Oh, get
your minds out of the gutter.
This week’s
topic comes from a comedy sketch done many years ago by British
comedian Benny Hill. He’s best known in
America for having lots of scantily clad women dancing around him, while the
rest of the world also remembers his ability to rattle off some clever wordplay
or jokes. If I do this right, though,
“patting the dog” will become a regular writing phrase and we’ll all get to give
him credit for that, too.
Many years
back, Hill did a sketch where he played a foreign film director being
interviewed by the press. When asked about
his new film (and I’m paraphrasing a bit here), he explains in broken English
that it’s a “deeply emotional tale of love and human kindness.” When the interviewer prods him a bit, Hill
goes into further detail.
“It’s about
a man who tries to leave the mob and sees his friends slaughtered by criminals
with machetes. So he tracks down the villains
and kills them all. Then he finds their
boss and kills him in front of the man’s family. Then he kills the man’s wife, and then his
children. Then he desecrates their
bodies and, as he leaves, he sets fire to their home.”
“I thought
it was a deeply emotional tale of love and human kindness?”
“It is,”
insists Hill. “As he walks out the door,
he pats the dog on the head.”
That got a
big laugh from the studio audience. And
from me, even though I was only eleven and really watching the show for the
scantily clad women. It was clever
enough to stick with me, even past those distractions.
See, the
studio audience and I both recognized the absurdity of what Hill’s character
was suggesting—that one miniscule, token act could balance out, or even
override, the atrocities he’d just described.
Patting the dog is a nice thing to do, yes, but in all honesty it’s kind
of low on the scale. Heck, for most of
us it’s more of an automatic response than a deliberate act of kindness. We see a dog and we pat him or her on the
head. That's all there is to it. We probably think more about tying
our shoes in the morning.
So the idea
that patting the dog would make us completely change our views on this character or this story is... well, laughable. It’s too little, too late. It’s the weakest kind of spin job.
And yet, how
often have we seen this sort of thing in books or movies? We’ll have a completely unlikable person who does nothing we can sympathize with or relate to. Violent drug dealers, sadistic assassins,
abusive spouses, jerk bosses, there’s dozens of characters that could fit this
category. And all too often, the writer
will give them some tiny, banal moment that’s supposed to make us suddenly
change how we feel about them. They pat
a dog. They thank the guy who sells them
their morning coffee. They get drunk and
confess their awful childhood. They go
to church and say their prayers.
Y’see,
Timmy, if I’m patting the dog, it means I’ve got a character who’s doing some
small, token thing that’s supposed to counterbalance a lot of really awful
things. And that just doesn’t work. I can’t spend page after page making the
audience feel one way about a character, then expect their views to completely
shift because of one minor action.
Now, at the
risk of possible Armageddon, let’s mix dogs and cats
I’ve
mentioned the “save the cat” moment once or thrice. This is Blake Snyder’s term for when a character
does something small and quick early on in the story that gets us on their
side. His example of this is “saving the
cat” (which some writers take way, way too literally) but it can be any number
of things. It’s just a simple action
that assures us this person is a decent human being. In my new book 14, the main
character’s saving the cat moment is when he decides not to drown a cockroach.
Here’s a
well-known save the cat moment from the movie Robocop. Remember when we see the still-human Murphy
practicing his quick-draw and spinning his pistol into his holster? He explains that he’s learning the trick for
his son, who sees all the great cops on television do it and therefore assumes
his dad should also be able to do it (because his dad must be a great
cop). And, Murphy tells his new partner
with a grin, it is just kind of cool.
It’s a quick little moment, barely thirty seconds long and only about
fifteen minutes into the film, but it establishes Murphy’s a good dad and an
overall decent guy.
Now, the
big catch with a save the cat moment is that we’ve never been against
this character. Saving the cat has never
been about changing our view of a person, it’s about emphasizing our view of them. It’s just a shortcut to
help the reader like them quicker so the writer can move on to more important
things. Like, say, the plot.
A lot of
folks try to have half-assed save the cat moments in their stories, but really they’re
just patting the dog. A couple easy ways
to figure out which column my random act of kindness falls in...
--If everything I’ve done up till this point has been to
make the character unlikable, then this moment is patting the dog.
--If it comes more than halfway through the story, odds are I’m
patting the dog.
--If I’m trying to change the reader’s perception of my
character with this moment, I’m just patting the dog.
This isn’t
to say I can’t reverse how my readers see one of my characters, but it’s not
going to be a quick fix thing that I can do with one line. It’s going to take lots of moments and a lot
of work. It’s a long process that can’t
be rushed. Even if I’m doing it with a clever twist, the reader needs to look back and see that the seeds of this
change stretch all through my story.
Because
there’s another word for when someone does a sudden reversal like that. It’s called a betrayal. And no one likes to be betrayed. Even if it’s just by characters in something
they’re reading.
Next time,
I’d like to run some numbers by you real quick.
Until then,
go write. And remember to thank Benny
Hill.
This just helped me sort out something AI was working on.
ReplyDeleteBTW, the example of saving the cat that popped into my head was from Enter the Dragon, when John Saxon's character literally saved a cat from a guillotine. that comes fairly late in the story. I think it works but am curious about your thoughts.
If memory serves (I haven't seen Enter the Dragon in years, and to be honest I don't think I've ever seen the whole thing beginning to end in one sitting), Saxon's character saves the cat pretty late in the story. He's already pretty firmly established as a good guy and Lee's ally. By this point he's not saving the cat as part of character construction, he's just doing it... well, to save the cat. As another famous story analyst once said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. ;)
ReplyDeleteA similar moment happens in Frank Miller's Batman: Year One when Batman is pinned down by a trigger-happy SWAT team and still takes a moment to rescue a cat that's been trapped in the building with him. It's more than halfway through the series, so it's not a character-building shortcut (or an attempt at one), just a moment of the character acting as we know he would.
A friend of mine also pointed out that "pet the dog" is on TV Tropes, pretty much exactly as I describe it here. So apparently I'm not that original. Although they don't give any credit to Benny Hill, which was a large part of my motivation in bringing it up... :)
ReplyDeleteHowever, TV Tropes also says that "patting the dog" is synonymous with "save the cat," and that's just wrong. They're almost polar opposites.
Well written.
ReplyDeleteI will pass the phrase on. Pat the Dog. I know...DON'T.
Thanks.