Video: “Nuking the Fridge”
Another in the excellent screenwriting series Raising the Stakes.
Another in the excellent screenwriting series Raising the Stakes.
Jonathan W. Stokes is a screenwriter with a unique credit to his name: Five of his original screenplays have been named to the annual Black List. That alone should get your attention, but there’s also this: Over the last few years, he has produced an excellent video series called Raising the Stakes.
In the Season One, Episode 3 video (“Nuking the Fridge”), Jonathan says this:
“I think a protagonist’s believability is inversely proportional to their kill count. The more people your hero kills, the less the audience believes the movie.”
Here is the video “Nuking the Fridge”:
Jonathon contrasts the violence of movies like Rambo, The Fast and the Furious, and TV series Cobra Kai with that of The Godfather:
“Michael Corleone, one of the toughest gangsters in cinematic history, is knocked out with a single punch. His jaw broken, Michael then spends the next year in Italy dabbing his nose with a handkerchief because of the damage to his sinuses. This level of consequence makes the movie’s violence feel real and high stakes… Compare this with movies where characters trade punches for five minutes straight.”
Jonathan isn’t slamming movies with unrealistic violence (he even says he’d like to write a F&F film). Rather, he’s making an important point about how a film’s approach to violence contributes to how believable the story universe is to the audience.
I would go even one step further: The more realistic the violence, the more we care about the characters. I’ve grown weary of superhero movies where the violence is so overblown, the stakes are often about the fate of the entire universe. Contrast that with a superb movie like Logan. In that story universe, the violence is gritty, raw, and real. People get hurt.
By making the violence realistic, it shrinks the distance between the viewer and the action because we can relate to the characters’ pain.
Which is not to say you can’t write movies with unbelievable violence. In certain genres, such as action, science fiction, and fantasy, unrealistic violence goes along with the audience’s suspension of belief that things like that can’t happen. It’s not real, therefore, anything goes.
However, it’s possible to go so over the top, that a film “nukes the fridge” and loses the connection with the audience.
Movies and TV series Jonathan references in this video:
Check out all of Jonathan’s Raising the Stakes videos.They offer an excellent foundation in grasping the essence of screenplay structure.
For more background on Jonathan W. Stokes, you can go here.
By the way, I recently interviewed Jonathan. Look for that chat soon.
For an article I wrote in which I compare the movies Wall-e and Logan, go here.