There's a dynamic that I'm sure you're aware of but you didn't quite capture in this essay. As Americans we used to have outgroups like the Soviet Union and the Germans. However, as we developed the largest economy and most powerful military in the history of the world, there was no other country or outside entity that made a compelling villain. Emerging to fill the void was the opposing political tribe. Democrats and Republicans are each other's outgroup.
However, there are a few things keeping us in line. First, the two groups are intertwined in the US economy so there's a practical necessity to tolerate each other. Second, many of us have family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc who are on the other side, and we might resent them but also probably wouldn't be willing to mow them down in the most brutal and violent way possible. Third, the two sides are fairly even in terms of political power so neither side has much of an opportunity to take down the other side.
Nonetheless, we do tell stories about how the other side is evil, our side is virtuous, and we need to run a scorched earth campaign and utterly destroy those fuckers. I could give plenty of examples but that might get into dangerous territory. I'm sure anyone reading this could at least think of ways their opponents do this.
I enjoy your perspective. You’re right about a lot, too much, actually, and that makes me a bit uncomfy. This is America, the land of rugged individualism. The biggest existential threat to our country isn’t the Mountain People or Orcs or some alien invasion (though wouldn’t it be nice if it were? We could finally bust out those $700 billion a year we spend on the military). No, our true “villain” is much closer…the guy down the street with the opposing yard sign, your cousin who won’t shut up about ivermectin at Thanksgiving dinner… We don’t need an “Other” to hate when we’ve got each other. Every holiday meal in this country is basically Civil War II, only instead of Avengers trading blows, it’s your uncle versus your niece arguing over who ruined the economy. And instead of vibranium shields, we’re armed with bad faith tweets and Facebook memes. But maybe that’s the story our culture is struggling to tell. If you squint through the CGI carnage of D&W, what you’re left with is a group of messy, broken people, squabbling over who gets to define the meaning of their existence. Sound familiar? America doesn’t lack a cause, we just can’t agree on which cause to believe in. Climate change should unite us all, but instead we’re over here splitting into factions like we’re on Survivor (or the Apprentice…). So, D&W, yes, it’s mind numbing and ridiculous, but there’s something reassuring in the way it shrugs at the chaos and keeps going. The nostalgic Green Day montage? It’s not an elegant cultural statement it’s an admission that this is all absurd. And sometimes, when you’re staring down the barrel of existential dread, absurdity is the only reasonable response. So yeah, I laughed at the dick jokes. I let my brain switch off for two hours and enjoyed watching Hugh Jackman beat the living hell out of an army of Deadpools (honestly I was in it for the Wolverine bod *drool). And maybe, just maybe, that’s what we need right now…a little gallows humor while we all sit around the campfire of our crumbling culture, roasting marshmallows over the ashes of the very franchises that brought us here. Fuck it. PS Love your work.
I'm not sure that much of anything you say here about Deadpool v. Wolverine couldn't also be said about Don Quixote. Both are very meta, both take a comedic approach to violence, and both require a fairly intimate knowledge of their genres (in Quixote's case, the romance) to get the in-jokes. A comparison to Quixote is instructive in that the book similarly undercuts stories about "heroism told around the campfire to motivate young people to go out and be heroes themselves." Also Quixote was written in 1605, so if your thesis is that the nature of D&W indicates a "chilling symbol of society's decline," then society has been chillingly declining for 400 years. Not sure of your intent, but that and your citation of a Jim Geraghty tweet suggests to me that you're making a conservative, William Bennett-ish argument here.
Ooooh I love this, because Don Quixote DOES talk about IP management in the second part; addresses it DIRECTLY. So Don Quixote is relaased and becomes a huge hit. And suddenly unauthorized sequels appear (fanfic!) written by ransoms, but a guy name Pedro de Avellaneda stands out. Miguel de Cervantes, the original author, is furious and writes the second part. Early on there is a speech by Don Quixote the character angrily ranting about those shitty fanfics and how this is his REAL sequel. So, IP management! The meta has been with humanity way longer than you give it credit for
I suppose my point was that the whole story is not an abstraction of IP management issue in itself like D&W, but I guess that's irrelevant now.
