Fiction and Originality

Hey there everyone, sorry for not posting these last couple of weeks.  I recently got a new job, and have also been focusing on getting my collection of short stories published through Amazon's CreateSpace.  Right now I'm editing my manuscript and collaborating with a friend on a cover, so everything is coming along nicely.  Expect that bad boy to drop in a few weeks!

Anywho, one of the most talked about topics in fiction is originality.  You see it not only in conversations about books, but conversations about movies, television, and every other story telling medium, as well.  Many people lament the loss of "originality" in film in particular.  One of the most common criticisms of James Cameron's Avatar, for instance, is that it was just like Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves, but with blue-skinned aliens instead of Native Americans.

 

All the metaphors for Native Americans, without the need to hire any Native American actors!

On the other hand, one of the most popular quotes about creativity is "good artists copy; great artists steal", a line that is made even better by the fact that no one is sure who to attribute it to (most people say either Pablo Picasso or TS Elliot, but no one is sure).  In fact, many people say originality doesn't exist.  So what's the deal?  How can we mourn the loss of originality, but also embrace this loss and make clever little witticisms about it?  What is "originality" in creative works, and fiction in particular, anyway?

Before we tackle the tricky subject of borrowing from other works, let's talk about the base concept of originality first.  There is a lot to unpack here.

It's important to realize that even if you aren't drawing explicitly from fiction or any other type of creative work in your writing, there are certain tropes- that is, story telling devices- that show up in stories you create, and these tropes have all shown up before.  It's not a bad thing, as there are only so many different types of characters, stories, and themes you can create.  I've seen so many starting writers try too hard to be innovative and in the process they either (1)never end up writing anything because that perfect, mind-blowing, game-changing story never comes or (2)create a jumbled mess that is so focused on being different it forgets to add quality story telling.

Humans have been telling stories for a long, long time.  Stories about love, hatred, war, peace, oppression, liberation, courage, cowardice, acceptance- every theme you could ever want.  Stoic characters, loud characters, funny characters, sad characters, brave characters, honest characters, deceitful characters, optimistic characters, cynical characters and more, as well as every permutation of these traits you can think of.  There are too many situations to even name that can happen in these stories- that's why there is an entire online encyclopedia dedicated to these tropes.

Don't click that link if you were hoping to be productive any time in the next couple hours.

This is what people mean when they say you can't be completely original.  Even if everything you write is drawn from a combination of your noggin, your life experiences, and the life experiences of other people in your life, there is almost certainly a number of tropes that fit us and our experiences.  Not in the minute details, but in what they boil down to.

Speaking of "not in the minute details, but in what they boil down to", let's move on to the topic of drawing inspiration from other creative works.  Because there are a lot of examples of great works that are influenced by other works, and those influential works themselves having been influenced by other works.

Let's start with my favorite filmmaker, whom I've written about before: Akira Kurosawa.  Aside from being one of the best filmmakers of all time, he is also one of the most influential.  The Hidden Fortress inspired the original Star Wars trilogy; Yojimbo inspired A Fistful of Dollars; Seven Samurai has influenced so many films, from The Maginificent Seven to A Bug's Life, that it's hard to keep track.

 

Just some little movie trilogy, you may have heard of it.

And yet, even being one of the most talented, innovative, and influential directors ever, Kurosawa had his own influences as well.  The linked article talks about the influences on his work as a filmmaker; in addition to his own life experiences, one of the biggest influences on Kurosawa was Russian literature, especially Dostoyevsky and [Maxim] Gorky.  My favorite movie of all time, Kurosawa's Red Beard, is based on a short story collection by Shūgorō Yamamoto, and also draws from a Dostoyevsky novel for one of the movie's subplots.  So to say he came up with the ideas for his brilliant films by himself would be, at best, disingenuous.

Think of stories as a chain reaction of different influences coming together.  Every story is a mixture of the author's life experiences, the life experiences of people they know or know of, ideas they've studied, fictional works they've seen and enjoyed, other creative works they've experienced and enjoyed (I once wrote a short story inspired by a painting I saw), and other such sources that come together  into whatever work that person creates.  Originality, if such a thing exists, comes in the way you synthesize those pieces together, not in pretending that whatever you make has never been influenced by anything else and is completely unlike everything before it.

And that's where the "not in the minute details, but in what they boil down to" idea comes back into play.  Every story, boiled down to its bare elements, is very basic.  Fight Club, a book and movie I was just talking about with my good friend Morgan, is one of my favorite stories out there.  Many people, myself included, find it very creative and original.  Yet, at it's very core, Fight Club is about a person overcoming a certain part of himself.  In that sense, Fight Club isn't much different than most other fiction.

Can Tyler Durden overcome himself... by working up the courage to ask Marla to the prom?!

