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The bigger the stakes, the less we care
It was about half way through Tron: Legacy that it was revealed the world would end if Clu got out of the computer with his super army; this is also when I stopped giving a crap. The moment the world was at stake I couldn’t care less about what happened. This is a problem with many movies, and sequels in particular; sequels try to up the ante from their original film. The idea that bigger stakes make a more exciting film is simply wrong. In general, after a certain point, the stakes are just too abstract for the audience to care.
If you were to graph stakes to the audience’s engagement, it would probably be something akin to a normal bell curve. Obviously very low stakes are not interesting. If a movie was about a dude trying to get back to his kitchen before his pizza turns cold, unless you are stoned, you are unlikely to care. However you also equally unlikely to care about a computer program destroying the whole human race.
As the graph shows, the keyto making the audience care is to have Liam Neeson act his freckin heart out as he kills half of Paris to save his daughter’s life. Sure, his daughter is like, 1/6 billionth as important as the stakes in Tron, but I cared about 830,000 times more. The math does not lie.
There are a few reasons for this.
It’s Not Real
This is obvious, and somewhat stupid since nothing in movies are real. However, it is still hard to give a damn about some made up group of people. Students use history class to catch up on sleep or draw penises on the back of girl’s books, and that stuff actually happened. Those stories of murder, war and incest are real. The Cold War was real stakes yet it has been boiled down to Sean Connery in a submarine. People glance at news stories about genocide and super bacteria killing all of us and they barely stop sipping their coffee. If the real stuff doesn’t get us on the edge of our seat, you think me telling you some dumpling childen in a made up land of chinese food are all going to dry up if the world’s broth shortage doesn’t come to an end is going to make you care. Besides being the stupidest made-up storyline ever, it simply doesn’t mean anything to you. And I am hungry.
We know it is not going to happen
If I thought for a minute that a Disney film would have a digital army pour out of a computer screen and commit the xenocide of humans, I may have been bouncing off the walls during the final minutes of Tron. However I don’t see that turning into an amusement park ride, so it won’t be happening soon. We know Middle Earth is not going to die. We know the Moonraker satellite is not going to destroy the earth. We know Bruce Willis won’t let an asteroid hit Manhattan.
In fact, the bigger the stakes, the more certain the audience is that those stakes are not going to be lost.
Joss Whedon writes stories where the entire world/universe/existence is at stake almost every episode. He said the same thing; that the audience knows Buffy will save the world. The world can’t be what is really at stake. Instead the cataclysmic storyline has to act as a catalyst for more personal stakes, emotional stakes. Sure, Buffy is saving the world, but she is really fighting her insecurity or dealing with the death of her mother or any other number of relatable personal experiences.
We cannot relate to the end of the world
Unless you have had your level 85 World of Warcraft character deleted by a hacker, more likely than not you cannot relate to the end of the world. It hurts people’s head when they think hard about the size of the universe, or the number of deaths in the holocaust, or to quantify how many people are currently fatally ill. There was a video of parts of the sun exploding last week, and when I tried to grasp the size of it I almost went insane.
The best movies simplify big stakes into something relatable. Titanic is not engaging because thousands of people might die. First off, we already know they are going to die, but secondly, we wanted it to happen because it would look awesome. It was engaging because Rose might lose Jack. Losing a loved one, or missing out on your new sexual partner is something I can relate to.
Tron had a simple thing going; a father abandoned a son. They reunite and must escape a prison to be a family again. I can get behind that. I can relate to overcoming family issues. I can’t relate to isotope people being killed in giant pill-like ships, and an army of super computers destroying the world.
We only care about ourselves and people we know
People are selfish. We care about ourselves. We care about our friends. The less connected someone is to us, the less we care. This sucks, but history proves it true. A good movie makes the characters our friends. It has been said a romance movie cannot work unless the audience falls in love with the characters. We care because humans are also empathetic. We care about Scott Pilgrim because we like him and we see part of ourselves in him. If he is in danger, there are now stakes I care about.
We get to know characters in movies, and they become our friends – for some of us our only friends. The best movies make everything about the characters. Armageddon worked so well because the world is embodied by Liv Tyler’s sleek, smooth mid-section. That is what Ben Affleck cares about, and that is what I care about.
The world in the movie only encompasses what the movie has shown us
The last reason is a bit abstract. People go to movies to escape. Most worlds presented in films exist only within the movie. Even when a film is about “our world” it is often a stylized version of our world. Because of this, we will not fill in the blanks. A filmmaker cannot simply say “the world is at stake” and like magic we will think of our world, our house, our family, our cat – it won’t happen. We will think of the world as presented by the movie.
