I think there's a world of difference between crime-porn; the never ending books written and adaptations about heinous crimes, and fiction that thematically addresses social or political concerns.
This week I saw A House of Dynamite. It's brilliant. A frightening reminder that nuclear weapons still exist. Too close to real life? Yep. But that's the point.
I'm struggling with this issue in my own current serial (it involves a Charlie Kirk-like figure), so I've been thinking about your points a fair amount. True, inserting the "real world" into a fictional one can be tricky. But if we want to create a fictional world that feels real, that sometimes means drawing from actual events. For example, a war movie can't exist without showing the experience of war. And even in a fantasy or science fiction world, the experience of war has to feel real or readers are cheated. Too much second guessing kills the story.
This is a very interesting topic that you chose to write about and to be honest, I don't even think it's that deep to answer this question.
If anyone writes a story that covers certain topics, you bet that there's someone out there who has a trauma that makes him stop the reading or maybe take offense with what happens.
In your topic you speak about 9/11 or Wars that are happening in the world and all the bloodshed. But what about someone falling from his bicycle? Could it be that there might be people that lost loved ones because they fell from their bicycle?. Or what about a car accident? How many stories don't have car accidents in them? And how many people die in the world everyday due to car accidents?.
Compared to 9/11 those are relatively small events, but they are no less impactful to the people that have to go through them. Does that mean that we can't write stories about car crashes? Cant write stories about losing people in general. There will always be people who lost someone, and might emotionally connect to something in a story, and maybe receive flashbacks from whatever happened in their life's story.
All in all, I think that if you write about planes crashing, that doesn't mean that you're you're invoking 9/11 and using it for your own story and entertainment, if you can call it that. You are writing a storyline that depicts a plane crashing that people could get offended by that or get traumatic flashes from when they were maybe at the base of the towers as they collapsed. That's not so much, and this may sound a bit harsh, your problem.
It's not that the world can adjust to everyone's needs. Everyone's insecurities, everyone's trauma's. The only thing that we can do is put a disclaime around the front or in the back or in the synopsis or wherever, " watch out this story contains x".
To not make this even longer, I think that we must be careful not to Pander to this main character syndrome where everybody feels that they have the right not to be offended, but everyone thinks that whatever they have to deal with is also the problem for the world to deal with and to help with. If I write that someone dies by a stab wound or maybe a gunshot wound, does that mean that I have to say sorry to everyone who died by a gunshot? No, I write a story and as long as the writer takes his writing serious and uses anything that he wants in the story as it should be used and fits the story as he writes it then I don't see any issue in using anything. It if someone wants to use 911 in a story. Of course there are certain limitations in how far you can go to depict it, but I do think that if you want to and you have a good story then that's good.
One example, I think that works really well is for instance Mac from CSI, New York. He lost his wife during 9/11 and and they're screenwriters road to great effect how that works. It was a really traumatic and emotional moment. When you you see what happened to him so that's the way that's something like that can work.
Anyway I could probably talk about this for ages, but let's leave it here. Thanks for the great post. Really give something to think about.
Great points. Especially the one about falling off a bicycle, and smaller scale tragedies. You know the visual gag that gets overused a lot, where someone is standing on the street (often a baddie), camera is parallel to the road, and they're giving some sort of speech - and then a truck comes out of nowhere and they disappear from frame?
I used to think that was quite funny and unexpected, until a friend of mine was killed in a road accident. The context changed for me, especially if a film is playing it for laughs.
But it's a tricky one: as you say, you can't ban car accidents from fiction simply because they happen in real life to people. Inevitably, everyone reacts differently based on their own life experience. The most innocuous-seeming thing can be deeply traumatic to the right (wrong?) person, and as writers we can't really account for that.
I don't think there's a particular answer to this, or even an especially clear question: but it is certainly something that is always there, in the back of my mind.
I write what I’m told is satire, and I’m also told that it’s precariously close to the truth. In fact, I do look at real events, mostly a mix of finance and politics that I find absurd or just funny, and write about them. I think it’s ok if the essays are perceived as uncomfortably true, but it does sometimes concern me.
"It’s not unusual to see a reactionary response to strong themes in fiction: the demand that politics be ‘kept out’, although this tends to be code for “I don’t like my views to be challenged.”"
That is a choice that a viewer makes on their own terms. If they have a particular obsession or fetish with political concerns, or if they have academic training in the humanities, they will assume metaphorical meaning exists in places where the creators did not intend it to be, but the onus is on them to prove the existence of the meaning. However, if they are looking at the creative product entirely in the light of escapism (vis young children re: "Paw Patrol"), they will not feel the need to create a deeper meaning behind it, or may not be capable of doing so yet.
Certainly a subject I find myself thinking about a lot.
I think there's a world of difference between crime-porn; the never ending books written and adaptations about heinous crimes, and fiction that thematically addresses social or political concerns.
