The Importance of Surprise, Revelation, Sacrifice, & Beauty in Successful Stories

Recently I posted something from Chris Vogler on the importance of "wishing" in successful stories. Here is something just as important, on surprise, revelation, sacrifice, and beauty.

 I've enjoyed Jordan Peterson's perspective on the important of narratives in culture. Now, he interviews one of the best storytellers of our time, Randall Wallace.  Some highlights are quoted below.

Jordan Peter's recent podcast with Randall Wallace has some profound moments in terms of narrative and storytelling. It's long (2 hr 22 min).  Randall Wallace is not only an A-List screenwriter, but also a producer, director, and novelist. It is always challenging to listen to dialogue between two effective, responsible, achievers... who are smarter than the rest of us.  Excerpts follow.

SURPRISES and REVELATIONS

[29:40] WALLACE: There's a quote from Mary Oliver that a friend shared with me recently. It's, "keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable." I find that in a great story, or in any great piece of art that surprise is the central currency of its power. There's an element, if you will, of revelation. I think it was Paul Tillich (Carl Bart), I'm not, sure who said: "Religion is man's way to God and is always erroneous, but revelation is God's way to man and it's always perfect." Well, there's a revelatory aspect to any great story when you're telling someone a story and they didn't see coming what just happened. That's what makes them awake that's what stabs them broad awake.

In Braveheart so many people said to me it was when the woman that William Wallace loves, when her throat is cut that's when suddenly they knew they were not in a typical action movie. Even to the very end of Braveheart there would have been many people in Hollywood, and were, who thought well that this movie needs to end with his friends swinging in on vines and saving him. We can't end an expensive historical epic movie with a guy beheaded and disemboweled. But that was where it had to end for me. But how we get there and what it says surprised me and surprised the audience too, and in that I would think is how it becomes resonant.

I was doing a charity screening of Braveheart a few years ago. For the first time in oh, two decades, to sit in a theater and actually see the movie screened not on television but projected in a theater and doing it for a charity in Austin, Texas. At the end of the movie, I walked up onto the stage to do a Q and A. The first person who stood up was a young woman in the front row, 19 years old. So, she wasn't born when Braveheart had come out. I was surprised that she stood up first and she said: "Mr. Wallace, I don't have a question I just want to tell you something. My fiancée died six months ago and before he died, he told me he wanted me to watch Braveheart so I would understand the way he loved me."  And I did I… I had to stop. I… I couldn't go on for several minutes it shocked me it moved me it surprised me . 

PETERSON: You said that you write love stories. and I guess she put her finger on that really profoundly.

WALLACE: There's the idea that that men want to be courageous. They want to be willing to

sacrifice themselves for what's worth sacrificing for. And women want a man like that and they, the women, want to be participants in that story, in that same journey for themselves. To me it's narrative that can give you that more than any abstract explanation.

[33:49] PETERSON:  There's a strong association between something that's informative and something that's surprising. If you can predict it, technically speaking, it doesn't contain any information and so information always comes in the form of surprise… we are wired to attend to what's informative because that's what updates and teaches us. So, then you said revelation comes in the form of surprise and I would say that's virtually the case by definition isn't it? Imagine you're viewing a narrative through a particular lens. 

You're in a cognitive perceptual structure, a frame of reference that you're using to track all the actions and to make sense of them, and to make predictions. And if something unexpected happens that means that you've just learned that [your previous] frame of reference is no longer applicable to the current circumstance. So, what that really does mean is that something transcendent, at least from the perspective of [your] current frame of reference, has in fact occurred. That's a mini miracle in some sense, right? Because a miracle is something that doesn't obey the laws that you're currently following… so a surprising revelation is a mini miracle… 

I would also say the narrative does something else. It doesn't just surprise you it also gives you a new frame of reference instantly within which that surprise now makes sense. If it doesn't then you're left unsatisfied by the movie…  I've seen that often in particularly in movies… the writer will throw a whole variety of things up in the air and it's really compelling. Then about three quarters of the way through the movie you think it'll be really something if all of that gets tied together [by the end.] Then it doesn't, right? It falls flat. It doesn't end in a manner that does justice to what's been set up. 

That's a classic narrative structure. There's a stable state to begin with, and then something that disrupts it and throws everything into a state of chaos temporarily, and then the establishment of a new state. A good story definitely does that for us.

Around the 53 min mark Wallace tells the story of writing Braveheart and taking an early draft to Jack Bernstein (who wrote Ace Ventura). Wallace says Jack and him are polar opposites. After reading it Jack told Randall, "this is the best thing of yours I've ever read."  The story surprised Jack (and Randall). It had that revelatory quality of love in it. William Wallace did what he did, because of love. So, there's a connection between love and revelation—the revelation of how much one loves. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF SACRIFICE

Then there is this about the importance of sacrifice around the 46 min mark. Peterson is talking about the stories in the Old Testament, but it has profound meaning for fictional characters in our movies.

[46:00] PETERSON: One of the great human discoveries was that of sacrifice. It was the discovery that you could modify the present so the future was different... You can give up something that you're deeply committed to in the present, something of extreme value, and obtain something of even more value in the future yeah... It's a cataclysmic discovery.

While you can give up something that you own, you can give up something that

you love. You can die for something, or you can sacrifice your entire life to it. The last of those is the ultimate sacrifice — to give up your entire life for the sake of the highest ideal. ... That is what everyone admires and that's what we all look for in stories that's what compels us... It's the basis of romantic attraction... associated with generosity...and share the fruits of your sacrifice. There's cosmic significance to the idea of sacrifice.

WALLACE: I agree with that completely... that's what is at play when you're making the sacrifice. There's this other element of faith in it... instead of it just being a negotiation, central to the sacrifice... is a transforming commitment, that the person [sacrificing] is being transformed.  

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEAUTY

[59:41] PETERSON: There isn't anything that's more valuable than beauty, and I mean that from the cold-hearted conservative capitalist perspective. It's stunning how valuable beauty is. The most valuable artifacts in the world are paintings I know, except ... factories that make computer chips. Single artifact paintings are worth 150 million dollars at the at the upper end, along with ancient manuscripts that are works of timeless art. It looks like an investment in beauty is one that pays off as long as the thing remains in existence. I don't know how much everything in Europe that's beautiful cost but it was plenty, and it's paid back in spades and is only going to become increasingly more valuable as the past becomes more and more scarce, which is happening very very rapidly. I mean, these countries have more tourists than people, and it's all a consequence of art and beauty.

WALLACE: In Rome there are something like 150 cathedrals. If you went to three or four a day, in a month you couldn't visit them all. And and everyone you walk into takes you to a different place, which is exactly as they they were intended to do. 

[74:58] PETERSON: People have no idea [about the importance of beauty]. That's why I wrote chapter eight [Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible.] They have no idea how much they're starving for beauty. It's a hunger that goes far beyond, well let's not say that -- it doesn't have to go beyond material hunger -- but no matter how well fed you are, without some relationship to beauty, there's too much suffering in the world for it to be viable. Beauty, along with truth, is the antidote to suffering. It's not optional. It's crucial and you can tell that by its economic value. For those who are hard-headed you can't point to anything with more economic value. Period.