At the end of the day I guess I am a bit tired of the constant winks and nudges, corporation backed media throws at me, trying to engratiate with the viewer.
But that's neither here nor there and hardly relevant to the convo, I was proven wrong and the only thing I can sort of hold on to is that Cervantes was just a guy and not like...Disney.
I mean no offense, but I'm new to Substack and I'm starting to realize lots of people here need to chill out and touch grass. You don't need to feel existential angst over Disney movies ending civilization or things beyond your control. You should get a dog and go to the dog park every day, meet new people and play with puppies for at least one hour a day. You'll feel better.
Also, the Madonna choral versions on D&W slaps hard.
The Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588, and since that time, the Spanish empire entered a period of collapse and decline. It’s not surprising that that is when Don Quixote was written.
I came out of Deadpool & Wolverine feeling vaguely uncomfortable - thanks for helping me understand why.
This also put a finger on another plot point of the movie that made me unconsciously squirm: that Wade's initial motivation to be a part of something that "matters" and contribute to society is actually a naive weakness to be exploited by a corrupt authority figure. What actually matters is his small social circle and continued ability to consume/reference pop culture. As you point out, the emotional payoff of the heores' willingness to sacrifice themselves must be undermined both during the scene via ridiculous framing of High Jackman's roided-out physique/choral rendition of a pop song and immediately afterwards with a joke. Because sincerity is cringe.
As an older millennial, I'm find myself generally distressed by the gleeful nihilism in pop culture and currentlu dominant political beliefs, as well as younger people's widespread insistence that work is inherently exploitative and unworthy of their full attention and commitment.
I guess that's how I know I'm getting older, since I'm complaining about Kids These Days.
I only recently discovered your writing so i haven't enjoyed any of your books. I also don't know the culture of your comments section... So forgive me if i make an ass out of myself.
I think the very idea that a culture "Needs" a uniting enemy is very archaic. Western society is facing "What is the meaning of life?" Head on with limited access to scaffolding like religion, a collective enemy etc.
There are four corners of the psychological "Dark forest" : 1. Death, 2. Life has no objective meaning. 3. We are responsible for our own lives. 4. We are ultimately alone in our skulls.
According to long time counselors, these four realities are the core of most trips to therapist's offices. I can see these four issues hit me at various times and i can see them in people acting out and suffering.
Their is no way to "Solve" these four corners of the dark forest. All we can do is get familiar with them. Whats really next level is when you make your home in the dark forest. Instead of running from these thoughts or denying they exist they become our place of strength. You feel your terror subside and your need for soothing or vice declines. Eventually you come to see the strange liberating beauty in the dark forest. Its your true home... Where no one can evict you.
This is how to be okay. This is what good story should be imparting. An external enemy is a distraction. Getting more people to get comfortable in their dark forest is our true challenge.
Thanks for writing. I appreciate all of your tik toks.
This still might mean the end of the action movie genre, though, right? I’m finding it hard to think of action movies (successful or otherwise) that go anywhere near the “people vs. their environment” framing of which the Dark Forest seems to be a subclass. Movies like Interstellar can get away with using the abstract idea of despair as a primary antagonist, but it does seem like there are certain types of stories that don’t work well if there isn’t some evil other that’s at least somewhat sentient (plus modern zombie movies tend to have at least a throwaway line that attributes the existence of less-sapient zombies to some more-sapient group’s original sin of greed or arrogance or something). Maybe this is a type of story we actually don’t need anymore anyway. I dunno. Trying to figure out from this why it seems to ring true for me that certain types of stories “need” a personified villain, but also that there are obviously already many interesting, even popular, stories where there’s no such thing.
