Now seems like a good time to explore why it's so hard to write fictional revolutions
Aux Features Film
A lot of mainstream fiction about revolutionary movements isn’t all that great, which seems bizarre since rebellion against brutally unjust systems and the evil sacks of shit responsible for their enforcement is, it turns out, an inescapable part of real life. A video from YouTube creators Just Write offers an explanation for why this is, looking at well-known examples from film and TV that succeed or fail in depicting revolution.
The clip’s argument basically boils down to the fact that social change is enacted by groups, not special individuals chosen by fate to overthrow an old order. Using examples from shows like Mr. Robot and Westworld, Just Write demonstrates how broader rebellions are usually depicted as secondary—or an outright obstacle—to what’s accomplished by a more important hero character.
The video focuses on book/film series The Hunger Games as an example of how to center a protagonist without making their actions the most important aspect of a revolution. Though there’s plenty of other issues with its story, The Hunger Games is lauded for depicting its main character as one part of a larger movement that is able to resist an authoritarian government because of a collective effort.
“It’s easy to have the hero and villain have a fistfight at the end,” the video says near the end. “It’s hard to dramatize an entire social movement.”
Watch the entire video for more on the difficulty of writing fictional revolution and, following in the spirit of its argument, to view a list of protester bail funds linked in its YouTube description.
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41 Comments
The clip’s argument basically boils down to the fact that social change is enacted by groups, not special individuals chosen by fate to overthrow an old order. Haven’t watched the clip yet, so how does Star Wars fit into this?While Luke turning Darth Vader back to the light side and Vader subsequently tossing the emperor down a shaft seems to fall under “specific individuals,” one could argue that it was irrelevant, since the Rebel Alliance (most definitely a group enacting social change) destroyed the shield generator, penetrated Death Star II, and destroyed it. The emperor would have died regardless.(Don’t bring up Rise of Skywalker. That’s J.J. ABrams’ fan fiction as far as I’m concerned)
Star Wars is much more reflective of a civil war than a social revolution like the kind being discussed in the video. The actual core of the Rebellion are planetary governments that don’t like the Empire providing a military to fight the Empire in military style conflicts.
Don’t successful revolutions typically involve a civil war?
I’m not saying it’s one or the other, I just mean in the context of what’s being discussed in the video I don’t think it’s a useful example.
It depends on definitions. For example, it is true that the 1917 Russian Revolution led into what is called the Russian Civil War, but unlike most civil wars, people weren’t fighting over the right to rule a subset of the territory, both the Bolsheviks and their opponents believed they were the legitimate government of all of Russia. Same thing for the Maoists and Nationalists in China after WWII. While the Nationalists were forced to retreat to Taiwan, they weren’t fighting to be separate — they believed (and still officially believe although it is a bit unrealistic today) that they were the rightful rulers of all of China.
Do “most” civil wars really involve fighting over a mere “subset”? I’ve heard the argument that those should instead be called “separatist wars”. The Spanish Civil War was fought by people trying to control the same territory, as were a number of other conflicts called “civil wars” during the interwar period. The English Civil War was also fought between Royalist and Parliamentarian forces trying to control the same territory.
Actually, that’s the correct definition of a civil war. It’s the American Civil War (but also some others, like the Nigerian one) that strays from the proper meaning of the term, not the Russian and Chinese ones, being in truth a failed separatist uprising.
“Though there’s plenty of other issues with its story” – Really? Like what? I think Hunger Games will endure at least as much as Bradbury has.
The third book, which is what’s most connected to direct revolution, has to shoehorn a mostly nonsensical and not interesting action plot in order to make it fit with the battle arena from the first two stories.
I thought it worked well to 1) recapitulate the themes of the first books and 2) continue with the theme that the stuff Katniss sees is all (deadly) theater, and not part of the real story.
