Screenwriting: Writing Hate Speech Dialog
The 2016 presidential election is an excellent time for screenwriters looking for inspiration into the nature of hate and conflict. Nothing infuses conflict like hate speech, and conflict is the essence of storytelling.
Partisan divide is a given. However, Donald Trump has wedged a racial divide not seen since the days th Ku Klux Klan in the 20s or the Civil unrest of the 60s. For a screenwriter, imagining Trump dialog in private is far scarier than anything he's said in public.
Trump has also been labeled a narcissistic psychopath, although narcissist is generally considered a characterization associated with psychopath. Still, Trump's public rhetoric is dangerous enough. In combination with the racial divide generated from white cops shooting blacks and blacks shooting white cops, and the fears of ISIS and Muslim extremism, the potential for Trump to say something really bad is very real, and could plunge the country into a bloodbath.
Movies allow characters to say things no one in their right mind would ever say in a newspaper or online, not without an anonymous username. Trolls are particularly adept at name-calling and saying the most horrible things. For instance, from the 587board.com/bbs, "BREAKING: A nigger just shot a cop at a Houston gas station. A violent animal like subhuman nigger just took a life."
How bulletin boards manage to exist is a controversy in free speech in itself. The attacks on women, Jews, Muslims, and just about anything else that can be attacked, are brutal and uncontrolled. Along with an ongoing bullying problem and hackers invading coporate and government IT, there's plenty of dialog to feed the fodder of hate speech.
Creating antagonistic characters has its drawbacks in terms of the mental and emotional health of the storytellers who create them. Some screenwriters might say creating evil characters is cathartic and revealing, bringing to light the inner workings of the evil mind. But like Edward Norton's character in the Red Dragon, the toll taken from crawling into the nightmareish caves of an evil mind can drive a good mind mad.
Considering the rampant infusion of violence in movies, TV and video games, creating violent evil characters does not require that much probing into psychology and motivation. It's believed some industry professionals are paid to come up with new and unique ways to slaughter humans.
As a largely visual medium, we don't need to hear characters say bad things, we just need to see them hack people into pieces with blood splattering all over the walls. The commercialism of violence becomes mundane and doesn't come close to getting a rise out of audiences as much hate speech spoken directly by characters.
The goal is to get a rise out of the audience, and in the movies (or any visual media), characters can say anything screenwriters want them to say, no matter how evil, no matter how cruel, no matter how disgusting.
Hate also begats hate. It takes a real special personality to fight hate with love. Proponents of love as the ultimate weapon against hate must be able to endure carnage and destruction without resorting to fighting back, save for self-defense.
Love pundits could play the self-defense card, claiming self-defense is the only time where doing harm is justified. But like the famous photos of the 60s where hippies stuck their fingers into the barrels of guns pointed at them, absolute refusal to fight will get you dead. We never saw what would've happened had one of the soldier's pulled the trigger at the moment a peace demonstrator's finger was stuck in the barrel.
Following is a random exploration into the most horrible kinds of thoughts and things people can say and do. For me personally, coming up with my own hate speech dialog is not purging. It scares the hell out of me. Are the examples I come up with things I've heard or things my own imagination conjured up?
How much do I hate but never express? Is this the appeal of someone like Donald Trump, who allegedly speaks for all those whose thoughts, words and actions are tightly bound by the constraints of political correctness?
Trump followers support him because they believe he "speaks his mind." There is also such a thing as saying the wrong thing. Saying the wrong thing, coming from a presidential nominee, can turn freedom of speech into a platform for freedom to openly hate, and letting go of that hate will only generate violence, cause harm, and perhaps even destroy lives.
Following are quotes from the movies and elsewhere, largely culled from IMDB and other online sources. Links are provided.
Abu Muhammad al-Adnani (spokesman for ISIS): Smash his head with a rock or slaughter him with a knife or run him over with your car.
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/isis-told-supporters-run-people-cars-years-nice-article-1.2712241
Perry (In Cold Blood): It doesn't make sense. I mean what happened. It had nothing to do with the Clutters. They never hurt me. They just happened to be there. I thought Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman... I thought so right up to the time I cut his throat.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/In_Cold_Blood_(film)
Pastor Roger Jimenez, Verity Baptist Church, Sacramento (speaking on the Florida gay club massacre): The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die. The tragedy is — I’m kind of upset that he didn’t finish the job!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/06/14/pastor-refuses-to-mourn-orlando-victims-the-tragedy-is-that-more-of-them-didnt-die/
Pastor Steven Anderson, Faithful Word Baptist Church, Tempe, Arizona (speaking on the Florida gay club massacre): But these people all should have been killed, anyway, but they should have been killed through the proper channels, as in they should have been executed by a righteous government that would have tried them, convicted them, and saw them executed. Because, in Leviticus 20:13, God’s perfect law, he put the death penalty on murder, and he also put the death penalty on homosexuality. That’s what the Bible says, plain and simple.
So, you know, the good news is that at least 50 of these pedophiles are not gonna be harming children anymore. The bad news is that a lot of the homos in the bar are still alive, so they’re gonna continue to molest children and recruit people into their filthy homosexual lifestyle… I’m not sad about it, I’m not gonna cry about it. Because these… 50 people in a gay bar that got shot up, they were gonna die of AIDS, and syphilis, and whatever else. They were all gonna die early, anyway, because homosexuals have a 20-year shorter life-span than normal people, anyway.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/06/12/christian-pastor-celebrates-nightclub-massacre-theres-50-less-pedophiles-in-this-world/
Jack Torrance (The Shining): Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said, I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in!
From the website, Wehatefatpeople.wordpress.com: "A fat person cannot be beautiful. Mentally or physically, it is IMPOSSIBLE. You’re a fatty and you are UGLY in many ways. You have a disgustingly chubby face. Your torso is nasty. Your arms and legs are flabby. You’re character deficient because you have no self-respect. You’re a disgrace to your ancestors and yourself. I hate you. I don’t even know you and I HATE YOU."
https://wehatefatpeople.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/reason-to-hate-fat-people-1-they-automatically-look-unaesthetic/
John Wayne: I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves. https://www.azquotes.com/quotes/topics/white-supremacy.html
Don Zaluchi (The Godfather, speaking about drugs): I don't want it near schools! I don't want it sold to children! That's an infamia. In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people, the coloreds. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.
Commodus (Gladiator): They tell me your son squealed like a girl when they nailed him to the cross.
Hannibal Lector (Silence of the Lambs): A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
Grand High Witch (The Witches): Everywhere i look, I see the repulsive sight of hundreds, thousands of revolting little children.
Donald Trump
The number of quotes by Donald Trump is immeasurable. Simply do a Google search and make yourself sick.
"My IQ is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don't feel so stupid or insecure; it's not your fault."
“Ariana Huffington is unattractive, both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man. He made a good decision."
"You know, it doesn't really matter what [the media] write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass."
"He's not a war hero," Trump said of Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Republican. "He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured."
"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot people and I wouldn't lose voters," Trump said at a rally in Iowa, pointing his finger at the crowd like he was shooting a handgun, as he expressed confidence that he would remain atop the Republican field.
"(Hillary Clinton is) very talented, very smart. She's a friend of mine, so I'm a little prejudiced." (2007)
As an endcap, believe it or not, there is a site called Insults.net.
When a screenwriter writes dialog, is it born from the character or the writer's own thoughts and feelings? Either way, crawling into the mind of an evil character might be fun for some, and dangerous for others. Sometimes it's a wonder if writers reflect evil and hate, or if what they write generates it.