Stab Me With A Word
June 1st, 2010
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Just Like In The Movies
April 6th, 2010
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The Working Relationship
March 27th, 2010
I’m posting these photos of directors working with actors after finding so many of them when looking for pictures to illustrate the next post. Like a lot of people I’m interested in creative processes and how individuals, or collaborators, work or don’t work together and what the outcomes are as opposed to the goals. Some of these pictures are credited others not, but all appear to use their arms during the collaborative process.
Katherine Bigelow and The Hurt Locker
Clint Eastwood and Invictus
Sydney Pollack and Tootsie
Gavin Hood and Wolverine
New Moon
The Private Life of Pippa Lee
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Going to the Chapel of Love
January 5th, 2010
Happy endings. They’re a problem, aren’t they?
Of course, some people rubbish the whole notion of ‘happy endings’, finding them ridiculously simplistic and perhaps evidence of the lowbrow tastes of those who loll about all day in peach coloured negligees eating soft centred chocolates and reading bodice rippers – as so many of us do.
Happy endings are said to be evidence of patriarchal brain washing, seducing innocent young females into fantasies of rescue and everlasting married bliss when they should be fantasising about their earning potential as merchant bankers or realising their inner potential by climbing Everest without oxygen and sans makeup. Marriage these days is not the neat end of the story; it’s not the one and only aim of contemporary western women as it used to be portrayed, particularly in post war popular culture.
It’s not the only aim, if it is an aim at all, because we know that in real life happy endings, where the lovers remain dreamily happy forever, just don’t happen. Lovers turn into partners – or not – and a whole truckload of interpersonal issues get dumped on their white picket fence and, if they stay together, they’ll be dealing with these issues until death or divorce part them.
The story of the courtship, not the forty-year aftermath, is what concerns your average romantic comedy writer. In popular fiction and film, the courtship is much more fun than the marriage because many deeper personality issues have yet to surface and we can enjoy the projected dreams and desires as much as the characters do. We can laugh at their bumbling and misunderstandings, recognising and laughing at ourselves all the while. But where to put that full stop? How can we end on an optimistic note at this point when we know what lies ahead of them?
Marriage, a lifelong commitment to another person is a hard road to travel, and almost half of those who attempt it fall by the wayside. Sustaining a marriage requires relationship skills, generosity, hope, forgiveness and an ability to reach deep into the self to find these things. It’s complicated, more so than most of us imagine when we sign on. Marriage can’t signify a happy ending in this era. So I’m still a bit wary of plonking a marriage at the end of my stories. But we still need resolution and we want an uplifting conclusion that will somehow temper the remorseless of reality, and what marriage does do is signify commitment, and maybe commitment is the optimistic ending we are after.
Getting married is an expression of hope, symbolizing that you will do your best when the bad times come – which they will – to keep the relationship together. So why should that commitment in itself be a happy ending? Why not make serial monogamy or multiple lovers or celibacy the gold standard of human happiness? Because a functioning, intimate and sexually exclusive relationship with a person you respect and enjoy being with – sustained until the end of life, meets so many of our human needs that it is, let’s face it, what most people, male and female, yearn for.
So when the lovers on screen or in the book finally sort out their differences and decide they want to be together, that is what we are wishing for them. Not a sugary, improbable happy ending, but the strength and good fortune to sustain the love until the end of their lives. We know the odds are long, but we close the book or leave the theatre hoping their white picket fence stays upright and only needs a few coats of paint over it’s lifetime.
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‘Kiss me and you will see how important I am’
December 7th, 2009
Title - Sylvia Plath
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Bolting The Sex Scene Together
October 29th, 2009
from The Age of Innocence
“What is that intriguing display to the right of your tea-cup? Is it a storyboard? Is that how you know that your characters will be allowed three sex scenes–no more, no less? Blog to us about it–I’d like to know how it works for you.”
