Cliches.

[camwyn]

Went to see Bulletproof Monk last night, as y'all no doubt know. I liked it a great deal; I would watch it again before I watched Shanghai Noon, but if it came to a choice between Monk and, say, The Mummy, Mummy would win hands down. Shanghai Noon has many problems, most of which stem from the fact that it's basically an Abbott & Costello movie with a lot of People Getting Hit, plus Donnie Yen. I was never very fond of A&C's movies, so that's probably a big part of why I feel as I do... The Mummy, on the other hand, is a fine example of the pulp genre, and an excellent slice of cheese as well. If you go through my Pulp Survival List, you'll find that a significant number of the tips there can be traced directly to stuff in The Mummy. Some folks have said that Bulletproof Monk is a pulp movie, too, and I suppose one can make a case for that given that it features a Kung Fu Nazi. Nazis show up in two kinds of movies: Deeply Seriously Important No Really Dammit movies, and pulp movies. In the Deeply Seriously Important kind they're there for historical purposes, unless you've got one of those putrid romance movies that seems to think World War II was created to increase drama and woe for protagonists. In pulp movies, Nazis exist to indicate that truly good people can ultimately defeat even the greatest of evils - well, that or they're there because you can beat the crap out of a Nazi character and nobody will squeal about discrimination.

However, I would venture to say that Monk is not a pulp movie. Pulp movies are high on adventure, usually but not always thin on characterization, and very much plot-driven. You usually get an exotic locale and a disproportionate amount of danger to people who aren't part of the main cast ("we've got to save the world!" "we've got to get the sacred stone back to the village!" "we've got to divert the river before it can flood the miners' homes!"). You occasionally get mysticism or magic, and when these come into the game, they're usually front and center. And the bad guys always, always, always get punished, after putting the hero and/or the sidekick and/or the chick in mortal danger several times.

Monk fulfilled a lot of these criteria, but the mystical magical foo had an entirely different feel to it that pushed this movie into another category altogether. I prefer to think of Bulletproof Monk as a chopsocky movie. This doesn't hail from the cinematic roots that pushed Spielberg to give us Indiana Jones; this springs straight out of a Shaw Brothers foundation. This movie was adapted from a comic book, but I'll wager any money you like that the comic book's author was a big fan of movies that had titles like 'The Five Deadly Venoms' or 'The (insert number between 7 and 108) (insert adjective) (insert noun) of Shaolin'. It might have an English script, and it might have been set in the United States, and it was so definitely filmed in Toronto that it isn't even funny - here's a hint, guys, if you have a character say 'this is America' then HIDE THE DAMN ONTARIO LICENSE PLATES - but it's a direct spiritual heir to films of that ilk, and as such I think it does pretty well.

What tipped me off to this was the tinky-tink music they played whenever Chow Yun-Fat had to discuss philosophy. The music was entirely too perky and vaguely like the stuff old American movies played whenever an 'Oriental' actor came on screen to be ignored, so I focused as hard as I could on Chow's speeches. Quite a bit of what he was saying made my teeth ache, as it sounded like it came straight out of the first edition Akashic Brotherhood tradition book, but as that thought went across my head, the realization that AkBroFirstEd was essentially the spawn of those movies made it bearable. When a modern-day movie drinks at the same creative well as the movies made in the 50's and 60's, of course it's going to come out with a lot of the same stuff in it.


That's the point at which I found myself thinking about cliches. I've spent huge chunks of my gaming life (active since 1992-1993) avoiding cliche characters, because they annoy the hell out of me. More specifically, because they swarm in packs and annoy the hell out of me. It's one thing to have the best soccer player in the world and the most gorgeous woman on the eastern seaboard in a given city; it's something else entirely when every bloody woman in town is either striking or gorgeous, and when every man around is over six feet tall and has perfect teeth and hair. It's like the old Ars Magica game: you knew any lepers you met were mages, because Leper was an eight-point flaw and only mages could take more than seven flaw points. If you ran into anyone who was less than gorgeous or who was not particularly bright stat-wise, it had to have been a super, probably either a Nosferatu (for the uglies) or a Get of Fenris/Brujah type (for the not bright).


