Warning! Mild Ghostbusters and Be Kind Rewind spoilers ahead!

This is a silly post for a silly subject.

Ghostbusters is a key movie for Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind: not only is it the first movie the Jack Black and Mos Def characters remake—”swede”— but the two movies actually share the same plotline: friends going-into-business.

Kurt Vonnegut:

Anyone can graph a simple story if he or she will crucify it, so to speak, on the intersecting axes I here depict:

“G” stands for good fortune. “I” stands for ill fortune. “B” stands for the beginning of a story. “E” stands for its end.

A much beloved story in our society is about a person who is leading a bearable life, who experiences misfortune, who overcomes misfortune, and who is happier afterward for having demonstrated resourcefulness and strength. As a graph, that story looks like this:

This story shape describes most comedies, especially romantic ones:

In the case of the going into business story, it goes like this:

1. friends go into business to wild success (good fortune)
2. business gets shut down by government agency (misfortune)
3. the community rallies behind the friends to save their world (good fortune)

Here’s Ghostbusters:

1. Friends get kicked out of Columbia, go into business for themselves, land on the cover of Time magazine, etc.
2. Walter Peck from the EPA comes down and shuts down the power grid and all hell breaks loose
3. the mayor gets the Ghostbusters out of jail, NYC rallies behind them, and they kick Gozer’s ass

Now Be Kind Rewind:

1. Jack Black erases the tapes, so he and Mos Def have to record their own movies, and everybody loves them
2. the lawyers from the MPAA come to shut them down (and the developers want to tear down the building!)
3. the ‘hood rallies, they make the Fats Waller documentary together, and they have the screening in the building so the developers can’t tear it down

It’s a great plot because it has great American themes: friendship, capitalism, and community.

Okay. So this post might not pass the “so what” test. I’ve had a couple margaritas…sue me.

Can anyone else think of other “going into business” plotlines?

Kurt Vonnegut’s master’s thesis in anthropology was rejected by the University of Chicago. “It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut writes. “One must not be too playful.” This excerpt from PALM SUNDAY, is the gist of his argument:

Anyone can graph a simple story if he or she will crucify it, so to speak, on the intersecting axes I here depict:

“G” stands for good fortune. “I” stands for ill fortune. “B” stands for the beginning of a story. “E” stands for its end.

A much beloved story in our society is about a person who is leading a bearable life, who experiences misfortune, who overcomes misfortune, and who is happier afterward for having demonstrated resourcefulness and strength. As a graph, that story looks like this:

Another story of which Americans never seem to tire is about a person who becomes happier upon finding something he or she likes a lot. The person loses whatever it is, and then gets it back forever. As a graph, it looks like this:

An American Indian creation myth, in which a god of some sort gives the people the sun and then the moon and then the bow and arrow and then the corn and so on, is essentially a staircase, a tale of accumulation:

Almost all creation myths are staircases like that. Our own creation myth, taken from the Old Testament, is unique, so far as I could discover, in looking like this:

The sudden drop in fortune, of course, is the ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” in which an already hopelessly unhappy man turns into a cockroach, looks like this:

Have a look [at "Cinderella"]:

The steps you see, are all the presents the fairy godmother gave to Cinderella….The sudden drop is the stroke of midnight at the ball….But then the prince finds her and marries her, and she is infinitely happy ever after. She gets all the stuff back, and then some. A lot of people think the story is trash, and, on graph paper, it certainly looks like trash.

But then I said to myself, Wait a minute–those steps at the beginning look like the creation myth of virtually every society on earth. And then I saw that the stroke of midnight looked exactly like the unique creation myth in the Old Testament. And then I saw that the rise to bliss at the end was identical with the expectation of redemption as expressed in primitive Christianity.

The tales were identical.

UPDATE: Vonnegut goes over this again in A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY, which I’m currently listening to on audiotape (so no diagrams…but never fear: Gerry over at Backwards City has posted the chalkboard graph of “The Metamorphosis.”)