Defining what is or isn't plagiarism is a little bit tricky, particularly because the line can be ambiguous.  But this is where the "minute details" come in.  Two stories might share similar characters, themes, and overall stories, but how similar are their character's arcs, the way they explore their themes, and the specific plot points they go through?  Earlier I mentioned Yojimbo/A Fistful of Dollars.  Well, I have have been a bit nice in saying A Fistful of Dollars was "influenced" by Yojimbo, because the movie actually seems to be plagiarized from Kurosawa's film.  Scene by scene, the movies are incredibly similar.  So similar, in fact, that Kurosawa brought a lawsuit against Director Sergio Leone and won.

Interestingly, Leone's defense was that Yojimbo wasn't a completely original work, either.  And he certainly had a point.  Kurosawa himself stated that the 1942 movie The Glass Key was a major influence for the film.  The difference here is that Kurosawa took a lot of tropes/story elements from The Glass Key and made them his own, while Leone took entire scenes from Yojimbo without giving proper credit.

Originality in fiction, to me, comes from the ability to synthesize an original story from existing parts.  Creating fiction is sorta like the act of creating life: you're not doing anything new, but you're creating something unique (also, you're naked, sweaty, and possibly drunk... that's how most other authors also write, right?).  So if you're a writer of any sort, don't feel the need to focus on creating fiction that is unlike any other.  Focus, instead, on creating something worth reading or watching.

2001: A Space Odyssey and Fight Club: Nietzsche Approved FIlms?

This may come as a surprise, but one of the internet's favorite activities is over-analyzing pop culture.  Picking apart different films, books, TV shows, video games, and other forms of entertainment is a lot of fun and can be very thought-provoking, which probably explains so many websites and video dedicate themselves to doing just that.  I, of course, am a huge dork for this sort of thing.

If you're at all into film, you've heard of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Fight Club.  Hopefully you've seen them as well, as they are widely considered two of the best films ever made, sentiments which I am inclined to agree with.  They also have something else in common: people have made the case that they are Nietzschean in nature.  That is, they represent the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche; specifically, the concept of the Ubermensch.  As someone who is very familiar with Nietzsche and even wrote a post about him on my old blog, I will analyze these films to determine whether or not they truly do represent the idea of the Ubermencsh.

 

Fun Fact: I hated nationalism and antisemitism, yet my Nazi sister who inherited my writings still
maimed them to make them support Nazism.  Oppressors really will co-opt everything, won't they?

First, a brief summary of Nietzsche's ideas.  Nietzsche was of the existential nihilist tradition.  Nihilists believe that values have no objective basis (that is, there is nothing that can give us a moral criteria with certainty, hence why moral ambiguity exists), and everything is therefore meaningless.  Existentialists believe that finding your own purpose in life is what is most important.  When you put the two together into existential nihilism, the philosophy is basically "well, everything is pointless, but while we're alive we might as well find our own reason for living or whatever."

As for the Ubermensch, there are a lot of misconceptions about what it truly means.  The main idea behind it is an extension of existential nihilistic belief: that values are meaningless, but we should build our own.  The Ubermensch is someone who has completely cast off previous notions of morality to build a new paradigm of morality based completely around "this-worldliness", or in other words focusing on life in the here and now.  No enduring oppression for the hope of a good afterlife.  No viewing life as expendable.  No living by abstract guidelines if they aren't helping preserve life on Earth.

An Ubermensch, then, isn't a biological/evolutionary trait.  It is instead a life outlook and subsequent way of living to aspire toward.  It is confronting nihilism, accepting that values are inherently meaningless, deconstructing the values of the society you live in, and building your own new set of values with life as the main criteria.  There are a lot more intricacies and nuances to the concept, but this is sufficient for exploring the main question of this post.

Do 2001: A Space Odyssey or Fight Club actually represent Nietzschean ideals?

2001: A Space Odyssey

 

 2001: A Space Odyssey was a landmark in film making, and a very different cinematic experience than most movies.  We follow the movie in segments, two of which don't involve any dialogue at all.  The overarching narrative is that humanity's evolution was pushed along by an artifact, known as a "monolith", that granted humanity's evolutionary ancestors the ability to wield tools.  By the end of the movie, the final surviving human astronaut discovers another monolith orbiting Jupiter, which sends him on a bad acid trip and rebirths him as a giant star fetus.  But hey, aliens, am I right?

Because its an unwritten law that cinema geeks cannot call themselves film buffs until they over-analyze at least one Kubrick work, there is no shortage of interpretations about 2001.  Seeing it as a film that explores the concept of the Ubermensch is a leading theory popular enough to have its own Wikipedia section.  In both the movie and Nietzsche's works, humans are simply the bridge between apes and something greater.  I mean, there is even a track called Thus Spake Zarathustra, named after Nietszche's magnum opus!  How can it not be the perfect Nietzschean film?

Just like how the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a democratic republic because its in the title!