In my opinion the the concept of the four corners of the dark forest, being an internal psychological problem, is closer to the idea of “People vs their self” rather than “People vs their environment.” the antagonist we face is our own discomfort with facts of existing like death, the experience of being alone in our heads, having to make meaning out of life that comes with no instruction manual and being responsible for the results of our actions or inactions. I think there is a growing discontent with heroes that solve their problems by punching or shooting. These action movie tropes are hugely influenced by an Imperialist mindset that violence is just another tool. I have another idea that is the idea of Anti -Love. Hate is one flavor or anti-love but there are many flavours … apathy, fear, othering, dehumanizing, scapegoating, etc etc… the list of Anti-Love behavior is long… and we can commit acts of anti-love against ourselves… eating unhealthy food in excess, demanding unrealistic standards of ourselves etc. this relates to the four corners of the dark forest in the sense that coming to terms with these hugely antagonizing facts of our psychology… requires we show ourselves compassion, understanding and love. Just one example: It can be hard to lose someone to death… and if we never get familiar with the dark forest of death the loss may become overwhelming. Contemplating our own finitude may be too much and we may hide in our infinite to do list. By lovingly bringing ourselves to the death dark forest movies like “The Notebook” do us a wonderful service of letting us process our feelings around death. Forget action films, we need more films like the Notebook that skillfully and somewhat subversively get us to the place where we can get familiar with our deepest problems. A loving parent feeds their children vegetables even if the child does not like them because the parent understands nutrition and health in a way that the child is incapable of. The same needs to be true of the storytelling we share. There are far too many people afraid or unaware of how to make their home in their dark forest. I see people suffering every day addicted to sugar or validation online… people blaming themselves or others or the universe. Then acting out small or large acts of Anti-Love, which results in even more people being harmed, perpetuating these insane patterns through each generation. One day everyone will peacefully exist in their own dark forest… where we are familiar and at peace with death. understand and proudly accept the privilege of being responsible for our lives. Become aware of our constant companion of ourself and accept the inflow and outflow of people in our life story. And start contributing to the unfolding collaboration of creation of the meaning of life. That's the moral of the story, in my humble opinion.
Thank you for elaborating! That makes a lot of sense — in fact one of the most egregious Hollywood (and video game) tropes in this vein is when they take a conflict that really ought to be “versus self” and use the scifi/fantasy element to make it an external punchable thing anyway; rather than contemplate the nature of humanity, or of his own personal demons, Dr. Jekyll now simply manifests Mr. Hyde as a separate entity and duels him. Certainly it’s flashier. I’m tempted to think it’s more “accessible” too, but that’s circular reasoning; broad audiences understand the memes and shorthands that communicate the direct/violent conflict in the story *because* that’s the common archetype.
Free Bird Games have made some interesting art in this Dark Forest space, I think. Their stories are more “visual novel” (and on tight rails, at that) than “game” but even the veneer of interactivity does something hard to describe (but cool, imo) with the narrative pacing and overall structure. Visual shorthand borrowed from the likes of Final Fantasy is used to instead tell stories about the inner thoughts and final wishes of a person on their deathbed. I would be delighted to see this model of storytelling become more widespread.
Thank you! I deeply appreciate that feedback. I once spoke with a videogame design PhD candidate and he said dominance systems are everywhere in videogames because they were everywhere in human culture up until a few hundred years ago. The innovation of a "Leviathan" government that enforces laws and has the power to restrict the rights of the individual if they violate the rights of other individuals... This whole system is relatively unprecedented in human history and we have yet to adapt our subconscious and thus our entertainment to this reality. Its similar to how cell phones absolutely ruined the genre of horror for a few years because writers didn't have deep understanding of how to incorporate them. Videogames especially have had a hard time figuring out how to treat every enemy with even a drop of humanity. In some ways game designers are at a disadvantage because the player does not view cannon fodder enemies as truly human, they're elements of a puzzle. they're more like the blocks in Tetris than actual people. So i don't have any surprise that an industry built from its very core on expendible enemies struggles with stories like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I wonder if there has ever been a human culture that had freedom from hunger, violence, and poverty for long enough to even approach the problem we face of having no antagonist other than the self? I think there have been small pockets of time where some privileged philosphers or royalty can contemplate this issue, but i can't think of a single time period where large swaths of the population were faced with the full impact of existential angst of the four corners of the dark forest. Maybe we shouldn't be so surprised at the deep polarization and othering we're all doing. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised at skyrocketing anxiety in younger generations. We've never had this problem before as a species and we're all staring at the void collectively.
