Many fighters say time slows down during combat, like it did for Neo in The Matrix. Experiment with different characters operating on different time speeds.
There’s an excellent montage of changing time in Notting Hill as Hugh Grant’s character strolls along a street and seasons change a couple of times during that one walk.
Your time-travel stories should always offer a fresh perspective, a new slant on the story’s original problem. Perhaps show how what is “bad” was once “good,” or reveal the eventual downside of a seemingly good idea.
The personal desire to slow or stop the passage of time, often through red sports cars or blond hair color, offers universal story opportunities (Death Becomes Her).
If your hero’s running away from a problem, show the problem’s life cycle with at least three of these distinct phases: how it began, what could have solved it then, what failed to work, how it grew, how it will all end, what the results will be. Having gained insights via time travel, or astute observation, your heroine can now apply her acquired wisdom to the problem.
DUALITY
The nature of the universe dictates opposites: up/down, dark/light, cold/hot, male/female, etc. The polarity of the bar magnet produces the magnetic field that allows actual work to be done. Computers run on a binary system. Genetic diversity, in a test tube or a body, requires polarity. Playing up duality in your stories increases dramatic conflict.
A. IN ACTION
Seasonal extremes and night-and-day dualities usually play background roles in stories. Our biological clocks are attuned to these rhythms and often marked by ceremonies as ancient as our awareness. Christmas, Easter, Halloween, and many religious festivals are tied to dualities of summer/winter solstices and fall/spring equinoxes.
Societies often use nature’s dualities to justify gender inequality and the disparity between rich and poor. E.g., masculine solar = strong and energetic, feminine lunar = weak and reflective (although in the ancient goddess religions it was just the opposite).
B. IN MEDIA
When Harry Met Sally is an example of the Dark Force of gender duality. Harry’s masculine viewpoint resists the possibility of Sally’s equality, as well as the challenge of sexual duality ruining their friendship. Sally is suspicious of Harry’s masculine motives and skeptical of his ability to resist the dual sexual standards. Their story is about overcoming polarization.
Screwball comedies such as Adam’s Rib and Bringing Up Baby progress from warring opposites to collaborating dualities as both man and woman eventually see and accept the value in what each brings to the party.
The 1980s comedy Nine to Five is about working women convincing their misogynist boss-man, through trickery and force, that duality should be a positive thing, not an archaic oppression mechanism.
Daylight, the flip side of night, is a vital element in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ann Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and all vampire tales because sunlight destroys vampires.
Onset of winter is the challenge in some sagas. Award-winning docu-drama The Journals of Knud Rasmussen tracks an Inuit tribe’s survival tactics. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the Doctor and his creation flee north to the icy Arctic, away from their temperate home.
Dr. Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, and The English Patient all juxtapose harsh remote areas with sophisticated urban settings, helping to symbolize the conflict between society’s expectations and the characters’ own desires.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation - Solar Plexus, both Lower & Aspirational: the home of duality.
Use duality of clothes (princess vs. prostitute), dialogue (stock broker vs. street rapper), or setting (desert vs. oasis) to signal a change in message or conflict.
Illustrate your character’s arc by showing his progress from initial resistance to eventual acceptance and working with the other thing/person in a duality. Romancing the Stone is a great example of this: Kathleen Turner’s character goes from girly-girl romance writer to brave adventuress as she arcs from initial conflict with Michael Douglas’ rogue character to working together towards a mutual goal.
As simple a thing as heating up coffee or cooling down on a hot day can illustrate this Dark Force — we must expend effort to mold Nature’s dualities to our will.
EARTH, AIR, FIRE, AND WATER
All mythologies personify the elements and give them backstories: thunderbirds, ocean gods, fire lizards, airy-fairies, the Fall of Atlantis, the Flood (most cultures have this myth).
Mythologized or not, earthquakes, high winds, wildfires, droughts, floods, and tsunamis are constant reminders that Nature is bigger than us and must always be taken into account.