I did laugh when I found this comment on my blog this morning, but not the cruel, hard laugh of a writer who will only extend to a measly three sex scenes for her characters. Nor do I think, ‘hmm … eighty five thousand words … lets see, yep that will be three sex scenes.’
Writing a sex scene requires skill. There are awards for bad sex scenes and who wants to win a competition like that? They require perhaps more work than other scenes because they are so unforgiving. Reading a sex scene is like looking at life drawing – the errors stand out, even to non-drawers, because we are so used to human proportions and sensitive to any distortions. Most adults have a sex life, (I have to assume), and therefore writing about such a primal, universal experience is judged differently by the reader than any other scene. That is, those who want to read sex scenes. Many people tell me they want more sex in a book and others say less to none at all.
For me as a writer the sex scenes have to be integral to the story. They can’t be too explicit, nor can they be blowsy with euphemisms. I’d like them to be moving or convey the emotional worlds of my characters but I’m not sure I’ve succeeded at that yet. I don’t want to simply close the door and let them shag away merrily until I open the door and get on with the story. There is a scene in Martin Scorsese’s film The Age of Innocence when the male and female characters are alone in a carriage and he unbuttons her glove. That is a powerfully erotic scene and needs nothing more. And the film The Piano gives another scorching scene when the Harvey Keitel character touches the skin of Holly Hunter’s character through a small hole in her stocking. Those two scenes give me an idea of what to strive for.
Good writing about sex is sometimes so erotically charged it could possibly be better than the real thing. Bad writing about sex is just funny. I read a crime novel a couple of years ago and it sticks in my mind because for nine tenths of the book there was no mention of sexual activity. On the third last page the male character looks at a female character and refers to the ‘iron bolt’ in his pants. What the …? Where did that come from, I wondered? I flipped back a few pages, but no, no lead up, just the iron bolt reference, a quick sentence inferring they ‘did’ it, and off to solve the mystery. Not good. Don’t change the mood or bring in your iron bolts right near the end.
Sexual activity between adults can be the carrier or conveyer of endless emotional variety from none to rapturous devouring passion. But for the purposes of the story I’m trying to write the sex scenes are to convey emotional bonding and intimacy. Very vanilla, I know, but mostly that’s how it is. My characters are in love and they bind themselves closer and closer to each other every time they have sex. The positions and all the other details are secondary to the emotional focus of the scene. And they only get three, or maybe even two sex scenes, because that’s all I need to get across where their emotional journey is starting. It goes awry after that, but I’ll say no more at this stage.
As to my whiteboard … I don’t usually construct a plot from beginning to end. I know where I’m going, vaguely, and use the Phillipa Bumble Along System. It works for me because I like to be loose and I like not knowing. It does lead to a vast numbers of words being generated and tossed away. But they are only words. So the whiteboard is a sort of calendar line. I have the first draft of the novel and to avoid the trap of having the entire story take place in two weeks, I set up a chart and map out the scenes over a certain amount of months. I can see where they should go and I can stop the telescope effect before it happens. That’s the theory anyway.
Egon Scheile
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Political Correctnicity
October 2nd, 2009
There are few films I can sit through without mentally taking the film apart to see how it works. I wish it were not so because I like to lose myself in a good story.
Today I was subject to a smallish person’s pressure and ended up sitting in a cinema surrounded by a sea of even smaller people, all wriggling and eating and making endless trips to the toilets. But if you’re going to do the kid pic thing you may as well have the complete sense-surround experience, otherwise it’s like watching a football grand final on your own.
Some films for children are excellent. I have favourites, both Toy Stories being very high on my list. But some are so far from excellent you wonder why anybody bothered to make them. This film I saw today fell drearily in between. It didn’t even have the guts to be truly atrocious.
A slow backstory, which had the kids restless and whining, and two fairly clichéd unappealing buddies – a lonely old man and yes, you guessed it, a fat ethnic kid who befriends him, and they follow his dead wife’s dream together. Two characters on the margins of society, old connects with young, sees the world through a child’s eye. Oh please, quell my nausea…I know, it does happen. But why is it such an appealing trope in films?
