Need, desire and change – it is the stuff of our dreams and nightmares.

This happy subject came to me the other day while I was watching the 1935 film Anna Karenina from Leo Tolstoy’s novel staring Greta Garbo and Fredric March, directed by Clarence Brown. If you ever wondered what those boys in the ‘30s could have seen in Greta Garbo, watch this picture and you will see the reason.

As I was watching the film, I began breaking down the plot points.

One of my first writing jobs was rewriting dialogue. Early on a film editor taught me the basics of breaking down a story.

One of the points I learned was figuring out the need and desire of the main character. In a story, particularly American films, the needs and desires of the characters are not the same, which can be said of me and everyone I know.

The basic idea is a character has a desire. In a love story the boy wants the girl. Most love stories work on the premise the boy wants the girl, but the boy does a bunch of dumb stuff and loses the girl. The boy fixes his dippy behavior long enough to win the girl back, then nearly blows it again, but finally gets the girl so the movie can end and the boys watching in the audience can go home with more false hope.

To break down the plot, the boy wants the girl to love him – that is his desire. The character’s need is to become a boy the girl can love, which is a much different fish than his desire. It means the boy must change – that darn change.

The character either changes and the picture ends with zippy music, or everyone falls off the cliff and we all go home and drink vodka in milk.

A character’s desire is always in conflict with what he needs, and so are mine.

My desire is to watch the Food Channel and eat praline ice cream until I have to roll off the couch – now that is a fun goal for life. However, I need to become someone who believes broccoli and mashed rutabagas blended in a smoothie is really tasty.

The clash of needs and desires is present at all levels of human goofiness, from love stories to government grandstanding.

Listen to any government talk session, from the Legislature in Olympia to city council meetings, and you will hear the clash of needs and desires.

The desire is always easy. What we want is what we want. It is bright and shiny and projected on screens. Then some annoying guy in the back of the room asks the one question that makes everything hard and sweaty. We all hate that guy.

From health care at the federal level, to land deals in a city or county, to drugs abuse in our high schools, the desire is easy. It is the girl we wanted at 16. The need is to find out who we are, how we got here and how to become someone the girl will love. The part that makes us mopey and whiny.

It’s easy to say governments just goof it up because they are governments and they are supposed to do everything wrong. Unfortunately if you check closely, the government is us and blaming those guys is another way to avoid facing the need in the story; that darn change – the thing that makes everyone want to throw up and go home.

OK, maybe the better way is to watch Count Vronsky fall in love with Greta Garbo and eat praline ice cream.

Life may be too short for that darn change.