on (mis)guidance

A couple of days "off". We just passed the B.C. Day long weekend, and I extended that by a day yesterday, at least as far as posting to this blog goes. Now I'm back at it.

A writer, like any other artist, any other worker for that matter, needs to know how to go about the task. There seem to be three basic components to this knowledge: tools (alphabet, words, grammar); instruction (guidance from the experienced practitioner); and examples (existing written works).

In my experience, one needs to be careful about what instruction to accept. There are "experts" in the field who will steer you wrong--not intentionally, but simply because their advice is not appropriate for you. I think about reading advice articles by literary agents, in which some stressed the importance of "writing for the market"--that is, writing things that are similar to what is selling to publishers at the moment. This might be OK advice for certain kinds of writers, but it is poison for others, in my opinion. If you follow wrong advice, it's like following wrong directions to your destination: the more time you spend following it, the farther off course you are.

The lesson, as far as I'm concerned, is this. When it comes to advice, disregard the supposed authority of the dispenser of it, and pay attention to how the advice makes you feel. Does it inspire you? Do you get a "yes" feeling somewhere in your core? Is the person giving voice to a feeling you already had in you anyway? If so, then it's probably good advice for you, and you should take it.

On Saturday night Kimmie and I watched the movie Toy Story again (for, I think, the fourth time). On our new digital TV it was especially good. As with all high-quality movies, I enjoyed it more this time than on previous viewings. After the movie we watched a couple of the accompanying "special features", one of which was a gathering of the four main guys on the creative team, 10 years after the movie's release (which was in 1995). I felt a real kinship with these guys, and their experiences echoed some of my own from my television days.

Unlike live-action films, animated movies are not simply written; the original words are sketched out as pictures before the "story" is regarded as created. Preliminary animations are done of characters and scenes, to try things out. The animators in this case, working for Pixar, were making the movie for Disney. As they developed their script and characters, Disney executives would review the work and give them "notes" (industry term for feedback). The animators, most of whom were working on their first feature film, diligently tried to follow the advice they received. When the time came to screen a preliminary version of the show for the executives, the film fell flat. It was unfunny and uninvolving.

The executives realized that a drastic cure was needed: the filmmakers would have to go over to Disney, where they could be supervised more closely by the executives. The director, John Lasseter, realizing that this would be the death of their project, begged for two weeks in which he and his team could turn the show around on their own. The execs, realizing that this was impossible, indulged him.

The team worked frantically for two weeks. They were going to roll the dice, and this time, do it "our way". They still made use of the feedback they'd gotten so far, but used it critically, following only those tips that they really agreed with. This is what reminded me of working on The Odyssey. Warren and I developed our own policy with regard to network "notes": if a suggestion improved a script, write it in. If it made no difference to the script, write it in (humor them). But if we felt that a suggested change was for the worse, we would ignore it or, if necessary, fight back.

You can guess the outcome. In two weeks the Toy Story team delivered a much snappier, funnier, more original prototype, and earned the right to keep working on their movie in their own studio. The resulting movie of course was a major hit.

An artist in training needs guidance and teaching, but at the same time, an artist must be free of authority, which smothers creativity and originality. It's a difficult balance, I think--but it must be found.

don't do it

Nobody knows anything.

This statement was made famous by William Goldman, the screenwriter and novelist, who was making a comment on the movie industry. He was pointing to the fact that many people in that industry, especially studio executives with high salaries, claim to understand the industry and what makes movies successful, and indeed must believe this in order to justify said high salaries, even though the facts seem to point quite the other way. The great majority of movies are flops both critically and commercially. To Goldman the inescapable conclusion was that, all chest-thumping aside, nobody in the movie industry, not even those who have been in it longest and have enjoyed the most success, really knows what makes a movie successful. Nobody knows what's going to work. Or, in brief: nobody knows anything.

But why stop there? Is this condition merely an aspect of movies, or is it a more general phenomenon? When it comes right down to it, who really knows what they're doing? Does anyone?

Take the Iraq War. The stated reasons for the invasion were Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's links with Al Qaeda. For the sake of argument, let's assume everyone was sincere and honest about this from the start. Before long it came out that these reasons were in fact nonexistent. On the face of it, it would appear that the invasion was therefore a boo-boo, even in its own terms. Assuming sincerity and honesty, a lack of knowledge led to a mistaken and highly costly and bloody action, and we have every reason to think that Goldman's dictum applies 100% in this case as well.

That's a spectacular instance, but by no means the only one. You don't have to be a Buddhist to see that ignorance is the driving force behind much of our activity, perhaps all of it. From Thalidomide to CFCs to pumping groundwater dry throughout the world (currently under way--soon much of the world will be without water to irrigate crops with or to drink): action is confidently undertaken on the basis of incomplete knowledge, with disastrous results.

We hear of the "law of unintended consequences": everything we do brings a harvest of unexpected knock-on effects. Many of those are unpleasant, and have us scrambling to take new ill-informed actions to try to deal with them. I'm wondering whether the law of unintended consequences is the motto on the flip side of the coin of "nobody knows anything".

It feels good to do things instead of just sitting around on one's duff. I often feel bad about how little I do. But if we look at it objectively, the world would probably be in a lot better shape if more of us spent more time on our duffs and not trying to do things. This is the view of Hinayana Buddhism (sort of), as well as the Hippocratic Oath: "first of all, do no harm". As in first aid, the wise, disciplined approach is often a matter of not doing too much. Meditation, indeed, is really just a calculated strategy of sitting on one's duff.

