REELING AND WRITHING X: TRIUMPHANT FOOLS AND INSTITUTIONS

REELING AND WRITHING
or,
Miss Dermark's 2015 Advent Calendar

DAY TEN

TRIUMPHANT FOOLS AND INSTITUTIONS
or,
MY FAVOURITE PLOTS AND PLOT TRICKS FROM SAVE THE CAT


INTRODUCTION

INSTITUTIONALIZED Institutionalized: A movie about a group of people and the craziness that develops when we identify with something bigger than ourselves, group dynamics that are crazy and self-destructive.

Ingredients: A group (an “institution”) with its own rules and norms. A breakout character. Action (exploring the group mentality and rewards/threats associated with becoming a member in it, and ultimately deciding to join or not).

9. Institutionalized: These are stories about a group of people with a common cause.

Institutionalized

This is the story about a group–usually told from the point of view of one member (or ex member) of the group. Oftentimes, we will begin the story with the narrator or main character entering the group for the first time, and as he learns the rules, the audience learns them as well. The “institution” can include schools, clubs, friends/cliques, families, the military, religious institutions, mental wards, etc. Blake gives examples including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, M*A*S*H, The Godfather Trilogy, The Breakfast Club, and Animal House. I daresay a lot of military movies fit into this formula, as well as movies about teenagers.

The Institutionalized formula is about learning to fit into the group. Or maybe it’s about wanting to fit in, then, at some point, realizing that everyone’s crazy/mean/evil, and then wrestling with the decision if you will go along with the group (i.e. succumb to peer pressure) or rebel and remain an independent person (and probably become an outcast). Lord of the Flies is also an example of the group-gone-bad situation. Or, in the case of The Great Gatsby, you have a man who desperately wants to belong to the Old Money clique, and he’s trying to buy his way in, because he’s certain if he can be rich enough and socially-acceptable enough, he will finally win the heart of his love, Daisy. But what he doesn’t realize is that he will always be on the outside looking in, and even though he intrigues Daisy (albeit mildly, I think), she is a permanent member of the Old Money clique and she never even considers bucking the group for him. And, unfortunately, he dies before he figures this out.

Perhaps more than most of the other formulas, there’s no real prescribed outcome for the Institutionalized formula. Maybe it’s a wholesome story about growing up in the Walton or Brady family and learning to work together as a team for the betterment of everyone, or maybe it’s about wanting to join a group and working really hard and getting into it, or maybe it’s about doing that and then realizing that there’s a dark side to the group and maybe you need to get out. Or maybe, like Gatsby, you die still trying to break into a group that will never accept you. Whatever light or dark turn this story takes, it is all about getting into, being in, or getting out of a group and how the group affects each other (if you’re following multiple characters fairly equally) or how it affects the main character.

INSTITUTIONALIZED

(M*A*S*H, American Family, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Animal House, Breakfast Club)
Ultimately, the main question is: “Who is crazier, me or them?”
Primal Goal: Loyalty to the group above all else (even common sense or survival)
Notes:

• These movies both honor institution (group, family, gang, clique) and expose the problem of losing ones identity to it.
• The group dynamic in these stories is often crazy and self-destructive. (“Insanity of the herd mentality”)
• It’s about the pros and cons of putting the group before ourselves.
• Must have a breakout character whose role is to expose the group goal as fraud.
• These stories are often told from the view of a newcomer, an innocent who is being initiated into the group by a veteran member.
• These newcomers provide a way for the audience to learn how the group operates.

1. Institutionalized: these stories focus on a large group and choices they make and the sacrifices they endure. Usually, they involve an individual going against the grain of the established norms.

Institutionalized

This is the tale of a group: the mental patients of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the doctors of Mash, the Mafia family of The Godfather. The story details the pros and cons of "putting the group ahead of ourselves." It honors the group - yet exposes "the problems of losing one's identity to it."

According to Snyder, there's always a "breakout character whose role is to expose the group goal as a fraud." But there is also, often, a newcomer to the group, through whose eyes (and questions) we come to understand the dynamics of the group. After all, we're usually dealing with a "crazy... even self-destructive" environment, and unless we understand what's normal and what's crazy, it'll be hard to figure out what's going on.

The essential ingredients are a group, family, organization, business, etc; the story is about the choice between towing the company line or being a rebel; and finally, a sacrifice must be made, leading to one of three endings—join the system, destroy it, or commit some form of "suicide."
Institutionalized involve common goals among several characters. The stories are told in a group setting. The story is often presented through the viewpoint of a newcomer to the group. This allows for a presentation and evaluation of how the group operates. Often the conclusion is a shock when one person makes an insane sacrifice for the good of the group.

THE STARS' TEARS AND THE SECRET PAST OF STRAWBERRY FIELDS
A place called Strawberry Fields, a humane and non-profit equal-opportunity mental institution deep in the adorable Cornish countryside... can it really be that dark? It's next to a regiment's quarters, for some reason. And the cold seasons are pretty stormy. (Dramatic pause.) Then there's something sinister at the bottom of the sugar bowl...