A. IN ACTION
See more at CNN and The Weather Channel. Watch Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth.
Floods and storms yearly plague the same places, yet people still live there, defiant against the Dark Forces, or just plain stupid.
B. IN MEDIA
The world’s myths are full of disaster stories just waiting to be updated.
Earth - In Galaxy Quest Captain Taggart (Tim Allen) unsuccessfully battles a rock monster that has “no motivation and no vulnerable spots,” Technology saves the day. Mountain climbers are going up against the earth. Lawrence of Arabia battles and conquers desert sands, as do the Fremen of Dune.
Fire - Titan god Prometheus felt sorry for primitive humans and stole fire from the gods for them, so they could grill mastodons and stay up past dark telling stories around a campfire. He was severely punished for this early version of intellectual property piracy.
Fire is predicted to end this round of reality in many myths. Volcanic fire is the plot driver in Last Days of Pompeii, Krakatoa East of Java, and Volcano. The movie Backdraft features firemen. And don’t forget Bambi and that scary forest fire.
Water - Sea god Neptune thwarts Odysseus’ return to Ithaca in The Odyssey. Hercules’ boyfriend Hylas is seduced by water nymphs and Herc misses the boat, literally, as Jason and the rest of the Argonauts sail on for the Golden Fleece.
Other water stories are Poseidon Adventure, The Perfect Storm, Waterworld, and The Day After. Novelist Clive Cussler’s hero Dirk Pitt is a primo scuba diver, so many adventures take place in and around water. The 2004 Southeastern Asia tsunami and 2005 Hurricane Katrina are already mythologized in story and song.
Air – Twister is all about tornadoes. Judi Dench is an air elemental in The Chronicles of Riddick. American Indians have a Thunderbird deity and some winds are named. Zephyr is the Greek west wind, a demon boss in the game Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, and a character in the Golden Sun game. Some prophecies about the early 21st century predict killer windstorms, rather like those hitting Europe these days.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars novels deal with all four elements as humans terraform Mars, and sea levels rise on Earth from climate change.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation – Root: sheer survival.
What makes disaster films interesting is how people react to the disaster: some shine, some slink away, some shatter.
Use the universal symbolism of the elements. Water = emotions. Air = spirituality. Fire = mind. Earth = body. In a scene with two people, put the emotional one in front of the water, so when we look at them we see that emotion symbol. Work the other symbols into action or dialogue to enhance your meaning, such as lovers arguing in the rain.
Take us back in time to experience the shattering of a world or the collapse of a civilization via one of these elements.
Follow the Stealing Fire From Heaven theme and have your Prometheus bring some new element to the situation that counters these Dark Forces (crossbows, electricity, computers) and angers the establishment. Perhaps he escapes Prometheus’s punishment, perhaps not.
What if humans could control the weather? Who decides whether it’ll rain or not? How could that go bad?
Global warming is already changing things, including sea levels
. Explore ways we can head it off, deal with it, or not.
RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW
Nature is not all butterflies and cuddly kittens. It’s also brutal, bloody, and downright nasty. But hey, don’t take it personally, that’s just how it is. You know, The Lion King “circle of life” thing.
Many of our problems with animals are territorial. Even today elephants and tigers kill humans if they’re forced out of their natural habitats. Predators and creepy-crawlies naturally tweak our fight-or-flight genes. Perhaps it’s genetic memories of earlier days when we ran from saber-toothed tigers and literally swam with the sharks. The animal kingdom can provide exciting dangers and obstacles for your characters.
A. IN ACTION
Many mythologies use animals to symbolize characteristics: wise owls, crafty foxes, courageous lions, loyal dogs, lone eagles, etc. In some initiatory systems the aspirant acquires an animal spirit guide. Because we are related to animals and recapitulate that heritage in our gestation process, some imagine we can shape shift into various animals if our will, or our drugs, are strong enough. Emerald Forest plays on this theme, as do the Dune novels and Altered States.
