The Tipping Point

The outcome of a story can generally be calculated fairly easily simply by looking at the archetypes involved, and calculating the odds. Crudely, the more good characters there are in comparison to the evil characters, the more likely that the good guys will come out on top – a principle that holds true regardless of whether or not the Hero is archetypally good or archetypally evil.

An important principle to keep in mind when adding up the odds for or against the Hero, is that the number of physical bodies in the tale is absolutely irrelevant: the only thing that matters, ultimately, is how many distinct archetypes are involved. You can up the apparent ante almost infinitely by multiplying the number of enemies encompassed under a single archetype (how many storm troupers did you say there are on that Death Star?), but on some level the audience will know that it is a trick. No one actually believes that ten-thousand orcs will be able to win the Battle of Helm's Deep, and no one imagines that Rambo can't dispense with an entire Soviet platoon.

In general, there are three ways that the outcome of a story can work: it can be a foregone conclusion that good will triumph, or it can be a total slaughter in favour of evil, or it can be a neck-in-neck race where the audience is actually unsure of who is going to edge ahead in the end. All three of these alternatives can work, provided the tension is handled properly, and provided the archetypal balance is tipped in the right direction.

Stories in which good is guaranteed to win out are exceedingly popular for on-going television shows, or series of books in which the audience knows, from the beginning, that the heroes have to survive long enough to complete the actors' contracts. No one who sits down to watch an episode of Star Trek really worries that the Klingons will triumph over the Federation, or that the Enterprise will be entirely consumed by the alien slime, or that the entire away team will be wiped out by the hostile natives. The question is not whether, but how the heroes will triumph.

When you look at the archetypes in these stories, you generally find that there is a complete complement of heroic types filling out the top of the square, and usually only one or, at the very most, two real villains to counter them. Take, for example, the original cast of Dr. Who: you have the Doctor playing Magus, Ian as Disciple, Barbara as Mother and Susan as Orphan. Even assuming that they don't meet a single sympathetic character in the world that they are exploring – and they nearly always do – they already encompass all of the heroic archetypes on their square. It doesn't matter how many indistinguishable Daleks you deploy against them; archetypally, it's still four against one.

Stories where it is clear the evil is going to triumph have to be handled carefully, or else they end up with the bad-bad-gloomy-bad problem discussed in earlier lectures. Titus Andronicus, once described as having been written during Shakespeare's “Quentin Tarantino phase,” illustrates the problem with grisly accuracy. There is, by the end, only one good character, Marcus, who is so utterly powerless against the prevailing horrors that he can't hope to do much but soliloquize about them in the end. (No, Andronicus' daughter is not heroic; before she is raped she's unsufferably self-satisfied, and afterwards, her victimization serves to impel Titus to even greater acts of depraved brutality.) The evil characters are numerous, colourful, well-drawn, and ubiquitous. Obviously, all is going to end badly, and it does, with the traditional Shakespearean “everybody dies” tragic ending. The story is made to work by providing sympathetic moments for the villains; against the backdrop of a mutual holocaust, there are moments of genuine pathos, hints of possible repentances that never fully emerge, but that establish that there is still some sort of moral order lurking in the background of the horror-shop action. Still, it is a fine line, and it is not difficult to imagine productions of the play that would be totally unendurable. (Julie Taymor's post-modern version is definitely worth a look. She overcomes the problem of horror piled on horror by using two of the most minor characters in the script, Titus' grandson and Aaron's newborn baby, as an emotional hinge: as children, their innocence is a given, and their ability to survive beyond the confines of the play gives her treatment a powerful soupçon of redemptive content.)

Finally, there is the neck-and-neck conflict, the story in which it is not clear who is going to triumph. Generally, this is the most powerful option in terms of building tension: page-turners and movies that keep the audience “on the edge of their seats” will often include a carefully balanced complement of heroes and villains. It is important to note, here, that in neck-and-neck stories, it is often impossible to calculate the outcome merely on the basis of the number of good-guys vs. the number of bad-guys. Take Bizet's Carmen, for example: there are four characters of significance involved in the main plot: the Hero (Jose), his Nemesis (Carmen), the Hapless Lover (Micaela) and the Villain (Escamillo). Added up archetypally, it's two-on-two – so who wins? In this case, tragedy triumphs; the reason is that a character who is of the same handedness as the Hero – the corner characters when you build the square – will always be of greater weight and power than the characters along the sides. Poor Micaela, for all her prayers, is powerless against Carmen; she is only the Hapless Lover. (For a precise contrast, see “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers”; it's the same set of archetypes with a single important difference: instead of the Hapless Lover, the Hero is provided with his actual Lover. This is enough to tip the scales, so that the heroes leave in triumph and the villains succumb to mutual destruction.)

Aside from ordinary archetypal stacking, the outcome can be made uncertain, and the audience's tension level kept up, by artfully concealing, or drawing into question, the archetypal alignment of some characters. Having an apparently good character turn out, at a critical moment, to be evil may jeapardize the entire archetypal balance of a plot (this is one of the main devices used in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and is probably the reason why it has become a cult classic.) On the other hand, having an apparently evil character turn out to be actually good can create a sense of elation and excitement as the audience's archetypal dread is relieved. Note that this is not exactly the same thing as having an evil character become good or a good character become evil; Scrooge's repentance, Darth Vader's change of heart, or (I need an example of a good character who falls down, and my head is not working) are a different phenomenon – if a character's nature is simply being concealed from the audience, then the truth may be revealed at any time, whereas a change of alignment demands sufficient archetypal motivation to justify the fall or redemption of the character in question.

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