KÉTKEDÉSVÁR: WHEN OTHELLO ENTERED THE HABSBURG ERA
Károly Harsányi (Eastern name order: Harsányi Károly), also known as Karl Harschanji, has got a huge chip on his shoulder when it comes to his latent identity issues. Adopted and educated by the same Austrian military that orphaned him and seized the clan's ancestral estate in the 1849 repression, the childhood trauma of seeing his mother and nanny die right before his eyes still haunts him often at night. Now that he's the colonel of a regiment, sharply dressed in white and scarlet, the commandant of a fortress garrison, and speaks fluent German (not having forgotten Hungarian, but using this language only to himself, for instance in his personal annotations), no one could tell the aloof and reserved officer in his late twenties or early thirties is so conflicted at heart. A ruler and a leader with a bleeding heart... whose old wounds slowly open and whose sanity slips as the story unfurls. And he is one of the insider POV characters, even though his insider status slips gradually, exposing the outsider within.
The newcomer POV characters in this Institutionalized are Elisabeth Charlotte "Liselotte" von Liebenstein and her childhood friend/surrogate brother Rainer von Waldheim, both of them from the Austrian provinces and in their late teens. They are also betrothed to one another since childhood, since their fathers were comrades in the Hungarian War of 1848-9 and Freiherr von Waldheim sacrificed his life to save his commanding officer, Count von Liebenstein, from revolutionaries on the battlefield (an element taken from M. de Wolmar in La Nouvelle Heloïse). And the family estates of both dynasties are merely separated by a stream. Both Liselotte and Rainer are only children, she is adored by both her parents and he, though at first overprotected by a widowed mother, gradually broke out of his shell with his best friend. They were separated when Rainer was sent to Vienna to military boarding school and the Count was plunged into a coma, then bedridden, then wheelchair-bound, following a riding accident. A decade later, both young people reunite at her debut in high society, when Rainer is a lieutenant at 18 and Liselotte, about to turn the same age, is staying with courtier relatives for her debut ball. It is during this ball that she meets Károly and the whole snowball starts rolling, when she faints, from wearing a tightly-laced corset (she is a tomboy giving the impression of a proper lady), in the colonel's arms and he takes her out on the balcony to loosen her corset, feeling beneath her petticoats to find the corset. Rainer follows his commanding officer, ready to draw steel on him for whisking the girl away and for touching his fiancée there. The misunderstanding is soon cleared and the irate lieutenant sighs in relief as he takes away his hand from the pommel... but the stage is set for the meat of the story, the Othello rewriting proper.
Rainer is not solely based upon Cassio, but also upon Jacinto in Galdós's Doña Perfecta: a freshly-baked by-the-book young lawyer used by his family as a tool to gain status, Jacinto is a pedantic young man who has never had the chance to meet other young people of his own status in his provincial hometown, for there is no other young person there who has pursued superior studies at a university like he has done. Thus, he considers himself superior to all the others. When at last a gentleman born and raised in foreign countries arrives, and Jacinto is given his first case to defend in a court of law, he is elated, for at last he can prove his worth and display his so often praised intellectual skills in public. He is euphoric because at last he has a real defendant to defend... Rainer, like his dark-haired and queer Baratheon namesake, is a military Jacinto, a character often found in my stories. While Galdós presents the little lawyer as pedantic, corny, and ridiculous, my female and military takes on the character, also influenced by Napoleon as a teenage lieutenant, paint pictures of aloof, awkward, and gender-role-deviant, yet sympathetic characters.
The author herself, id est, me, knowing both the praise and the isolation that come with unusual cleverness first-hand, has a predilection for this kind of characters. Liselotte is basically like Rainer but homeschooled, which gives her even more social awkwardness and innocence.


THE BARATHEON SAGA: CAPITALISM, THE PROTESTANT CHURCH, AND THE MILITARY... DERMARK STYLE
What do an industrialist, a clergyman, and a lieutenant, all three brothers from a new money family in turn-of-the-last-century Prussia, have in common aside from their blood ties? Their status as upstarts, obviously. They have to prove to an evolving and rapidly changing, yet at heart conservative, establishment that the surname Baratheon is not bereft of meaning.


THE RINGSTETTEN SAGA (ARC I): FOUR SPECIAL YOUNG PEOPLE IN TIMES OF WAR




THE FOOL TRIUMPHANT: The fool triumphant: Setting a ‘village idiot’ underdog against the establishment and showing that s/he’s the wisest of us all in the end.
Ingredients: The “Fool”, an underdog. The establishment. Action (setting the “fool” against more powerful “establishment” guy and seeing the fool eventually winning in life).

The Fool Triumphant

...an underdog... and an institution for that underdog to attack.

This goes a step beyond being The Everyman and moves into being the Village Idiot. He's the underdog, the overlooked, the ridiculous, and he's set against a Goliath of an enemy, often an "establishment" bad guy. But they underestimate him, and because he's The Fool, he's got the forces of luck and good nature on his side. He may not fully understand the danger he's in, but whatever his goal, he won't give up - and the villain doesn't stand a chance.

