I tried watching Hereditary the other night, and among the few movies that have made me cry, it is the only one that I didn’t finish, and I never intend to. Usually when a movie affects me deeply enough to trigger that sort of physiological reaction, I need to stick through to the end, hoping for some kind of hope, or at least resolution. But with Hereditary, I knew from nearly the very beginning that there wouldn’t be any. Every member of the family it followed was dismal and disconnected; if there was any love there, I didn’t see it (and love in movies, or any story, shouldn’t be the sort of thing you need to watch closely to discover). When tragedy struck, the gore and guilt forced a response from me, but I could already tell that the filmmaker wouldn’t give these people any satisfying conclusion. He was putting them through hell so he could make some esoteric point about society and construct a beautiful shots of severed heads crawling through ants, not because he wanted to tell a real story about these people.
In retrospect, it was a bad idea to watch a horror movie as a palette cleanser from another horror movie, but the next night I watched Us, and it convinced me that at least some filmmakers can do it right. The family in this film is hardly perfect, but they clearly love each other enough that, when their lives are threatened, it actually means something. I read a few reviews that described the characters as superficial walking clichés that compliment the film’s condemnation of American materialism, but that misses the point entirely. We see mundane but charming scenes of family life that prove that these people aren’t hollow, that it matters when their lives are at risk. The true horror isn’t the superficiality of capitalism, but its human cost, and how arbitrarily it chooses who succeeds or fails. And I think it’s a real problem that so many critics would assume we shouldn’t care about the characters when we really should, in this movie especially but also in any well-told story.
Of course, the problem with being a writer is that any critique you have on a story could just as easily be thrown back against one of your own. And actually, I don’t think I would have noticed this trend towards ignoring characters’ humanity if it weren’t for a similar trend in my own writing. The past week I’ve been looking through short stories, searching for something fit for publication, and I’ve noticed that almost all of them are stories of disillusionment, of characters learning that their family or social group or faith isn’t as pure as they once thought. The problem, though, is that these characters never really trusted these things in the first place; they were always drifting, sarcastic creatures, keeping an arm’s distance from anything optimistic. And if my characters don’t have anything to hope for, then no one has a reason to care when they lose what they hope for.
So I went back into these stories and tried to inject something worth caring about into them, but I abandoned every attempt because the results seemed too sappy, melodramatic, or self-serious. And that illustrates the problem that Hereditary and my stories and so many others try and fail to face: love, beauty, and hope are hard to write. The writerly part of our brains scream that they’re too simple, too over-done, not serious enough. Readers don’t take much convincing that a character or setting is corrupted, but suggest anything worth caring about and they go on high alert for unrealistic sentimentality. So a careful writer will edge away from anything authentically happy into stories like Hereditary, where everything is well-paced and thoughtful and aesthetically perfect and there’s no good to be found anywhere.
Looking back further in the archives of my stories, though, I found that I hadn’t always been like this. In high school I wrote stories where characters aimed for true happiness, and sometimes even found it in the end. On most levels they were much worse than what I’m writing now, but there’s something that I lost, something worth recovering.
Not to blame Grinnell too hard, I got an excellent education there, but I think it’s clear where I lost it. In class discussions a professor would prod and doubt any new idea a student proposed, but let critique pass unexamined. We were taught to doubt everything, break every assumption or hope down to its component elements. And while critical thinking is essential, it would’ve been nice if the professors had said a little more about what to do with a system once you’ve deconstructed it.
I’m not advocating for stories where nothing bad ever happens, or even complaining about dark and disturbing stories. But the dark and disturbing stories that work are ones in which a character has something worth wanting or protecting. Once you have that, losing it actually matters. As nervous as I am to propose any new writing rules, knowing how many of those have failed me, I would tentatively suggest that any writer would do well to locate the hope in their story before going too far with it. A story without that might be exciting and funny and pleasing to the eye, like a painting, but I doubt it will ever really be satisfying.
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