I think the depth of the books gets underestimated sometimes, because the fan focus on “team gale/peeta” nonsense missed a lot of the point of the stories and distracted some people from some of the subtler, more complex aspects of the books. (not that i think they’re totally perfect or beyond criticism, just that a lot of dismissals of the series are reductive and ill-informed)
Well, what Bradbury? I suppose you mean Fahrenheit 451? But that clearly was a parable (either about censorship as most people interpret it or as Bradbury himself claimed, about the decline of reading after the invention of TV) — he wasn’t really suggesting that people should take the idea of firemen destroying books seriously — but Collins was clearly trying to create a realistic story. And the idea of a society that has the incredible technology needed for the Games and just uses it for that rather than anything more useful (even if still being oppressive) is just kind of dumb. I do have to give Collins credit in that unlike a lot of similar works she realized that revolutionaries aren’t necessarily 100% morally perfect and are generally willing to do awful things in the name of what they see as the greater good.
I don’t agree – to me, the works were heavily allegorical and were aimed at philosophical questions about the nature of leadership and rebellion. I think the games and the technology were the bait to get the readers.
I’ve heard it’s portrayal of a community on the edge of starvation isn’t very accurate to what perpetual near-famine looks like in real life. That’s a fairly major issue in a story called “The Hunger Games”…but it’s also something that I sincerely hope most readers will never have first-hand experience to compare it to.
I guess time will tell. *Eyeroll*
For starters, in the fifth paragraph of The Hunger Games, Katnis puts on her boots before she puts on her pants.“I swing my legs off the bed and slide into my hunting boots. Supple leather that has molded to my feet. I pull on trousers…”
One that especially sticks out to me is Tamora Pierce’s Daughter of the Lioness books. After the first one got some well-deserved criticism for framing a random white girl as the key figure of an oppressed black population deciding to finally overthrow the ruling class, the second very much goes out of its way to stress that she’s only a very small piece of a revolution that literal generations of work had gone into, and just happened to come along when it started.
I got so confused for a moment, until I realized you weren’t talking about *Song* of the Lioness. I totally agree that Pierce did a great job of incorporating the feedback well, instead of just getting defensive
I can’t watch the video, but it seems like the premise is flawed. The first two Star Wars and the original Matrix are generally successful films that are still very much about the three or so people that matter in their respective revolutions. You can argue about quality, but other films that did well and have large followings using this same template include Braveheart, Avatar, and V for Vendetta, among others. The Hunger Games might be better than some, but I think it’d be hard to argue that it’s better than all of these.
Additionally, many WWII films about local resistances rely on your knowledge of history to fill in the blanks, but they are still often about one person or a small group of people making a huge difference. Inglorious Basterds literally rewrites history so a member of the French Resistance takes out Nazi high command with the help of only a few other named characters.
I would certainly agree that this is not a very realistic take on revolutions, but that doesn’t seem to be what they’re arguing here.
Well, that’s the point. It’s not that the ‘chosen one’ narrative or the “small band of named characters overthrows a huge evil” narrative makes for a bad story. It makes for a GREAT story. But that’s also not how revolutions actually work, and it can be actively damaging to collective action to believe in the “savior” that’s going to show up and fix everything.
The premise, boiled down, is more that writing about big changes that happen through collective action is hard, because it’s hard to write about huge numbers of ordinary people getting together to accomplish large and difficult tasks. It’s somewhere between hard and impossible to tell a story where the protagonist is “millions of people in a group with shared goals.”
So, we tell stories about the mythical ONE person who single-handedly (or, at least, are instrumental in) takes down tyranny and changes the world, rather than the necessary collective action that ACTUALLY changes the world.
I would agree with all of that.
But the first sentence of this article is
“a lot of mainstream fiction about revolutionary movements isn’t all that great” which seems to imply that revolutions create narrative or artistic problems for the story, not that their portrayal is usually a poor reflection of reality. Indiana Jones does a shit job of portraying what archaeology is like, but that’s largely a separate issue from how good the movie is. Maybe the actual video makes the point more clearly?
Yeah, that’s incomplete. it should probably be “isn’t all that great AT PORTRAYING REVOLUTIONS”.
The video points that out, the movies/books/tv show he focuses on (The Matrix, Hunger Games, I Robot) are all great and he says as much, but they mostly ignore or downplay collective action vs. the actions of a single “Chosen One” who’s better, smarter, prophesied, etc.