Ha--here's maybe a case in point. I was just seeing Kimmie off to work. On the front porch, I swung the door closed behind me--only to have it slam on my fingertip. Smash. I gave it a good one, and it hurt plenty (still does--I'm typing this with my left hand).

I didn't know what I was doing.

( don't worry--I've been applying an ice-pack, and it's starting to calm down.)

Yeah, I'm liking sitting on my duff--the perfect activity for those of us who don't know anything.

notes on finishing Aristotle

I've just finished keying notes from Aristotle's Poetics. This short work is still probably the best overall guide to writing dramatic works, whether as prose or as script. Aristotle focuses on storytelling, which he sees as the core of the poetic art. Art, to him, means "imitation": when we see art we must be reminded of life in some way. In Shakespeare's terms, it is the mirror held up to nature.

For Aristotle, the highest form of poetry was tragedy: serious poetry intended to be acted out on stage. In order to gain the fullest audience involvement, the characters need to be "better" than we are, at least in certain respects. Why? Because the key emotions of tragedy, according to Aristotle, are pity and terror. It is to experience these vicariously that an audience watches tragedy, and they are evoked by seeing superior people undergoing misfortune. When a good person suffers, we feel pity; whereas when a bad person suffers, we feel satisfaction.

It felt a bit strange to read these things, put so bluntly by the great philosopher, and yet he hit the nail on the head. We see it all the time in movies: the bad guy does mean things, and gets his just deserts in the end. The good guy, or girl, braver and more noble than we are, suffers, and we feel pained about that. It's politically incorrect to rate people on a quality scale, and yet that is what popular art does all the time as a matter of course. (For the record: I'm no friend of political correctness--quite the reverse.)

According to Aristotle, comedies are stories about people who are worse than we are. And this is true also: think of the TV sitcom, the staple story of which is about the flaw of one of its characters. Out of jealousy, social climbing, greed, lust, or other motives, a character does ridiculous things, and we laugh. "Ha ha, what a schmuck." The typical sitcom episode ends with the character being chastened, and apologizing for his behavior: all is restored to equilibrium until the next episode.

It gets me wondering though about more modern dramas, that depict gangsters and low-lifes (say) in heroic dramatic roles. Usually gangster heroes (such as those played by, say, James Cagney) were seen as popular heroes by many--admirable rebels against corrupt or unjust government forces. Or some, such as Vito Corleone in The Godfather, are relatively good: he may be a greedy, violent, vengeful, ignorant criminal, but he has principles or a code of honor that his foes lack. He's better than they are.

But then we get to the "grunge" phenomenon of the 1990s: movies like Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting, populated almost exclusively by the dregs of society: criminal lumpenproletarians who lack redeeming qualities. Both movies were more or less comedic in tone, at least in many places, and so were perhaps conforming to Aristotle's scheme in that way. But I found most of the characters in both those movies revolting, and I cared less about what happened to them than about whether I was about to be subjected to yet more disgusting scenes. I wouldn't want to see either movie again, although I thought there was much cleverness and ingenuity in Pulp Fiction.

But in general I regard shows like that as a measure of the aberrant times we're in. I think about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, how people in that future dystopia attend movies to watch the women and children of their "enemies" being killed, and laugh at them. In many ways, we're there now.

Still, I'll rely on Aristotle. All spiritual training involves the cultivation of virtue--and not just the relative "virtue" of being less cowardly or brutal than one's enemies. The challenge of being human remains the same. And as Gandhi recommended that one should be the change one wants to see in the world, so I think I should create the stories I want to read.

So that's what I'm doing.

genre for fun

It's 2008, and we return to our work routine. Kimmie, off for the past 10 days or so, prepares upstairs to return to the office. I too will return to a more "normal" schedule.

Over the holiday I continued to work on my notes, but not directly toward The Mission. Instead I became absorbed in two topics: genre and theology.

Why these? In the case of genre, it's my evolving sense that this elastic concept, which according to some (including Aristotle) is key to being able to execute an artistic work properly, is not well understood. Robert McKee in his text Story emphasizes the importance to the writer of an understanding of genre, especially the genre in which he is trying to write. He provides a list of movie genres, but it is an omnium gatherum of story types ("education plot"; "revenge plot"), settings ("Western"; "historical drama"), and moods ("comedy"; "horror"). To me this is mixing apples and oranges, with a few mangoes and persimmons also thrown in.

Stories, like most things, can be categorized in a number of ways. Which are the ones that matter most to the creative writer?

I'm starting to see it this way: no work is of simply one genre. Rather, each work comprises several. I'm thinking that genre, which comes from the same root as the word gene, functions much like a gene: it is a definite unit of heredity that makes itself manifest by expression. In the body, a gene is responsible for the production of one or more proteins, which are themselves like chemical machines or robots that perform functions. Just as a person's genome is the total suite of his or her genes, what we call genre in a story is actually a genome as well: the total suite of its genre components.

Suppose you're writing a Western romantic comedy. Is your story a Western, a love story, or a comedy? Answer: all of the above. "Western", "love story", and "comedy" are all genres in the genome of that story. It has "inherited" story traits from all those genres.

The mixing and combination of genres in storytelling is much like the mixing of genes in reproduction. The vast possibilities of combination make sure that each individual is a unique expression of traits--and that is true of both organisms and stories.

What are the implications for the writer? One still needs to study genre--but one needs to understand all the genres in the genome of one's story. In this example, you'll need to know something about Westerns, about romances, and about comedies. Of course, each of those is a category with many subcategories--and you will need to know your subcategories.

