Portrait of the Artist?

I just finished reading a basically sound book, Gigi Rosenberg's The Artist's Guide to Grant Writing.  But I'm still stuck on a sentence in the middle: "An artist statement reveals your philosophy, why you do what you do - your themes, your processes, your obsessions, and all the other details your audience needs to know."

Now, to be fair, I would not for a moment deny the importance of an artist statement to grant writing, which is the subject of her book.  And a little later on, she has a very valid point about how the process of writing such a statement can help you understand and focus your own work.  But why does "your audience" need to be told about "your themes, your processes, your obsessions"?

Is it the artist that matters?  Or is it the art?

There is a great line in 1776.  (Okay, there are, at a very rough estimate, 2,347 great lines in 1776, but for our purposes right now there's only one that matters.)  Thomas Jefferson has drafted the Declaration of Independence, and now every member of Congress has to put in his two cents about wouldn't it be better if you included this, or took that out, or changed this word, or…  Through it all, Jefferson sits there, silent, agreeing to every change.  Finally, in exasperation, John Adams demands when Jefferson is going to speak up for his own work.  And Jefferson answers:

"I had hoped that the work would speak for itself."

Art is self-expression, yes.  But that is its process, not its purpose.  It's the difference, if you will, between agent cause and final cause.

Which brings me to my favorite painting, Rembrandt's The Painter in His Studio.

Given that we don't even see the painting here, just the artist, it might seem an ironic choice for this post.  But the painting is so much bigger than he is.  And the painting is in the light (one could argue that it is creating the light) while he is in shadow.  And Rembrandt didn't provide us with an artist statement.

Looking at this, I think of St. Augustine.  In a sermon on John the Baptist, he wrote:

John is the voice that lasts for a time; from the beginning Christ is the Word who lives for ever.  Take away the word, the meaning, and what is the voice? … When the word has been conveyed to you, does not the sound seem to say: The word ought to grow, and I should diminish?  The sound of the voice has made itself heard in the service of the word, and has gone away, as though it were saying: My joy is complete.  Let us hold on to the word.

If you're in a good mood...

Don't read this post.  Seriously.  Stop now.  Go make art while the sun shines.

When I'm feeling useless, untalented, and generally waste-of-time-and-space-ish, I go and read this.  All the way through.

And then I get back to work.

Not All Tears Are Evil

The reliably insightful Simcha Fisher has me thinking about sentimentality and pain, about the difference between manipulation and earned tears.  I love a movie that can really hurt me, burrow into my heart and shatter it and then stay there, somehow making it more whole.  But how does a story do that?  And how does it make sorrow more than a reflex?

A few suggestions:

1. The pain must be more than thwarted desire.  I think this is why most "chick flicks" don't work for me: The be-all and end-all is that, in the end, they get each other (laughs) or they don't (tears).  I need something more than that.  Some sense, however tiny, of sacrifice.  Some hint, however faint, that the love we are seeing is a reflection of a higher love.  Romantic love can be selfish, and it's not that I'm opposed to happy endings (see the first item, below), but giving needs to precede receiving.

2. Surprise me, if you can.  At the very least, do not tell me how to feel.  Jose's death in For Greater Glory does not move me as much as Fr. Vega's "I will always be a priest" speech, and I think that's because of how they were each filmed (or I have some serious issues, take your pick).  Jose's death is all slow-mo and close-up, the equivalent of screaming at the audience "This is important!  This is moving!!  Be moved!!!"  It indicates a lack of trust in both the moment and the audience.  I wanted to be moved, was fully prepared to be moved, but my contrarian nature rebels at being commanded to be moved.  On the other hand, for Fr. Vega, the marvelous Santiago Cabrera just says the words, calmly giving us a glimpse of a soul torn in half.

3. (Closely related to #1)  Tell me something more than "Life is sad."  I know that.  We all do.  I have problems of my own - I don't need to cry over fictional ones.  There is nothing profound or brave about telling me that life is pain (unless you follow it with "Anyone who says differently is selling something.").  Loss is the ultimate truth.  Except that it isn't.  And if you can make both of those statements at once, and show me that they are both true, then I will gladly cry.

So here follows, in no particular order, a list of some moments that do this for me.  I have made no attempt to describe them.  The point is that they are parts of a whole that give the whole meaning, so to describe them would be to write the movie again.  If you've seen any of them, hopefully you know what I mean, and if you haven't, I won't diminish them by summary.

(Aside: I have limited this to film because that's what I write, and therefore what I analyze, not in any way to suggest that literature or other media can't have the same effect.  They can and do.)

