I thought about this a lot while watching a movie on a flight from New York to San Francisco recently. The movie was The Lucky One starring Zac Efron, based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks ("The Notebook") about a damaged war vet who has a romance with a damaged young mother. To give you a sense of how much I enjoyed this film, while watching a particularly cheesy scene, I actually slapped my forehead in disbelief. (The woman sitting next to me laughed in agreement, and at the end, we both agreed that we had just wasted nearly two hours of our lives.)
But it got me thinking: what makes something cliche?
As a starting point, I looked up the definition of the word in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary:
3 : something (as a menu item) that has become overly familiar or commonplace
Of course, this makes a lot of sense. Something that is cliche is unoriginal, overused, and overly familiar. Cliche things are stereotypical and even predictable: we know how the character will behave or where the plot will go, because we've seen it before.
In my mind, this raises two critical questions. First, at what point does something transition from a classic story to a cliche? I mean, characters and stories get reused (and eventually overused) because they're good and worth repeating. I'm sure we can all think of characters or stories that have been repeated but that stand as good movies. Gladiator is the classic redemption tale of a down-on-his-luck man fighting his way back for revenge and justice - see also Robin Hood, The Mask of Zorro, even Harry Potter. How many romantic comedies feature the egotistical male lead, a fiesty but insecure female lead, and their respective best friends? How many re-tellings of Shakespeare's King Lear are there (any story with an aging father and three rivaling daughters)? And Avatar followed a tried-and-true formula - selfish pioneer learns to be selfless by falling in love with indigenous princess and helping indigenous people rebel against "white" conquerers. But the same formula that we have enjoyed in countless films before (everything from Dance With Wolves and Pocahontas to FernGully and The Road to El Dorado) became to me a total cliche with James Cameron's film - predictable, over-the-top, stereotypical. (It didn't help that dialogue is not Cameron's strong suit, and that the dialogue was equally cliche, predictable, and melodramatic.) So why is the retelling of a classic story sometimes enjoyable, maybe even nostalgic, and other times it is stale and annoying?
The other lingering question is: how do you avoid cliche when telling a story? I had the privilege of taking a playwriting course in college with Michael Hollinger, a brilliant and accomplished storyteller (and an all-around great guy). In one class, Michael addressed this exact subject, stating that what makes characters (and stories) interesting and not stereotypical is contradiction - something different or unexpected or contrasting with other traits. Contradiction not only defies stereotyping, but it also adds complexity, depth, and intrigue, makes things less predictable, and that in turn makes things more interesting. In the case of The Lucky One, there was nothing contradictory about these characters - they were predictable and standard in so many ways, flat and uninteresting, and, worst of all, the lead character doesn't even grow and change, so that he stays as a one-note character the whole time. (Can you tell how much I enjoyed it?)
What do you think makes something cliche? When does a classic story become cliche to you? Have you seen or read any stories that were stereotypical but enjoyable? And have you seen or read any stories that were cliche in the set up but that defied stereotypes somehow?
The contradiction aspect is a good trick -- flipping one characteristic, and basically making sure that characters are well rounded. But even that can become cliche. The rogue with the heart of gold, for example.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to expand on one factor that I think is huuugely important, which is the moviegoer. Cliche, (or anything having to do with art, really), isn't a monolith. To riff off your examples, Avatar was enormously successful commercially. People obviously connected to it, despite the formula. It depends on what an individual values. For some people, the fact that Avatar took place in a new setting, with blue aliens was different enough to make it new and fresh. For others, it wasn't.
Or another example The Kids Are All Right won tons of critical acclaim, but just seemed like more of the same to me. The fact that it had to do with a lesbian family didn't make it fresh enough for me to see past the common family trouble themes. (And I'm sure there are plenty of movies that I loved that were thought cliche by other people)
Part of it is familiarity and expertise. For example, all romance novels follow a pretty strict form (some would call it a formula). Too a non romance reader, they would all look similar. An avid reader, on the other hand, moves past the high level generalities to see the nuances of each particular story. Similarly, to a non classical music fan, all Mozart sounds the same, while a scholar would find them wildly different.
Expertise can also work the other way. I'm sure if we take some of our western fairy tales and show them to Chinese people, they would think they're highly original.
That said, I *can* think of a few films that seem highly original -- at least given my own cultural experience. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Memento...
These are good thoughts.
ReplyDeleteThe difference between a time-tested story element and a cliche? I think the answer is truthfulness.
There are timeless issues about the human condition that people have grappled with ever since Gilgamesh. We'll never get tired of redemption stories because they speak to us on a deep level.
But I think these old ideas become cliches when they are brought out in a lazy way. While I enjoyed "Avatar," I felt like it trotted out the structure of better movies without truly wrestling with the implications.
The movie sort of pulls out the going-native formula from "Witness and Enemy Mine" without really thinking it through, and I think that's what feels so lite. Doesn't it seem like it should be a more agonizing dilemma for Sam Worthington to be torn between betraying Earth and letting Na'avi culture die? Instead the bad guy is so obviously bad that it seems like a no-brainer for Sam to switch sides. I felt like he should pay more of a price, alienate some people he loves, maybe even lose more of his humanity, like Robocop.
oops, meant to break up "Witness" and "Enemy Mine." (And "Dances With Wolves.")
ReplyDeleteThanks, Livia. I agree that a fatal flaw can be cliche, but then I would argue that it's not a contradiction - that is, it isn't an alteration from the stereotype. And you raise an interesting point about the role of the audience and its perception of the subject matter. Your final point ties nicely with John's observation about how the story is told more than the story itself. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Memento" were a "love story" and a "crime story", respectively, but both were told using unique storytelling narratives and structures. (Anything by Charlie Kaufmann is unique and brilliant in my mind.)
ReplyDeleteJohn, you raise a good point though I wonder, if truthfulness is what distinguishes a cliche from a good story, then wouldn't the quality of the story be irrelevant? To me, your latter point about the quality of the story and the storytelling elements is more significant. Because even if the story gets at a universal truth, the quality of the storytelling will determine whether it's an award-winning drama or a Lifetime Original movie...
On the theme of audience, let's see how far we can push this. Here's a proposal. If you like a story, then it's a fresh retelling of an old theme. If you don't like it, it's worn and cliche.
ReplyDeleteDiscuss.