One interesting task would be to take a story and analyze its genre affinities by comparing it to other stories that have similar traits. When I was explaining this idea to Kimmie over the holiday we had just watched the Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life. "Christmas story" is itself a genre, which includes things such as A Christmas Carol and Miracle on 34th Street and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It's also (for want of another term) a supernatural fable. Again, here it resembles A Christmas Carol, but also other works such as Here Comes Mr. Jordan (remade as Heaven Can Wait) and Splash. Its actual plot structure follows one of the types of what Robert McKee calls "ironic ascension", one in which the character is

pushed further and further from his goal...only to discover that in fact he's been led right to it.

In this the story resembles Ruthless People. It also falls in the category of story called "education plot", which, in McKee's words, "arcs on a deep change within the protagonist's view of life, people, or self from the negative (naive, distrustful, fatalistic, self-hating) to the positive (wise, trusting, optimistic, self-possessed)", and in this way resembles stories such as Tender Mercies and My Best Friend's Wedding. It's also a domestic drama, and its mood is mainly comedic.

All of these are contributing factors--all are genres in the genome of It's a Wonderful Life.

Over the holiday I was reading and typing notes from works such as Aristotle's Poetics, Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, McKee's Story, and even a bit of Genetics for Dummies in order to dig into my genome metaphor.

That's one way to have holiday fun--and it was fun.

Now: back to work.

Paul's 80s Festival

On Saturday night Kimmie and I watched Driving Miss Daisy, written by Alfred Uhry based on his stageplay and directed by Bruce Beresford. This was the last movie in Paul's 80s Festival: a weekly viewing of the best movies (in my opinion) from the 1980s. (Hmm, maybe I'll put this movie in Paul's 90s Festival, since it was actually released mainly in 1990, being given only a "limited" release in December 1989, no doubt to enable it to qualify for the 1990 Academy Awards...)

The festival has lasted longer than I expected. I see from my Palm journal that it launched on Saturday 8 July 2006, when Kimmie and I watched the 1980 Canadian movie Atlantic City, written by John Guare and directed by Louis Malle (this movie was not as good as I'd remembered, and I dropped it from the Festival list).

Most Saturdays since then we have watched an 80s movie. Some movies turned out, on re-viewing, to be duds, and I weeded them out altogether. Others were good, but not in the top class, and I put them on my private "B-list". In a few cases I could not lay my hands on a copy of a movie either at a library or at any video-rental outlet on the North Shore (Videomatica has copies of everything of course--but it's over in Kitsilano and offers only a three-day rental period and highish rental rates). But these movies I believe will turn out to be, at best, B-listers. I think I've developed my 80s Festival into pretty much its final form.

Interested? Here they are, then. The movies of Paul's 80s Festival, my "keeper" movies, in order of North American release date:

• Coal Miner's Daughter


• The Gods Must Be Crazy


• An Officer and a Gentleman


• 48 HRS


• Gandhi


• The Verdict


• Tootsie


• Tender Mercies


• Fanny and Alexander


• Risky Business


• The Big Chill


• Terms of Endearment


• Splash


• The Karate Kid


• Amadeus


• The Terminator


• Beverly Hills Cop


• Witness


• The Sure Thing


• Cocoon


• Out of Africa


• Hannah and Her Sisters


• A Room with a View


• Stand by Me


• Fatal Attraction


• Baby Boom


• Hope and Glory


• Planes, Trains, and Automobiles


• Wall Street


• Broadcast News


• Moonstruck


• Babette's Feast


• Big


• A Fish Called Wanda


• Die Hard


• Rain Man


• Working Girl


• Dead Poets Society


• When Harry Met Sally


• Sex, Lies, and Videotape


• Driving Miss Daisy

There you have it. It's a nice, well-rounded collection. The element they have in common? Each one is a good story, well told. That's how you make it into Paul's 80s Festival.

Next up: can you guess? You got it: Paul's 90s Festival.

working girls (and boys)

Second mug of coffee draining down to the last cool swallows. We were up promptly after the alarm went off at 5:30, Kimmie wanting to turn over a new leaf and give herself more time in the mornings so she can leave punctually for work. Through my closed venetian blinds I can make out the bluish darkness still outside.

First thing for me, after I make the coffee, is to open up my big fat copy of Microsoft Windows XP Inside Out by Ed Bott, Carl Siechert, and Craig Stinson--an excellent resource. Sitting here at my PC, highlighter in hand, I make my way slowly through it, day by day learning more about the operating system I'm using.

Since Windows XP was first released in 2001, hundreds of fixes and improvements have been made to it. Most of these were bundled into two major updates, known collectively as Service Packs 1 and 2.

Well, I'm starting to think of the work I'm doing on The Mission now as my own Service Pack. Marooned on the sandbar of chapter 30, I'm finding that I want to circle back and look over the work as a whole. Recently most of my notes have been in a document I set up to write ideas for draft 2 of the book as a whole. I've been displeased and dissatisfied with aspects of what I'm writing, and I want to address these problems so that I don't finish my draft with those lame, arbitrary things left in it.

The specific problem, I believe, is arbitrariness. Everything in a story, from story events to points of characterization to specific images, should be organic: should belong to the story and help communicate its meaning. This is not easy to achieve, and requires careful, deliberate, and skilled effort.