The best movies give a human face to the world. Give us details about the world so we care about the MOVIE world. Spiderman 2 contains scenes with the citizens of “New York” helping Spiderman. Going back to our good man Michael Bay, he has quite a few montages of San Francisco in his masterpiece The Rock. We have seen a cast of colorful characters in that city. We care about THAT San Francisco.
In Tron, the world is embodied by a dog, Captain Sheridan and a bunch of douchey rich business men. We literally see nothing else of the outside world. So why would I possibly care about the world ending. It is a world of douchey business men. I will not fill in the blanks and think of it as MY world, because it’s not.
To end with a point slightly off topic – I think that is a narrative strength of video games compared to film. Video games can present world we care about more deeply than any movie, because we are a part of it and we do have stake in it. The world is a game is our world for anywhere from a few hours to hundreds of days if it’s an MMO. Anyone who has played Link’s Awakening has experienced probably the saddest of all world end, and all it does is simply fade away.
Conclusion: Be Casablanca
Big stakes are fun because they give us spectacle, explosions, death, cool imagery and what not. We don’t actually care about the world ending. That is one reason Casablanca is so brilliant – it calls the audience out on it. If you stop at any moment during the movie and think about what is going on, it is some heavy stuff. This isn’t an asteroid hitting the earth, this is World War 2 and genocide. This is a brilliant speaker who is a moral authority running form Nazis. Yet the whole movie is about something we care about more – Ingrid Bergman looking gorgeous as all heck, and will she choose the man’s man, Bogart. It’s not till the end of the movie does it let on how big the stakes are. As Bogart puts it to the audience
“ but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.“
He is right, but those problems make for a much better movie. Sure, have big stakes, but make them matter by having the more personal stakes be in the foreground. That is what we will always care about more.
Did you mean to spell “pray” incorrectly?
I did. Good catch. It has been fixed.
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Hey man. I really enjoyed the read. Hopefully a lot of good and thought-provoking reviews etc. can keep pouring out of Facerocker. I couldn’t agree more about your stance on the ‘stakes’ of movies and how they relate to an audience.
As a big comic book nerd, I’ve experienced this same issue, but inversely when it comes to scale.
Too often, characters like Superman and Wolverine have gone through such absolutely ridiculous things and survived (easily, really) that it reached a point where it doesn’t matter what *might* happen to them, it won’t succeed, and this translated directly into their films.
There has to not only be a small-scale connection to care about the plot going on, but also the feeling as an audience member that the protagonist faces very impacting, powerful repercussions as a result of that failure. And that’s not necessarily repercussions having to do with the action sequences, it could very much emotional and/or inter-personal situation that just happens to have the Global Event as a background.
Make me believe the ‘hero’ might actually lose, or suffer as a result of the costs of success, and I’m sold.
Great article. This is the same reason why I never like Michael Bay movies. Because he never gives me a reason to give a crap.
I can’t stand Michael Bay movies becEXPLOSION!!!!!!
I still thought that tron was good, mostly for the graphics and stuff, and for other reaasons
Very interesting read. Made me think about the LOTR trilogy. Surprised you didn’t cite it. Seems like the perfect example of portraying huge stakes on screen (and on print) but still keeping the audience connected.
Hey man, LOTR has a reason for being written. I admit stuff like that gets predictable, but J.R.R. Tolkien based it on the Bible and and Its message, and if you don’t respect the Bible, at least respect the Message
lol Lotr wasn’t “based” on the bible :p of course it has influenced his creation, him being immerged into catholic culture, but you are going a little bit too far.
Nice article by the way
hadn’t noticed but wow this is pretty accurate. But then why was “Avatar” such a great movie? well in my opinion that is
Like Ankur says above, Avatar is similar to Lord of the Rings in that while the stakes are big, it makes the audience care about the smaller stakes. Sure, Middle Earth is at risk, but really we care mostly about Frodo overcoming the evil of the ring and surviving.
In Avatar, sure we care about the Navi to an extent, but we care mostly about the love story. The bigger stakes are filtered through the more personal ones.
Speciocide isn’t a word – I think you mean xenocide. But you do make some damn fine points.
he does indeed
I don’t read many articles and find them interesting, but this one caught my attention. Thanks for writing it.
I guess on some degree this is why I liked district 9 so much. It started with a presentation of the world inside the movie, before turning into a narrative. Made it feel a bit more real I think.
Hmm.. you made a good point!
Shot man – good to have some brain food on this site, too.
effin’ A.
good post
I just watched shrek forever after and got a lil watery eyed at the end Cause the characters have been developed over so long of a period he’s completely ficticious yet some how hollywood for me to care BLAST THEM! meh back to reality
Kinda Like the Matrix, the first one was great, the second one was meh, and the third was terrible.