Action!

More notes on the tendencies of people I know to fast forward:

Brandy has been DVRing Alias from the beginning of the run on TNT, playing catch-up. But she’s been going through them rather quickly– by fast-forwarding through all the action scenes.

Paraphrasing her: I don’t need to see another scene of Jennifer Garner kicking butt. She does it well, and it’s empowering, blah blah blah, that’s not what I’m watching it for.

Josh Friedman talks about it here:

Movies are too violent because violence in movies is easy to do and boring to watch. And by easy to do I don’t mean easy to commit to film–the people who coordinate fights and car chases and plane crashes and alien attacks are absolute stone cold geniuses at what they do.

The people who are fucking lazy are the writers. Honestly, what does an action scene do to move a story ahead? Nothing. What does it do for a characters’ journey? Nothing. What does it do for the movie itself? Take up a chunk of time that now doesn’t need to be filled with character and story.

And you know why? Because character and story are hard things to write. And it’s easy to write an action scene. I know. I’ve written hundreds of them. They bore the crap out of me. But at least I know they’re gonna take up some pages in my screenplay without me having to figure out the hard stuff. Action sequences are the junk food in any writer’s kitchen. That’s not to say there aren’t good action sequences–ones that literally take your breath away–but those are few and far between. For me, when the tripod in WOTW comes out of the ground and starts blowing shit up with no mercy–my jaw dropped open and my heart actually raced. And I bring that up exactly BECAUSE I was involved in the movie. I knew it was coming and yet it still got me excited.

And shouldn’t the point of action sequences be excitement? No one wants to admit that–but violence in film is supposed to be EXCITING. It rarely is. But that doesn’t stop people from jamming a movie full of it for no reason other than lazy writing.

And thus boring the shit out of us.

They both have a point. I actually find action scenes tedious to write for precisely that reason, and anyone who’s read what I laughingly refer to as my ouvere knows that I have precious few action scenes in my body of work. Most of the action takes place off camera, unless it reveals something about the character or moves the plot along. I always view it as an extension of Elmore Leonard’s dictum: Avoid writing stuff the reader tends to skip.

What it boils down to, of course, is revealing the characters by what they do. Scott McCloud posited in Understanding Comics that expression of art is anything that doesn’t relate to survival or procreation. Most action sequences only concentrate on the survival aspect– and the reason we love James Bond and John McClane is what they do during the survival aspect part of it, the flourishes of style. Because at that moment, we see their character– it’s not just that they overcome adversity, it’s how they do it.

Of course, it’s also possible to have suspenseful action, scenes where action is pending, but how the characters act in those situations also reveal much. Think of the three-way standoff in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, or the preparation scenes in Ocean’s Eleven, or the Super Posse chase in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

But I do find it fascinating what people are getting bored by. One could suppose that one reason Bush’s approval ratings are hitting the ground and beginning to dig is because he’s perceived as doing nothing. No action at all. And no potential for action, as he’s too tightly constricted– and the actions that he’s taken are ineffectual and wrong. And for someone who’s positioning himself as a man of action, that’s deadly. (Oh, you knew there would be a Bush reference somewhere in here.)

Speaking of Alias: there’s a piece on J.J. Abrams in this month’s GQ (the one with Jennifer Aniston on the cover). Worth a quick read, particularly when he talks about story and characters.