Love & Uncharted: Cliché in the Modern Era

A professor once told me there is only one story. Every piece of content with some semblance of a narrative comes from the same place and tries to do the same things. The Odyssey can be impenetrably dense to some, but in just how many ways does it differ from Batman vs. Superman? A rugged older gentleman is set adrift while he struggles to conquer his demons; a younger man, full of passion and strength, must prove himself in the face of enemies surrounding him. Stories are intensely human creations, however and whenever they’re created. Intrigue and cliché are, therefore, universally applicable. When telling stories, video games and television shows succeed for the same reasons. Netflix’s Love and Naughty Dog’s Uncharted are different stories pursuing identical goals in identical ways, but these seemingly radically different forms of content are really comrades-in-arms in the fight against trope, rehash, and stagnancy.

The most compelling stories are ones that flirt with cliché but stop short of fully committing. Clichés are awesome. Love that can stand the test of time. A man wronged taking what’s owed. As a culture, we love these kinds of stories; we love them so much we’ve tired of them, but we haven’t tired of what lies beneath. Take Uncharted, for example. Nathan Drake is an attractive, white, heterosexual man. Naughty Dog hardly trampled on anyone’s preconceived idea of an action hero, but that’s not to say Drake isn’t a fantastic character. He might be attractive, but he’s not sexualized; he might be heterosexual, but he’s hardly intent on making the ladies swoon. His heart’s set on adventure and adrenaline sometimes to a fault, sometimes at the cost of his relationships. Drake is human; he’s flawed. And not in the he’s perfect and his life’s perfect but he struggles too sense either. Drake, in the first game and briefly in the third, has to deal with the possibility of his mentor, Victor Sullivan, dying on a quest Drake dragged him on. Drake similarly has to contend with the knowledge that this predilection of his for adventure cost him his marriage to Elena. Naughty Dog might have grounded their character in the familiar, but taking a trope and turning it on its head is compelling in of itself.

Netflix’s Love inverts trope in a similar fashion. Gus and Mickey are sheltered white youths turning the corner, in terms of maturity, from the partying of their 20s to ideas of settling down in their 30s. In Mickey we have the quintessential “hot girl” who’s obviously gorgeous, but, oh brother, she’s a little crazy too! In Gus we have a “nerd” who writes awful, but still kind of awesome, theme songs to movies with his friends; sure it’s cheesy, but underneath all those years of watching TV over approaching girls at a bar, there’s a certain charm. Though, Mickey and Gus are so much more than their summaries. Mickey, it turns out, isn’t all that well-adjusted. She doesn’t know how to handle herself. She’s too distant and then too overbearing. She wants Gus to open the door and let her in while she keeps him a block away. And Gus is similarly fallible; he might be, ironically, more suave than Mickey, but he loses sight of what’s (and who’s) important. The tiniest promotion at work derails the fragile orbit of his life. Both Mickey and Gus (and Drake) are human beings. They’re built of stereotype and nuance alike; they’re rooted in preconception but inevitably dash what people come to expect of them.

An overwhelming hallmark of modernity and, frankly, a compelling piece of content is the influence of the feminist movement. Women have had a raw deal when it comes to their portrayal in popular culture (and in many other ways, no doubt). Be it demonizing women for being “crazy,” weirdly preying on drunk girls at the bar, or men building their lives around “getting” the girl, to name a very few, it got old. Sexism is cliché, and not the kind of cliche that’s based in some compelling archetypal construct. But getting it right is a lot less complicated than you might think. Women are actually people too. They are heroic, intelligent, sexual, anxious, confused, funny, and prone to anger all in equal measure to men.

Uncharted and Love are no strangers to human nature. Elena is smart, determined, level-headed, driven, and last of all gorgeous — she’s also sometimes too laser-focused on getting what she wants, which exacts a toll on her relationships (much like Drake). After a while, Elena’s model-like looks and physique fade into the background because Naughty Dog makes it clear her sexual identity isn’t all that important to the narrative. Elena’s a person; she’s rich with layers, the least relevant of which is how she looks. Chloe is the flipside of the coin: she’s a much more sexual being, but she’s the one to make the moves. More importantly, underneath her ultra-confident façade is a fragility. Bravado masks a deeper need to abate a loneliness that threatens to consume her if she would only let it. Mickey does her part to transcend the idea that women are strange creatures; there’s no code to crack or secret to interacting with them.

Mickey makes mistakes. She’s not always likable, but she’s much more than a fantastical imagining of a woman — she is one. Even her roommate, Bertie, has a cliché-breaking sense of self-possession and self-confidence uncharacteristic of a “shy girl.” Bertie knows what (and who) she likes and isn’t afraid to make that known; she will speak up when she’s wronged, even though she’s nicer than fresh baked apple pie. In one sense, Elena, Chloe, Mickey, and Bertie are all physically perfect women roughly adhering to preconception — the “in front of your eyes all along girl,” the “temptress,” the “hot girl,” and the “shy girl,” respectively — but they’re much more than their stereotypes.

What characters do and the events surrounding them are just as important as the characters themselves. Uncharted isn’t your typical firefight-filled romp through the jungle. Sure, lots of faceless, one-dimensional goons meet their end, but Naughty Dog highjacks, in every title, the well-drawn, historically-rooted adventure set out before our characters. In Drake’s Fortune, a climactic showdown with the scummy Eddy Raja turns into a fight against supernatural man-beasts to survive. In Among Thieves, the trail of a war criminal leads our intrepid band into mountains which hide a sinister secret: the gateway to a mythical land and its otherworldly defenders. In Drake’s Deception, a trek through the desert turns into the exploration of a delusion-inducing city of legend. Each Uncharted lulls the player into a false sense of security until the story nears its end and there’s a distinctive turn for the unbelievable.

Love might seem like a Judd Apatow romcom, but it’s not: it’s much more Girls than the 40 Year Old Virgin. The leads aren’t together by the end of the first episode. Love does its part to make the viewer think they know what’s happening but then dashes expectation. The initial episodes have Mickey and Gus meet and even hit it off, but there’s no jump into a relationship. Even when the dam feels like it’s been broken and finally Gus and Mickey go out together, the date doesn’t go very well and the relationship slows down. Love, at least in the first season, is not a show about a relationship — it’s about the lives of two individuals who sometimes cross paths with one another. This connection of questionable strength is then tested constantly. Relationships are hard, and that’s not limited to the drama between halves of a couple. Only by the very final scene of the season is the viewer given a sense that something real between the leads is to come. The season is one long prelude to a relationship, and that’s why it’s so interesting. It’s a romcom without the romance. This larger narrative structure is part of a story schematic antithetical to the meet, date, break-up, get back together sequence of events well known to viewers.

The line between freshness and cliché is microscopic, and how much you appreciate the straddling of this line depends on much content you’ve consumed. Preferences aside, a break from the norm is only significant with an understanding of what the norm is, but just as Pixar films are engaging to children and adults alike, so must content appeal to both veterans and newcomers. As such, for creators, historically compelling stories are good places to start. Uncharted is an action game where a hero finds treasure, defeats bad guys, and saves the world; Love is a show about two people who meet and eventually fall for one another. But upon closer examination, both are deconstructions of the respective genres they’re a part of, rejecting known clichés and introducing new mechanics to keep any viewer engaged. While, certainly, they’re different mediums and tell stories of varied scopes, Uncharted and Love skirt the line between been-done and want-to-see; they marry the idea of uniqueness with what consumers have historically been compelled by within cliché, and that is what makes a story — or a larger piece of content — successful.

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