This sort of plot pokes fun at things we take too seriously. Snyder proposes that "no establishment is too sacred to be skewered." After seeing Life is Beautiful, where a fool takes on the Holocaust, I'd say his hypothesis won out.

Also, there may be a Straight Man "who is in on the joke and can't believe the Fool is getting away with his ruse." (One example given: Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump.) This character sees the Fool for what he is - and, if he's "stupid enough to try to interfere," he'll "get the brunt of the slapstick."

The Fool Triumphant

The bumbling dolt–the underdog–always manages to win. Forrest Gumpis given as an example of this, but I saw someone else suggest that Life is Beautiful is also the story of a fool triumphant–while being set in the most unimaginable place possible for foolishness: the Holocaust. (While the “fool” dies in the end of the movie, his son survives, which was his real goal, so he gets to claim a victory.)

Another classic example: Rocky and Bullwinkle. Or Mr. Magoo. Or The Pink Panther. Or Dumb and Dumber. Obviously it’s a formula that lends itself well to comedies (especially slapstick), but Forrest Gump and Life is Beautiful are dramas, so it’s possible to play it seriously.

Blake points out that often the fool has a straight man as his sidekick or the person who winds up the butt of the jokes (often because he tries to interfere with the fool and stop him). The straight man often sees the fool for what he is, but can’t convince others that he’s really a dolt that’s incredibly lucky or riding on the coattails of others. (Think Inspector Gadget, who never realized that his niece and her dog were the ones solving all his cases while he got all the glory, or my husband’s suggestion,Get Smart.)

I would argue that there’s a secondary subset of this which is Dumb, but Not so Dumb. Your classic fools, like the Pink Panther, Inspector Gadget, and Mr. Magoo are 100% fools. But Forrest Gump actually falls into the Dumb, but Not so Dumb category because, despite the fact that he’s not smart–that he doesn’t get things that normal people get–he understands the things that are important, like love and friendship, and if people just take a minute to listen to him, they’ll receive really great wisdom.

Blake Snyder was one of the writers of the screenplay for the old Sylvester Stallone and Estelle Getty movie, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, and that’s arguably another Dumb, but Not so Dumb formula. Estelle Getty is the fool who cluelessly cleans her cop-son’s revolver in bleach (because it looked dirty) and meddles in his love life. But when she gets caught up trying to help her son solve a case, she smartly plays up her clueless old lady routine to trick the bad guys. So, like Forrest Gump, she’s at least partially aware of the fact that there are things she doesn’t understand, but she also knows what’s important, and she’s smart enough to take care of what matters.

As is obvious from the title, the requirement for this formula is that the fool must triumph. (What ends up happening to the straight man is anyone’s guess, though!)

THE FOOL TRIUMPHANT

(Being There, Forrest Gump, Dave, The Jerk)
Notes:

• On the outside, The Fool appears to be the Village Idiot; however, he is really the wisest of them all.
• As the underdog, The Fool has the advantage of being anonymous, and everyone naturally underestimates his ability; ultimately this allows him the chance to shine.
• The Fool is an overlooked man who wins because of the specialness of not giving up despite all odds.
• No establishment is too sacred or off-limits to be the bad guy.
• Rules:
• The Fool is inept and unequipped for life.
• The Fool is set up against a powerful “establishment” bad guy.
• Often an “accomplice” who sees The Fool for what he really is, and is surprised he is getting away with his “ruse.” (The “accomplice” often get the brunt of it when they try to interfere.)
• Ultimately those society calls “winners” get a comeuppance by the actions of The Fool. (This gives us average people hope, as well as poking fun at the structures we take so seriously.)

1. Fool Triumphant: an out-of-the-ordinary character, a "fool" by society's standards, must try to blend in. During the process, they change, but they also transform the ones around them.

The Fool Triumphant places an underdog besting a more powerful bad person. The bad person usually represents an establishment the public enjoys ridiculing, such as business people or government leaders. The Fool initially appears unable to achieve success. Usually, there is an insider who marvels at the unexpected chain of events.

PLEASURE PAST AND ANGUISH PAST: WHEN GERDA IS THE FOOL TRIUMPHANT
Though the original Snow Queen was a quest with elements of Bildung (coming of age), the lead in my present-day retelling adds a significant dash of free spirit, so typical among my female leads (both heroines and sheroes), that eschews the story to make it more appealing and less of an Andersen carbon copy, as well as subverting the "plain vanilla hero" cliché.
Catherine Saunier is pretty much the Luna Lovegood of Collioure. Not only is she a quirky aspie and hyperactive to the point of needing drugs: her right-brained caetextia makes it hard for her to think logically (hence her difficulty in Maths and games like chess).
The straight foils to Cath are first her friend Étienne, then Tellagorri, Friedl and Renée, and finally Irina.


THE STARS' TEARS: TWO FOOLETTES AND A STRAIGHT MAN VS. THE PAST