Unfortunately, like most of my past romances, this section is going to end quickly and disappointingly.  As I discussed above, the whole point of the Ubermensch is for humanity to completely reevaluate their life outlooks and systems of morality.  I also mentioned it has nothing to do with biological evolution, and that goes double for evolution that was initiated by an outside species.  Humanity's ascent to the Ubermensch has to come from within ourselves, not any external force.  Even if that force is something as rad as alien LSD trips.

Fight Club

 

Ah yes, Fight Club.  One of my favorite movies, but also one I like to avoid talking about with people I don't know very well.  Why?  Because as my good friend David Zafra discussed on his own blog, Fight Club is often arguably misunderstood by dudebros everywhere who: saw the movie, thought Brad Pitt's character was awesome, and wanted to start their own fight clubs.  The thing is, Pitt's character isn't supposed to be someone to emulate.

Now I don't want to be too harsh on those folks, partially because that was me at one point, but also because there is a lot to like about some of the things he says.  Pitt's character does raise a lot of good points about consumerism and materialism (though he also whines about women existing and making decisions and stuff, which should hopefully be the first hint that things are off with him).  Combined with the badassery of the fight clubs and Pitt's own charisma, its easy to embrace him. 

Of course, everyone knows what happens next.  The narrator turns out to be Tyler Durden, and Pitt's character was just a manifestation of Edward Norton's mind.  Norton stops everything and him and Marla presumably live happily ever after (a change from the book author Chuck Palahniuk actually prefers).  So how does it fit as a Nietzschean film about discovering the Ubermensch?

Quite well, metaphorically, even if it doesn't go all the way.  If you look at Pitt's character as a manifestation of Norton's own nihilism, then the movie becomes a personal quest for Norton's own character to confront his inner nihilism, give into it, and then overcome it to find his own values.

Looking at the good points that Brad Pitt makes about society, such as him essentially arguing that consumerism and materialism are bullshit, notice that these are critiques.  Nihilists can tear down any world outlook, because it is all about stripping down ideas to their bare assumptions and finding fault in the foundations of those assumptions.  Nihilism is a fantastic mindset for deconstructing things, and that's why Brad Pitt's character brings up a lot of good points: there's a lot of bullshit and he has no trouble calling it out.

The problem with Pitt's approach is that he then goes the path that unfettered nihilism often goes: giving into meaninglessness and adapting a fuck shit up mentality.  This is why everything escalates the way it does.  When you don't give a shit about anything, nihilistic angst often gives way to destruction or hedonism.

Or, hedonism bot.

Throughout the movie, Norton's character is originally enamored with Pitt's.  He embraces everything Pitt has to say, giving into the nihilist destruction that inevitably snowballs in the movie.  However, towards the end as he pieces everything together, he also realize that destroying everything isn't the answer and finds meaning in his relationship with Marla.  After a serious of wacky hijinks, he stops Pitt's plan and the movie ends with them holding hands. He's confronted the inherent meaninglessness of things, accepts it, and overcomes it in the connection he shares with Marla.

What's interesting about this, is that director David Fincher doesn't actually understand this Nietzschean concept of the Ubermensch, and tried to paint Pitt as the Nietzschean ideal.  In one interview, he says "I was very cautious to say that this Nietzschean uberman is a great idea for high school seniors and college sophomores, but it doesn’t really work in the real world beyond that, you know?  And that’s kind of what the movie’s talking about."

This is why, throughout the film, Pitt's character indeed does a few semi-Nietzschean things.  An example is when, while driving, Pitt's character puts them into a near-death situation and asks the two Project Mayhem recruits about what they've always wanted to accomplish before they die.  You also see it when they hold a gun to the head of a convenience store clerk and demand he start living life the way he want to, or else they will track him down and shoot him.

Now, to reiterate, one of the most important parts about the idea of the Ubermensch, and the thing that Fincher misses here, is that life is the main criteria for the Ubermensch's value set.  Risking a car crash or threatening the life of someone, even if its supposed to help a character find meaning in their lives, blatantly disregards the criteria of life.  It also is forcing these decisions on people in a life or death situation, rather than letting the characters arrive there themselves on their own instead of by force.

Ironically, Fincher therefore displays a similar misunderstanding of the Ubermensch that many of the aforementioned dudebros do of his movie.

So, in the end, this movie can be seen as a Nietzschean film, despite the director's best efforts to the exact opposite- or, perhaps more accurately, discredit a straw man version of the Ubermensch while accidentally making a film that adequately looks at it the way it is supposed to play out. While the film doesn't follow up in detail what is supposed to happen afterward in the Nietzschean model, where one builds a new set of values after confront nihilism, you can see that foundation being set in the romance between Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter.  After all, each Ubermensch is supposed to create their own unique set of values for themselves based on their own individual lives and experiences.

Hmm, I wonder if there is something we can take away from that and try to apply in our own everyday live?

Nah, forget it.  Time to start a shirtless fight club!  It's gonna be badass, bro!