You’re boring. Don’t feel bad. I am, too. Trust me, we’re better off this way.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles

“Remind me of my own life, but not so much that I get depressed,” is basically storytelling’s origin story. It’s one of the defects of the human mind: we want to investigate the sensation of being human without having to acknowledge the heinously boring bullshit from which sensation typically springs. To square this circle, we swap out real, lame moments for significantly cooler and extremely fabricated ones, treating only the underlying emotions as sacrosanct.

And then: Yahtzee, baby – all the insight of existence, minus the part where you have to exist. You’re basically putting your feelings up for adoption and hoping that a rich couple takes them in.

While none of this is groundbreaking, it is instructive to investigate the unspoken understandings and expectations under which the process plays out. There are certain types and volumes of lies that are considered Close Enough to reality so as to not qualify as pure escapism. Their application, like everything else about the human mind, is weird.

Here are some general guidelines:

UglyCool

Your protagonist can have either a cool job or a cool personality, but never both. That’s too much cool. If your middle-aged male lead is a heroin addict – a bad thing! – make sure he’s also a former small-time wrestler – a cool thing! If your middle-aged female lead is having a breakdown – oh, no! – make sure she’s the CFO of a Fortune 500 company – neat!

I couldn’t tell you why people will find a professional kickboxer believable only if he also has irritable bowel syndrome, but the heart wants what it wants.

Brief Punctuations of Reality

You can’t sucker punch your audience through the screen (yet) but you can do the emotional equivalent: draw up a larger-than-life character only to give them an Unexpectedly Human Moment.

But it shouldn’t be too sudden a moment. Introducing a character who is an actual, literal Nazi only to reveal shortly before or after his death that he had been nursing a three-legged diabetic puppy back to health is too much, and will be considered manipulative. This seems counterintuitive, because you are trying to manipulate the audience, and the audience is there specifically to be manipulated, but part of the magic is that both parties are pretending this is all on the up-and-up. Humans are weird.

At Least I’m Not That Asshole

Having one irredeemably shitty character is essential for two reasons: irredeemable characters are transmutable to every genre of film (Rey and Finn both have annoying supervisors in The Force Awakens, for instance) and their presence establishes a baseline for character behavior that makes our protagonist seem eternally likable by comparison. This is the Swiss Army knife of Sorta Real stuff, because everybody has a supervisor in life, even people who have never had a supervisor before.

Oh, This Life!

Your character cannot get everything! This is essential. If they win the lottery they also have to, like, lose a leg in a bear trap or something. The best thing about this rule is that Tom Cruise has dedicated his entire career to breaking it. Ethan Hunt steps in a bear trap and somehow de-ages five years and is made a Supreme Court justice.

Anyway, dinging our hero a little allows us to slide into the fake stuff more easily. We want to feel like we’re going to live forever, but to actually see an invulnerable main character makes us feel like we’re deluding ourselves with overly-childish escapism. To accept some damage here and there makes us feel mature, and in no way clinging to the absurd belief that we might be able to live forever (but c’mon, we’re totally going to live forever).

The End

People want to exist somewhere in the middle of the realness spectrum, slightly – but never too garishly – leaning towards the fiction side, and will pay accordingly. Understanding that you can’t go too far one way or the other is why David E. Kelley has more money than God, and F. Scott Fitzgerald drank himself to death. Always know how much bullshit you can get away with – mess up the ratio even a little and you’ll only succeed in bumming everybody out. And people can do that themselves for free.