h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you want to write something that's going to last, you might want to choose your theme carefully.

There are some great themes: love and jealousy, pride leading to a fall, wrong-doing and remorse, loss and grief etc, which were relevant in the time of the ancient Greeks (as we were saying on another thread) and will be relevant to the end.

The ways in which those themes are worked out in detail are going to differ. You could, if you chose, make your proud man captain of a spaceship who sets out to explore a distant planet. He's so confident of his abilities that he fails to order all the necessary checks and, on the way back, his spaceship begins to run out of oxygen. In their desperation to reach , his crew mutiny...

Sure. There's a reason why Gene Roddenberry pitched 'Star Trek' to the studio as 'Wagon Train to the Stars'.

But I would like to add something: not all the real themes have been adequately explored. And some of those 'timeless' themes have been given too much attention, in my opinion.

Take 'love stories'. If we're not careful, we end up with the same, tired cliches of 'love' - most particularly, the idea that the truest, most important love relationship is between a young woman and a young man, that leads to marriage and family. This reinforces a certain narrow view of the human potential. Hollywood is guilty of that - for decades, no matter what the subject matter, there had to be a heteronormative 'romance' at its heart.

Describe the US Civil War? Okay, there's this Southern belle and her boyfriend, see...

Sink the Titanic? Sure. There's this girl, see, and she's engaged to the wrong guy...

World War II: you need to blow up an important bridge. Er...okay, the heroes enlist the help of a beautiful female freedom fighter, say, Sophia Loren or Gina Lolabrigida. She falls in love with the leader...

You see what I mean? In the meantime, the themes that we need are being ignored. Films like this were why I, as a kid, considered the film industry to be a trifling thing. Why was the story called 'The Adventures of Robin Hood', when I was watching Olivia de Haviland trying to look sexy while munching on a chicken bone?

When I was about 13, I more or less accidentally got to see 'Bridge Over the River Kwai'. I was transfixed. Not a romance in sight...real themes and Sesue Hayakawa. Aha, I thought.

I'm not saying that the needs of our minds are vastly different from those of 5,000 years ago. They're not. But we haven't even begun to explore everything yet.

Take your space mutiny. That's sort of like a plot of 'Star Trek: Voyager'. But here's what one episode of that show did to it. [Go away, Peanut, here be Spoilers.]

Plot: The crew of Voyager consists of former enemies: Starfleet and members of the Maquis, a resistance group. They have to work together, because they are stranded 70,000 lightyears from the Alpha Quadrant. To alleviate loneliness, many of them indulge in interactive holonovels. In this episode, someone - nobody knows who - has left a clandestine holonovel in the database.

In this holonovel, First Officer Chakotay leads a mutiny against the Captain. Heady stuff.

Pretty soon, all the crew have slipped onto the holodeck and tried out this guilty pleasure. The captain and Chakotay laugh, but want to know who wrote this. Of course, it's the least-likely person: Tuvok, the humourless Vulcan security officer. He did it early on, as a 'training exercise' in case of mutiny. Silly man.

The captain and crew demand that Tuvok finish the program. They want a plot resolution. Unfortunately, when Tuvok reopens the program for a rewrite, it turns out that an evil saboteur - a former crewmember who is now dead - has left a virus in that program. To survive, Tuvok and another crewmember, Paris, must fight their way out, while the Captain reaches into her bag of tricks to WRITE them out of this holoprogram run amok.

The story is fascinating, and fun. It takes you awhile to realise just what real themes underlie this story: just where our imagination may take us, just how we use that imagination to help us in real life, the importance of trust and cooperation, etc.

Sorry, running on too long. But I'm agreeing with you - there are real themes, and we can find them everywhere.

I can understand why a film or a book trying to depict, say the Second World War, might throw in a romance. It's to make the big issues - war and peace, courage and loyalty etc - relevant at an individual level. I suppose you're right that it doesn't have to be a romance. I remember enjoying Nevil Shute's 'Pied Piper', where an old man rescues a string of children from occupied Europe. But it has to make the big issues personal.

And I'm afraid there's the consideration that at least half your audience is going to be female. Perhaps women like soppy romances. (Though I must admit that I never really bought the Jack-Rose romance in 'Titanic'.)

You've got a great point there - make the issues personal. But if we want to examine things a bit more closely, let's make the issues personal and not cliched.

I'm not really convinced that 51% of the audience wants soppy romances. I think that's a specialty audience.

Take an example: in 'The Celluloid Closet', the filmmakers show how gay audiences spent years doing resistant readings of the films, searching for something that expressed their point of view:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celluloid_Closet

Now, I've done some reading in psychology, and that is true of any minority: ethnic minorities, psychological minorities, etc.

For instance, a film about Mary Slessor of Africa would not be a film that catered to the tastes of romance readers. But there must be millions of women who would appreciate the story of this courageous woman and the children whose lives she saved. And somebody should write it a bit better than the author in this link:

http://www.gaychristian101.com/mary-slessor.html

For that matter, just think about all of us who read science fiction, starved for any real discussion of philosophical implications, and grateful to the crumbs thrown in our direction by Star Trek scriptwriters, when a series like 'FlashForward' gets cancelled because it gives the punters a headache thinking about free will.

At least Data was trying. He even had an argument with Freud on the holodeck - and invited Stephen Hawking there, too. (I expect Professor Hawking had a good time playing himself. )

An interesting thread, personally I do not usually intentionally write to a theme. The theme is the kernel that provoked my interest in the first place. As I am sure you have noticed most of my work is historical non-fiction, although I do dabble in fiction for my own amusement.

What made me want to reply here was your mention of the Titanic film. As you know there are many of them, and I have watched almost all, far too many times. My personal favourite is the Clifton Webb film from the 1950's. A wealthy British man learns his American wife is taking their two children back to America aboard Titanic. He purchases a ticket from a family in steerage just in time to board the doomed ship. This is not the usual love story between a man and a woman, but the love of a man for his son.

FS

I suppose that it's in longer fiction - novels, anyway - where the literary experts insist you know what the theme is. Though it might apply to drama, too.

When it comes to stories about the relationship between father and son, how about 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy? Which must be one of the bleakest stories I've ever read.

Hi MVP thanks for the reply

>I suppose that it's in longer fiction - novels, anyway - where the literary experts insist you know what the theme is. <

Perhaps I did not express myself well enough. I don't believe it is possible to write a story of more than a paragraph or two without developing a theme or two. My thought is more that rather than first choosing a theme and then crafting a story to fit it, I prefer to find a story, and after it is complete, find what the theme was. As an example in my recent entries on Benedict Arnold, the major theme is that to truly hate or despise someone, we must learn to love them first. A second theme that comes out in the conclusion is that anyone who betrays a trust will never be trusted again, even by those he aided.



I have not read "The Road", but you have given me reason enough to read the reviews. Let me just say that a man, and a boy who wants to be a man, trapped on a doomed ship where most of the men die, does not have a happy ending.


FS

That's a good point, you two: rather than shoehorning the them into the story, it's probably best if we let the story show us what the themes are. I like that.