No, not exactly. Its based on the book “Loves exicutioner” which has the four ideas… the author is a therapist who discovered the pattern through years of helping people. i just thought they mapped well to the storytelling idea of the dark forest. The dark forest comes from Arthurian Legend where the knights of the round table were on a quest for the grail and came to the mythical dark forest. They decided the Knightley thing to do would be to each enter the forest where it seemed “Darkest” to the individual Knight. So they each had to be brave to face their personal darkest fear. This became a writing technique to put your character into their own personal unique hell before they learn their lesson. I have a love of screenwriting and therapy. The four corners of the dark forest is a framework that helps me understand my vices, my fears and my triumphs. I use this idea to find meaningful things to write about. Do you have any questions? I love sharing this idea.
As usual, this made me think and I almost agree with the premise except...Deadpool is 100% a comedy. This flick is closer to Monty Python or Airplane esthetically, and those films are not diminished by having questionable villians. Absurdist comedies generally have ridiculous or banal villians on purpose.
Unlike Wick, Braveheart, or even most Avengers movies - which aim for emotional gravitas via some moral high ground - D&W never for one second expects you to take it seriously, and so doesn't really suffer from its vapid premise any more than Naked Gun or any Mel Brooks film does. It's just trying to make you laugh.
Looking at the villains in the James Bond franchise backs up your thesis. Early films have traditional villains (Russia etc) but it becomes more nebulous over time with country of villainy either not specified or villains being terrorists without affiliation, acting for financial gain.
Not a disagreement, just an extension of your points about tribalism as operating system.
"Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so useful, why didn’t it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense? In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, is not geared to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. What reason does, rather, is help us justify our beliefs and actions to others, convince them through argumentation, and evaluate the justifications and arguments that others address to us.
In other words, reason helps humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment. This interactionist interpretation explains why reason may have evolved and how it fits with other cognitive mechanisms. It makes sense of strengths and weaknesses that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists―why reason is biased in favor of what we already believe, why it may lead to terrible ideas and yet is indispensable to spreading good ones."
Yeah, I don't agree. Maybe on a meta-level, but I sincerely doubt this was the message people tried to convey when writing these scripts and filming these films. They want to pay their mortgages, and thus write stuff that sells.
But the point is that this is the kind of thing you have to tap into in order to pay your mortgage; you have to write a movie that’s in touch with the millions of people who go to see it. And that means your movie has to reflect cultural beliefs about the world, including ones you might just have yourself.
It doesn’t have to be a case of trying to explain these beliefs, or to challenge them. It doesn’t even have to be conscious; usually creating anything successful is a brutally Darwinian process. It’s just saying a successful thing will reflect something about a society in a similar way to a candle guiding moths towards it: the success is hacking into something, whether it intends to influence or not.
This is kind of what people mean when they say all art is political. I’m sure this movie didn’t set out to advance any particular policy in the real world. But it did set out to be successful, which means it must reflect something about the worldview of its audience. And that will mean it says something about the audience, just incidentally
Interesting point, and maybe why this Deadpool fell really flat with me, as I don't have a lot of sentimentality about cancelled superhero movies.
That said, the villains of Top Gun 2022 are obviously supposed to be Iranians. There's no other country that makes sense. And, of course, that's a country who we definitely haven't been fighting an on-off will they or won't they proxy war for the last decade-plus.
There's a dynamic that I'm sure you're aware of but you didn't quite capture in this essay. As Americans we used to have outgroups like the Soviet Union and the Germans. However, as we developed the largest economy and most powerful military in the history of the world, there was no other country or outside entity that made a compelling villain. Emerging to fill the void was the opposing political tribe. Democrats and Republicans are each other's outgroup.
