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The holy fool

The movie, television and the publishing industry are full of fools. That´s it and I stand for it.

I´m not talking about producers who buy bad ideas, or publishers who treat people like garbage. I´m talking about the stories. Every single story you can think of will include at least one idiot, and if it didn´t you´d be very disappointed. It´s not as strange as it sounds.

All stories have obstacles between the protagonist (the hero or main character) and the goal. There are different kinds of obstacles, but everybody´s talking about the antagonist (the bad guy or villain), whose conflict with the protagonist is a personal conflict.

There are also physical obstacles, such as locked doors and broken tools. The conflict between protagonist and physical obstacles are often called "war against object".

But the kind of obstacle that the audience associate with best, and the kind that you can vary in most ways, and the kind that creates the most interesting conflicts - that´s stupidity.

Now you´re wondering what exactly I mean by stupidity. Well, it´s not that kind of stupidity where your characters stare with their mouths open, but plot stupidity.

Plot stupidity. That´s the kind of stupidity that involves making Sir Anthony Hopkins a fool, and having him thanking you for it.

How? Let´s say you´re going to watch a movie starring Sir Anthony Hopkins (who portrayed Hannibal Lecter in three films, by the way), and some other actors. He´s playing a man looking for his daughter. When the movie starts, he knows exactly where his daughter is. So he goes and takes her home. End of film.

It doesn´t sound very exciting, does it? You would fall asleep, or liking Sir Anthony, you would wait for what happened after he and his daughter got home. But an astute writer such as yourself of course recognise that the movie lacks an antagonist. Okay, so let´s add a villain:

Sir Anthony Hopkins plays a dad looking for his daughter. He knows exactly where he is. So he goes. But there´s her evil boyfriend (played by Michael Madsen), who refuses to let her go. After a hard struggle, Sir Tony manages to defeat Mr Madsen, and takes his daughter home.

This version is certainly better, but it´s still not very good. As soon as you see the boyfriend you´ll know what´s going to happen, and who of Sir Tony and Michael Madsen is going to win. So what do we do to keep our grip over the audience created by a gripping trailer and an agressive ad campaign?

The standard solution in action films would be to throw in some car chases, explosions and a vicious knife fight at the very end, and perhaps that would make an interesting movie, but most likely not. The standard solution in a drama would let Sir Anthony and Mr Madsen talk at length about loyalty, love and fatherhood, or some other matter, and it would still not be interesting. And other genres would throw in their respective standard sequences, all resulting in a mediocre film.

A more prudent course of action is to summon the guardian angel of fools, and beg for a small loan. In fact, more than a handful of small loans...

IGNORANCE.
The obvious problem of our story is that our dear actor knows exactly where his daughter is. We begin by hiding the location from him. How he solves that situation is a matter of taste - an adress on an old letter, a spirit that tells him, or ordinary detective work, etc. The point is that we can get in a few other characters to help with a piece of the puzzle.

MISUNDERSTANDING.
If that´s the end of it, your audience will still fall asleep. So let´s add a misunderstanding. Maybe Sir Tony´s helping detective (Jack Nicholson) thought that Sir Tony was talking about some famous woman, or Sir Tony thought that Mr Nicholson was a good detective and not a over-the-hill ambulance-chaser.

Let´s say neither Sir Tony nor Mr Nicholson discovers the misunderstanding. Then there can be several sequences where it is almost discovered, before it is finally revealed, preferably at the wrong moment.

STUBBORNESS or PRIDE.
If, on the other hand, the misunderstanding is discovered immediately, it could infuriate Mr Nicholson with Sir Tony, to the point that it would hinder the two men from working together to find the daughter.

SECRETS.
What if Mr Nicholson had a motive of his own to find the daughter, for example if he was secretly hired to kill her? That would be quite a reveal, and would definitely cross out Mr Ex-Detective from Concerned Dad´s Christmas-card list. But Sir Tony could hardly be faulted for not guessing this if Mr Nicholson hid it well, could he?

DETOURS.
The Thompson twins from the Tintin albums are really the best example of this. Their curiosity and blind execution of the law often take them away from the main story, while they end up in airplanes without pilots or get themselves arrested as saboteurs. Here, Sir Tony could try to get help from a local sheriff (played by Susan Sarandon) who just has to deliver a baby and stop a robbery before helping him.

CLUMSINESS or NERVOUSNESS.
After all these events, we expect Sir Tony to be able to put forward his case to his daughter in a normal way. So of course, that can´t happen. Instead, he is so nervous that he takes a couple of drinks the night before meeting his daughter to calm down, and end up insulting her intelligence. Now, he´s in deep trouble.

WRONG CONCLUSIONS.
But Sir Tony´s drunkenness may not be the only reason for his daughter to want to stay. Perhaps Michael Madsen is not as evil as Sir Tony was led to believe. And perhaps Sir Tony´s daughter (Ashley Judd) is happy with him, despite all the signs of the opposite.

