There’s been a bit of talk about Tom Cruise’s new movie Valkyrie and how Tom Cruise speaks without a German accent despite playing a German character. I don’t understand that really. Having your characters speak in outrageous accents didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Why exactly is it offensive to have a Chinese character say “Me so solly” and yet it’s expected for a German character to speak like “Zis und Zat”? Aren’t those really the same thing?

I’d understand those sorts of accent in a film which is based on English speaking events, but the events of Valkyrie all took place in the real world in German. The fact that those events have been transcribed to English means that the audience should simply accept that some invisible translation has occurred for their sake. (Also, I know that many Americans during World War 2 spoke German fluently as a disguise, why couldn’t Germans have done the same thing?)

A couple reviews I’ve read — mostly through blogs, traditional media wouldn’t dare be so glib about a WW2 movie — essentially cast aside the movie because of the “unauthentic” accents. The people the film is based on spoke perfect and unaccented German. It was their native tongue. So it makes sense to me that any retelling of this story in the English speaking world would either be entirely in German (unfeasible for commercial reasons) or use English as the primary language and treat the characters as if it was their native tongue (what seems to have been done). Then again, I haven’t seen the movie so I should probably just shut my mouth until I can decide how distracting the American accent is.

The cool thing to do now in TV and film is to go “dark.” That is, to take a character down a turbulent, depressing, and possibly disturbing path to bring greater depth to them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there is something wrong with the idea that merely having “dark” stories brings character development or that it improves the quality of your stories. (There is also the implied assumption that to bring depth to your character you need to take this darker path; if you need an example of excellent character growth without the trappings of “dark” storytelling just watch The Office.)

Of course, dark stories come in different shapes and sizes. The Dark Knight was a much grimmer and darker look into both Batman and Joker’s psyches, and it delved into their interdependence on each other. That’s good dark. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the characters endure a crushing war which drastically changed many of the characters and it explored the complex relationship between politics and religion and science. That’s good dark. Oldboy is the story of a man imprisoned for 15 years for reasons unknown who is given a week to discover why; Oldboy examines solitude, the influence others have on you, the monsters inside everyone, and many other disturbing and difficult questions. That is good dark.

But there’s a very bad trend, which seems most pronounced among sequels and spin-off shows, with a very different, and lazy, technique of telling darker stories: the deal with the devil. In Stargate Atlantis, the Atlantis expedition will on occasion tentatively join forces with the Wraith, the enemy du jour of the Pegasus Galaxy. On Star Trek Voyager, the crew reluctantly joins forces with the Borg to stop a common enemy more powerful than both.

The deal with the devil isn’t necessarily bad, but it needs to make sense. Team Atlantis wouldn’t join forces with the Wraith, or at least they shouldn’t because it doesn’t make sense; the Wraith are not a morally ambiguous group, they were designed to be essentially pure evil. The Atlantis team, and similarly the crew of Voyager, are bastions of sanctimonious self-righteousness and to have them coordinate with these evil groups reeks of story superseding character.

The point of dark stories is not to be cool. It’s not to be dangerous. It’s certainly not to tell dark stories. As always, it’s all about the characters. If your characters have inner demons requiring exploration of inseemly qualities, or they aren’t portrayed as a paragon of propriety, then their story can naturally progress toward those darker stories and possibly come back from it a stronger person and a richer character. But TV shows, and obviously movies as well, shouldn’t use it as a crutch to sustain their weak plots by sacrificing their characters, and viewers shouldn’t accept it.