Last night I was watching Taken with Liam Neeson. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the plot in two lines. On a trip to Paris, his daughter is kidnapped and is about to be sold into the white slave trade. Liam isn’t going to let that happen at any cost.
Liam has what I call in the movies, a moral compass. It is different than a regular compass, one that points to true or magnetic north. A moral compass is one that helps us choose between what is right or wrong at any particular moment.
I love the idea of the moral compass. At any particular point in time, just when the difference between right or wrong gets a little murky, the hero or heroine in a movie simply pulls out their moral compass (given to them by the writer) and voila! – the correct choice is made instantly.
I wish I had a moral compass like Liam Neeson. But mine is a lot more like Captain Jack Sparrow’s. His doesn’t point north. Instead it points to whatever he wants most at the moment. Damned compass.
That’s how I ended up in Florida. The moral compass pointed south in more ways than one and before I knew it (in the space of one week) I was setting a course for Florida.
I know now that it was the magnetic personality of my ex that swung the needle from its normal Northwest pointing position. I didn’t know that it had become demagnetized at the time. One day it simply pointed south and since I have a nasty habit of following my moral compass, off I went.
I should have realized that this had happened before. In 1990 the compass pointed south and I ended up in San Francisco, the victim of another woman I had met on vacation. Damned vacations.
That time, the compass was only on the fritz for a month before it pointed Northwest again. I followed it without question. I only wish I had followed it again this time around, but it didn’t start pointing Northwest until recently.
So, back to the moral compass I wish I had. In the movie, Liam Neeson is making mincemeat out of Paris in search of his daughter. Evil doers from Albania are being stacked up like cord wood – Liam even shoots his one time friend’s wife. There is carnage wherever anyone puts up any resistance to returning his daughter to him. That is one cool compass, largely because he did a lot of morally bankrupt things that were made righteous because he was searching for his kidnapped daughter.
Oh, if only my own moral compass had been so perfectly calibrated. I could do no wrong because even if I did something wrong, it would be for the right reasons, not the shaky ones that I come up with on the fly.
While I would like to think that my moral compass was once rock steady, I recall a time when I was just six years old. My mother took the boys with her to the T & R supermarket in the Highlands. While roaming the store, I saw a big tub of peanuts. I really wanted a peanut. But as I picked one up my brother bitch slapped me up side the head. He said it was a sin to steal.
Well, I’ve sinned plenty since. Even a bitch slap couldn’t fix my moral compass, which I can’t really recall if I had with me at the time.
And therein lies part of the problem. I don’t always seem to have my moral compass with me, especially when I travel. That’s when all hell seems to break loose as I assume that a different set of rules applies once I have left the state or worse, the country.
Liam didn’t have that problem in the movie. His moral compass was the same in Frances as it was in the states. Mine, well, I can only guess that I forget to reset it to local time as my morality runs about three to six hours behind. I only come to question things long after the fact.
I know, of course, that Liam’s moral compass isn’t so unshakeable as all that. No one’s is in the real world. And there’s a reason for that: Liam has a writer determining what his moral compass is set to.
As we all know, writers live on very shaky ground when it comes to their own morality. Our moral compass is more like a Cuisinart that minces, dices and frappes everything until the lines are so blurred we have no idea what reality really is.
As such, our own moral compass is already spinning around and around, rarely pointing anywhere that is true. We live in complete moral turpitude, largely because we are by nature chameleons, injecting our own selves into the people and places we write about.
So when the chance arises to write about a hero or heroine who has a rock solid moral compass, we jump at the opportunity because it’s our only chance to know what it’s like to have one ourselves.
Let’s face it. A moral compass is the perfect device for telling a good story. Having a stalwart main character – one whose actions all come from a singular viewpoint of right and wrong – is like going on a holiday in your own mind. This hero or heroine can be something we can never be: morally unflappable. The hero will die for a cause or kill others for it. He will face the greatest odds and through his moral fiber alone, overcome them. He never sells out, never questions his own values or sense of self.
We can never do this as writers, of course. We sell out all the time. We have all the moral fiber of rice paper. While we like to hold all the cards, we are willing, ready and able to fold at a moment’s notice.
Perhaps that’s why I love a great story with a hero or heroine. You always know that they, unlike you, will do the right thing. Rambo never went postal and shot his own men as he escaped the evil clutches of the Viet Cong. Luke Skywalker never went into his father’s line of work. Superman never let the world go to hell in a handbasket because he wanted to show Lois how super he was in the sack.
Such is the beauty of being a writer. Now if I could only write that kind or morality into my own life story. But really, why bother. My moral compass is just fine. It’s all over the place and I kind of like it that way. It makes life far more interesting, and if nothing else, gives you lots of fodder for filling pages.
In the Emerald City, waiting for my compass to come back from the shop – I’m having the point superglued to Northwest,
– Robb