Pain, Give Me.
A story isn't a story until it hurts.
If I was to try and tell you the story of my life, or rather, if I was to try and turn my life into a story, then I would tell you about my pain. The death of my parents, the loss of my childhood home.
Brook House was named after the mercurial waterway which, though usually bone dry and home only to nettles, would in exceptional years swell with dank brown water and engulf the property. It was built in the liminal space between the wilds and suburbia, the perfect expression of my parents personality, of the wound of being middle class, of being neither one thing or another. Here they clung to another version of the 80s dream, dropping out yet staying in, vanishing in plain sight. They were not totally self sufficient like Tom and Barbara in the Good Life though at times they got close, the garden filled with crops and chickens and a poly-tunnel incubating sweet red tomatoes, bent over ears of corn and for a time a dense forest of marijuana. Here I grew, flooded and frozen, tall and ungainly, barely part of your world at all. There they both died, stiff and waxy, yellowed like leaves from the weeping willow bent double outside.
I have not returned, though I am back here most nights, it remains my dream home or at least my home whilst dreaming. Uprooted, I am now a pot plant bending my neck to find the sun as it falls into my third floor flat. It’s been years since I made my first film, cut in Brook House, my mum dying down the hall, leaving without seeing it. Can I tell stories without her in the audience? Or have the many frustrations of the years since come because I’m still writing for ghosts? It hurts to have so much to say to people who cannot hear me.
This might come over overly British but even an American would tell you who they are by sharing their pain. They might frame it as a tragedy triumphantly overcome or a wound healing, but pain is still the heart of the matter. Pain is the essence of storytelling. Empathy isn’t just how we understand other people, it’s how we understand. So if you want someone to understand you, you have to trigger their empathy. Tell them how it hurts.
Identity politics feels like a new thing, some expression of progressive left liberal woke special pleading, a hierarchy of despair were groups demand privileged status because of their pain. But once you lift your eye from the detail of how society could work better, all politics is identity politics. As a voter you look for the people who look like you, knowing innately they will tweak things in your shared best interest. As a politician the trick is to make others feel you share their identity, their story, their pain.
Communism is industrial identity politics. Marx wasn’t a labourer, Engles owned factories, but the story they told of the pain of having your labour stolen resonated around the world. Trump is an outspoken millionaire but the story he told of being poor, ignored and overlooked, has become the template for right nationalism everywhere. Movements are built on shared pain not shared goals. This is the problem with so much of green politics. People don’t share your pain when you block the traffic, they peevishly feel their own more keenly. The pain of the environmentalist often feels self-important next to the righteous pain of the tax payer, the squeezed middle. Regardless of income who cannot find it in their heart to see themselves as somehow squeezed? The cancelled white feminist, the over looked middle aged man, the teenage boy who can’t lose his virginity. We all carry our burdens with heavy pride, polishing them into mirrors to see ourselves.
But if all stories work through the power of empathy, they also teach its limits. The casually despatched bad guys of action movie cliché, the monstrous parade of acceptable villains its ok to kill. Pain is sweetest when someone else is to blame. Empathy is easy to trigger but even easier to switch off. Recent panics about “populism” in politics often sound anti-democratic, like popularity isn’t democracy’s only currency. But “populism” in politics is about goodies and baddies and baddies in real life are just as un-personed and disposable as they are in fiction. This is the danger of identity, when your pain cuts across someone else’s neither can move forward without losing themselves, without one or other being dehumanised, placed beyond empathy. This is why people howl about being cancelled, it’s not their views but their wounds that are being dismissed. That is why both sides entrench, hurt, unmoving.
However, the real lesson of story telling is not just the power of pain but where it happens most powerfully. Of course in a drama pain is everywhere, bad things follow worse, then worse still, then surprisingly our team win. But the crucial pain of a story always happens in the middle. This is the pain that transforms you. Trainspotting is a clear example. The middle is where Renton overdoses, nearly dies and then endures his cold turkey. Other bad shit happens later but this is the pain that changes him and without it he’d just be a moany bastard who fucks over his mates. Stories are not static. Powerful pain does not define you, it moves you, it transforms you.
So if I was to try and tell you the story of my life, or rather, if I was to try and turn my life into a story, then it would not be a ghost story but an exorcism. I am not trying to return, to take back control or make my America great again. We cannot be what we were. My blessing is that having endured the pain of leaving my parents’ lopsided dream home I have nowhere else to live but reality. But reality is another story.
I’ve been thinking about pain because the past couple of weeks have been quite difficult but it did all somehow end up at the BIFA party where I met one of my idols, polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska whose first film, The Lure, is a musical about mermaids and the fall of communism and if that isn’t something you want to watch then I doubt you're reading this substack. You can actually see at the BFI tonight or here on Netflix any time you wish.
My screenwriting course returns in January - book your place now or perhaps give me as a gift to the person you would most love to see telling their stories. Details here.