However, there are a few things keeping us in line. First, the two groups are intertwined in the US economy so there's a practical necessity to tolerate each other. Second, many of us have family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc who are on the other side, and we might resent them but also probably wouldn't be willing to mow them down in the most brutal and violent way possible. Third, the two sides are fairly even in terms of political power so neither side has much of an opportunity to take down the other side.
Nonetheless, we do tell stories about how the other side is evil, our side is virtuous, and we need to run a scorched earth campaign and utterly destroy those fuckers. I could give plenty of examples but that might get into dangerous territory. I'm sure anyone reading this could at least think of ways their opponents do this.
I enjoy your perspective. You’re right about a lot, too much, actually, and that makes me a bit uncomfy. This is America, the land of rugged individualism. The biggest existential threat to our country isn’t the Mountain People or Orcs or some alien invasion (though wouldn’t it be nice if it were? We could finally bust out those $700 billion a year we spend on the military). No, our true “villain” is much closer…the guy down the street with the opposing yard sign, your cousin who won’t shut up about ivermectin at Thanksgiving dinner… We don’t need an “Other” to hate when we’ve got each other. Every holiday meal in this country is basically Civil War II, only instead of Avengers trading blows, it’s your uncle versus your niece arguing over who ruined the economy. And instead of vibranium shields, we’re armed with bad faith tweets and Facebook memes. But maybe that’s the story our culture is struggling to tell. If you squint through the CGI carnage of D&W, what you’re left with is a group of messy, broken people, squabbling over who gets to define the meaning of their existence. Sound familiar? America doesn’t lack a cause, we just can’t agree on which cause to believe in. Climate change should unite us all, but instead we’re over here splitting into factions like we’re on Survivor (or the Apprentice…). So, D&W, yes, it’s mind numbing and ridiculous, but there’s something reassuring in the way it shrugs at the chaos and keeps going. The nostalgic Green Day montage? It’s not an elegant cultural statement it’s an admission that this is all absurd. And sometimes, when you’re staring down the barrel of existential dread, absurdity is the only reasonable response. So yeah, I laughed at the dick jokes. I let my brain switch off for two hours and enjoyed watching Hugh Jackman beat the living hell out of an army of Deadpools (honestly I was in it for the Wolverine bod *drool). And maybe, just maybe, that’s what we need right now…a little gallows humor while we all sit around the campfire of our crumbling culture, roasting marshmallows over the ashes of the very franchises that brought us here. Fuck it. PS Love your work.
I'm not sure that much of anything you say here about Deadpool v. Wolverine couldn't also be said about Don Quixote. Both are very meta, both take a comedic approach to violence, and both require a fairly intimate knowledge of their genres (in Quixote's case, the romance) to get the in-jokes. A comparison to Quixote is instructive in that the book similarly undercuts stories about "heroism told around the campfire to motivate young people to go out and be heroes themselves." Also Quixote was written in 1605, so if your thesis is that the nature of D&W indicates a "chilling symbol of society's decline," then society has been chillingly declining for 400 years. Not sure of your intent, but that and your citation of a Jim Geraghty tweet suggests to me that you're making a conservative, William Bennett-ish argument here.
They are not meta in the same way. One is fiction about fiction, and the other one is fiction about IP management.
Ooooh I love this, because Don Quixote DOES talk about IP management in the second part; addresses it DIRECTLY. So Don Quixote is relaased and becomes a huge hit. And suddenly unauthorized sequels appear (fanfic!) written by ransoms, but a guy name Pedro de Avellaneda stands out. Miguel de Cervantes, the original author, is furious and writes the second part. Early on there is a speech by Don Quixote the character angrily ranting about those shitty fanfics and how this is his REAL sequel. So, IP management! The meta has been with humanity way longer than you give it credit for
I should just walk into the ocean.
I suppose my point was that the whole story is not an abstraction of IP management issue in itself like D&W, but I guess that's irrelevant now.
At the end of the day I guess I am a bit tired of the constant winks and nudges, corporation backed media throws at me, trying to engratiate with the viewer.