On Saturday night Kimmie and I watched the 1988 movie Working Girl, starring Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford (the movie actually bills Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver as the stars--an artifact of their greater contractual muscle and higher fees). The movie was written by Kevin Wade and directed by Mike Nichols (of The Graduate fame). It was about the 4th time I'd seen the movie, and I continued to find more in it to appreciate. One of things I appreciated about it this time was the unity of its elements.

For example, when Tess McGill (Griffith) is making her way to Manhattan via the Staten Island Ferry during the opening credit sequence, we learn that it's her birthday. Her friend Cyn (Joan Cusack) gives ger a tiny cake and sings "Happy Birthday". Her "birth" is being celebrated: and Tess, without yet knowning it, is indeed on a journey of birth to a new life. Soon she's working for a new boss, Katharine (Sigourney Weaver), a successful, ambitious, and supremely self-confident woman, who, it turns out, is also having a birthday--a week later than Tess's. They're both turning 30--a pivotal age--but Katharine is actually younger than Tess, and has apparently achieved vastly more. They are twins and mutual shadows: Tess is blonde, working-class, and struggling to gain a toehold in the business world; Katharine is brunette, of patrician stock, and seems to have had wealth and success hand-delivered to her.

With the birthdays come gifts. Tess receives sexy lingerie from her boyfriend Mick (Alec Baldwin)--yet another gift that she can't wear outside their apartment. Katharine, for her part, is showered with gifts when she breaks her leg in a skiing accident (including a near-life-size plush gorilla--a funny inside allusion to Weaver's earlier role as gorilla researcher Dian Fossey). But the more important gifts come from Tess's new associate and would-be lover Jack (Harrison Ford). When, now impersonating a high-powered deal-maker, Tess shows up at a meeting without a proper briefcase, claiming that she's "lost" hers, Jack gives her a beautiful briefcase, classic symbol of the businessperson. With this he sends the message, "you're one of us."

At the end of the movie, when Tess and Jack have gotten together and she has indeed made it as a wheeler-dealer, he gives her a final gift: a metal lunchbox, packed with lunch and other tenderly considerate goodies. The lunchbox is emblematic of her origins, and with this Jack is telling her that he accepts and loves her for who she is. As a high-powered executive she can carry a lunchbox so she doesn't forget where she came from--so she doesn't lose what is most important about herself.

My point is that these choices were made deliberately and carefully, most likely by Kevin Wade, the writer. They are not arbitrary. The result is that the movie feels unified--it feels as though everything in it belongs.

That's where I want to get to with my own story. But (big surprise) it's not easy. You need to know your world and your characters before you can really make meaningful, non-arbitrary choices. And knowing anything, I find, takes time.

Still, what else am I doing with my life?

permit me to do my best

In this household, on Saturday nights, Paul's 80s Festival rolls on. We've made it up to 1988. Last Saturday we watched, for the third time, Babette's Feast, a Danish gem based on a story by Karen Blixen.

If you haven't seen the movie (or read the story), it takes place in a windswept Danish fishing village of the 19th century. Two beautiful sisters are daughters of the local Protestant minister, and devote themselves wholeheartedly to his program of piety and good works among the tiny congregation. Chance events in the outer world bring two young men to the village, one a dissipated and conflicted soldier, the other a successful Parisian tenor. Each falls in love with a different one of the daughters, and each is eventually, but gently, driven off by the strength of the girls' attachment to their father and his mission.

Seventeen years later, a Frenchwoman, Babette, appears at their doorstep, a refugee from the violence rocking Paris in 1871, sent to their care by the tenor, Achille Papin, whose heart still aches for the Danish girl whose singing voice had enchanted him long ago. Although they are poor, they take Babette in as their servant. One day Babette discovers that she's won a French lottery, and insists on celebrating her mistresses' late father's birthday with a feast.

I'll say no more about the story, which remains a quiet, unpretentious, one-of-a-kind masterpiece. What struck me most about it on this viewing, though, was the scene in which the older and world-weary Achille Papin composes his letter of introduction for Babette. He reflects ruefully on the fleetingness of fame and fortune, and writes (to the best of my memory): "The artist, the world over, has a single cry: 'Let me be permitted to do my very best!'"

Even as I typed those words now, I found that tears came to my eyes. In this one scene, this one line, an experienced artist has expressed the soul of artistic integrity. (This theme lies close to the heart of the story, for it turns out that Babette too is an artist.) This theme of the artist and his integrity touches me deeply. It forms part of the core of some of my very favorite works, such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Sunset Boulevard.

Last night, after Kimmie and I watched a couple of episodes of Fawlty Towers on a DVD from the library, I played the interview with John Cleese that comes as a special feature with the show. In the interview a much older John Cleese reminisced about creating the show (it first aired in 1975) with his then-wife Connie Booth. (Basil Fawlty was based on a real hotelier in Torquay, England, who had accommodated Cleese, Booth, and members of the Monty Python troupe.)

According to Cleese, everyone at the BBC who heard the show concept or read the first script thought it was a dud. They variously regarded it as boring, cliched, and unfunny. It presumably got made because of Cleese's track record and recognition value with Monty Python. When the first season of six episodes ran, it got poor reviews.

But after six more episodes, an audience had found the show and loved it. It became a major worldwide success, and is often regarded as a high point of the sitcom format.

Cleese narrated the early difficulties of the show cheerfully and without rancor, but I felt for him. It's painful to be told by supposedly knowledgeable people that your work is no good. At that point you're driven back on yourself, on your faith in the material itself--on the tenacity of your own convictions about what constitutes quality. When they wrote the show, they thought it was funny. The world agreed with them. The only people offside were the "professionals" in charge of allowing the created work to be produced.

