The excellent tension

Here's one thing that makes characters incredibly compelling to me: tension between who they really are and who they present to the world. That's the most relatable thing, isn't it? Because none of us are who we think we are in our heads. There's no perfect transfer of who we are on the inside to the outside world, even if we always wanted to do that, which I don't think anyone does. You'd have to be one hundred percent at peace with yourself to do that. And who doesn't have some traits they'd rather be without?

I was trying to figure out what made the characters of Community so brilliant and that's what I figured out. They're all in a constant state of tension between who they are and who they present to the world.

There's actually a wonderful third part to that tension, in that they're all trying to become something new. That's what moves it beyond great to fantastic. We love watching people try to transform themselves or reach beyond, especially if they're not very good at it and fall back a lot.

Okay, Community. I fell in love with it in the last month or so. To an extreme degree. I had a bunch of episodes on the dvr and kept watching them over and over and then got season one through Netflix and did the same thing. Over and over, then with the commentaries, then again without the commentaries.

Obviously it's brilliantly funny, and it's a created family, which always gets me, but the thing that amazes me is that it's a half-hour comedy that's fundamentally character based. Characters grow and change. That's incredibly rare.

I can't even watch most half-hour comedies because of the translation circuit in my brain. It goes like this: say a character's funny thing is that they're mean. Like all the jokes in their lines are based on how mean they are to people, or how self-centered, or how stupid they are. Take Joey on Friends. He's kind of dumb. His lines are supposed to be funny because the joke is: he's kind of dumb. I can't stand that because due to the translation circuit, all I hear is: he's kind of dumb. Being dumb, is that funny? I don't laugh. I turn it off.

Yay for not being able to enjoy commonly appreciated humor! Whee! Go ahead and plot that on the spectrum.

So it has to be a bit more complex than that, see? Which Community is, because the characters are one thing and are also trying to be someone else, which makes them vulnerable and sweet and irritating and human.

If you've read the whole (flawed, incomplete) Canterbury Tales in the original a dozen times like some people who have no lives, you know that what makes it brilliant is the same thing. People presenting themselves in one way while unintentionally showing everyone else that they're not. Same thing! So brilliant!

Community centers on a self-centered lawyer who's nowhere near as cool and selfish as he thinks he is. Or maybe he wants to be that lousy person but a better side keeps forcing him to be a good person despite his inclinations. Either way, you see the jerk and the good person superimposed. The first time I watched it, I hated that guy. I wanted to punch him in the face. It takes a little time to see past the presented personality to the person underneath.

I'm not a good enough person myself to be able to do this IN REAL LIFE, where I mostly just get annoyed and avoid irritating people instead of seeing past the surface to the good person underneath. But here's a half-hour comedy that makes me realize that. Criminy! It's true that when I get that irritated with real people, I can generally get past it by thinking about what great characters they would make. Suddenly they're fun and interesting story generators! Yay! I know, I have some things in common with Abed, but I could also go on all day about how he uses the lens of fiction to understand the world through story and metaphor and how that's exactly what the show does for us. The show is Abed. I know!

I would love to hear the show's creator talk about this and see whether it's as conscious as I feel like it must be, but then again, maybe I'd rather give him all the credit in the world instead of finding out otherwise. Unrealistic expectations are limiting.

Here's why the show caused my brain to melt down. There was a terrible, terrible episode. The one about the chicken fingers. I forget the title, something about Poultry. It should have been more of what I just said, using a metaphor inside a metaphor to build something even better, but it didn't work. I've been puzzling for days over why it didn't work. I keep thinking things like: it was too absurd and over the top! But the whole show is absurd and over the top. The paintball episode was absurd and over the top and worked perfectly.

Was it the voiceover? The money aspect of it? The way the group was integrated into the whole economy of the school? That might be it, actually. The absurdity usually works so well because it's contained to our characters. I can accept that a group of people will build their own bizarro world, but I can't accept that everyone around them buys into it and plays a part in it. That's part of what makes the concept work, that no one around them buys into it. They're misfits and nerds and weirdos and don't belong to the rest of the world. The tension between what they think they are and what they really are was completely blown and destroyed. I kind of reject that episode in my mind, which I realize makes me bats in the belfry, but it just doesn't fit or work in the system the rest of the show creates.

Another incredibly annoying episode was right near that one, the one with the bratty high school kids making fun of Jeff and Britta. But that worked the other way around. An ordinary conversation started the episode, one that we would completely accept, but then these outsiders from the real world barged in and pointed out how ridiculous and sad and lame our characters were. It forces you to confront that same original excellent tension I've been talking about, that difference between how they see themselves and how they really are. We're on board with both, but then these brats shoot down how they see themselves completely and make use realize how pathetic the situation is on paper.

But everyone's lives can look pathetic on paper. Ooh, you work in an office. Ooh, you stock shelves at Lowe's. Ooh, you do other people's makeup. Or whatever. Put it in the voice of mockery and of course it sounds stupid and weak. That's kind of the point. The point is that mockery doesn't tear down anything. All it does is point out the divide between the truth about ourselves and the person we present to the world. Without that tension, and especially without the third part, the drive to change and move forward, there's no life there. There's no story.

I'm thinking a lot since the great chicken revelation about whether this tension is there in other shows I like. I have to think more about it. The opposite of this tension is WYSIWIG, something I can't stand at all--it makes for boring characters. Boring, boring, boring. And how do you even tell stories with them? I'm not sure anymore. I guess if you like or hate or laugh at people based on the assumption that what you see is all there is, then you can do sort of a D&D or paper doll storytelling thing. You could even write inner conflict in someone who is WYSIWIG, if they want two conflicting things. But it would be enormously better if they WERE two conflicting things AND they wanted two conflicting things. Orders of magnitude better.

Honestly, I think the people I like the most in reality have this going on. But that's a whole different story.

I need to use this much more in my own writing. I've already incorporated it into the current project, but as I'm looking back, I can see how this is a theme (thanks, Chaucer!) in a lot of other work. But Community made me realize this in a whole new way. Excellent tension chicken revelation for the win!