I saw Mockingjay Part 1 earlier today, and I really enjoyed it. I actually liked it more than I liked reading the book. I thought the book was good and had an important message, but I had a hard time feeling invested in it, and I didn't have the same reaction to the movie at all. I've been thinking about why.
I've had a similar response to a couple of other famous books, most notably some of the Harry Potter books, especially Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix. And I think I had those reactions because those books were just so unrelentingly depressing that I started to feel I'd lost the tension of the story. In Order of the Phoenix, I remember wanting so badly for Ron to succeed at Quidditch just because I wanted a little gilded moment to make me feel there was a reason I was still here. A reason I was still rooting for our heroes even when everything became hell. When he got out there and failed, I felt crushed -- and not crushed in a good, "damn this book and the glorious ways it hurts me" way, but crushed in a "why am I reading this?" way. I didn't give up on the book, but I slogged through it feeling like I was hurting myself, desperate to find the payoff somewhere.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I don't like dark. I just finished saying I liked the movie version of Mockingjay, after all, and it was very bleak. I enjoy stories set in dystopias, and there's creepy weirdness going on in a lot of the worlds I create. One thing I love about speculative fiction in general is that it can dial the weird up to 11. Monsters. Dictatorships. Wars. Intrigue. Devastation. I love it all.
But to me, when a story is dystopian or has realistic monsters behaving realistically, it's vital that the writer not drown her reader in the morass of horror. A sad story needs to be sad, but a story also needs conflict and excitement to keep it moving. To keep the reader feeling invested in the tale that's unfolding, even if the adventure is a dark and terrible one.
There's probably an official term for this that I don't know yet (and please enlighten me in the comments, if so), but when I'm writing, I think about mathematical graphs of waves that go up and down. Even when I'm writing a story where part of the point is that the protagonist faces terrible odds and will pay a devastating price for every gain -- I want there to be gains. However small, they need to exist. Because they keep the story going.
I feel like Mockingjay the movie did this better than Mockingjay the book. Mockingjay the book was an amazing, harrowing look at what PTSD really would do to a character, without sanitizing or romanticizing it as a hero story. Katniss constantly ran and hid, or reminded herself of basic facts about herself and her surroundings to ground herself. That's all realistic and impactful, and drives home that no war story can be the story of an action hero.
But it fell apart for me after a while, because it stopped feeling like a story at all. It felt so fragmented and so bleak that I just wondered why I read past the point where I understood the toll the violence took on Katniss.
The movie was harrowing too. Horrible things happened. Only a few of them were seriously toned down that I noticed, and I spent most of the movie feeling like I was going to scream, hide, or cry. It got me, and it got me good, just like it was supposed to. And it showed those little details that made Katniss's PTSD feel real, like her hiding in a closet and her repeating facts about herself to keep herself from slipping away.
But the movie cut out enough repetition of those things that it didn't belabor the point. It allowed them to have more impact for being rarer.
That let the viewer see the plot for what it was, and follow it, and want to know what happened next.
Maybe I'm just confirming the opinion I already held here, but that just drove home the importance of "the wave." I'm working on something now that's set in a dystopia, and a bunch of violent things have to happen. But this reminds me to keep the plot moving. To keep the protagonists winning one every now and then, whether they get their happy ending in the last chapter or not. To make sure there are a few black jokes when they lose.
To keep it feeling real on the one hand, but to keep it tense enough that it still makes for an exciting story on the other.
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