But that's neither here nor there and hardly relevant to the convo, I was proven wrong and the only thing I can sort of hold on to is that Cervantes was just a guy and not like...Disney.
I mean no offense, but I'm new to Substack and I'm starting to realize lots of people here need to chill out and touch grass. You don't need to feel existential angst over Disney movies ending civilization or things beyond your control. You should get a dog and go to the dog park every day, meet new people and play with puppies for at least one hour a day. You'll feel better.
Also, the Madonna choral versions on D&W slaps hard.
The Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588, and since that time, the Spanish empire entered a period of collapse and decline. It’s not surprising that that is when Don Quixote was written.
Yes, society has been declining for 400 years
I came out of Deadpool & Wolverine feeling vaguely uncomfortable - thanks for helping me understand why.
This also put a finger on another plot point of the movie that made me unconsciously squirm: that Wade's initial motivation to be a part of something that "matters" and contribute to society is actually a naive weakness to be exploited by a corrupt authority figure. What actually matters is his small social circle and continued ability to consume/reference pop culture. As you point out, the emotional payoff of the heores' willingness to sacrifice themselves must be undermined both during the scene via ridiculous framing of High Jackman's roided-out physique/choral rendition of a pop song and immediately afterwards with a joke. Because sincerity is cringe.
As an older millennial, I'm find myself generally distressed by the gleeful nihilism in pop culture and currentlu dominant political beliefs, as well as younger people's widespread insistence that work is inherently exploitative and unworthy of their full attention and commitment.
I guess that's how I know I'm getting older, since I'm complaining about Kids These Days.
I only recently discovered your writing so i haven't enjoyed any of your books. I also don't know the culture of your comments section... So forgive me if i make an ass out of myself.
I think the very idea that a culture "Needs" a uniting enemy is very archaic. Western society is facing "What is the meaning of life?" Head on with limited access to scaffolding like religion, a collective enemy etc.
There are four corners of the psychological "Dark forest" : 1. Death, 2. Life has no objective meaning. 3. We are responsible for our own lives. 4. We are ultimately alone in our skulls.
According to long time counselors, these four realities are the core of most trips to therapist's offices. I can see these four issues hit me at various times and i can see them in people acting out and suffering.
Their is no way to "Solve" these four corners of the dark forest. All we can do is get familiar with them. Whats really next level is when you make your home in the dark forest. Instead of running from these thoughts or denying they exist they become our place of strength. You feel your terror subside and your need for soothing or vice declines. Eventually you come to see the strange liberating beauty in the dark forest. Its your true home... Where no one can evict you.
This is how to be okay. This is what good story should be imparting. An external enemy is a distraction. Getting more people to get comfortable in their dark forest is our true challenge.
Thanks for writing. I appreciate all of your tik toks.
This still might mean the end of the action movie genre, though, right? I’m finding it hard to think of action movies (successful or otherwise) that go anywhere near the “people vs. their environment” framing of which the Dark Forest seems to be a subclass. Movies like Interstellar can get away with using the abstract idea of despair as a primary antagonist, but it does seem like there are certain types of stories that don’t work well if there isn’t some evil other that’s at least somewhat sentient (plus modern zombie movies tend to have at least a throwaway line that attributes the existence of less-sapient zombies to some more-sapient group’s original sin of greed or arrogance or something). Maybe this is a type of story we actually don’t need anymore anyway. I dunno. Trying to figure out from this why it seems to ring true for me that certain types of stories “need” a personified villain, but also that there are obviously already many interesting, even popular, stories where there’s no such thing.
