Great Stories Are Not For Escaping. They’re for Re-Connecting.

You know, there’s a great – devastating, but great – story from the early days of the AIDS epidemic, culminating when the nurse-narrator hugs a patient in the last stages of the disease. He bursts into tears. “Oh, thank you, thank you,” he weeps. “It’s been so long since anybody touched me.”

There’s a great – not quite as devastating, but just as resonant for our purposes – moment in Stanley Tucci’s great film BIG NIGHT — based on a top tier screenplay by Howard Rodman —  where a woman is reduced by tears by a gourmet feast. “My mother was a terrible cook,” she cries. An actual emotional release, from cooking.

A question has been asked: what makes a good story.

It’s a pressing question, but a great one; the problem is that it’s vaguely phrased and therefore does not address all the myriad things a top-tier story can do.

I think it’s more instructive to address the difference between a good story and a great story.

And this applies to all stories, from jokes to TV commercials to novelettes to novels.

It has become increasingly popular to praise stories for being escapist. For taking us away from the world of the 9 to 5 grind and the problems with Mom and the appalling headline news and making us forget ourselves, for a while. And that is a key function of a story, to be sure.

A good story can do that.

But isn’t it just as legitimate to say that we lose ourselves in all that clutter and that a great story that help us get back in touch with who we are?

A great story touches us in a place that we forgot we knew how to be touched.

A good story takes us away.

A great story delivers us back home.

A good story touches us.

A great story, like the great meal of BIG NIGHT, touches us in a place where we didn’t know we could be touched.

Why do we weep so hard at the end of LORENZO’S OIL, for instance? Why do we weep so hard for Eponine, in any good adaptation of LES MISERABLES? Not just because sad things are happening; sad things are always happening. (In STAR WARS, when Princess Leia’s planet is destroyed, complete with the billions of people on it, we forget about by the next scene – and more to the point, so does she, pretty much.) We weep because we have been massaged into an empathy so deep that it touches it in places we didn’t know we could be touched. We have been brought back to ourselves. We have been delivered to our own souls.

This is not just true of tragedies, mind you.

A great story of a lived childhood can stand in for all childhoods, even if it doesn’t resemble our own in any respect. A CHRISTMAS STORY didn’t make me cry once. But I grinned like a loon throughout it, crying, “That was me! That was me!” Even though I didn’t grow up in the thirties and have never celebrated Christmas and certainly never wanted a Red Ryder B-B Gun. That was me; the rhythms of childhood was there, and the film put me there. It touched me past all my adult armor and brought forth from me the thrill of recognition.

Escapist stories can have that. Some do. But so many of them are closed systems, intersecting only with the universe they create, and while they might do that brilliantly enough for us to be drawn in and feel the thrill of identification, they miss the a-ha moment, the rush of recognition, the thrill of being touched in a place that needs to be touched. (Of course, some of us so completely internalize such fictions that we then feel such jolts when we are massaged in familiar ways, when it is that which is touched; to wit, the fist-pump when we recognize the Cosmic Cube as the device we first saw when we were reading and grooving to comic books. That is touching part of us, in the sense that these mythologies have become part of us. One of the great attributes of THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS was, indeed, its canny recognition that so many of us wanted to see Batman beat the tar out of Superman, just once. It’s a great moment, more powerful by far to those who have spent a lifetime reading comics than it is to those who pick up that book alone and wonder what the fuss is about. It is just not to be mistaken, in personal impact, for the moment we are given, in a story about families, for instance, when we realize that we were insensitive little shits as children and that our mothers loved us anyway.)

The stories that touch us most deeply are those that, literally, touch us most deeply, in those places where we forgot what it was like to be touched. Or even better, those that plant in our most barren soil new organs of feeling that didn’t exist before, well-springs of empathy for those whose plights we never considered, but now recognize as linked by humanity to our own. Or, in science fiction, those that make us consider ideas that we never entertained before – and if they *also* return us back to our humanity, by showing us how that intersects, then so much the better?

A story about two spaceships going pew-pew-pew at one another? If it has nothing but thrills to offer us? Might well be diverting. Might well take us away from ourselves, in the way that it’s intended to. Might even get us to care deeply about the characters. But if it just takes us away, and then doesn’t bring us back, it can only be a good story, to one degree or another. It cannot be a great one, in the sense that a simulated taste, let’s say a spoonful of flavoring with no caloric value, might indeed be delicious but will never be filling. It is not an actual meal unless it fills us. And THAT is the difference between a good story and a great one. It has to leave us possessing more than we had when it started.