Animal trainers always advise respect for the animals since they’re wild first, tame second. Many trainers and zoo workers have paid a high price for forgetting this. Big game hunters have shivery stories of cunning animals who tracked them down years after an encounter and others who even set traps for the humans.
TV’s Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray. It was totally impersonal, but it tragically illustrates that old adage: Stay out of Nature’s way and She won’t kill you.
B. IN MEDIA
Enkidu of Mesopotamian myth and Siegfried of Norse myth both understood the language of animals. Aesop’s Fables and most fairy tales are full of tricky and treacherous animals.
Mothra, Willard, Snakes on a Plane, the snakes in Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Edge, The Ghost and the Darkness, Predator, Arachnophobia, A Cry in the Dark (“Dingo got my baybee!”), the hyenas in The Lion King, and of course, Jaws.
Though he must leave them for the world of humans, The Jungle Book’s Mowgli fully understands the beasts who raised him. So too does the researcher in Never Cry Wolf. Werewolf stories give lycopanthic characteristics to humans; a classic is An American Werewolf in London. In the book and movie Altered States, a scientist genetically reverts to an earlier animal, as also happened in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where the Klingon Warf became a wolf, someone reverted to a lizard, and… did Data turn into an abacus or a pocket calculator?
Extreme animals make for spooky movies: Them, The Birds, The Thing, Cujo, Tremors, Jurassic Park, and the behemoth sandworms of Dune. How about those pigs (cops) in the chilling socio-political satire Animal Farm?
And then there’s the archetypal Moby Dick, that great white whale who seems to have a personal vendetta against Captain Ahab, who certainly has one against him for taking off his leg. It’s a perfect storm of Dweller on the Threshold versus a Dark Force.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation – Root: survival.
We tend to humanize animal behavior, often to disastrous ends. A psychologically perceptive story such as Moby Dick will show why we do that, and why it’s not a good idea.
The terror of animals out of control is buried deep in our genes and can supply endless amounts of drama — use it well, and you can create truly horrifying Dark Force tales.
When hunter-conservationist Jim Corbett tracked man-eating tigers in India, he’d wear a mask on the back of his head because tigers usually attack from behind. Have your character learn animal ways and use that against them.
Heroines who can commune with animals offer unique story paths. Explore this favorite tool of children’s stories in a different direction: instead of animals teaching humans, go vise-versa. Or have animals incensed at how humans are ruining their planet and deciding to wipe us out.
Update the stories of human/animal mixes such as centaurs. In the TV series Dark Angel, the genetically engineered heroine Max has cat genes and qualities.
Explore the shape-shifting concept. If you could flip gene switches for instant expression of other qualities, what could your characters become and do? Fly? Burrow? Run like a cheetah?
A PLAGUE ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES
Epidemics, pandemics, plagues, etc. are impersonal Dark Forces, though they can be wielded by humans to ill ends. Viruses and bacteria are tiny. Plagues are huge and horrifying. It’s normal for one person to be sick. It’s just wrong wrong wrong when thousands or even millions fall ill and die.
Some say humans are a virus infecting planet earth and that plagues are nature’s way of running a fever and combating the disease that is us. Others say humans are simply breeding grounds and mobile hosts for bacteria and viruses who really rule the world.
A. IN ACTION
The Black Death plagued Asia, Europe, and the Middle East for many centuries, wiping out millions. Diseases introduced by colonizing Europeans destroyed a significant part of the populace in the Americas and the Pacific. The Spanish Flu pandemic just after World War I killed 50-100 million people while only ten million died in the War.
World travelers are advised to get vaccinated against diseases we had thought under control: smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, typhoid, polio, etc. Plus, we’re still fighting dengue fever, sleeping sickness, malaria, river blindness, tick fever, etc.