In my opinion the the concept of the four corners of the dark forest, being an internal psychological problem, is closer to the idea of “People vs their self” rather than “People vs their environment.” the antagonist we face is our own discomfort with facts of existing like death, the experience of being alone in our heads, having to make meaning out of life that comes with no instruction manual and being responsible for the results of our actions or inactions. I think there is a growing discontent with heroes that solve their problems by punching or shooting. These action movie tropes are hugely influenced by an Imperialist mindset that violence is just another tool. I have another idea that is the idea of Anti -Love. Hate is one flavor or anti-love but there are many flavours … apathy, fear, othering, dehumanizing, scapegoating, etc etc… the list of Anti-Love behavior is long… and we can commit acts of anti-love against ourselves… eating unhealthy food in excess, demanding unrealistic standards of ourselves etc. this relates to the four corners of the dark forest in the sense that coming to terms with these hugely antagonizing facts of our psychology… requires we show ourselves compassion, understanding and love. Just one example: It can be hard to lose someone to death… and if we never get familiar with the dark forest of death the loss may become overwhelming. Contemplating our own finitude may be too much and we may hide in our infinite to do list. By lovingly bringing ourselves to the death dark forest movies like “The Notebook” do us a wonderful service of letting us process our feelings around death. Forget action films, we need more films like the Notebook that skillfully and somewhat subversively get us to the place where we can get familiar with our deepest problems. A loving parent feeds their children vegetables even if the child does not like them because the parent understands nutrition and health in a way that the child is incapable of. The same needs to be true of the storytelling we share. There are far too many people afraid or unaware of how to make their home in their dark forest. I see people suffering every day addicted to sugar or validation online… people blaming themselves or others or the universe. Then acting out small or large acts of Anti-Love, which results in even more people being harmed, perpetuating these insane patterns through each generation. One day everyone will peacefully exist in their own dark forest… where we are familiar and at peace with death. understand and proudly accept the privilege of being responsible for our lives. Become aware of our constant companion of ourself and accept the inflow and outflow of people in our life story. And start contributing to the unfolding collaboration of creation of the meaning of life. That's the moral of the story, in my humble opinion.
Thank you for elaborating! That makes a lot of sense — in fact one of the most egregious Hollywood (and video game) tropes in this vein is when they take a conflict that really ought to be “versus self” and use the scifi/fantasy element to make it an external punchable thing anyway; rather than contemplate the nature of humanity, or of his own personal demons, Dr. Jekyll now simply manifests Mr. Hyde as a separate entity and duels him. Certainly it’s flashier. I’m tempted to think it’s more “accessible” too, but that’s circular reasoning; broad audiences understand the memes and shorthands that communicate the direct/violent conflict in the story *because* that’s the common archetype.
Free Bird Games have made some interesting art in this Dark Forest space, I think. Their stories are more “visual novel” (and on tight rails, at that) than “game” but even the veneer of interactivity does something hard to describe (but cool, imo) with the narrative pacing and overall structure. Visual shorthand borrowed from the likes of Final Fantasy is used to instead tell stories about the inner thoughts and final wishes of a person on their deathbed. I would be delighted to see this model of storytelling become more widespread.
Thank you! I deeply appreciate that feedback. I once spoke with a videogame design PhD candidate and he said dominance systems are everywhere in videogames because they were everywhere in human culture up until a few hundred years ago. The innovation of a "Leviathan" government that enforces laws and has the power to restrict the rights of the individual if they violate the rights of other individuals... This whole system is relatively unprecedented in human history and we have yet to adapt our subconscious and thus our entertainment to this reality. Its similar to how cell phones absolutely ruined the genre of horror for a few years because writers didn't have deep understanding of how to incorporate them. Videogames especially have had a hard time figuring out how to treat every enemy with even a drop of humanity. In some ways game designers are at a disadvantage because the player does not view cannon fodder enemies as truly human, they're elements of a puzzle. they're more like the blocks in Tetris than actual people. So i don't have any surprise that an industry built from its very core on expendible enemies struggles with stories like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I wonder if there has ever been a human culture that had freedom from hunger, violence, and poverty for long enough to even approach the problem we face of having no antagonist other than the self? I think there have been small pockets of time where some privileged philosphers or royalty can contemplate this issue, but i can't think of a single time period where large swaths of the population were faced with the full impact of existential angst of the four corners of the dark forest. Maybe we shouldn't be so surprised at the deep polarization and othering we're all doing. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised at skyrocketing anxiety in younger generations. We've never had this problem before as a species and we're all staring at the void collectively.
