Last week we discussed two issues common in modern writing: failure to take it seriously and disregard for realism. Today we’re continuing the topic with another issue endemic to the failures of popular media, particularly films and TV shows. We are not immune to these errors, errors we can introduce into our own stories with disastrous effect. Even if you particularly are not in danger of these problems, learning about them can have two beneficial effects: first, it allows more intelligent, more precise analysis of others; second, it can illuminate by contrast or simple focus ways in which you can excel all the more, turning a non-problem into a strength.

Labels Versus Reality

If you’re at all involved in the whirlwind of modern news, you’ve probably realized that everything and everybody has a label for everybody and everything. You’ve also realized that these labels are often only loosely connected to reality, often more products of the labelmaker’s wishes, not the character of the thing labeled. Nevertheless, labels are obviously a strong narrative-making tool, a means to simplify the complications of reality into streamlined (if dubiously accurate) stories for people to react to. He is a villain, he a hero, her a distressed mother, her an inveterate monster. People hear, and react. The tools seems useful, in fact, for us who write fiction that is intended, unlike the news media’s fiction, to be read as fiction.

The central danger here only shows up when the labels are not backed up by the story. Now, certainly, there are many ways for this to go wrong. Push the reader too much, and he’ll rebel against the manipulation, for one thing, so label-making needs to have some subtlety, nuance, and coherence with the rest of the story. As a rule, don’t instruct the reader; construct the thing and let him recognize the label built into it. Sometimes, even, ambiguity is the point, making labels an active detriment. Other times, too, you intend the label to be false, a red herring, a misdirection, even dramatic irony (such that the perspective of the characters assigns a label the reader recognizes to be false or refuses one the reader knows to be true). These situations aren’t my concern here.

The danger of relying on the labelmaker, artistically, is that it really isn’t sufficient to the job, not on its own. It can work, don’t get me wrong. People are fully capable of believing lies about reality. All you need to do is make the lie appealing enough, make it fit with their prejudices, attach it to a caricature or a falsehood they don’t have the context (information) to recognize as a falsehood. Politics furnishes millions of examples of this process, one aided by the relative disengagement of many and the collage of damning ideologies, philosophies, and religions which afflict the world.

In a story, then, a label can suffice to shape the reader’s perception. It can hook onto something they care about and parley that into a perception unsupported by the facts of the story as given. Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a Marvel TV show from a few years back,¹ pulled this trick off with certain parts of the audience. It took the pre-existing attachment (and, in some cases, the relative dispassion or the lack of care for facts, the over-reliance on unmoored empathy²) of this segment of the audience, particularly attachment to the two main characters, Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes (who were, to my understanding, rather well-written in previous installments of the franchise³) and it told these people to accept the presented labels because these characters accepted them. The show hooked the labels into the pre-existing investment, and not entirely unsuccessfully.

It’s a shame, therefore, that it rather fails to back up the labels (clearly intended as correct) with the actual events of the story, with regard to the Wakanda special forces, John Walker, or the terrorists. This is the basic problem of relying on labels. When the story doesn’t back up the label, they become artistically bankrupt, flimsy and failing to get their effect from the more invested, more keen-eyed parts of the audience, not to mention that it’s just wrong to lie to your readers. Let’s investigate this through the example I’ve already given.

Falcon and the Winter Soldier (hereafter FWS) tries this trick in at least three different areas. First, it labels the Wakandan (all-female) special forces as the good guys. This seems plausible, on the face of it, given that Wakanda as a whole has generally been portrayed as better-than-not. The issue arises when the Wakandans’ first move on meeting a soldier of an allied nation (in the company of a long-time resident of Wakanda and ally thereof in a personal capacity) is to assault him with deadly force in hopes of taking his weapon, disregarding all attempts at diplomacy. These are not ‘heroic’ actions, but the story obviously expects the watcher to condone them- because they’re being done by the ’good guys’.

Second, the story is clearly trying to play John Walker as a tragic descent into villainhood. The issue? He really doesn’t do much wrong. He has some issues with his temper, yes, but he never lets it pass the bounds of sympathy. In fact, the anger is humanizing, a point of attachment for the watcher, because we can all recognize that being put under an immense strain, being called to live up to a grand legacy, is very stressful, that some anger and worry is a normal part of life. It makes him human, not villainous- but the writers still try to use it to label him as a villain. Further, his grand moment of departure, the point at which his true character is ‘exposed’, is when he kills the terrorist who just killed his best friend after said terrorist makes an apparent attempt at surrender- which attempt is accompanied by continued combative action. The music labels this as villainy- but an attentive watcher will recognize the failure to actually portray villainy. At worst it’s less-than-paragon, a little gray, something plenty of heroes have in them.

Third, FWS tries to label is antagonists, a set of redistributionist, anti-nationalist terrorists, as ‘sympathetic.’ Certainly antagonists can be made sympathetic; the problem isn’t with the attempt. It’s with the fact that said terrorists have engaged in an utterly remorseless series of attacks on anybody and everybody who opposes them without care for civilian casualties. It’s also the fact that they’re manifestly motivated by self-interest (it was better for them before world population instantly doubled). Yet the story persists even to the end in portraying them as sympathic, so much so that the ostensible hero appears to prefer the terrorist’s leader, who has engaged in a lot of murder, to John Walker, the hero’s technical ally (whom the hero has made a creditable attempt to kill, if the evidence is taken into account).

The problem here is with expecting the label to do the work. If I write a story that doesn’t back up the label, it becomes less than nothing; it becomes, in fact, an active harm, because it makes the reader aware that he cannot trust me, that I’m lying to him. Think back to the classics. Do you think Odysseus is tricky because he’s labelled as such? Perhaps initially, but the real impression was made when Nobody tricked Polyphemus and Odysseus the suitors. Do you think Samwise a man of estimable contentment and loyalty because that’s how Gandalf describes the hobbits? Perhaps at the beginning that was the case, but the real strength of the character comes from his interactions with Frodo and the rest, from his actions in Cirith Ungol, from his steadiness upon Mount Doom.

This is the lazy path. It’s the path that does not respect the reader, does not take the characters or the story seriously. It rests on a presumption that the reader has to accept what he is given, to be utterly credulous, and it implies that what is presented is honestly worthless. Using the label as a shortcut this way presents a specific worldview: one in which the world is determined by our perspective of it, not vice versa. This post-modernism, consciously adopted or not, would say that objective reality is irrelevant, even nonexistent. In fiction particularly it will declare that the story is fake, so why not treat it as fake, as completely malleable, as having no existence? The reality of the story, secondary or not, is ignored in favor of an imposed narrative- and by imposing the narrative, the writer has implicitly declared that it’s his subjective declaration, his framing of the facts, which matters, not the facts themselves. It’s the same worldview that believes a man becomes a woman because he calls himself a woman- sacrificing objective reality to the name it bears.

The solution is simple but not easy, like a lot of writing advice. The solution is to make sure you back up what you assert, that your heroes act the hero, that your villains act the villain. Make sure that complicated antagonists and dubious protagonists are really what you’re advertising them to be, that the reader learns what they are not by having the bare assertion imposed on them but by observing how the characters live. Do the same with the rest of the story, too, with the setting’s agents and cultures and institutions. In other words, make sure your gold isn’t just gilt, and you’re good.

God bless.

Footnotes

1. I watched a very long review of the show, from which most of my information is derived; I have not watched it myself. I don’t have time for watching crap. ↩︎
2. This video is definitely not a way to mark myself for controversy. ↩︎
3. The way I understand it, the great strength of pre-Endgame MCU films was strong character writing, even when plot and worldbuilding faltered. ↩︎