“Throwing ideas back and forth” – I wrote this in Week 1 but edited it significantly to more explicitly fit the Cleese prompt.
The Lens, the Novel and Screenwriting
“Look Both Ways”: A Reflection
I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration.
Look Both Ways by Marco Holden Jeffery
They have that look of new love, innocent and fresh, yet so fragile. Everything they encounter in the world is a new delight to be experienced in tandem. They stroll slowly, hand firmly in hand, dawdling as they travel through the campus. Their only pressing matter is the other, and the precious time they have together; they are in no rush to waste it.
But perhaps the signs were there from the beginning; how could a world so cruel allow a love so pure to persist? They exit the campus, their pace still at a snail’s, lost in deep conversation, lost deep in one another. Why would their gaze drift anywhere else but the face and eyes of their love? The rest of the world holds no interest in them, not their own presence within it, not the BEWARE VEHICLES sign to their back, not the soft dip onto the road before them, not the accelerating Ford to their left, manned by a gentleman entirely focused on himself, his importance, the urgency of his problems and the world around him.
Love ends too quickly, the Ford screeches abruptly to a halt all too late, the smell of burning rubber fills the air. The boy extends his still-warm hand, and lets out a scream, but the world is numb and silent as the facade of new love falls away. Time barrels by quickly, the flashing lights and piercing sirens, the assuring voices doing little to soothe his pain. All of a sudden it’s much later, he’s not sure if it’s hours or days, and he finds himself at a towering stone structure, a green wooden door, the cold words emblazoned on the stone: CITY MORGUE. He strikes the door in desperation and disbelief, but it’s far too late.
I wrote this piece with the intention of conveying how all-consuming “love” can be and how it can be a distraction from other happenings in your life. Of course, I’m not just trying to say you should pay attention to your surroundings when with your significant other; it’s more a comment on making sure you’re on top of your life and not focus all your efforts on one relationship. I think the images that were put together for this story also beautifully conveyed how fleeting moments and relationships with other people can be; we’re introduced to these characters and the world they lived in so briefly, before it’s torn apart.
I feel like my piece captured this idea of how delicate human relationships can be. From the second paragraph, we start to feel the uncertainty of this world, and even from the first paragraph the immediacy of the couple, their need to be with each other conveys how precious moments are when they can be lost so quickly. I try to create a sort of sphere around the couple, through which the outside world filters as tiny pieces, sounds and sights leaking through the cracks, and I feel like this may haven’t been fully achieved but there are a few aspects that could be fleshed out or refined to convey this.
I feel like I struggled to capture the brevity within which a lot screenwriters and other storytellers manage to paint a strong world. In the screenplays we have looked at during this course, although admittedly written by incredibly talented and experienced screenwriters, manage to say so little in so few words. Frozen River (Courtney Hunt, 2009) manages to convey so much about a world and the characters within it with very little dialogue and very select descriptive language. I feel like my piece is somewhat overwritten, and relies on prose and flowery expressions too much to communicate its story world. Obviously when I write something resembling a screenplay for my final product, I won’t be able to use this style, but I must keep in mind the techniques the screenwriters we have examined use to capture tone, setting, character and history with such brevity.
In this week’s reading (Ganz 2013) the author spends a lot of time focusing on the idea of the lens. A screenwriter, following a tradition he posits started with natural scientists and early novelists, writes the world as if he/she is observing it through a lens of some sort; in the case of natural scientists a telescope or a microscope, but in the case of screenwriters a camera lens. Detail is noticed as a camera lens might, focusing on specifics, seeing things our characters might not and presenting things as they change, rather than as static objects. Things are included and omitted to best tell our story as ‘looking through a lens involves a simultaneous act of looking and framing – a mediatization occurs at the moment of looking’ (Ganz 2013, p. 10); by choosing to observe a particular “frame”, we are deciding what should and should not exist in our media work, what should and should not be noticed and focused on. I found it particularly interesting how Ganz related this practice to forms of creative writing; in many fictional works, our authors or narrators aren’t necessarily omnipresent but do observe the world from a particular perspective, noting particular things that give clues to other things but not necessarily being aware of everything.
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was fairly poorly adapted in 2012 but the same concept of single-character perspective was employed in the film adaptation.