It’s somewhere between hard and impossible to tell a story where the protagonist is “millions of people in a group with shared goals.”Yet it’s been done – this is basically the model for early Soviet films including Eisenstein’s Strike and Battleship Potemkin. Also one of the most seminal films about revolution ever made, The Battle of Algiers. All real historical events, though, granted.
“i can’t watch the video that is the subject of this whole article, but lemme opine on what i imagine its message to be” is a hell of a lede
Star Trek: DS9 did about as good a job of this as I’ve seen with the Cardassian revolution against the Dominion. It starts with a few military resistance cells and eventually grows into a social movement. The resistance is ultimately destroyed, but the people refuse to believe it (thinking that the reports of the resistance’s destruction is just propaganda) and what started as a resistance becomes a planetwide revolution. What makes it work so well is that the moment the characters we’ve been following become effectively powerless (their ships destroyed, their followers killed, hiding in a basement) the collective action of what they started takes over. They’re symbols of the revolution, but the strength of that revolution no longer comes from them, but from the people.
If the complaint is about realism, one issue is that most of the people writings these haven’t lived through revolutions or done much study of them. If a movie is about a revolution it may seek to portray it as an unambiguously good thing, ignoring the messiness frequently involved.
You know that Morpheus line where he talks about how the regular people connected to the matrix are the enemy? I think some wannabe revolutionaries in real life view the people in much the same way.
That was 15 minutes of my life I won’t get back listening to someone trying to sound really sophisticated while mostly babbling on about how much he liked the Hunger Games. In fairness, I actually did like large parts of the original trilogy – particularly the effects of PTSD on the participants – but the worldbuilding is not one of the strengths of the series, and the best that can be said for the politics the video author goes on and on about is that Collins takes a slightly different route than most authors but still isn’t convincing. (Incidentally, the sequel that came out last week has all the problems and almost none of the positives, one reason why this is a bit of a stretch.)But as far as the great man theory, one reason that it persists in writing is that it’s actually been pretty commonplace in political change throughout history. One example is Washington. Many authors have pointed out that if Gates rather than Washington had been in command of the Revolutionary Army (as the former often tried to achieve), post-Camden it would have likely marched on Philadelphia to displace the Continental Congress and do what every popular revolution had before: simply replace one group of despots with another. Fortunately, at Camden Washington shamed the entire officer corps into remembering why they were fighting in the first place, and then a decade later kept the lid on Federalist impulses to reestablish a monarchy with him on top, one reason why his leadership generally has historians rate him and Lincoln as our two greatest Presidents.So yeah, it’s tough to write revolution because history doesn’t provide a lot of neat successes, and most authors can’t be bothered to use it as a model.
“The problem with great man theory is that it’s correct” sure is a take, especially using Washington as an example—a guy who’s most famous for leading a large army, for starters.As you point out, he also resisted monarchy, which means he supported a system of government in which hundreds of other people were making meaningful decisions. And therefore probably would not be in love with your whole “Washington is an example of how one person is the most important part of a movement” shtick.
Oh, Washington knew precisely how important he was; look at his reaction to his land grants. And as far as his ‘hundreds of other people’, you seem to find it not worth mentioning that they had to be of the ‘better types of people’ that he believed had a natural right to rule – probably the single most important and widespread belief among the Federalists. It’s no coincidence that one of the reasons why the country was extraordinarily close to having another revolution in 1800 when militia were being readied to march on the nation’s new capital came shortly after the one man who had held together the massive cracks in the nascent country’s polity had died – but hey, who needs to look at actual history, right?What makes Washington truly great is that despite all that he gave up power willingly and deliberately, and him being at the right place at several right times really was the difference in forming the United States and the world’s first democracy, as flawed as it may be.But hey, if you get your political philosophy from YA fiction and Youtube videos shortly past the monetization requirement, feel free to keep writing hot takes about schtick.
