Lately, I’ve been thinking Darth Vader might be right.
Bad Santa and the
Battlestar Galactica miniseries both make a case for the dark side.
Battlestar Galactica opens with a Cylon robot chick we know is bad because she’s wearing red and charged like a sexual coppertop. Sure enough, she kills a guy and blows stuff up. Standard.
A couple minutes later, though, we see her milling among humans, marveling at a fragile baby. Mom leaves baby unattended, and – junior’s toast. Pretty darn dark, and indicative of worse things to come.
We’ve seen this cliché Frankenstein’s Monster-alone-with-the-kid moment many times, but few shows have made us stay to the bitter end. They usually cut out, or find a way for mom to save her kid.
Later in the miniseries, a convoy of stranded ships containing wounded is about to be attacked by Cylons. The only escape is a faster-than-light jump. Problem is, only half the ships are capable of doing this. The President makes a tough decision – the ones that can, will make the jump, her ship among them. The others are pretty much hosed.
So, cue preparing to leave and the President brooding a lot about how crummy she feels. We’ve seen this often enough, we’ve even seen the bit where the President’s pilots hear the doomed ships on their radio, begging and praying. But right before the jump, the pilots hear a woman say “damn you to hell for leaving us”. Harsh, and human. We’re not a nice species, makes sense we’d spend our last moments in anger.
In
Bad Santa, Billy Bob, is a, well, bad Santa who hooks up with a cute kid. (Fora discussion of what makes this movie work, see "When You Kinda Hate the Protagonist" in
Reversals) The kid has this advent calendar he cherishes, the bright spot of his life. One night in a drunken stupor, Billy Bob rips the calendar up and eats the chocolate. When he comes to, he feels awful.
Later, the kid asks for his calendar. Billy Bob says it’s in the hall – and it is. We think, isn’t that nice, he got the kid a new calendar. There is hope for him – even if we’ve seen this a million times before. But when the kid opens the calendar, we realize it isn’t a new one – it’s the old one, poorly taped together, the chocolate replaced with candy corn and aspirin. Dark, and funny, and unexpected.
These black moments stuck out for me, and (don’t hate me) because when they happened, I actually felt…
relieved.
Let me explain. I felt relieved that these films took a cliché moment – and then didn’t do the cliché thing. They kept if fresh by twisting it in an unexpected, and dark, way. This kept me engaged and actually bought them my trust – okay, you’re going to show me something new and take me on a real ride, not just walk me through prescribed moments.
And finally, though it sounds awful, dark is real. It felt somehow right, that this is what these people would actually do, rather than forced, high-cheese-factor-scenarios that have made me lactose intolerant.
But like the seductive and destructive dark side of the Force, dark moments come with a caveat.
First off, don’t write checks your story can’t cash.
Bad Santa can have dark moments because he is a bad Santa the whole way through; the entire film is dark, culminating in a twisted shoot out witnessed by children. Ditto for
Battlestar Galactica. Things are only going to go downhill and darker from here.
And second, don’t ever confuse clever, dark moments with shock.
Bad Santa opens with a shock moment – a drunk Santa pees himself in front of a bunch of kids. Shocking, gets a reaction – but not really clever, and would get a reaction no matter what the context.
Let me rant a little. I hate the shock genre. Shock-comedy, shock-horror – I think it’s sloppy. Shock, by its very nature, is shocking. It gets a reaction, no matter how you tell the story, if the actors are sock puppets or if the camera’s even pointed in the right direction. There’s no skill – your Cousin Eddy could deliver the same information and it would get a reaction.
To me, shock films like
Saw use a pile driver to hammer a nail, whereas a couple well-chosen, dark moments simply give you a sharper nail.
At any rate, this holiday season, give your audience the gift they’ll really love. A couple shots of the dark side.