A couple of years ago, I went to a talk by English novelist David Mitchell, the author of several genre-spanning novels including Cloud Atlas, which was adapted into a Hollywood film in 2012. At this talk, Mitchell spent a lot of time talking about his writing craft and process. Most of Mitchell’s books are written in a series of parts/sections, with most or each one from the perspective of a different character; it’s important to note that these characters aren’t necessarily regular humans but can be beings with supernatural powers (and therefore expanded senses and perception). Asked how he writes so effectively and clearly from character to character, Mitchell replied that he imagines himself as a “perspective cap”; when he is writing for a character, he imagines that he sees and thinks and feels only what they see, think and feel. This produces a really effective representation of character that Mitchell is often lauded for.
When I first encountered this discussion of the lens as a screenwriting tool, I immediately thought of this anecdote. The similarities are certainly there, as both techniques equally include and exclude detail relevant to the perspective. I began thinking of the lens as a sort of third-person perspective cap; it doesn’t have the omnipresence a third-person narrator in a novel might have, but it sees more than a single character can. In many ways, the lens approach imagines the camera as a character and watches from its perspective.
This will obviously be an important thing to think about when it comes to actually writing a screenplay in my practice. I have understood the idea of writing what is seen before, but not to the detail which the reading advises. When you write, it seems Ganz is implying, you must not only include all the rich detail your world demands, but also make sure you state what you want your camera, and eventually your audience, to be focusing on, and how much focus should be dedicated to these particular details. Ganz also provides a relatively pragmatic way to achieve this when thinking about screenplay writing; write as if writing for the camera. This isn’t a fully prescriptive statement, and the nuances are many, but is a good starting point when writing a highly-detailed scene or sequence that you want to particularly focus on building your world. Hopefully I can combine this with my previous experience in writing for perspective, as I outlined in my discussion of David Mitchell above; although his techniques focus on character, I believe the level of detail he includes in these perspective-based writings can be useful for this lens-based writing for screen.
I watched “Malcolm in the Middle”, and it got me thinking…
When I first learned about the content of this studio, the idea of a story world, my mind immediately drifted to the worlds of science fiction, fantasy and alternate history, worlds where the rules and structures of our own are almost unrecognisable. However, as we have discussed during the last two weeks every (but not limited to) work of film takes place in a particular story world, with its own setting, characters, history, boundaries and internal logic. These worlds range in scope from entire galaxies with thousands of featured characters to just a few characters in a setting of one or two household rooms.
Television sitcoms generally occupy a fairly similar world: a relatively undisturbed group of friends or family, existing almost exclusively in a couple of households, live a peaceful existence that is disrupted every week by some problem, obstacle or opportunity. Nine times out of ten, the pleasant status quo is restored as the episode ends. “Malcolm in the Middle” generally follows this formula episode-to-episode, except the status quo is far from pleasant; Malcolm’s family fight constantly, live in squalor and are completely financially unstable. In many episodes, the weekly problem is not a problem but a temporary elevation of one or more of the characters out of their position, before eventually tumbling back to their miserable normalcy. At the outset of the series, Malcolm is placed in a high-achievers class, a position that should allow him to transcend his dysfunctional working-class family; instead, it makes him an even larger target for bullies. In the season one episode “Malcolm Babysits”, Malcolm gets a high-paying job babysitting that allows him to escape his family in favour of his clients’ lavish house; as the reality of his conditions are revealed, Malcolm ends up back in his starting position by the episode’s end.
At first, to me this trend in sitcoms seemed like more of a plot issue than a world issue; the plot structure of episodic TV comedies demand that the status quo is restored at the episode’s end. However, through our discussions, particularly the one regarding “Sex and the City”, I realised this forms part of the internal logic of the shows’ story worlds. Much like in “Sex and the City” where New York exists as a safe space in many ways dominated by upper class women, sitcom characters and their situations must exist in an almost static state of being, generally fairly positive. The show logic dictates that, if there is a problem, it must be solved to restore the balance of the world by the end of the episode. “Malcolm in the Middle”, then, is interesting because its internal logic calls for a world that is NOT positive and happy; instead, the show and its characters must return to a state of squalor and dysfunction.