Legionnaire’s Disease, anthrax scares, mad cow disease, bird flu, AIDS… causes often spring from something fixable such as pest control, common hygiene, common sense, preventive medicine. Global warming allows more pests to thrive, upping incidences of disease.
Antibiotics have unintentionally created immune strains of some diseases, undermining our defense mechanisms. The fad for exotic pets increases risk of zoonotic (animal-to-human) diseases such as bird flu, Ebola from monkeys, SARS from cats, and new ailments from hamsters, iguanas, and other “pocket pets.”
B. IN MEDIA
Humans demand meaning and often attribute diseases to angry gods, evil conspiracies, or the wickedness of the victims. The Old Testament story of Moses features plagues of frogs, lice, flies, locusts, etc. as Yahweh’s tools of persuading Pharaoh to let his people go.
The Decameron is a series of racy stories written as diversion from the 14th-century Bubonic plague. Plague is a plot driver in Dangerous Beauty, as a courtesan is accused by the Catholic Church of bringing God’s wrath down on Venice. Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is set against plague, and Death is a character.
Read Stephen King’s The Stand and you’ll freak out at a sneeze. Tom Clancy’s Executive Order presaged current bio-war events. The films Outbreak, The Andromeda Strain, and Twelve Monkeys all deal with this deadly Dark Force. Philadelphia, Longtime Companion, and Angels in America explore social and personal issues around AIDS.
Germ warfare has been around since Caesar’s cook secretly added herbs to the enemy’s beer to cause diarrhea. An entire season of Fox TV’s 24 dealt with a deadly plague and the Counter Terrorism Unit’s efforts to contain it.
C. IN YOUR CREATIONS
Inner Drives Center of Motivation – Root: survival, & Throat: using smarts to survive.
The impersonality of epidemics makes them terrifying: You can’t reason with them, call a truce, or buy them off. But oh, how fascinating it is to watch people try to do so. Show us the many ways people are affected by epidemics: who panics, who’s calm, who runs, who stays to help, who uses it to their advantage, who thinks so far out of the Petri dish they save the day… or not.
The scramble for explanations offers rich possibilities: who blames gods, who blames victims, who refuses to blame and sets about solving the problem?
Show the consequences of thoughtlessness or stupidity: feeding cow bits to cows = mad cow disease; draining sewage into drinking water = cholera; dirty air filters = Legionnaire’s Disease, etc.
The consequenc
es of politics and bureaucracy can also be tragic: funds pledged to fight AIDS are held up by religious ideology or political power plays; funds intended for charity end up with terrorists.
Explore the psychology of germ warfare perpetrators: why this scattershot approach claiming innocents, instead of pinpoint accuracy targeting your enemy?
As biological warfare and pandemics lodge more deeply in our common psyche, we’ll need more stories about this. The more science and common sense you can add the better because neither punishment nor prayer has ever worked well against this impersonal, insidious Dark Force.
TECHNO TROUBLES
Robots gone wild, pollution, depleted uranium… sometimes technology is not our friend. Creators often have problems with their creations. The Judeo-Christian Yahweh faced rebellion both with angels in heaven and humans down in the Garden of Eden. Problems with his faulty humans continued such that floods, exiles, plagues, wars, and enslavement seemed necessary to get them back in line. None of it ever worked very well, though. Still doesn’t.
Hindu scriptures say we have problems with this universe because it’s made up of the faulty stuff left over from the last manvantara (universe), where Matter held sway over Spirit. Christianity personalizes this as individual Original Sin, for which we must accept, earn, or buy redemption, depending on the sect.
Human creators also encounter problems with their products, especially if they’ve done faulty Quality Control. Gepetto carved Pinocchio and the ungrateful boy ran off with thugs. Dr. Frankenstein, grief-stricken by his mother’s death, animated a patchy corpse, who ungratefully demanded a girlfriend and caused mayhem when his will was thwarted.
Power of the Dark Side Page 6