The reason I bring it up is because of one quote from Cleese. He said that he had once asked a film distributor what was the toughest kind of show to sell. The distributor replied: "Anything original."

There you have it. Originality, toxic to the salesman, is the life's blood of the true artist. The true artist wants to do his very best, to be permitted to do his very best. His heart will never be happy with mere familiarity and imitation.

Moonstruck

Paul's 80s Festival rolls on. Since summer 2006 we've been watching one movie from the 1980s each Saturday. This week, due to rare social engagements, we pushed movie night back two days and last night watched the 1987 romantic comedy Moonstruck starring Cher and Nicolas Cage. It was the third, maybe the fourth time we'd seen it, and, as always with the very best movies, Kimmie and I enjoyed it more this time than on any previous viewing.

The movie, excellent in every detail, stands the test of time admirably. As ever, I played close attention to the script, written by Bronx-born John Patrick Shanley. Here and there as I watched and laughed, I had that experience which I seldom feel while watching a movie: that the writing was at a higher level than what I could achieve myself--at least in that genre. I experienced the anxiety of the artist looking on superior work.

Shanley delivered the whole package: idea, story, characterization, and dialogue. The director, Canada's Norman Jewison, realized the script supremely well, showing his prowess through skillful use of the two main image systems: the moon and opera. The full moon hanging over Manhattan casts its spell over all the characters and knits together their stories. The main plot, about Loretta, a 37-year-old Italian widow played by Cher, becoming engaged to her boyfriend Johnny (Danny Aiello), whom she likes but does not love, is itself operatic. For Johnny, scurrying away to attend to his dying mother in Palermo, charges Loretta with the task of inviting Johnny's brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage) to their wedding, hoping thereby to end a years-long period of "bad blood" between the brothers. It turns out that Ronny, a baker, lost his left hand in a slicing machine when distracted by Johnny, and Ronny consequently also lost his then-girlfriend. Now, bitter and lonely, he shovels fuel into the hellish oven with his wooden hand, and carries an immense grudge.

Where another writer might have found dark drama--or an opera libretto--Shanley saw comedy. I'm reminded of something I said to Michael Conway Baker, who composed the soundtrack music for a little half-hour TV comedy that Warren and I wrote back in 1988 called "What's Wrong with Neil?", the writing of which Baker took the trouble to compliment me on at the wrap party: "A good comedy must first of all be a good drama." Baker agreed emphatically.

Moonstruck is a good drama. Hence, it's a good comedy. Loretta, shocked by the vehemence of Ronny's resentment of his brother and of his life, starts arguing with him and soon they're entwined passionately in his room above the bakery. Shanley places dazzling, even profound, insights into the mouths of his chippy blue-collar characters. Loretta, sharing some steak and whisky with Ronny in his room, observes that he, like a trapped wolf, had chewed off his own paw to escape the trap of a love that was not really for him. Many writers might have saved such gold for a big revealing moment near the climax of the movie; Shanley tosses it away while traveling through the story toward other things, a mark of great confidence and quality. He doesn't have to hoard his gold, he's got lots more. As a result, his characters quickly show great dignity and depth, even as they are peculiar and flawed people. Loretta here is revealed not only as sassy, unflappable and down-to-earth, but also insightful, concerned, and poetic.

It's very difficult to achieve writing of this quality. Indeed, I doubt that I can--a hard admission for me. Don't worry: I know I'm good. My excellence will just have to shine in other arenas.

The good news is that I get to enjoy the product of others' work, and my own background in writing lets me enjoy it at a deep level.

Stand By Me

The cold symptoms are deepening, but still have not reached the depth of which I know they're capable. My mind is still mostly sharp, and my nose is running only very slightly. Want me to keep you posted on my symptoms and secretions?

I got three pages written yesterday, limping a bit further through the desert of chapter 28. I was trying to rush, trying to go fast--to write with the same careless aplomb with which I knock out these blog-posts. A little bit of Stephen King in my gas-tank.

And speaking of whom, last Saturday's show in Paul's 80s Festival was the 1986 movie Stand By Me, the Rob Reiner film based on King's novella The Body. It was the third or fourth time I'd seen it, and, as with all superior films, it was even better on this viewing than on the previous ones. The genre is actually adventure: in small-town Oregon in 1959, a band of four young heroes sets out on a quest to find the corpse of a boy their own age (12) who has been killed in the woods, hit by a train. By fibbing to their parents, they manage to embark on the quest secretly and unsupervised, and must face their adventure with only their kid-smarts, along with a few cigarettes and a handgun boosted from one of their dads.

(Looking at the film on Saturday, I was surprised to see how strong its correspondence was to my own TV show The Odyssey, complete with a treefort club at the beginning--this must have been an unconscious influence on us as we set up our own story in 1989-91. Warren and I always felt our main debts were to The Wizard of Oz and Star Trek--now I would have to stir Stand By Me into the mix as well.)

The hero, Gordie Lachance (Wil Wheaton), who narrates the story as an adult (Richard Dreyfuss) in 1985, has recently experienced the loss of an older brother (John Cusack), whom his parents loved more than they love him. The story is Gordie's journey to come to grips with his brother's death, and life and death in general. (In this sense the movie covers--much more powerfully--territory similar to that of the 1981 movie Ordinary People.)

