Ark of the Lost Angels

IBM Selectric typewriter. One of those clever callbacks to Monday’s article.
_{Credit: Steve Lodefink}

Prologue

This week’s Wednesday article looks a bit different than they typically should. Today is, in fact, my birthday. While I don’t try to hide my thoughts and opinions here, I am king of this little domain after all, today’s article is going to be even more of a personal nature.

To start with, I have to give a birthday shoutout to my birthday buddies. This includes David Gilmour, guitarist of Pink Floyd; Rob Reiner, director of movies such as The Princess Bride; the famed Renaissance artist, Michelangelo; basketball legend, Shaq; musical theater lyricist Stephen Schwartz, and the theatrical release of The Big Lebowski (which came out the very day I was born).

Without further ado, some thoughts on why I think fiction is important.

Foundation

When I was growing up, I didn’t have many friends. I was reading at a college level while still in elementary school, and I wasn’t into a lot of the same things many of my peers were into. Movies and TV shows and video games and books all became my consistent companions, letting me travel to far off worlds and have fantastic adventures. It was that foundation that made me study English in college, with a focus on creative writing.

My parents showed me Star Wars when I was six years old. It was Thanksgiving weekend, 2004. Star Wars quickly became my favorite thing ever, I have an army of action figures and vehicles, I’ve watched the movies over and over again. Seeing Revenge of the Sith in theaters is a treasured memory: I actually got to see the last Star Wars movie the day it came out! Imagine my surprise and delight when I knew I’d get to see a whole new trilogy and anthology stories in theaters starting ten years later. And the wealth of Star Wars TV content fills my heart with glee. To this day, I will get a bit choked up when I hear some of those classic themes, or see the iconic moments from the movies, or even think about Carrie Fisher’s incredible performance as Leia Organa and what a tragedy it is that Ms. Fisher left us far too soon.

I think one of the things that Star Wars gave me was the franchise tagline: hope. I got heroes to believe in, to aspire to, even if they were flawed. It taught me that for good to win, it must struggle and triumph over evil. It taught me that all heroes are flawed and will face their challenges, but doing things for the right reason will allow you to triumph.

Fictional heroes are better than real ones.

Exemplification

Humans are hard. We’re difficult, fickle, and complicated beasts. The same hands capable of great good are capable of great evil. So, it should come as no surprise that we don’t always make the best role models as individuals. It’s hard to say you should aspire to be like someone who saved a bunch of people from a burning building and became a local hero, only to find out three years after they died that they routinely molested children. Decades of them as a positive example, and now they’re a source of great shame. The point being: humans are too complex to serve as perfect examples. Everyone has skeletons in their closet, you don’t always know enough about someone to say that they lived a wholly good life. Our real life heroes always come with baggage, maybe not as severe as my hypothetical, because all humans have inherent baggage.

But fictional heroes? They’re only as good or bad as we write them. Maybe they don’t always have to be realistic, they can be idealistic. We are imperfect and never reach our potential, that’s part of being human. The important thing is to do the absolute best we can and be gracious in our failures. To recognize our shortcomings but not let them be something we can’t grow beyond.

Superman resonates with people because his moral character is good. He is the kind of person we should aspire to be. Who uses their powers to help others. Who is kind and generous and always tries to do the right thing. Superman works as an allegorical character because he inhabits a world that isn’t quite as messy as ours. Superman is inherently an optimistic view of people, because as Superman does good in the world, more people are inspired to do good themselves. Superman is a way to tell us that if we do good in our world, we can inspire others to do good themselves, and that behavior ripples outward. And if enough people start doing so on their own, they’ll ripple out to more and more people.

We can be our own heroes. That doesn’t necessarily mean punching Lex Luthor in the jaw.

Illumination

Another great thing about fiction is the ability to inhabit a different world and follow people we normally wouldn’t get to follow. The fantastic is one part of that; the epic spectacle of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings takes us to fantasy places we could only dream of. More grounded stories can still take us out of our own lives and give us perspective on people like those we may actually encounter. As much as I wish it wasn’t true, I’m not crossing paths with any Jedi. But I do know a few criminals.

One of my all time favorite movies is Heat, Michael Mann’s 1995 crime drama starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. The movie is slick, it feels real, it captures a certain ambiance, and it tells a good story. I’ll never be a thief or a cop. I’ll never know what it’s like to be rocking and rolling, taking scores on the rough streets of the Angel City. But I do know that I can identify with that desire to do what I feel compelled to do, and an all-consuming nature that takes its toll on one’s personal life. And, through the brilliance of a great movie, I find myself having empathy for people I wouldn’t think I could. And it makes me deal with the complicated feelings I can have. I both want De Niro’s character to get away, and Pacino’s character to catch him, because I can see both of them as real people with depths and layers to them. In transferring the empathy that I feel for those people in those groups in a fictional work to those people in those groups in reality, I get the chance to better myself. Doesn’t mean I approve of what they do, but it means I can try and understand why they do it. Understand who they are.

Heat is still a movie, with plenty of behavior that only works within a movie, but that’s not to say something as hyper realistic as, say, The Wire doesn’t have its merits. The Wire is one of my favorite TV shows, up there with The West Wing in terms of dramas. The Wire made me understand the complexities of policing in the modern age, but also of criminals in the modern age. There were no clear good guys or bad guys; people did bad things for good reasons, and others did good things for bad reasons. It was the kind of perspective-shattering experience that only happens when you’re a step removed from the proceedings. They’re based on our real world but happen on the other side of the screen.