I hate to break it to you, but the fact that he handpicked other people or had weird (kinda eugenicist sounding) standards doesn’t mean there were no other important people. You seem to think “Great Man” theory is about whether or not someone is literally great, but it’s actually about the fact that no one accomplishes anything alone. The critique of Star Wars isn’t that Luke and his friends couldn’t have been that cool, it’s that for anything they did to realistically matter there had to be hundreds of people also doing things. And maybe they weren’t as flashy or noticeable, but they still shaped the course of the revolution.Washington, or Washington and a small group of his closest friends, did not singlehandedly make America what it is. He was not the only one with any impact on the historical landscape. He did some cool big things that only mattered because a bunch of other people—soldiers, writers, government officials—were also doing things. That’s all anyone is saying.
Glad to hear Internet Commentary University has provided tenure to you and that army of anyones. Best of luck on that career.In the meantime, there’s always Chernow’s Washington: A Life (among many, many others – just that he writes for people who don’t tend to read history) as a good start if you’d actually care to gain some insight into what you’re trying to argue about. Cheers.
Do you actually know or care what Great Man Theory is or do you just really like George Washington?
Also Washington led the militia to win America’s forgotten (and generally not counted) first civil war after the revolution — the “Whiskey Rebellion” of 1791-1794. Basically a group rebelled against the Federal government because they believed that Federal alcohol taxes were unfair (they were mainly farmers who were also distillers rather than just people who liked to drink).
Which was mostly Hamilton’s doing (it was his tax, after all).There was also the Additional Army formed a few years later to nominally protect the United States from France that Hamilton planned to coopt for his comeback. Washington was nominally in command and had wanted either Knox or Pinckney as field commanders since he didn’t really want to leave Mount Vernon, but Hamilton refused to serve under either and forced both Washington and Adams to give him a promotion to major general and command. In turn, Hamilton initially looked to conquer French and Spanish Louisiana and then once the Sedition Act hit threatened to bring the army to silence those who disagreed with Federalism in Virginia – and only failed to do either since he never really had the troop strength.(This is something that Lin Manuel Miranda doesn’t really cover and why I tend to read actual history rather than adaptations.)But yes, Washington was far from perfect. He was, however, good enough.
But he didn’t do it alone. And many other federalists opposed re-instituting a monarchy as well. Most often it’s the right people at the right place at the right time. Washington can and should be praised for his contributions, but he is not the hero of the revolution.
I would disagree with your assertion that ‘many’ Federalists opposed a monarchy, although that sentiment was more often expressed in favoring some sort of hereditary form of government not just for the executive but also the legislative. (‘If only Washington had SONS!’ was a famous quote by a Federalist Senator.)It’s also no coincidence the Constitutional property ownership requirements for House elections were keyed to the lower houses of the state legislatures while the upper houses and state offices required assets that were sometimes 20 times as much – all to restrict the common rabble from having undue influence, and that provision was drafted a full 6-7 years before partisan voting patterns began to emerge in Congress.To your comment about Washington, you’re right – he wasn’t solely responsible for the Revolution or the Founding of the Republic, and the record actually shows that he was generally a pretty lousy tactical commander.But it wasn’t just being the right person at the right place at the right time. Historians are basically unanimous that with anyone else in his position over the next two decades, things would have turned out vastly differently and far more poorly – there was literally nobody else who could have done what he did politically for the next two decades. If he’d made even a few different choices, they’d still have been accepted – and the early Republic probably would have failed.So yeah, this is why it’s hard to write revolutions well. The video is wrong; it’s not just about the people around the hero/ine, but what makes them tick too, and most SF/F writers are generally pretty bad at complex characters and politics.
I think too many people look back at what happened and ascribe too much import to individuals. And yes, you had a group of people like Hamilton who wanted a US monarchy and House of Lords, but many others wanted limits and periodic elections.
“Now seems like a good time to explore why it’s so hard to write fictional revolutions”[cringe] Is it, though?
All revolutions boil down in the end to whether the police/authority are willing to shoot. In Russia in 1917, they weren’t; in Eastern Europe in 1989 they weren’t. In Beijing in 1989 they were.
Not gonna watch that, but Mr. Robot wasn’t really about a revolution at all; it was about Elliot dealing with his personal shit.