Must Contain Mild Peril
When you’re telling a story, you can’t have beauty without tension. You need a little pain, a little panic, a little peril. If you’re taking the tension out of your creative work, don’t expect anybody to care.
In music, it’s a big part of what creates flow, intrigue, memorability. Without the tension built up when the Take That boys sing ‘we will never be uncovered again’, the last Back For Good chorus would be nowhere near as satisfying. And man is it satisfying.
A tune without tension lacks ups and down, tos and fros, waxes and wanes.
TV has the same need for these arcs. In our day, cartoons and kids’ books were about getting kidnapped, getting lost in the woods, or falling into quicksand. Now they’re about losing a sandwich. And we’re not saying we should plunge our children into a state of perpetual turmoil (unless they’re really really annoying), but does everything have to be so teeth-pullingly dull?
If the friendly snowman that changed the kid’s life for the better wasn’t going to eventually melt, his time on earth would not be magical. If Edgar wasn’t trying to scam the Aristocats out of their inheritance, the film would just be a bunch of cats sleeping for 90 minutes. If Marty McFly didn’t get accidentally thrown into the past, Back to the Future would just be him skateboarding in a red gilet for a bit, then having a Pepsi.
Emotion comes from tension – we need to feel that something can go wrong before we root for it to go right.
Football would be boring if we knew the score in advance. If our team couldn’t lose, we would soon stop caring.
You can’t just say ‘you should feel sad now’ and expect someone to fall in line emotionally – you have to kill off the labrador. And you have to do it at the right time. It can’t be at the start before we find out it’s a loveable lil scamp with an endless capacity for mischief. Let ‘em fall in love with it first…then skkkkkkrt.
Reach into their chest and rip their heart out.