How will this relate to my eventual creation of my own story world? In many cases, it seems very easy to create a world modelled on pre-existing worlds in similar settings. When you construct your own world, you look to other worlds for characters, histories and, of course, internal logics: sci-fi worlds include interplanetary governance and faster-than-light travel; fantasy worlds include a hierarchical monarchy and swordplay; or, as we discussed in class, coming-of-age film worlds feature male protagonists who must achieve certain tasks or undergo great change to “get the girl”. Rarely do we see a teen male protagonist “get the girl” through his own original self-being, but maybe it is these worlds that are the most interesting. “Malcolm in the Middle” takes the sitcom genre’s archetypal internal logic, and flips it on its head, because in reality things don’t always reset to a happy and peaceful status quo. Perhaps when considering my story world, I should try and differ my work from other works that might share its genre or setting by giving it a unique, among other things, internal logic.
(I borrowed some ideas about “Malcolm in the Middle”‘s structure from this article: https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/why-malcolm-in-the-middle-is-a-socialist-masterpiece)
In our first week, while discussing how story worlds are created and presented, we spent a lot of time talking about the notion of these worlds as “what if?” scenarios. What if our idyllic life was an enormous reality TV show? What if a magical world existed parallel to our regular one? What if society had evolved without the concept of lying? Sometimes these scenarios can be a massive change to our world, and sometimes they’re simply the introduction of something unfamiliar into the familiar. Amazon’s TV series Man in the High Castle presents us with a familiar yet very unfamiliar 1960s America where Japan and Nazi Germany won World War II and have since occupied and partitioned the United States à la East and West Germany; some of the first shots we’re treated to include a Times Square filled with Nazi Propaganda and a view over a San Francisco with a noticeably Japanese architectural aesthetic.
Nazis have been a staple as antagonists in Western cinema and television pretty constantly since the war, and we’ve had thousands of depictions of the SS and other arms of the German war machine both in period pieces and in speculative or science fiction pieces depicting their revival (2012’s Iron Sky, in an outlandish example, depicts a persisting Nazi presence on the Moon that returns to invade earth in 2018). However, what Man in the High Castle does interestingly is not its depiction of Nazis as military occupiers, a form in which we have seen them countless times, but instead a focus on Nazi peacetime society. How do adherers to Nazi ideology live now that the war is over and their dream has been realised? How does the everyday East Coast American, subject to Nazi rule, conform with their society?
Despite the prevailing ideology, many customs and practices we see in depictions of late 1950s and early 1960s middle class American life persist. The first American Nazi family we meet lunch together in a scene that reminded me of the Draper residence from Mad Men; the dining room is very well-to-do, the little girls are dressed in modest but intentionally fine dresses, the mother similarly so but with a white apron around her waste. The father, Obergruppenfuhrer John Smith, is dressed a war veteran or working military officer might at Sunday lunch, in his olive military uniform studded with various medals and commendations; the only difference is the Imperial Eagle pinned to his breast and swastika band around his arm. The son, similarly, looks like a Boy Scout, in a light brown shirt and shorts with a small neckerchief; of course, the swastika on his arm implies this is the dress code of the Hitler Youth. The parallels between American society and the one presented here are intentional; many of the practices these upper middle class people are engaged in are only made “Nazi” by the symbols of the occupying force.
These parallels continue: the family’s son strives to achieve in school, particularly in the subject of “Aryan history”; as class begins, the children swear allegiance to the Reich in a catechism directly mimicking that of the modern day American Pledge of Allegiance; handshakes with superiors are replaced with a salute and a “Sieg heil!”; clean family cars drive through spotless suburban streets and houses with white picket fences. On phone booths and cigarette packets, the swastika takes a prominent place, which is disconcerting when you notice how often it just replaces the American flag. Even the aforementioned scene in Times Square reminds us of the omnipresence of visual advertising and American symbolism.
However, the intrigue in Man in the High Castle isn’t just in its parallels between peacetime middle class life in America and a Nazi alternate history; the point it may be trying to make is that life often doesn’t change for the better off classes, no matter the political situation. It’s the differences that make you realise how fundamentally Nazi ideology has altered the functioning of society. In one scene, a doctor tells the aforementioned John Smith that his son has a rare genetic disorder that will leave him, it is implied, physically disabled. Of course this would be an upsetting discovery for any father to make; however, in the Greater American Reich, those who are not of good genetic stock are subject to extermination. The fact that he has a son with a genetic disorder would threaten Smith’s work-related ambitions; a man whose genetic stock is inferior would be questionably inferior himself. So, as the doctor informs Smith, the common and correct course of action is to quietly kill his son himself, so no one will ever discover his genetic imbalance.