Because you can squeeze more demographic in that’s why. Cynical? Yes.
I also recently attended a massed school choir event and I felt like I’d stumbled into a re-education camp. I made the mistake of assuming a choir sings for pleasure and for the music. But I was wrong. The Department of Education – taking their cue from The Department of Hollywood Entertainment have decreed that Message is the driving force of a school choir.
I was reminded of Lisa Simpson’s experience of school choir where she and the choir sang for the adults in front of a giant globe of the world. The song consisted of one word – ‘children.’ That would have been exquisite compared to endless songs with lyrics along the lines of, ‘You can do it, we are all the same, your dreams, we are just like each other and we follow our dreams and we love the disabled and follow their dreams as well and we reach the sky and the world is sick and we can heal it if you follow your dreams,’ and on and on like some sort of Jungian Dream Analysis Workshop crossed with a Maoist Workers Choir.
I had to keep my opinions to myself however as some people were shocked by my cynicism. So I shut up, until I ran into an old friend, a chemistry academic and father of another choir member. He told me he was busy re doing the chemistry curriculum – at the behest of those higher up the University food chain - and that the Department of Chemistry has been instructed to include more ‘aboriginicity’ into the curriculum. I had to ask him to say this new word again, twice. Will they put more Chemistry in the Aboriginal Studies curriculum? he asked. We had a laugh together but I dared not delve any deeper into the seething morass of vipers that is the modern politically correct, user-pays university.
Don’t misunderstand me, all these worthy sentiments are, well, worthy. But I just don’t want my Dominant Cultural Values poked down my throat in such a crude manner. Please, at least attempt to disguise them, make them appealing – use humour or animation or music. Make them palatable, we do it with vegetables…some have been known to spend hours carving a carrot into the form of a dog and making barking noises to get a child to eat said vegetable.
But to return to the film…
There were moments of humour and charm, usually based on close observation of animal behaviour and instinctual drives, (and who hasn’t been tripped up by their instinctual drives), very similar in tone to the old Loony Tunes cartoons. In fact, this film was so derivative of other classic children’s fodder it was hard to tell where the originality lay. But those moment s of genuine humour caused me to think ‘now why didn’t they get the person who wrote that bit, to write the whole movie?
Why? Because someone, somewhere said, ‘We must have a message.’
You can just see the script writers, huddled around their smoky fire of burning office furniture in the back lane behind Big Cartoon Studio, with their scribble pads, bottles of Jack and darned overcoats being approached by the smooth Armani clad guy from marketing who says, ‘We want more of that you know, that sentiment stuff? And throw in a couple of cripples, ones with big eyes.’ He starts to walk back through the door, turns again and says, ‘yeah, and make it inclusive, one with blue eyes, one with brown.’
He departs and the writers slump, pass the bottle around again and think longingly of the advertising industry. Poor guys.
I remember Bambi, as a child, for the primal fear in the loss of the mother. It’s a hard part of the film for small children – the unthinkable happens. I see that, but now I also see Bambi basically being told to get over it, let go of the emasculating feminine, be a man, toughen up and go without intimacy in his life until he finds a mate – it’s a sort of male initiation rite of a film. Messages are nothing new. They are half the reason why stories evolved. Many stories of monsters and so on partly express the fear of our internal worlds, but also express messages that must be attended to –for example, if you go down to that billabong without an adult a bunyip will pull you in and you will drown. Danger is the message, fear is the control.
Maybe the best writers do weave messages into narratives but also challenge the dominant cultural values, subvert them, question them and stretch them in a way we notice but are not overly distracted by – until we come back later to think more deeply about the book. They can turn conventions on their head but still work within them.
What makes a book or a film a success is sometimes is unknowable, but I know for sure that when I find myself thinking about whether I fed the dog or not, it is usually the fault of some sermonising script, some worthy moralising message that cannot be leavened by all the CGI and 3D glasses and product giveaways devised by the marketing juggernauts of Big Entertainment.
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