In a previous part, I covered the storytelling model of Matthew Dicks, who specializes in live, spoken-word competitive storytelling from real life. He has a theory of stories I found deeply unsatisfying: That the essence of a story is a moment of character change where the protagonist changes in an important way from the way they were. Everything else is “just stakes.” His key example is Jurassic Park, and according to him, the story is about Alan Grant flipping from disliking children to liking them. Everything else is just stakes. The dinosaurs are just stakes.

I don’t know about that. I think the story is about dinosaurs. That doesn’t mean Dicks is wrong. Dinosaurs might just be the stakes in Grant’s story, but Grant’s story is not the story. I think the problem is caused by the adjective “just.” Most literary writers, storytellers-from-life like Dicks, and writers in genres like romance are enormously interested in ordinary human life, including their own. Everything revolves around ordinary concerns, especially ordinary human relationships. But these writers don’t particularly feel the need to throw dinosaurs into the mix to create sufficient stakes. Not only are ordinary lives interesting enough, they supply enough of their own stakes. This says more about the personalities of the writers than the world.

A lot of storytelling in speculative genres on the other hand, seems to feel the need to introduce dinosaurs. By which I mean any outlandish stakes-increasing element. Time travel, FTL space travel, aliens, magic, wizards, and so on. Occasionally literary writers do this too, though they seem to feel more of a need to code in symbolism projecting back to ordinary life.

But why might you need dinosaurs for their own sake? No Freudian symbolism. No deep morality tale about not messing with genetics. Just… put in dinosaurs because dinosaurs are cool.

Via the latest issue of Simon de la Rouviere’s excellent Scenes with Simon newsletter, I found a video on good endings by Michael Arndt, screenwriter of Little Miss Sunshine, that basically answers the question I explored in Just Add Dinosaurs, where I argued that Matthew Dicks’ approach to analyzing stories in terms of stakes falls short because it leads to obviously ridiculous (to me) conclusions like “Jurassic Park is about Alan Grant’s relationship with children rather than dinosaurs.” In Dicks’ model, the dinosaurs are “just” stakes. In a treatment that’s in other ways very similar to Dicks’, Arndt unbundles the idea of stakes into three kinds: internal, external, and philosophical. He argues that the difference between good and great endings lies in some sort of moral inversion around the philosophical stakes (which not all stories have), and that these stakes in fact constitute the meaning of the story. Without these philosophical stakes, other bits feel mechanical.

In these terms, it’s easy to see what is actually going on with Jurassic Park:

• Internal stakes: Alan Grant’s relationship with children is flipped
• External stakes: Hammond’s dangerous scheme of starting a dinosaur theme park is thwarted
• Philosophical stakes: A world with live dinosaurs is shown to be cooler than one with just fossils

This point is subtly made in the original, with the climactic battle being raptors vs T-Rex, rather than humans vs. T-Rex, and with the ominous shot of the Barbasol can. But it’s in your face with the series arc finale. By Jurassic World: Dominion, we’re just living in a world where dinosaurs in the wild is normal, and the theme park villain is trying to weaponize them. The philosophical stakes are now trying to save the cool world.

So yes, my first naive instinct was correct. Jurassic Park is about dinosaurs. Why does an accomplished, champion storyteller miss this point that’s obvious to any narrative-illiterate 8-year-old?

I think it’s because Dicks specializes in telling personal stories from his own real life. In fact it’s a rule of his that’s the only kind you’re allowed to tell in the oral tradition his book is about. You’re not even allowed to tell someone else’s story. So while his theories may be sound for that narrow scope, Jurassic Park doesn’t actually belong in the reference set.

Personal stories are of course very meaningful to those who live them, but let’s be honest: Most have zero philosophical stakes. They may be entertaining yarns with fun external stakes and modest internal stakes, but the nature of reality and the moral dimension of the universe aren’t involved.

This also explains why personal stories mostly bore me. Even my own. If there are no philosophical stakes, I’m not interested. If there are good philosophical stakes, I’m actually fine without either internal or external stakes.

Philosophical stakes are a neat lens. They explain many puzzles. For example the original Toby Maguire Spider-Man worked much better than the Amazing Spider-Man because the philosophical stakes (“with great power comes great responsibility”) are front and center in the former and basically missing in the latter. They‘re front-and-center again in the Tom Holland reboot (“be friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, not Avengers member with all the status and perks and famous friends”). You know it’s the right decision because Tony Stark gives him the fancy suit anyway. The Friendly Neighborhood stakes are apparent in the sequels as well. Even if Holland Spider-Man is fighting cosmic battles in the multiverse, he’s always fighting for friendly neighborhood stakes over Nick Fury stakes. He’s never going to want to be a god even if he has the required abilities (in contrast to Hawkeye who plays cosmic god hero without quite having what it takes, often neglecting his friendly-neighborhood scale life to do so).