This time I was struck by how much the movie centers around death, since the story itself and its young heroes are so full of life. The story itself is launched by the adult Gordie reading that his boyhood friend Chris has just been killed trying to foil a robbery in a fast-food restaurant, catapulting Gordie back in his mind to 1959 and their journey together to find the other boy's body. Gordie is not alone in struggling with family issues: two of his companions also have hard relationships with their fathers. At some deep level, their journey into the woods is a trek to father-atonement (another link with The Odyssey).

Although they are trekking into the forest, they follow train tracks, so there is a sense of path, as in The Wizard of Oz with its Yellow Brick Road. The symbolism of the path is different from the symbolism of hacking one's way into wild bush, as the Grail heroes did: this road has been built, but built by adults--by fathers. It's not a footpath or road, though: it's for trains--big, impersonal, masculine machines. They're powerful and get you where you're going, but they're also deadly if you get in their way. They don't stop for children.

Trains are one image-system in the movie; another is bridges. When the boys first set out, they cross a little rail-bridge: the threshold of adventure. Their most dangerous adventure en route is when they decide, after argument, to cross another rail-bridge: much longer and much, much higher. What is a bridge? It's a way to cross what is otherwise uncrossable--it carries you to a place where you could not go without it. From childhood to adulthood perhaps, or from one's everyday consciousness to the deeper zone of the unconscious forces within. I think of the Chinvat Bridge in Zoroastrianism: a narrow bridge in the afterlife that each soul must cross, but which only the good can reach the far side of, the bad plunging to the abyss. In this adventure, the two image-systems come together: a train shows up on the bridge, chasing them from behind, terrifying them and almost killing them. The boys have taken their lives in their own hands, and are branded as worthy for the rest of the adventure by surviving this brush with death--the same death that claimed their quarry.

It's a true heroic quest: the boys are up against forces that are bigger than they are, both within and without; they have to dig within themselves to meet the challenges, with no guarantee of survival. It's not a playground, it's real life.

This is a really well-written and well-produced show. It's got a permanent spot in Paul's 80s Festival.

on thematic research

After my post yesterday I gave more thought to what it means to research the meaning-content of a story (my story, anyway).

For I suspect that it's not strictly necessary for most writers to do such research. The meanings of stories emerge naturally and inevitably from the narrative. When the writers of the Clint Eastwood thriller Magnum Force were developing their screenplay, for example, I doubt they did specific research into the abstract nature of justice. But the thematic interest and tension of the movie, its meaning in my sense, has to do with justice. What are the individual's responsibilities and rights concerning justice when his society's institutions of justice have been perverted and turned into institutions of injustice? What if the forces of the law have themselves become criminal?

This question is interesting and important, and it is, in my opinion, much more responsible for making Magnum Force a hit than the fact it starred Clint Eastwood engaging in violent gunplay.

Magnum Force was conceptually a relatively simple movie (although, I think, a very good one--and a rare example of a sequel that lives up to the quality of the original, in this case Dirty Harry). Movies in general need to be conceptually simple; it is not a conceptual medium. Their ideas should be simple, but deep and emotionally charged--important, in other words. Novels do not need to be so simple. Since the medium is words, they are inherently conceptual; they are absorbed over a much longer time, and the reader is free to pause and backtrack if he or she wishes. Literature, of all the art forms, is the one best able to explore ideas to their conceptual limits.

So for me thematic research means investigating my story at the level of ideas. To use Dirty Harry again, I would be investigating the question, what is justice, anyway? I believe that digging into that question would be fruitful in sparking story- and character-ideas. Ideally, different ideas of justice would be held by different characters in the movie (I'm not sure how many actual ideas are represented this way in the movie--it's been years since I've seen it!). Their ideas would guide their decisions and their actions, and, to the extent that these ideas were incompatible, dramatic conflict would be generated.

Thematic research, then, clarifies the ideas underlying a story, untangling the confusion that exists first of all in the writer's own mind. If you were assigned to write Magnum Force, you might go in with your own assumptions about justice, maybe something like, "justice is the orderly operation of the law in a democratic state". But it would be good if your assumptions started to bump up against competing ideas. How about something obvious, like, "justice is ensuring that people get what they deserve"? Now, if your orderly operation of law does not result in people getting what they deserve, then what? Conflict.

Of course, each question sparks further questions. What does it mean to say someone "deserves" something? Who decides? These sparks can start their own fires, so to speak. Plato's whole masterwork The Republic is, in theory, the result of an inquiry into this topic--what is justice? I'd like to think that if I were writing Magnum Force, I would dip into The Republic to see what I could find.

Hmm. I seem to have talked myself out of my own supposition stated above, that writers of simple stories don't need to do thematic research. Now I'm thinking they probably do! (Do need to, that is--they probably often don't actually do it.)

For the best stories, in my opinion, are ones in which the writer has clarity about the competing ideas involved. You need to know what your characters truly stand for, and then give them their own integrity based on that. Even your deceitful, two-faced villain has integrity somewhere, even if it's only in a steely adherence to the conviction that the world is a Darwinian jungle where only the fittest survive, and survival is the supreme value.

So, in the spirit of untangling a great knot, I proceed day by day with my thematic research, learning about what my characters might believe, and learning also what I believe.

Sunset Boulevard

After a cloudy morning and a forecast of possible thundershowers, the sky is clear and the hot sun is back. I have returned from a brief errand trip, which involved dropping off a couple of DVDs at the library. One of these was Sunset Boulevard, which Kimmie and I watched last night.

