THE STORYTELLER’S THUMB ON THE SCALE
I watched Sicario last night.
Good movie. Maybe.
But I didn't love it.
And trying to figure out why sent me down a rabbit hole about storytelling, Dune, Sergio Leone, Frank Herbert, Tolkien—and eventually something much bigger than movies.
Here's what I think:
I don't want a story to prove the storyteller right.
I want the storyteller to find out what's true by telling the story.
A great story starts with people.
They want things. They love things. They're afraid of things. They make choices. Those choices have consequences. Those consequences narrow the choices that come next. Things may happen to them. Things they have to deal with. And things start happening.
And eventually you arrive at the ending and think:
Of course.
It couldn't have ended any other way.
Not literally. The writer could have typed anything they wanted.
But given these people, and these choices, and everything that has happened—
this is where we had to end up.
Sergio Leone was a fucking master at this.
At the end of For a Few Dollars More, the watch comes out one last time and suddenly things you've been watching for two hours CLICK into place.
Not because Leone stops the movie to tell you what revenge means.
He tells the story.
And the story tells you.
That's different from beginning with a conclusion.
Power corrupts.
Religion is dangerous.
Charismatic leaders are dangerous.
The CIA is evil.
Capitalism is evil.
Socialism is evil.
Trump is evil.
Trump is wonderful.
Whatever.
Once the storyteller already knows the answer, something dangerous or just plain bad for the story starts to happen.
The characters stop being people and start becoming evidence, devices to grind an axe with.
Of course the powerful man becomes corrupt. He has to. Otherwise my thesis doesn't work.
Of course the religious movement becomes murderous. It has to.
Of course my political enemy does something terrible and my political ally does something noble.
I've already decided what's true.
Now I'm just arranging fictional furniture to prove it.
And eventually, if you're paying attention, you can feel it.
You can feel the storyteller's thumb on the scale.
That's what finally helped me understand my complicated relationship with Dune.
Frank Herbert wasn't merely telling the story of Paul Atreides and discovering, Holy shit, look what happened to this guy.
Herbert had something he wanted to say about charismatic leaders, messiahs, power, religion and our willingness to surrender our judgment to heroes.
And he deliberately made Paul incredibly compelling.
His father is murdered.
His family is destroyed.
He flees into the desert.
He joins the Fremen.
He falls in love.
He learns their ways.
He rides the fucking worm.
He becomes their leader.
He defeats his enemies.
The Emperor kneels.
And I'm sitting there going:
FUCK YEAH, PAUL!
Then Herbert's larger story essentially says:
Interesting that you trusted him.
And I went:
Oh.
Well, fuck you too, Frank. 😂
And here's the thing:
Herbert's warning isn't stupid.
Charismatic leadership can be incredibly dangerous.
Religion can become monstrous.
Power can corrupt.
Governments can become tyrannical.
All true.
But none of those things is inevitable.
Charismatic leaders can also do extraordinary good.
Religion has produced horrors and extraordinary acts of love, service, beauty and sacrifice.
Power can corrupt—and power can be used responsibly.
Reality is complicated.
Which means the more interesting question isn't:
How do I construct a story proving what I already believe?
It's:
What actually happens if I follow these people honestly? And what do I ‘discover’ along the way? (Isn’t that more LIFE like? More scientific: We follow the story and we don’t impose our belief on it!)
Maybe Paul becomes a tyrant.
Fine.
Show me.
Let him make one understandable decision.
Then another.
Let victory create a problem he didn't anticipate.
Let solving that problem require a compromise.
Let that compromise create another problem.
Let his followers begin doing things in his name that horrify him.
Let him compromise again.
Keep going.
And maybe someday we look up and the young hero we loved has become responsible for the deaths of billions.
And we think:
Holy fuck.
Of course.
That's tragedy.
And now you've actually shown me something about power.
Maybe something neither of us knew when we started.
This might also explain why The Lord of the Rings works so beautifully for me.
Tolkien certainly believed things.
But when Frodo finally reaches Mount Doom...
Frodo fails.
He doesn't nobly throw the Ring into the fire.
He claims it.
Because after everything Tolkien has shown us about the Ring, Frodo simply tossing it away might actually have been the dishonest ending.
And then Gollum matters.
And Bilbo's mercy matters.
And Frodo's mercy matters.
And something planted much earlier suddenly becomes necessary to the ending.
CLICK.
Tolkien doesn't have to write:
MERCY IS IMPORTANT.
The story DISCOVERED it.
And that's the distinction I've been trying to articulate.
I'm not interested in stories that don't mean anything.
Quite the opposite.
I want stories to mean something so deeply that the author didn't have to force them to mean it.
Have a hypothesis.
Have beliefs.
Have something you're curious about.
But then create real characters and let them fucking live.
Let them contradict you.
Let the good guy occasionally be wrong.
Let the bad guy occasionally be right.
Let power save somebody.
Let love destroy somebody.
Let the religious man be a hypocrite—or a saint.
Let reality inside your story resist you.
And then follow it all the way to the end.
Maybe that's what the greatest storytellers do.
They don't use a story to tell us what they already know.
They tell the story to discover something they didn't.
And when they really nail it, we discover it with them.
And now I should return to Sicario… since this started the whole thing. While I think what I said above sums where I discovered things well enough, Sicario felt a little like the creators had something to say, and used the characters in the story to say it, instead of just following the line for one character. It could have been a simple revenge story. It could have been the story of a good cop asked to compromise her principles. But it never fully got behind the characters, and instead was a vehicle to say what the creators wanted to say… and that felt hollow to me.