Others Have Actions, I Have Reasons

One of my favorite scenes in Deadwood happens in the finale of the first season. Al Swearengen, the villain, kills the universally beloved town preacher (played by the brilliant Ray McKinnon, who I would later have an opportunity to work with on the show Rectify). Al suffocates the preacher to death with his bare hands and uses the moment as an opportunity to teach one of his henchmen how to properly suffocate a man to death. This is a moment that should ring as one of the most horrific acts that this horrible man commits, but the context makes it a lot more complicated.

The preacher was in a state of constant suffering brought on by a brain tumor for which the doctor had no solution. In the prior scene, we had just seen the doctor on his knees, begging God to end the poor man’s suffering.

Throughout the doctor’s entire prayer, we played no music, letting the raw and visceral emotions of his desperate plea play out in silence. The music comes in only on his final words, “I beg you to relent, thy will be done.” Just a simple tone, a high note that composers Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil created to be something reminiscent of a church organ layered with an angelic choir. Just a tone that comes from that moment of prayer and continues as we watch this horrific murder. Just a single tone that turns Al, for a moment, from a villain to an angel of death.

One of the cool things about a well told narrative is that it doesn’t just tell us what the characters did. It tells us why. That’s where the old cliché about actors asking, “what’s my character’s motivation” comes from. Great storytellers know that you have to do more than just reveal the plot, you need to convey the characters’ intentions. We, as the audience, get to judge Al not by his actions but by his intentions. And we don’t just sympathize with the character who does the wrong thing for the right reason, we love him for it.

Twenty years later I’m working on Government Cheese, for Apple TV+ and a character pulls the opposite move.

Hampton, freshly out of prison, is attempting to rebuild his relationship with his family, but he needs money because he owes it to some bad people. So he agrees to do a heist, a terrible heist. He robs a synagogue. There is no ethical question, what he’s doing is bad. He is struggling morally with his choices but he has convinced himself, and subsequently the audience, that he is ultimately doing it all for his family.

In an attempt to reconnect with his son, he takes him camping, and from his son’s perspective this is a big father-son bonding moment. But Hampton sneaks away and commits the heist in the middle of the night and then sneaks back. It turns out the whole camping trip was just cover to establish an alibi for the heist.

He is doing the right thing by his family taking his son camping, but he’s doing it for the wrong reason, to establish an alibi. And when his son finds that out, it ruins it for him. And it ruins it for us the audience too. That’s the second half. We absolutely hate people who do the right thing for the wrong reason.

It’s easy to see how you can come to opposite conclusions when you judge someone by their actions and not by their intentions. This sets up a real mismatch because, unlike in fiction, in the real world we aren’t privy to other people’s intentions, only their actions. The only person’s intentions you truly have access to are your own. We are driven by our own intentions. They lead our actions, but we are stuck trying to guess others’ intentions after we see them act and after we have had our own emotional reactions to those actions.

As a result of this mismatch we can only really judge others by their actions and we can only really judge ourselves by our intentions.

So we’re stuck. We can’t judge people solely by their actions, fiction and experience teach us this often leads to opposite judgments than we would come to if we knew the whole story, so we simply imagine what their intentions are. But way too often we ascribe people worse intentions than the ones they actually have. It’s the cause of most conflicts, the same action leading to two different narratives.

Too often we are telling ourselves a story about another person that maybe isn’t exactly true. We carry resentment and anger that may not be how we would feel if we only knew why they did whatever it is they did.

The good news is fiction gives us the tools to solve this problem in reality. Just being the audience of good stories has given us all the practice at judging not only ourselves, but others by their intentions. Al wasn’t just freeing the doctor of his suffering, he was revealing a pathway to free ourselves from a lot of our suffering too. It’s an opportunity for us to practice being better storytellers to ourselves.

When you find yourself in conflict, or surprised by what you imagine to be someone else’s bad behavior, imagine a story in which their intentions are pure. Are you sure that’s not true?

Imagine a story in which they had no choice. Are you sure that’s not true?

The truth is you can’t ever truly know what someone else’s intentions are, but you have an infinite number of stories you can imagine. You can ascribe them whatever intentions you want in your mind. Practice being an overly generous storyteller here. Imagine a scenario where they are the hero for taking this seemingly bad action. Are you sure that’s not true?

The first benefit of this way of thinking is to you and it is immediate. You get to be happier in that moment, freeing yourself of the negative feelings that you feel towards someone, which may or may not be justified and replacing them with one that feels good, empathy. But there is a second hidden benefit.

Sometimes people actually do have bad intentions and act badly as a result. We have all regretted something we did or said after we did or said it. Often in that scenario, we feel like there is no way out. We did a bad thing and have no way to justify it, even to ourselves.

But when someone gives you a better way to think about the bad actions, you’ll take that off ramp that redeems you. The simple act of imagining someone being a better actor than they actually are gives them a pathway to walk down where they become that better actor. The really cool thing is that trick not only works on others. It works on ourselves.