their group, manipulating its members into behaving in ways that benefit it.
The psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt has explored the stories that competing ideological tribes tell about the world.
The evil truth about humans is that we don’t just compete for status with other people inside our tribes. The tribes we belong to also compete with rival tribes.
