There are many times in my life when I’ve run across a compelling story that kept me involved from the very beginning to the bitter end. We’ve all been there, glued to every word, panting as we delve further into the psyche of characters who painfully discover they can’t get what they want. A good story states the main character’s goals at the onset, but this doesn’t always make a great story. A great story, in my opinion, takes what matters most to a character and yanks it away like a dangling carrot in front of Bugs Bunny after he’s been on a month-long carrot fast and makes him work hard to get even a bite out of it. But how do writers accomplish this in a flawless, non-manipulative way? I am going to compare two unrelated films, Unstoppable and Flashdance, and look at their common thread: high stakes, which is a device to keep audiences hooked.
In the film Unstoppable, it is clear from the very beginning that two conflicting characters, played by Denzel Washington and Chris Pine, will have to join together to save a city from disaster. The twist is, instead of a runaway bus, plane, or rocket, a chemical-laden train is threatening the lives of thousands of innocent people. Chemicals + out of control train + lots of death = a good return on investment, right?
I’m in the “no” camp. Here’s why:
The stakes are high – a train, with broken brakes accidentally slips into full throttle (I’m trusting the writers checked with the Pennsylvania railroads to make sure this could actually happen), is laden with toxic/fatal chemicals and is thrown on a collision course with a rural city. We see two railroad engineers at odds with each other before the train runs off. We get a glimpse of their personal lives – Denzel accidentally misses his daughter’s birthday (how many times have we seen that one?), and Chris Pine struggles with his spousal relationship (another tired re-run). We see a school field trip full of elementary-aged children climbing a train that will get in disaster’s way, their little faces filled with awe and excitement. We see a chubby underdog railway worker jump out of the train to fix the railroad’s switching mechanism and not only not get it to work, but he can’t jump back into the train to stop it. It’s a good start in creating a recipe for a catastrophe.
So, why didn’t this movie hook me? The trick to getting people involved in a story isn’t always action-packed adventure and the threat of chemical annihilation. It’s not even about throwing children into potential acid baths. It’s all about the main characters. As Anne Lamott, one of my all-time favorite heroes, states, “Find out what each character cares most about in the world because then you will have discovered what’s at stake.” Denzel’s daughters and Chris’ wife aren’t even in the runaway train’s path—and did we even care about them in when we saw them at the start? Sure, saving other peoples’ lives is still important, but what the film’s characters care about most is sitting far, far away, off-screen. This doesn’t get me involved. It has me running away to clean off the mold on my shower head.
On the flip side, let’s look at Flashdance. There are no physical high stakes in the story. No danger of school children dying or a town getting wiped off the face of the earth. Jennifer Beale can’t even hold a candle to Denzel Washington’s acting abilities, yet her story made a far deeper impact with viewers. (After all, how many people have heard of and have warm fuzzies about Flashdance? Okay, how many have heard and have warm fuzzies about Unstoppable. Yeah, exactly.) Why? Okay, part of it was sex appeal. Jennifer’s hot and she busts (actually, her double busts) some pretty alluring moves. But that’s a discussion for another day.
What made us care about Flashdance was seeing how the main character wanted to be a dancer, and not just any dancer – she wanted to go to the best dance school in the nation. We saw her working hard to accomplish her goal, slaving all day at a steel plant and pouring water on herself at night. She didn’t have to save peoples’ lives, or even care about her rural Pennsylvania town. Instead, she sweated, agonized, and struggled to fight barriers set up to keep her dream from happening.
She loses one person in her life – an old lady whose only gifts were encouragement and a pair of moth-infested ballet slippers, but we still care. Why? Because the stakes in the story are high for her. Not high for anyone else, just her. She loved the old lady, who ended up being the only person in the world who truly loved her. Jennifer’s character suffers a series of losses which seem small in comparison to an out-of-control train barreling toward innocent people (including children!), but we can’t stop watching because we want to see if she accomplishes her goal. When her radiator breaks, she cries over the puddle of water on the ground and we cry along with her, not because she’s a good crier, but because we’ve been taught to care. WE CARE.
Critics panned Flashdance for many reasons, but it was still the bigger blockbuster of the two (worldwide gross was $227 million compared to Unstoppable’s $169 million, adjusted for inflation). Both films offered high stakes – one had a town facing impending doom, while the other offered the loss of a much-cherished dream. The first sounds much more exciting, but since none of us have the time to waste on two-dimensional characters who we don’t care about—and truth be told, we weren’t even invested in the children who were maybe possibly about to die–Flashdance won the hearts of millions while Unstoppable isn’t even a movie we can remember the name of a month after we’ve watched it.
I’m willing to watch a movie that has a character wanting to hold the first grasshopper Olympics in his bedraggled sinkhole of a yard—I just need to know that he cares about his goal, that we know why he’s fighting so hard for that goal, and that’s he’s willing to risk tooth and nail to achieve his goal. We all deserve to see a character’s whole enchilada – the quirks, the losses, and the demons. We want to see people just like ourselves risking their guts over their dreams, whether they’re big or small, to make them happen.
Now that’s what I call great high-stakes drama.
~Stacey
Tags: Anne Lamott, author, caring about characters, characters, flashdance, high stakes drama, motivations, plot twists, unstoppable, writer, writing
