Rules, breaking them, and why people should stop trying to.

I was once told by a teacher; "You have to know the rules before you can break them", and for the most part, this is a flawed argument.  If you don't know the speed limit, you can still break it. Yay for being a literal person!

The core of the quote, however, is true: if you're going to create something that shatters the rules, you have to know those rules.  Otherwise, it's just open and breezy.  While that's fine for somethings, it does a poor job of breaking the Rules.

For instance: Women in Movies!  Yay! Sexism! Woot.

By now, we all know the words to this argument; women don't get their fair place in the industry.  Usually it's a writer making every female character somehow represent everything they hate about women, best shown by them exhibiting the exact same "positive character flaws" as men, but only shown as "negative character flaws" when it's them.  Yes, character flaws can be good and bad.  Adam Sandler can scream and be generally the equivilent of a crazed man you'd slowly back away from at the store, and it's "funny".  A woman in the same movie does it, and she's obviously the villain in this story.

Or, it can be the genre as a whole: next time you watch an action film, try to see how the women fight.  Do they fight by hurling their dominance on the end of their fist into the enemies smug face?  Crunching bone and sinew?  Do they kick down doors and take no names?  Or do they fight like something out of the Matrix?  Big air moves, lots of flipping and throwing?  Do they do that really cool move where she grabs his arm, leaps up quickly, hooks his face with her legs and hurls him while she sticks the landing?

Yeah, the word is "Waif-fu" and it's used when they want to show that a "little" woman can beat up bigger men.  Part of this is due to the fact you rarely find women in Hollywood who are big and bulky fighter types, but you find a lot of men like that.  That part isn't really sexism, there's just not a lot of actresses who decide to train for that build.  

Now, the point of this is that we see things that try to break this mold constantly, but they do it with such an over abundant measure that we can only roll our eyes at it.  They make it the whole point of the movie that "this is a woman", that we forget that there was supposed to be some entertainment here.  You're not breaking the rules there, you're pointed them out.  When this is done, they tend to forget that there was a reason behind the rule breaking.

All the best films break the rules set in place by the weaker ones.  Kill Bill, Kick-Ass, Avengers, A slew of new Disney (since their job is to be ahead of this curve).  But ask yourself, why?  Why is breaking these rules such a big deal?  Because breaking these rules is what makes us grow, and growth is goddamn interesting to watch.  We love it.  Those three movies up there?  They're super hero movies, and each one of them breaks the rules behind hero movies, even when the rule is clearly seen, they just walk over that line not even looking down.

"Not even looking down" is key there, because when you look for that line, you will find it, and you will find nothing else.  Don't try to break the rules, for the sake of breaking the rules, that will simply leave you and your audience bored.  Yes, we can make a movie where a female character is portrayed as something new and inventive for both genders, but the point is missed if that's the point of the story. 

No one cares if you walk up to a line, and boldly state that you will cross it, wait for dramatic tension, and then cross it expecting applause.  We're too busy watching the person who's just steam rolling through it all, waving massive flag of "eat it" while giving precisely 0 fucks as to what they step on.  Rules would only get in the way of their story.

Unless of course, you're "The Walking Dead" inwhich your first scene is breaking a rule (deliberately killing a child character in a violent way by a hero) in an effort to point out "this is the starting point for our rule breaking".  That is, of course, breaking the rule listed above.

Don't try to break rules, either live in them, or step out of them, but don't spend your time trying to make a point about something that small.