Hey, that's pretty neat. Did you come up with that yourself..? (Googling "Dark Forest" turns up unrelated subject matter.)
No, not exactly. Its based on the book “Loves exicutioner” which has the four ideas… the author is a therapist who discovered the pattern through years of helping people. i just thought they mapped well to the storytelling idea of the dark forest. The dark forest comes from Arthurian Legend where the knights of the round table were on a quest for the grail and came to the mythical dark forest. They decided the Knightley thing to do would be to each enter the forest where it seemed “Darkest” to the individual Knight. So they each had to be brave to face their personal darkest fear. This became a writing technique to put your character into their own personal unique hell before they learn their lesson. I have a love of screenwriting and therapy. The four corners of the dark forest is a framework that helps me understand my vices, my fears and my triumphs. I use this idea to find meaningful things to write about. Do you have any questions? I love sharing this idea.
Big fan since Cracked Days!
As usual, this made me think and I almost agree with the premise except...Deadpool is 100% a comedy. This flick is closer to Monty Python or Airplane esthetically, and those films are not diminished by having questionable villians. Absurdist comedies generally have ridiculous or banal villians on purpose.
Unlike Wick, Braveheart, or even most Avengers movies - which aim for emotional gravitas via some moral high ground - D&W never for one second expects you to take it seriously, and so doesn't really suffer from its vapid premise any more than Naked Gun or any Mel Brooks film does. It's just trying to make you laugh.
4 reminds me of that quote, "Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil."
Looking at the villains in the James Bond franchise backs up your thesis. Early films have traditional villains (Russia etc) but it becomes more nebulous over time with country of villainy either not specified or villains being terrorists without affiliation, acting for financial gain.
Agree that our meta culture is infighting with no clearly identifiable threat. Maybe in twenty years?
Disagree that D&W is 4.5 out of 100. It was hilarious and knew what it was and played it’s own meta critique of superhero movies well.
Not a disagreement, just an extension of your points about tribalism as operating system.
"Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so useful, why didn’t it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense? In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, is not geared to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. What reason does, rather, is help us justify our beliefs and actions to others, convince them through argumentation, and evaluate the justifications and arguments that others address to us.
In other words, reason helps humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment. This interactionist interpretation explains why reason may have evolved and how it fits with other cognitive mechanisms. It makes sense of strengths and weaknesses that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists―why reason is biased in favor of what we already believe, why it may lead to terrible ideas and yet is indispensable to spreading good ones."
https://sites.google.com/site/hugomercier/theargumentativetheoryofreasoning
I absolutely love your work. All of it.
Yeah, I don't agree. Maybe on a meta-level, but I sincerely doubt this was the message people tried to convey when writing these scripts and filming these films. They want to pay their mortgages, and thus write stuff that sells.
Everything really doesn't need to be navelgazed.
But the point is that this is the kind of thing you have to tap into in order to pay your mortgage; you have to write a movie that’s in touch with the millions of people who go to see it. And that means your movie has to reflect cultural beliefs about the world, including ones you might just have yourself.
It doesn’t have to be a case of trying to explain these beliefs, or to challenge them. It doesn’t even have to be conscious; usually creating anything successful is a brutally Darwinian process. It’s just saying a successful thing will reflect something about a society in a similar way to a candle guiding moths towards it: the success is hacking into something, whether it intends to influence or not.
This is kind of what people mean when they say all art is political. I’m sure this movie didn’t set out to advance any particular policy in the real world. But it did set out to be successful, which means it must reflect something about the worldview of its audience. And that will mean it says something about the audience, just incidentally
Interesting point, and maybe why this Deadpool fell really flat with me, as I don't have a lot of sentimentality about cancelled superhero movies.
That said, the villains of Top Gun 2022 are obviously supposed to be Iranians. There's no other country that makes sense. And, of course, that's a country who we definitely haven't been fighting an on-off will they or won't they proxy war for the last decade-plus.
“Any movement devoid of hope will quickly be devoid of members” So good!!!
The movie sucks, but you only needed point 5 for your review.
So glad you have a Substack.......