BLINDNESS.
Already when Sir Tony meets the Secretly Evil Detective there can be an important clue to how to beat him, but at the time, it didn´t seem that important. And there could even be signs earlier than that of why Runaway Daughter Judd did run away that nobody´s really paying any attention to.

That´s plot stupidity! I hope that the message was loud and clear: plot stupidity is important, and you can´t really get too much of it in a story.

It doesn´t have anything to do with intelligence. Sherlock Holmes and other equally smart detectives are plot stupid most of the time in their stories. It´s about the writer making the protagonist imperfect, and that´s the key if you want the audience to be able to relate to them.

And plot stupidity is present in every genre, from action movies to serious dramas to television sci-fi shows to sitcoms. You name it, it´s there. It´s just not called plot stupidity. It´s called excentrisms, weaknesses, quirks, vices, internal conflict or something like that. But now there´s a name for all of that.

THE PRACTICAL SIDE

So how do you use this plot stupidity technique? Actually, there are some guidelines you should follow:

Make sure that the fool is as smart as the audience. This is important, because it is so easy to misunderstand! Just look at Dr Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories. People label him as slow, but in reality he´s average intelligent, which makes Holmes a genius. If Watson was dumb, Holmes would only seem as smart as we are. (But, as I showed before, even Sherlock Holmes is a fool.)
Besides, the level of the fool´s intelligence makes the audience stick at the same level. In other words, you can control how much the audience should get, what red herrings the audience should follow, etc. If they keep their eyes on their stand-in, and not on the fact situation, it becomes so much easier to trick them. And then you can reveal the bigger truth at the end of the story. It´s outrageous how big things you can hide from the audience, as long as they are occupied by something else, especially if it´s emotional.
An example of how this rule is broken: a stupid question that only exists to set up a punchline.
Fools must have a reason for being fools, geniuses don´t have to have a reason for being geniuses. If you let a character be a fool in a scene, you´re really making it human: emotions, stress, clashing cultures - those things are wonderful when you´re creating a character. Smartness on the other hand, isn´t. That´s just following the plot.
An example: if Sigourney Weaver´s character in COPYCAT hadn´t been agoraphobic, she would have easily handled the killer. Her phobias are really the only thing we know of her, and yet we feel that we know her. That´s because she delivers a healthy dose of plot stupidity. It´s not until it´s 30 minutes left that she does something useful. But, she has a very good reason for being plot stupid. We have seen that reason. On the other hand we need no reason for her to succeed. As long as the clues are there, we accept it.
This way of thinking as a writer, automatically makes you thinking about the real solution before you start to write. Which makes it easier to concentrate on writing the individual scenes. If you don´t, you get stuck because you will constantly have to get smarter.
So, writing will more and more be about creating believable and insurmountable stupidity-obstacles, blocking the characters and the audience from understanding more than you want them to understand. That´s why the audience doesn´t know that the entire testimony is false in UNUSUAL SUSPECTS. That´s why Harrison Ford doesn´t get who killed his wife in THE FUGITIVE. So why do you think you didn´t figure out the ending of THERE´S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY before it ended?
In comedies, the entire world can be foolish, and obvious logical errors can lead to the right result. An example from Simpsons: when Flanders, the hyperreligous neighbour of the Simpsons, are rewarded custody over the kids, and plans to baptise them, Homer must stop him, but has no idea where they are.
HOMER: Okay, okay, don´t panic. To find Flanders, I just have to think like Flanders!
HOMER´S BRAIN: I´m a big four-eyed lame-o and I wear th same stupid sweater everyday, and I--"
HOMER: The Springfield River!
Naturally, that´s where Flanders and the kids are. This solution lets Homer be a genious without having him seem that way. Just try for yourself, writing a scene where a character guesses right without any clues, so that the audience will buy it.
Plot stupidity works best when they are in sync with the character. They should feel natural. This is how you do it: give every character one or two default-stupid-moves. Let them make the same type of mistake several times, but in slightly different disguises.
Plot stupidity is where you can weave in exposition. Just think about THE MATRIX. The first time Keanu Reeves meets Laurence Fishburne he´s told about "the matrix" and the resistance. Without newcomer Neo, Mr Fishburne never could sit down and talk, no matter how entertaining he was. It would have been too "on the nose".
But how do you explain things that everybody present should know about, and the audience doesn´t? You can´t do it like in novels, using a storyteller, so how? This is how you do not do it: by making one character stupid for a moment, so that another can explain.
And this is how you do it: make the characters disagree about the thing that needs explaining, and then the audience can learn during the conflict. Smooth, huh?

By now, it should be obvious how great a trick this plot stupidity really is. Yet it´s only now that it´s getting interesting, because it´s now that I will prove my thesis:

By giving you so much to think about, and by giving you insurmountable obstacles on the road, where I have pretended to be on your level, as if we were learning as we went along, I have managed to hide the ending from you.

It´s not until now that you will see that we are stupid, all of us. Us writers too. We are human beings, and we cannot understand life when we are living it, but with a slight lag. And that´s okay. In fact, that´s why we can connect with the audience. They are like us. We are all stupid.

At least, plot stupid.

By Lennart Guldbrandsson

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