It was the third time I'd seen the movie; I'd seen it once before Kimmie and I watched it maybe a dozen years ago. The digitally restored production was excellent. Again I had the happy experience of finding a movie I knew to be good to be even better than I'd remembered. As when I recently watched Risky Business starring Tom Cruise, it was such an absorbing experience that it seemed I was watching it for the first time. I know that Sunset Boulevard has been extensively studied, but I've not read those studies, so I'm going to make some observations of my own.

The 1950 movie, which stars William Holden and Gloria Swanson, was directed by Billy Wilder and written by him in collaboration with Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman, Jr. Supposedly, Wilder and Brackett, who had been successful but mutually irritating collaborators before, had started a script in 1948 about an aging silent-film star wanting to make a comeback in a much-changed Hollywood. Dissatisfied with their progress, they brought in the film critic Marshman after being favorably impressed with his analysis of their earlier film The Emperor Waltz, and Marshman contributed the idea of a young gigolo character.

Whatever the case, I see in the story another cluster of elements around the theme of the Great Goddess. This theme was worked out thoroughly, in different ways, by J. G. G. Frazer in The Golden Bough and by Robert Graves in The White Goddess. As Graves observed, the essential story of the myth was that of the immortal Goddess and her two mortal consorts: the reigning priest-king who was, in effect, her husband, and the young man who would overthrow the king to become his replacement. The new king would, in time, be overthrown by his successor in the same way.

In the movie, the goddess is of course the screen legend Norma Desmond. The old king is her servant Max (Max von Stroheim), who, it comes out, was in fact not only her director at Paramount, but her first husband (she's had three), and therefore presumably the first occupant of the "husband's bed" which the young writer Joe Gillis (Holden) eventually comes to occupy. Interestingly, in this story the young protagonist is not seeking to win the goddess; he becomes "attracted" to her by money, because he sees her as a way of paying the finance company that wants to repossess his car. Gradually, without knowing it, he falls under her spell.

In a deeper reading, based on Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness, the myth of the Great Goddess and her vying lovers is itself an expression of a phase in the emergence of ego-consciousness from the womb of the unconscious, symbolized by the Great Goddess. One stage of this is marked by the emergence of twin brothers, who are in a sense womb-mates of the Goddess, and who take on the qualities of light and darkness as part of the gradual separation of the world into opposites, which is the function of consciousness. This represents an earlier stage than that of the divine king who is the consort of the Goddess.

The Goddess image is strengthened by the fact that the movie project Norma wants young Joe to rewrite for her is Salome, the story of the biblical princess who performs the dance of the seven veils and orders the beheading of John the Baptist. The dance of the seven veils is actually a much older mythological motif, dating back to Sumerian times, when it was performed by Inanna, the queen of heaven, who had to remove her clothes in stages in order to descend into the underworld to rescue Dumuzi, god of vegetation, who is trapped there.

It becomes clear that Norma Desmond does represent the devouring dragon aspect of the Great Goddess after all: through her wealth, power, theatrics, and emotional instability, she seeks to draw Joe to her and keep him there forever. His independence and his artistic creativity become bound to her, sold for a luxurious lifestyle.

He sees the potential for freedom and creativity again in the person of young Betty Schaeffer (Nancy Olson), a reader at Paramount, who sees potential in him and wants to work with him at developing one of his ideas. She also falls in love with him, and he with her. She is like the captive princess in the Neumann analysis: the young, beautiful aspect of the Goddess, who represents the good things in life that the hero can attain if he can overcome the dragon and free her. Betty's captivity is expressed in the fact that she can't write the script on her own; she needs Joe in order to realize her own dreams.

But Joe does not slay the dragon; the dragon slays him. He does not have the strength to overcome her overwhelming power. In Neumann's terms, he does not make the transition to manhood; he is the adolescent who dies because he doesn't yet have the inner resources to defy the Goddess. Consciousness is snuffed out; it will have to await another rising, another hero, who may have more moxie.

There is so much more to say about this movie. To name only one element: Gillis shows up at the house and is mistaken by Max and Norma as the undertaker for their pet chimpanzee who has just died! The movie places much emphasis on this element, later showing a grotesque scene in which Max and Norma inter the chimp in the yard in a child's coffin. I could only shake my head in awe and admiration as I watched.

Yes, much more to say. The short summary is that this is one of the best movies ever made. It was a privilege to watch.

Risky Business

Yesterday, stopping in at the library on our way home in the cold wind and rain from New Westminster, Kimmie and I picked up a DVD of Risky Business, the 1983 movie written and directed by Paul Brickman and starring the young Tom Cruise. We watched in last night over our dinner of sauteed zucchini, broccoli, and portobello mushrooms on pasta.

It was our third viewing of it, and we both enjoyed it very much. I enjoyed it more than ever before. One important reason was that I saw in it a depiction of many of the elements of the great cycle of human myth described by Erich Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness.

Neumann's thesis is that world mythology maps the birth and development of ego-consciousness in humanity as a whole, which is identical to its birth and development in each individual. The conscious ego, the center of our personality, emerges from the dark bliss of unconsciousness as a baby emerges from the womb. After a long period of fleeting moments of consciousness that rise and sink back into the bliss of unconsciousness, the ego gradually becomes stronger, until it decisively proclaims its own independent existence, recognizing its distinctness from the nurturing but also smothering womb of unconsciousness. This decisive moment is pictured in the universal myth of the separation of the World Parents, in which a hero pushes apart his mother and father to create earth and heaven, and between them the whole manifest world.

