Anybody who dabbles in writing fiction sooner or later writes what I think of as a "cocoon story". It’s usually sooner, with the result that it’s often a dismal failure as a story.
A cocoon story is one in which you have the story characters (anywhere from two to twenty) in the midst of some great disaster, but they are shielded from that disaster. It could be a bomb shelter during a nuclear war, or an airtight cavern during a great plague, or the one building that didn’t come crashing down during a great earthquake.
In the story, the characters, in the beginning at least, are not directly affected by the outside events, but just sort of spend time talking about them. It would be a bit like listening to a baseball game on the radio where the announcer is describing the game purely in terms of what the expressions on the faces of his fellow sportscasters are. "Well, folks, we’re in the late innings, according to my watch, and something exciting just happened, because the other announcers are all cheering and pumping their fists in the air. That suggests to me that we’ve got a real exiting game going on down on the field!"
You see the problem.
Now, a competent writer will cause the barriers to gradually drop and allow the characters to eventually face danger and thus have to come up with various ingenious ways to avoid getting eaten, drowned, burned, irradiated, transmuted or otherwise by whatever Big Nasty Ugly is out there acting as the antagonist. You can get a pretty good story out of that, and a lot of writers have.
A good writer will work up some dramatic tension among his characters. Humans have an endlessly inventive panoply of ways in which they can conflict and all the writer really has to do is get the characters and situation established so that the conflicts are credible and can arouse reader interest while still providing a satisfactory resolution. A good writer will have a solid idea of where he is going before he has one of the last three humans on earth turn to one of the others and say, "Hey, Fred, is that Sally’s vaginal secretions I smell on your finger there?"
But both those approaches require strong emotions, derring-do, and,
if the writer is an American movie writer, a certain amount of gunfire.
The mark of a great writer is to take a cocoon story where outside
events don’t burst in on the characters, there isn’t any violent or sexual
interactions going on among the characters, and the whole thing resolves
uneventfully, and the reader or viewer is riveted. Samuel Beckett pulled
it off with "Waiting for Godot". "My Dinner with Andre" was a great movie
about two guys just sitting at a restaurant table and shooting the breeze–and
nothing else.
Aaron Sorkin is a great writer, and he wrote a cocoon story, "Ishmail and Isaac" in which nothing much happens, no character raises his voice in anger, and the perceived outside threat turns out to be a false alarm.
Sorkin wanted to talk about some of the fears and angers people have felt from 9/11, and he was successful.
He did something I didn’t expect. He didn’t even mention the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, airline hijackings or any of that. There were, in this hour, no huge disasters, no explosions, no sirens, no screams. All that happened was the FBI ran a computer search on known aliases of a middle eastern Moslem terrorist, and got a hit on a name that matched an employee in the White House.
The White House promptly went into full-lock down mode, a situation where nobody could leave or enter the building, known picturesquely (in the show at least) as a "Black Crash Situation".
They found the guy, and hustled him off to be interrogated by Leo McGarry, White House Chief of Staff. In the meantime, a class of high school students, as part of a Constitutional History course, are caught in the White House in mid tour, left to the tender mercies of Josh Lyman.
That’s the entire setup. The rest of the show is just the kids having a discourse with Josh, and other staff regulars as they mosey in and out, including Sam, CJ, Charlie, Toby, and eventually, Bartlett and the First Lady. This is intercut with scenes from Leo interrogating the suspect employee.
In the end, the terrorist is located elsewhere, and it’s obvious that the guy Leo was interrogating was guilty of nothing. The lock down ends, the kids get to go home, and the White House returns to routine. And that’s it.
Doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? The West Wing isn’t an action series at the best of times (and it’s always the best of times with this show).
The premiere featured the President hurting his knee in a bike accident and then having tea with leaders of the Christian Right. It made me an instant fan of the show.
The best show of that first season just showed the cast sitting around trying to figure out what to do with a dead vet that the DC cops found on a park bench with Toby’s business card in his pocket. It moved everyone who watched it to tears.
One great episode had them sitting around waiting for some poll numbers to come in. It was a great civics lesson.
The only time the show put any "action" in was the episode where white supremacists tried to assassinate Bartlet’s daughter and hit Josh instead, and the critics were largely unimpressed with that one.
In one recent episode of note, Bartlet simply stuffed his hands in his pockets and gave a little smile, and it was one of the greatest moments in television. Whatever you think television is, doesn’t fit West Wing.
The show is quiet, introspective, and thoughtful. This particular episode didn’t have the frantic pace that the show usually does (people don’t do anything, and they do it awfully urgently).
I’ve heard some criticism of the show. One was that nothing much
happened. I assume that came from people who don’t watch it normally. Another
was that it was "preachy".
Were the characters talking to us? Absolutely. And was there something
much bigger than the possibility of a Moslem terrorist in the White House
behind the creation of this episode? Of course. Where they preaching?
If a priest sits down with you and counsels you, he’s going to be a little bit preachy, isn’t he? If you’ve been have a run of bad luck and a friend tries to tell you how to better deal with life, that’s a bit preachy, isn’t it?
Yes, the show was a bit preachy. We needed it.
Some folks took issue with Leo McGarry’s interrogation of the Arab employee, complaining that the racism and general hostility and rudeness McGarry showed was way out of character.
They were right. It was way out of character. Normally, Leo wouldn’t act that way.
Of course, therein lies the brilliance of the episode. In this episode, there is no massive and horrific attacks upon New York and Washington. The World Trade Center isn’t mentioned.
It doesn’t have to be mentioned. Leo is a post 9/11 American, and like all of us, he is resorting his priorities. And, being human, he’s struggling a bit. Ann Coulter and the guy who killed that poor Sikh aren’t typical Americans; guys like Leo are. They have enough self-respect that they fight against the mental and moral disease of racism, and they are the ones who are calling up the FBI to tell them that some fellow named Ali Khan just came in asking about plane tickets to New York, or wondering if it is safe to rent the apartment out to the women in the veils. Once they stop being afraid, their normal good character and plain common sense will reassert itself, but right now, America is in the shadow of two towers, and the very best of us is feeling irrational surges of suspicion, and quite rational surges of worry.
If you missed this episode of West Wing, find someone who taped it. I doubt it will be rerun. It is, very much, a show of the moment.
And like many another transitory flash across the sky, it was brilliant.