Many of my favorite people hold opinions I don’t. They enjoy things I find annoying, and support positions I find misguided.

That’s good. Part of being a grown-up is accepting that others don’t have to share your tastes and beliefs, just as you don’t have to embrace theirs. Surrounding yourself with only like-minded people is narcissism by proxy.

When you zoom out to society as a whole, you want a healthy mix of opinions to generate discussion. Yes, you get a few blowhards and demagogues, but they often foster enjoyable debate. Culture is the result of a never-ending game, and you want good players.

But do you know who’s no help at all? Denialists.

“Denialist” is a term often linked with Holocaust or climate change skeptics, but in a general sense applies to anyone incapable of rational discussion on a given topic. You can’t debate them. Not really.

With topics that can be argued from objective facts, you can ultimately feel pretty secure calling a denialist wrong. But what if you’re talking about a subjective experience, like art or literature or movies?

What if you’re talking about Toy Story 3?

Toy Story 3 is so besotted with brand names and product-placement that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination–the usefulness of toys–and strictly celebrates consumerism.

In his widely-panned review of the widely-adored Toy Story 3, Armond White seems to have segued from film critic to film denialist. “Contrarian” feels too small, too polite — he’s not just paddling in the opposite direction of most critics, he’s climbed out of the boat and started grabbing fish with his bare hands.

Criticizing Toy Story 3 for celebrating consumerism is so non-sensical as to be objectively wrong.

Or maybe we’ve all been duped:

[Toy Story 3 is] essentially a bored game that only the brainwashed will buy into. Besides, Transformers 2 already explored the same plot to greater thrill and opulence.

Oy.

Paul Brunick does a point-by-point dissection of the Toy Story 3 review, revealing its many factual inaccuracies. Never mind what movie is being projected on screen — White is here to catalog how it falls short of his ideals:

What makes Armond’s reviews perversely fascinating is that he is so obviously intelligent, yet this intelligence has been harnessed to the warped imperatives of an increasingly frustrated personality. Where your average critical hack job is just banal, White’s ability to disconnect the dots exerts a kind of bizarro brilliance. Try to take any of his recent reviews as seriously as he insists and you’ll find yourself, like Alice and the Red Queen, running in hermeneutic circles, getting nowhere fast. It makes for mediocre criticism but lurid psychodrama.

Don’t feed the trolls

Since you can’t debate a denialist, shouldn’t you just ignore them?

In forums and message boards, yes. On their own blogs, sure. But when a denialist has a platform that otherwise feels legitimate, are you doing society a disservice by letting the counterfactual opinion sit there uncontested?

Take evolution, per my example above. By attempting to engage with denialists, defenders of science paradoxically lend their opponents legitimacy — particularly if they can portray themselves as persecuted. “Teach the controversy” starts to sound like a reasonable middle ground, drawing in otherwise-reasonable people who want to be perceived as wise and fair.

I don’t have a good answer. I haven’t devised a formula for figuring out when to just ignore it. And thus I spend a few hundred words on a terrible review of an excellent movie.

A few months ago, I discussed how Every Villain is a Hero — very few bad guys perceive themselves as bad guys, so you need to think of their motivation in heroic terms.

I just finished playing the Descent into Darkness scenario for Battle for Wesnoth,¹ which provides a surprisingly good example of this lesson.

The story follows Malin Keshar, a young mage trying to save his village from orcs. Desperate, he uses a little necromancy in a pinch, which gets him banished from his homeland. As the twelve chapters unfold, bad decisions snowball until the story reaches a satisfyingly bleak conclusion.

Reading up on the scenario afterwards, I came upon this description of Malin’s dilemma, a trope called All of the Other Reindeer:

A character is surrounded by people who constantly put him or her down, usually because of some trait that is integral to them being a hero or villain. It seems the only responses one can make to this are the extremes: “put up with it silently” or “let them die/kill them all.”

If a hero, the character will constantly show their virtue by putting up with it and saving their tormentors’ lives again and again. Said tormentors will be grateful for about five seconds (that is, until the end of the episode), and then start it up again.

If a villain, they’ll inevitably explode and slaughter their tormentors, to the barely disguised envy of the audience. Oh, the hero will stop them eventually, but not before most of those who wronged the villain are taken out.

That’s a great roadmap for one kind of villain backstory.

And if you haven’t spent an afternoon clicking through TV Tropes, it’s well worth the time suck.

1. Wesnoth is an old open-source game now available for iPad.

One of my frustrations with independent film — and in particular, micro-indies of the past few years — is a lack of narrative ambition.

Flip through the catalogs of any festival and you’ll see movies with fascinating characters and rich settings in which nothing really happens, as if the filmmakers took a Dogma vow to avoid plot.

My hunch is that it’s actually a consequence of thinking small. If you’re making a movie on a limited budget, it may put real constraints on your locations, schedule and cast size.

But that frugality doesn’t need to limit your story. Story is free.

Waiting around for things

I spent last week at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, working with writer-directors on their next projects. I don’t want to single out any one script — I’m eager to see all of these movies made. These filmmakers are very talented.

But I often found myself pausing at page 45 asking “What’s happened so far?” and “What am I curious about?” And too often, the answer was not much.

Some of my red flags:

• Are characters waiting around for something?
• Do they take half-steps, then retreat?
• Do major events (death, abortion, incest) happen off-screen, or before the movie begins?
• Do people talk about food?
• Could you swap a scene from page 10 and page 34 without changing much?

A few of these projects would fall within the loose borders of the mumblecore movement, stories that focus on the sputtering interactions of a few well-educated characters. This is no ding on the genre; I like my Humpday just fine.

But I wonder if filmmakers are looking to mumblecore movies as an excuse for underwriting and avoiding character conflict.

A lot of story can happen even when you’re constrained to a few locations. Hamlet takes place in a few rooms. So does The Usual Suspects. Both Go and The Nines pack a lot into each of their three-part sections. And while Sex, Lies and Videotape might seem low-plot, the story keeps forcing characters to make choices and face the consequences.

In meeting with the screenwriters at Sundance, I challenged them to look for scenes in which characters were talking about things and show them doing those things. Often, the omitted scenes weren’t more expensive than what they would replace — but they were more difficult to write. The beginning of an affair is trickier than showing it mid-course. A trapped child is uncomfortable to write, but compelling to watch.

The writing is always going to be the least expensive but most challenging part of the process. Making a low-budget movie is a study in compromises. Story shouldn’t be one of them.

In earlier posts, I’ve talked about protagonists and heroes at length. Yesterday Michael Goldenberg offered a a new description that I love:

The protagonist is the character that suffers the most.

In one sentence, both definition and practical advice. Perfect.