The Gray Man: Everything T/K

Assembled form the finest, most shopworn generic parts.

Ryan Gosling is pretty.

The concept of the cliche is misunderstood. Sure, as a writer you have to be careful about using cliches and other generic story ingredients because it brings a level of predictability to your story, and it screams lack of effort—most cliches can and should be replaced with something just slightly richer, more interesting, and more original¹. This is a muscle that most writers develop, the ability to identity a piece of lazy, generic writing and think of something with just a touch more spark to it. It’s sometimes a challenge, and often exhausting², but always worth it.

On the other hand, cliches become that way because they work. These generic story components pop up a lot for that simple reason. Sometimes it’s just the easiest way to get a story moving after you’ve written yourself into a bit of a corner, sometimes a writer puts in a tired old cliche as a placeholder, figuring they’ll do something more interesting with it tomorrow, then drinks a bottle or two of peach schnapps and loses a few weeks of time, and just leaves it in. Because, again, cliches work³.

Every now and then, however, you encounter a story that doesn’t just use the occasional cliche as a bridge between rough spots in the story or even as an example of temporary laziness, but which builds an entire narrative out of several cliches, essentially telling a whole story using nothing but the most familiar and overused elements. As an example of this triumph of meh storytelling, I present to you The Gray Man.

Meh

Ana de Armas is pretty.

I haven’t read the novels this film was based on, so I won’t be commenting on them. The film stars Ryan Gosling as Sigma Six, the sixth and apparently last “gray man,” a group of former criminals recruited by the CIA to do the messy work the agency itself couldn’t touch—not quite a freelancer or mercenary, not quite a real CIA agent⁴. Six did crimes, but as it turns out, they were the sort of justified crimes you can get behind⁵. Six comes across some compromising information that proves a high-ranking CIA muckety muck named Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page, handsome) has been doing some very sketchy stuff on company time. Six heads into the wind with his data, and Carmichael sics Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans), a sociopathic freelancer who washed out of the CIA because of his tendency to cause collateral damage, to track Six down using any means necessary. He eventually kidnaps a young girl that Six bonded with when working as her bodyguard, as well as her uncle, who happens to be Six’s avuncular mentor at the CIA and the man who recruited him in the first place⁶.

So, to recap, if you’re playing spy thriller cliche bingo at home, you have just won⁷. We have a hero skilled in and capable of violence who has a very strong ethical sense, who gets to show his soft, caring side by violently protecting a young girl⁸, who is betrayed by a high-ranking bureaucrat and has to battle a villain who lacks any redeeming quality whatsoever⁹. There is, in other words, not a single original idea in the entire film—it’s cobbled together from the spare parts of other spy thrillers, usually the most common and recognizable ones.

And here’s the thing: It all works, in the same way my old 1976 Chevy Nova ‘worked.’ It works precisely because there’s not a single risk taken. It embraces every boring cliche of the genre, from the noble anithero to the brutal antagonist who only has one personality trait. It takes these leftovers and combines them with the tired competence of a professional chef making a grilled cheese sandwich for a four-year-old and it hums along like a 2005 Ford Taurus that has never missed an oil change¹⁰.

Gray Everything

Chris Evans’ mustache is pretty.

That’s the funny thing about generic cliches like those—they become cliches for a reason, and you can definitely stitch them together into a perfectly cromulent narrative, and hope that something else about your story rises above and sets your story apart. If you’re writing a novel constructed out of the desiccated cliches of other novels, that might be sparkling dialog or a truly surprising plot twist¹¹. In The Gray Man it’s clearly the powerful charisma of both Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, two good-looking guys who have a bit of fun snapping off uninspired zingers and camping up their spy cosplay. They each got paid a load of cash to appear in the film, and their performances do manage to elevate it just enough to make it an enjoyable movie to have on in the background while you do other, presumably more interesting things¹².

This is a movie that has Ana de Armas playing a CIA operative who becomes disillusioned just so she can show up at key moments and save Six’s ass when his character gets stuck in a plot corner like an NPC in a video game trying to climb a low wall¹³. Her character’s sole function, which doubles as her sole trait, is to doubt the official line on what’s going on and to stop the CIA from murdering whoever it is they’re trying to murder as a matter of course. This is a movie that hires Billy Bob Thornton to play an old CIA mandarin despite the fact that Billy Bob Thornton has been phoning in his performances from an undisclosed location that might as well be Neptune since 1997 at least¹⁴. This is a movie that then hires Alfre Woodard to play a MI6 mandarin dying of cancer so she can class up the joint for approximately 3 minutes of screen time¹⁵.

The lesson here is this: If Netflix offers to dump a garbage truck full of cash on your lawn in exchange for a script as long as you can deliver it tomorrow¹⁶, you can in fact construct a story entirely from cliches. Should you? Well, yes, of course, there’s a garbage truck filled with cash on its way, you idiot¹⁷.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to Google how to boil shoe leather so its edible <bursts into writerly tears>.

Next week: The suffering will continue until morale improves on Peaky Blinders.

1. Professional note: Slightly is all you need.

2. Is “SOMETIMES A CHALLENGE, ALWAYS EXHAUSTING” the new title of my memoir? Probably.

3. As does peach schnapps, assuming your goal was to lose time.

4. Somehow the most quaint aspect of this premise is the idea that there are things the CIA won’t do because of ethical or legal concerns.

5. Like tax evasion, murdering pedophiles, or stealing your ex’s Netflix password.

6. You can tell this character is a wise mentor because he is: Old.

7. Your prize is smug satisfaction.

8. Badass heroes cannot show their caring side by protecting a young boy, of course. The reasons behind this convention are the same reasons I have been drinking heavily instead of expressing my emotions since I was 13.

9. Probably one of the worst sins a story can make is to have a villain who is simply a one-dimensional asshole. Speaking as a villainous, white cis male asshole, I can assure you we have layers.

10. 'Tired competence’ is the brand I’ve been trying to establish since 2001. The main challenge has been my complete lack of competence.

11. For me, that “something else” is profanity.

12. Future scientists will study the phenomenon that streaming has gifted to us: The Background Noise Entertainment. This has always been a thing, of course, but the always-on, art as “content” era we’re struggling through has really superpowered it.

13. Something tells me the screenwriters thought having a young, hot chick save Six’s ass was somehow surprising, because, yanno, a lady kicking ass? How delightfully unexpected! If you’re living in 1978.

14. Just about every scene has Billy Bob Thornton seated comfortably, making me assume it was written into his contract that Billy Bob doesn’t have to stand, ever.

15. I’m starting to suspect this film was greenlit during Netflix’s ‘we’ll just dump a garbage truck full of cash on your lawn if you have a script of some sort’ phase, now sadly over.

16. We’re thisclose to just having our entertainments created by AI and I’m starting to suspect we’ll never notice the difference.

17. Just a housekeeping note: I will do many, many unsavory things for a garbage truck filled with cash, and you’d be surprised at how small the truck can actually be. Hit me up.