This week I saw A House of Dynamite. It's brilliant. A frightening reminder that nuclear weapons still exist. Too close to real life? Yep. But that's the point.
So yeah, it depends.
I'm struggling with this issue in my own current serial (it involves a Charlie Kirk-like figure), so I've been thinking about your points a fair amount. True, inserting the "real world" into a fictional one can be tricky. But if we want to create a fictional world that feels real, that sometimes means drawing from actual events. For example, a war movie can't exist without showing the experience of war. And even in a fantasy or science fiction world, the experience of war has to feel real or readers are cheated. Too much second guessing kills the story.
The alternative, of not drawing from the real world at all, isn't really possible (and if it were,, probably wouldn't be very interesting).
Agree about the second guessing: as long as we make careful, conscious decisions in the first place, it hopefully works out most of the time.
This is a very interesting topic that you chose to write about and to be honest, I don't even think it's that deep to answer this question.
If anyone writes a story that covers certain topics, you bet that there's someone out there who has a trauma that makes him stop the reading or maybe take offense with what happens.
In your topic you speak about 9/11 or Wars that are happening in the world and all the bloodshed. But what about someone falling from his bicycle? Could it be that there might be people that lost loved ones because they fell from their bicycle?. Or what about a car accident? How many stories don't have car accidents in them? And how many people die in the world everyday due to car accidents?.
Compared to 9/11 those are relatively small events, but they are no less impactful to the people that have to go through them. Does that mean that we can't write stories about car crashes? Cant write stories about losing people in general. There will always be people who lost someone, and might emotionally connect to something in a story, and maybe receive flashbacks from whatever happened in their life's story.
All in all, I think that if you write about planes crashing, that doesn't mean that you're you're invoking 9/11 and using it for your own story and entertainment, if you can call it that. You are writing a storyline that depicts a plane crashing that people could get offended by that or get traumatic flashes from when they were maybe at the base of the towers as they collapsed. That's not so much, and this may sound a bit harsh, your problem.
It's not that the world can adjust to everyone's needs. Everyone's insecurities, everyone's trauma's. The only thing that we can do is put a disclaime around the front or in the back or in the synopsis or wherever, " watch out this story contains x".
To not make this even longer, I think that we must be careful not to Pander to this main character syndrome where everybody feels that they have the right not to be offended, but everyone thinks that whatever they have to deal with is also the problem for the world to deal with and to help with. If I write that someone dies by a stab wound or maybe a gunshot wound, does that mean that I have to say sorry to everyone who died by a gunshot? No, I write a story and as long as the writer takes his writing serious and uses anything that he wants in the story as it should be used and fits the story as he writes it then I don't see any issue in using anything. It if someone wants to use 911 in a story. Of course there are certain limitations in how far you can go to depict it, but I do think that if you want to and you have a good story then that's good.
One example, I think that works really well is for instance Mac from CSI, New York. He lost his wife during 9/11 and and they're screenwriters road to great effect how that works. It was a really traumatic and emotional moment. When you you see what happened to him so that's the way that's something like that can work.
Anyway I could probably talk about this for ages, but let's leave it here. Thanks for the great post. Really give something to think about.
Great points. Especially the one about falling off a bicycle, and smaller scale tragedies. You know the visual gag that gets overused a lot, where someone is standing on the street (often a baddie), camera is parallel to the road, and they're giving some sort of speech - and then a truck comes out of nowhere and they disappear from frame?
I used to think that was quite funny and unexpected, until a friend of mine was killed in a road accident. The context changed for me, especially if a film is playing it for laughs.
But it's a tricky one: as you say, you can't ban car accidents from fiction simply because they happen in real life to people. Inevitably, everyone reacts differently based on their own life experience. The most innocuous-seeming thing can be deeply traumatic to the right (wrong?) person, and as writers we can't really account for that.
I don't think there's a particular answer to this, or even an especially clear question: but it is certainly something that is always there, in the back of my mind.
I write what I’m told is satire, and I’m also told that it’s precariously close to the truth. In fact, I do look at real events, mostly a mix of finance and politics that I find absurd or just funny, and write about them. I think it’s ok if the essays are perceived as uncomfortably true, but it does sometimes concern me.
"It’s not unusual to see a reactionary response to strong themes in fiction: the demand that politics be ‘kept out’, although this tends to be code for “I don’t like my views to be challenged.”"
That is a choice that a viewer makes on their own terms. If they have a particular obsession or fetish with political concerns, or if they have academic training in the humanities, they will assume metaphorical meaning exists in places where the creators did not intend it to be, but the onus is on them to prove the existence of the meaning. However, if they are looking at the creative product entirely in the light of escapism (vis young children re: "Paw Patrol"), they will not feel the need to create a deeper meaning behind it, or may not be capable of doing so yet.
Aesthetic distance is changed by adding real-world events. In particular, having real world events AND fictional ones -- produces a clash.