Man in the High Castle has plenty of other interesting ideas and worlds presented within it, particularly that of Japanese-occupied San Francisco and a budding resistance movement present in the forgotten Rocky Mountains. However, what is most interesting for this particular part of the series, the lives of everyday middle class Nazi Americans, is how accepted this potential course of action is; if someone is of inferior genetics, then they must be exterminated without qualms, even if it is your own child. This intrusion of hardline Nazi ideology into what has otherwise been an idyllic, family-oriented and peaceful world is what hits you the hardest.
I’m not really sure how I can relate this to my own practice; maybe I will keep in mind the techniques the producers of the series use to subtly create this world that is so familiar yet so startlingly different if my own chosen story world embraces this concept of “the unfamiliar in the familiar”. However, I wished to record these thoughts nonetheless as I think they show very strongly the strength of a well-crafted, all-encompassing and expansive story world, where the rules are adhered to very strictly.
“I always find that if two (or more) of us throw ideas backwards and forwards I get to more interesting and original places than I could have ever have gotten to on my own” (Cleese, John 1991)
In our most recent tute, tasked with coming up with an ensuing plot and ending for an extended version of the 2002 French short film “J’attendrai le suivant (I’ll wait for the next one)”, our group, like some others in the class, touched on some fairly outlandish ideas during our discussion, before agreeing on a final story. Someone would propose something, and we’d extend the idea as far as possible, even if it became, as it often did, unbelievable and humorous. However, it was important that we submitted these ideas to a wider discussion, rather than just going with our sustained point of focus. This is something that John Cleese actually recommends in his lecture “On Creativity”, stating:
“Once we’ve taken our decision [read: idea], we should narrow our focus while we’re implementing it, and then after it’s been carried out, we should once again switch back to the open mode to review the feedback arising from our action in order to decide whether the course we have taken is successful … we tend to maintain tunnel vision at times we really need to step back and contemplate the wider view.”
Through this method of narrow focus and then group review, we’d be able to select portions of our extended discussion and incorporate them into our final story. What in many ways appeared to be a fruitless and insincere discussion ended up producing some “serious” and useable ideas and forming the core of our story.
However, it wasn’t the outlandish nature of our conversations that produced and honed our story, but rather the collaborative nature of our discussion. It was important that we as individuals or even pairs going down a particular path, extending a particular idea, had others to reel us in; many times, someone would pull someone up an idea for being too unrealistic, being too far removed from the existing story or not fitting the genre, tone and characters of our proposed story. When you’re stuck on a particular idea, although it’s useful for you to explore this idea to its fullest extent to extract all of its potential, you also need something to make sure you stay within the boundaries of the story you are aiming to tell, which more often than not is a collaborative partner of some kind (as discussed in this week’s reading).
The collaborative process wasn’t only important in limiting the scope of our ideas but also in their expansion. As an individual, when exploring an idea it feels like you stay on one track, following one aspect of the idea and, most times unintentionally, ignoring the others. However, by simply verbalising your idea to another person, you can elicit in them an entire range of other perspectives and possibilities from your starting point. Discussing an idea in a group, then, even one that you feel you have fleshed out to its fullest, is important for realising its full potential.
In terms of relating this to my own practice: in the past I have rarely asked others for this sort of creative input into works I’ve created; although I might consult with other people once I have the story fleshed out and in some sort of demonstrable form, I don’t think I’ve ever collaborated or consulted with others on the actual underlying ideas. However, I can now see the strength of doing so; by using this “back and forth” collaborative method, you’re able to, more times than not, reveal the most effective and fitting possibility for every thread of your story idea. Although you might have a set starting and ending point to your story, your exploration of what can happen in between may not be exhaustive; therefore, collaborating or consulting with someone else seems advisable. Although we haven’t embarked on any solid creative projects so far this semester, I’ll keep this exercise in mind and make sure to present things to my peers in the future.