Tom Cruise, playing Joel Goodson, the well-heeled, dutiful teenage son of complacent, affluent parents, is this hero. When his parents, leaving on vacation, leave him to look after the house, they expect him to continue along the rails on which they have set him from birth: the predictable track of responsibility and submission to their dictates. They show every sign of expecting his whole life to be lived in that way. He is nudged off the track by his friend Miles, who orders in a call-girl for him. When the girl, Lana (Rebecca de Mornay), arrives, Joel receives his sexual initiation, then finds himself embroiled with her further when she steals his mother's prize possession: a giant crystal egg she keeps on the mantle. In his effort to retrieve the egg, Joel finds himself in conflict with her pimp, and is eventually driven to accept Lana's suggestion that he host a night of schoolboys-paying-for-hookers at his parents' place in order to pay for damage to his father's Porsche.

The story contains virtually every element of the complete mythic emancipation of the hero from the matrix of the unconscious. I was most intrigued to watch how Brickman handled the crystal egg--an element I did not remember from my previous viewings of the movie. The egg, very valuable, was the "dragon's treasure"--for the dragon is a symbol of the devouring, regressive aspect of the mother, and the treasure is the boon of life and consciousness that she nonetheless carries within her and which it is the hero's task to free. The dragon itself appears in the guise of Guido, Lana's pimp (Joe Pantoliano), who gains possession of the egg, and is also in possession of Lana--the captive princess of myth. The captive princess is another epiphany of the Great Goddess, but a personal one, one that can be known and loved as an individual--one who contains all the love and life and creative potential that is to be gained by the heroic accession to full conscious autonomy.

Even the fact that Lana is a hooker is consistent with the symbolism, for the Great Goddess was regarded as mother, virgin, and prostitute. In the ancient world, "virgin" did not mean, as it does for us, physically inviolate; it meant a woman who was not under the authority of any man. In the ancient Near East the Great Goddess, whatever her name, was honored with the institution of ritual prostitution: her temples would be staffed by women who were regarded as epiphanies or priestesses of the Goddess, and they would have sacramental sex with men as a rite of both love and fertility, which the Goddess ruled. Often townswomen would have to prostitute themselves in this way before they could be married, to render due respect to the Goddess, and their wages would be offered to her.

So Lana's status as a hooker is consistent with her identification with the Great Goddess. And in the story she does indeed bring vitality to Joel's sterile, dutiful life. Sex, money, danger, violence, disgrace, risk, adventure--all come in her wake. Joel's mettle is tested, and he grows up; he becomes his own man. He is able to relate with Lana not as a timid teen but as an equal: a man worthy of her. By boldly displaying himself as he now is, he wins admission to Princeton University--the Ivy League college seemingly out of his reach as a "good boy".

Joel's mother, who has made an issue of how much she "trusts" him throughout the story, gives this the lie at the end when she angrily accuses him of putting a crack in her crystal egg. Yes: for the hero has hatched now. And Joel has indeed separated the World Parents, for while he mother stalks upstairs in a huff about the egg, his father takes him aside to reveal to him, joyfully, that he has been accepted by Princeton. Father and son are atoned. Joel reveals himself to be a "Good Son" not just in the sense of a dutiful boy in thrall to his parents, but one who has thrown off their authority and proved his worth to inherit a kingdom.

This gives an idea of why I found watching the movie so absorbing and exciting this time around. I doff my cap to Paul Brickman. Nice work.

Paul's Rom-Com Festival

Rose at 6:38 in the dark of morning. Rain pattered invisibly outside. I tried opening my Notes document for chapter 19, but did not get far. Other things supervened.

Tonight: program 11 of Paul's Rom-Com Festival. It's the 1990 movie Pretty Woman with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. It's another in the top drawer of the genre. There are many things to like about the movie, but next time you see it, pay attention to how the character of the hotel manager is portrayed. He is the only character, apart from the two lead roles, who undergoes a character-change in the course of the story. This makes his subplot--the change from disdain for hooker Vivian Ward to acceptance and even respect and love--an important one for the meaning of the movie.

For the record, here are the films of Paul's Rom-Com Festival so far, in chronological order of release (and viewing):

• It Happened One Night (1934) starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Story by Samuel Hopkins Adams; screenplay by Robert Riskin. Directed by Frank Capra.
  
• Born Yesterday (1950) starring William Holden and Judy Holliday. Screenplay by Albert Mannheimer based on the play by Garson Kanin. Directed by George Cukor.
• The Apartment (1960) starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Screenplay by I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder. Directed by Billy Wilder.
• Annie Hall (1977) starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. Screenplay by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman. Directed by Woody Allen.
• Tootsie (1982) starring Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange. Story by Larry Gelbart and Don McGuire; screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal (and other uncredited writers, including Barry Levinson and Elaine May). Directed by Sydney Pollack.
• Splash (1984) starring Tom Hanks and Darryl Hannah. Screenplay by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandell. Directed by Ron Howard.
• Baby Boom (1987) starring Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard. Screenplay by Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer. Directed by Charles Shyer.
• Moonstruck (1987) starring Cher and Nicolas Cage. Screenplay by John Patrick Shanley. Directed by Norman Jewison.
• Working Girl (1988) starring Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford. Screenplay by Kevin Wade. Directed by Mike Nichols.
• When Harry Met Sally (1989) starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan. Screenplay by Nora Ephron. Directed by Rob Reiner.
• Pretty Woman (1990) starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. Screenplay by J.F. Lawton. Directed by Garry Marshall.

I'll update the list as we move forward with the festival.