Personal Value Stresses, Heroes, and Storytelling

I was reading The Online Muse’s blog this morning. She has this entry about heroes in which she refers to Andy Bernstein’s essay on heroism.

This got me thinking about some discoveries I’ve made about myself in the last couple of weeks. Recently, I listened to Dr. Peikoff’s lecture “Integration as the Essence of Personal Identity”, which I thought was fabulous. Dr. Peikoff inspired me to think about the kinds of stories I like, the kinds of music I like, and to seek out common principles among them. The idea is to start with different categories of likes/dislikes, identify common principles uniting them, and then see if you can find relationships between the categories.  I asked myself the question: “What is my favorite kind of story?”

I decided that first it has to be an epic tale. Not only does it have to be epic in scale, but also epic in length. I like a good long story with rich detail and lots of events and conflicts. The nature of the primary conflict should have far-reaching ramifications to the entire world (or galaxy, or universe, etc.), but should fundamentally be of an intensely personal, even introspective nature to he heroes.  The resolution of that conflict should be an intense struggle, as well as a challenge to the hero’s integrity.  The hero’s romance should be deeply entangled in the nature of the struggle as well. The hero should win in the end, and get paid.  In other words, it’s not enough that the hero win’s out—he needs to benefit personally from his actions in a manner commensurate with the scale of the battle he has just fought. This is my kind of story.

Then I turned my attention to my taste in music. I enjoy a broad range of musical styles: classical, jazz, big-band, swing, rock, new age, heavy metal. I discovered very quickly that the music I liked was the soundtrack to my kind of story, if you will.  On the surface, heavy metal has little in common with swing. However, they are both very emotionally evocative forms of music. Swing has such a cheery style, and metal is menacing—but they are both intense.  

My favorite pieces of music tend to be long pieces filled with many emotional schema’s—Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony #6, Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond. I’ve discovered that I enjoy various forms of music for their capacity to stylize elements of “my kind of story.” Metal stylizes the intense conflict. Swing; the raw joy of “getting paid.” New Age; the introspective self-aware nature of the hero. Jazz; the capacity of the hero for unadulterated celebration. Rock is sort of a catch-all category that can take any one of theses emotional contexts and stylize a piece of it.

AC/DC captures that devil-may-care, all-or-nothing approach to conflict that the hero will need to win. Sarah McLachlan captures the deep esteem for romance and introspection that is also part of the hero’s psyche.  It’s not the specific content that’s relevant here: it’s the emotional flavor of the music. They are all a soundtrack to my kind of story.

Recently while visiting with M. and Ice Scribe, we debated which was a better science-fiction television show: Battlestar Galactica, or Firefly. I thought it was Battlestar Galactica; of course, Ice Scribe came down firmly on the side of Firefly. She argued that she immediately cared more for the characters in Firefly than in BSG. I could see how the characters in Firefly were more immediately real and colorful, but I still wasn’t convinced. I said that I didn’t value characterization as much as she did; which she (correctly) argued is an extremely important part of storytelling.  Let me say it here: I completely agree that characterization is extremely important, and that Firefly does a better job of immediately making you care about the people in it. That said, I still enjoy BSG more. Why?

I think my recent discoveries about “my kind of story” help explain this. What BSG has up front that Firefly lacks is a sense of the epic.

Firefly begins building an epic story in the background within the first few episodes, mainly centering around the mystery that is River Tam; but the episodes themselves are, well, episodic.  Joss Whedon did the same thing in Buffy, each season was an epic story filled with many side-adventures along the way. The epic story was advanced in bits and pieces throughout the season until it finally becomes the sole focus of the last few episodes.  This is a formula that works, and that I obviously enjoy. However, BSG takes a different approach. Had Firefly lasted on the air, I’m sure it would have been a mighty tale indeed (as the movie proves), and you could certainly see that it was going in an epic direction, but in 14 episodes, it hadn’t really established the epic conflict yet.

BSG begins by casting the entire universe into chaos. There are a few heroes, each with their personal values and value-clashes on whom the fate of the entire human race rests. We do not get to know the heroes as well or as quickly as we do in Firefly, but we are cast immediately into the “hot-grease” of the conflict. The scale and nature of that conflict demands our interest in the question of who the heroes are, or even if they are heroes at all. “Who are these people upon whom the fate of the universe rests?” In other words, the characterization is part of the unfolding mystery and intensity of the tale being told in BSG.

Another difference between the style of the two shows is in what defines a season. Firefly, if it followed the typical Joss Whedon format, would resolve most or all of the existing conflicts by the final episode of the season. The new season would begin by wrapping up any cliff-hangers, hinting at the next great battle, and having many unrelated side-adventures along the way. Part of this is due to the nature of TV as such. Most TV is designed so that you can “drop-in” on a show, catch an episode, and not be lost as to what is going on. Shows like “24” and “Alias” were the first to completely let go of that standard—meaning that to really get the show, you had to watch it from the beginning. It is not possible to appreciate “24” or “Alias” in an episodic fashion.

So with BSG. Not only does BSG not wrap up the majority of its conflicts by the end of Season 1, but it plunges humanity into even worse straits. These new cliff-hanger conflicts at the end of Season 1 are not resolved neatly at the beginning of Season 2 either—they become a central part of the storytelling of Season 2. Along the way, the mystery of Cylon motivations becomes filled in a bit, raising new questions; we finally see first major clash of the opposing viewpoints of the military commander and the schoolteacher-president.

BSG, 24, Alias: these shows require an initial commitment from the viewer—a willingness to invest the time in them, to get to know the characters and to see the full nature of the conflict revealed.

None of this should be taken as criticism of Firefly, or of criticism of Ice Scribe’s taste. I’m interested here in why I prefer one show to the other; of what my personal value-stresses are; of what it is that I respond to in literature and music. I have a friend who is enamored of the shows “CSI” and “Monk” precisely because they do not require a great commitment from the viewer—they are the quintessential self-contained types of programs. Watch and episode, miss 20—you’ll still know what’s going on when you watch again. His tastes are a function of what he is looking for in television and are perfectly valid.  I want the big, ongoing, intensely personal, epic scale story; so while I can enjoy episodic programs, they are not my favorite.

Now, I’m off to buy the first 3 Harry Potter DVD’s in preparation for the release of Harry Potter 4 on Friday. (