Nobody would be unattractive or non-combat-monsterish willingly, nobody wanted to be average, so I created an average character just for the hell of it. By the time I retired the poor bastard from play, Dafydd Rowlands was taking Xanax and Zantac alike on a daily basis- the stress and the ulcers were just too much for him to bear, because every damn supernatural group in existence tried to get their hands on him. The man worked for the phone company, for pete's sake! He was ordinary! I tried other characters along the same lines, most notably Roberto Montoya Torres, half-Seminole and half-Cuban; they were really a lot of fun even after the supernatural came to get them. Bob eventually joined the Arcanum after his precinct-mates dubbed him Spooky Torres, but he was just an average cop from the K-9 division. He happened to know stuff, that was all.

Eventually, though, I played enough average people that I started wanting to try something new. I got myself a Get of Fenris combat monster - of sorts; I never went as far as Ahroun. That's okay. Lewis Tanner had enough going for him without a Full Moon's rage. I got myself a prankster Ragabash, Dave Grishin, who the Garou called Speaks-Like-Microsoft. (Born a few years later, he'd have been Speaks-Like-Bill-Clinton.) I even went for a gorgeous (app 4) redhead chick, the Etherist/Progenitor Barbara "Don't call me Batgirl" Gordon. They were fun. I eventually went about trying to actively deflate cliches, not just avoid them; Fang is an example of that. He was supposed to be an overly skilled stage hand in the beginning, a profession you simply don't see Asian characters in when you're reading RPG material or watching movies. They've got a 'set' of parts you expect to see them in, and stage hand isn't one fo them. Fang, however, got the bit between his teeth and developed like mad. He's currently trying to teach a coop of West of England Tumbler Pigeons to do precision pooping drills. By damn, if he's going to be part of the cliche of old Chinese guys feeding birds in the park - or Chinese guys getting on maaaaagically well with animals - then he's going to do it his way.

That's the part that I found myself thinking about after Bulletproof Monk was over. Cliches weren't always that way. Once, cliches were new ideas entirely. Someone had to have been the first to write the gorgeous person's story; someone had to come out with the first movie about the half-trained apprentice seeking vengeance for the murder of his master. There was a time when stories about funny-looking monks out of snowbound Asiatic mountains were unusual and fraught with hopeful expectation, because anything might happen in them. Just because an idea's been done a million times and one, doesn't mean there wasn't some germ of something good in it to begin with.

Or that there's nothing good in it now.

It can be done, I think. It's possible to take the old, worn-out, tired-to-the-bone ideas and breathe new life into them. An innovative approach, perhaps, or the right set of tweaks. An honest and sincere return to the source material, and a reverence for what you're doing - play that part, write that storyline, whatever, as if it were the very first time. Just remember to acknowledge that it's been done before, and in so doing step aside and make it your own. Cliches got that way because there was something so appealing about them once that people just used and reused them instead of thinking up their own ideas, so take that cliched idea and add your own material to it. It can be done. You can make it good. Stephen Spielberg sure did; aside from Susanna Heschel, who was my professor in Modern Judaism and later in The Holocaust and History, I can't think of anybody I know who hasn't seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and considered it at least memorable. Get the old stuff out, the stuff everyone's done, and get rid of the uncreative, deadwood, irritating old parts. Pare it down to the source material that was good once, and then add your own. See what you come up with...

Now, if y'all will excuse me, I've got some RL work to do, and after that a class in management and labor relations. But it's an hour's car ride from work to school, and I've got a portable CD player and a CD I burned last night of nothin' but da most monkoplastic music in my MP3 collection. Both the ass-kicky and the meditative, along with two tracks in languages I simply don't understand. (Mongolian/Tuvan and, um, I think While The Earth Sleeps is in Czech.) I'll be turning over a couple of cliches in my head on the way to school tonight; we'll see what comes of it...