And The Wire is bleak. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture of my fair city of Baltimore, or of the concept of the American City at large. That kind of bleak outlook is good, especially for fiction. It reminds us of reality even within fantasy and helps keep us grounded. But the flip side is true: sometimes we need a little naïve optimism.

I was first introduced to Aaron Sorkin’s work through the West Wing. I have since watched several movies he penned, as well as The West Wing and The Newsroom the whole way through, multiple times. David Simon, creator of The Wire, is one of my favorite screenwriters, and Aaron Sorkin is another. They are so diametrically opposed to each other it isn’t funny: Simon is all about portraying the grim reality of the world we live in, while Sorkin imagines an idealistic, optimistic view of those same institutions while recognizing the constraints of reality. A show about the White House penned by David Simon would probably leave you feeling a little hollow and depressed by the end. The show that Sorkin did pen about the White House? It reinforced my love of my country, even as I recognized the ugliness of its flaws and the hard work we have to do as a society to reach our ideals. Even if I know, inside, that reaching said ideals is an impossible task because we are an imperfect people, I firmly believe that it’s a goal worth striving for anyways. Here showed me people who do believe in their mission and prove to be what public officials should aspire to. I appreciate that fiction gives us the opportunity to alter our perspectives on the world we live in.

Who says that we can’t take our David Simon world and inject a little more Aaron Sorkin into it?

Exploration

Another aspect I love about fiction is the ability to make a point to a mass audience while seemingly not making the work about that point. The X-Men series is, always has been, and always will be about the oppression of marginalized groups. “Stop getting your politics in my superheroes!” they cry, not understanding that it’s the point. The X-Men are mutants with abilities, they stop bad guys and save the day, but are still persecuted and treated as different and face a massive level of bigotry even if their mutations are as non-outwardly-presenting as telepathy or the ability to control storms.

Sometimes, it’s hard to challenge our views on the world we live in because we’re just too close to it. Fiction lets us get that one-step of removal I keep talking about, and it lets us think about real issues in a more abstract manner, away from our biases and pre-conceptions. It can lead us to breakthroughs about what we think and our own shortcomings when we analyze what happens on the screen or page.

I’ve found myself contemplating the meaning and nature of reality and what it means to be human simply because I rewatched Blade Runner the night before. The nature of science fiction is to react to the world of today and take its qualities to a further point in their evolution and imagine what would shake out. It’s why George Orwell was able to write 1984 and nail some predictions, because he was seeing the early form of those behaviors in his own time. Or how Margaret Atwood made Gilead feel terrifyingly real in The Handmaid’s Tale. She took what had happened to women in different places at different points of history and imagined a world where they all happened at the same time.

It’s good to have a way to look at the world without having to look at the world. Sometimes, a different lens makes everything infinitely clearer.

Inspiration

Another thing I love about consuming everything that I do is that it gives me inspiration for what I write on my own. Every piece of fiction is inspired by other works: fiction, reality, exaggerated tales of real-life exploits, etc. And I try to be proud of what inspired me. Often times, I’ll watch a movie or play a game, and think about the story. Think about what I’d do differently. Think about how I’d make the world out to be different from what the original creators did. It’ll start me off and running, and before I know it, I’ve crafted an outline of a story that takes the same premise and runs in an entirely different direction with it.

Furthermore, you can’t write to your best without knowing what makes a story fun and engaging. Operating in a vacuum only harms your ability to write. Now, that’s not saying to go trend chasing. I hate it when people try to cash in on the next trend instead of making something that speaks to them and has the loving care that gives it the quality to be outstanding. But writing in a vacuum, without looking at what worked well or didn’t work for others is a surefire way to get into trouble.

And, sometimes, you just get stuck while writing. You go out to take your mind off of things, catch a movie that has nothing to do with what you’re writing, and because you’re thinking about your own project obsessively, that one moment in the film gives you a jolt of inspiration, and the pieces you couldn’t see before now fall into place. Then you have to stop yourself from running back home to sit at your laptop until three in the morning because you paid twenty dollars for the movie ticket and another ten for popcorn and a drink, and you feel the obligation to sit through the rest of the movie because you already spent the money. Instead, you’ll spend ten minutes in the parking lot afterwards while you tap out all the ideas you tried to keep in your head throughout the rest of the movie on your phone’s notes app. Then you realize you’ll probably have to go see it again because you missed a solid part of the middle of the movie while you rewrote your work’s second act in your head.

If it wasn’t obvious by now, the ‘you’ in that paragraph is me.

But the idea still rings true. I wouldn’t structure stories the way I do if it hadn’t been for my love of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Christopher Nolan films, the Mass Effect and Halo games, and so on and so forth. I love getting inspired by works that I love, and I hope that what I write does their examples proud while still looking at the world from my own perspective.

Epilogue

Finally, I like writing. I like having stories to tell, coming up with fantastic worlds. I have written hundreds of thousands of words which people will probably never read, but I think it’s all worth it because one day I’ll have that story that gets put out into the world and people adore. I wouldn’t be who I am without fiction, everything that I have read, watched, or played. That’s everything from Percy Jackson to Inception to Cyberpunk 2077, to a whole lot of things in between. I know that I was so enraptured by heroes and villains, tales of glory and delves into horrid realities, of examples of sacrifice and love that I want to be able to put that into the rest of the world because it matters. Despite what people may say about how the arts are a pointless pursuit, the arts are how we connect with the world and each other in ways that wouldn’t be possible if we were locked to just our own reality.

The world will always need storytellers so long as there are people who will listen.