Lost, "The Constant": "Penny, you answered."

Serenity: "My turn." (I know I've mentioned this one before, but it belongs on the list.)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: "Okay."

Star Trek (2009): "Tiberius? No way, that's the worst."

The Prestige: "Jess, look at me. I will come for you."

Finding Neverland: "I'm not Peter Pan. He is."

Scrubs, "My Screwup": "Where do you think we are?"

The End of the Affair (1999): "Maybe there's no other kind." (I am not giving this movie an unqualified endorsement, but this scene works.)

And now for a sub-list (not exhaustive) from Doctor Who.  I'm working on some theories about why this show gets me so often, and so well, but for the moment, let it suffice that it does:

"Father's Day": "No, love. I'm your dad. It's my job for it to be my fault."

"Doomsday": Silence. The Doctor and Rose, a wall and a universe apart.

"The Family of Blood": "Could you change back?"  "Yes."  "Will you?"  "No."

"Last of the Time Lords": "It's just a bullet, that's all, just one little bullet."

"The Fires of Pompeii": "Save someone!"

"The End of Time": "Was she happy?"  "Yes. Yes, she was. Were you?"

"Amy's Choice": "It can't be. Rory isn't here." (This one comes close to contradicting #1, though I think it works well enough with #2 and #3.  Any Whovians out there who have thoughts on this, please discuss!)

Now it's your turn.  What moments are on your list?  And why do they work for you?

The Uses of Bad Art, Explained by Good Art

(Wherein Sharon agrees with J.R.R. Tolkien, who doesn't need the help.)

My awakening to screenwriting came through two sources, both of which I encountered at that impressionable age around thirteen.  One was a rather sublime movie, which may be the subject of a future post. (Kevin Jarre, requiescat in pace, and thank you.)  The other was a TV show - Mission: Impossible.

Not the 1960s classic, though I have since found and loved that one, too.  No, the too-brief '80s revival starring Peter Graves, Thaao Penghlis, Tony Hamilton, Phil Morris, and Jane Badler.  (If anyone read that last sentence and thought "What about Terry Markwell?" - to such an one, if such there be, I can only shout "Comrade!")

Mission did two main things for me as a writer.  First, it taught me to plot.  This was not a show where you could just throw your characters into an interesting premise and see what happened.  It was a giant puzzle, only comprehensible when the last piece clicked into place.  First and foremost, it was the structure that mattered, and when years later I read the Poetics - "We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and that the Characters come second." - I thought, Well, yes.  As Mission creator Bruce Geller said, "They are what they do."  And because of that structure, it was ultimately a show about the complete mutual trust of five people.  Everyone did his part, knowing absolutely that the others were doing theirs.  Not a bad metaphor.  (In case it isn't obvious, this is why I'm not a fan of the Cruise/DePalma/Koepp/Zaillian/Towne reboot, which systematically destroyed that theme.  The new creative team has made good progress in recovering it, but I have yet to see the Mission movie I really crave.)

The second thing Mission did for me was get bad.  Now, at their best they had never been perfect.  There was always far too much infuriatingly unnecessary exposition - it is never a good idea to have one of your characters say "Our plan is working!" - and the teaser seldom did anything other than say "the bad guys are bad," which we were pretty much going to figure out from the rest of the episode.  But I digress.  From generally sound plotting in the first season, allowing for some nice ensemble acting, they drifted in the second season into sloppy structure and sensationalistic premises.  Eye-opening for a budding writer, as it was an object lesson in how much the script matters.

Then, toward the end, they did an episode that was not just sloppy, not just unbelievable.  It was wrong.  I sat through it thinking "Max would never behave that way, and Shannon wouldn't fall for that, and none of them is so stupid as to…"  I got mad.  So I rewrote it.  And oh, it felt good.  I'm still proud of that story, as a matter of fact.

But where did all that righteous indignation come from?  After all, it was their show, not mine.  The characters were whatever they said, right?

As often happens, Tolkien supplies the answer.

One of my favorite passages in The Silmarillion is the creation of the Dwarves.  Please excuse a lengthy quotation - it's worth it:

Now Ilúvatar knew what was done, and in the very hour that Aulë's work was complete, and he was pleased, and began to instruct the Dwarves in the speech that he had devised for them, Ilúvatar spoke to him; and Aulë heard his voice and was silent.  And the voice of Ilúvatar said to him: 'Why hast thou done this?  Why dost thou attempt a thing which thou knowest is beyond thy power and thy authority?  For thou hast from me as a gift thy own being only, and no more; and therefore the creatures of thy hand and mind can live only by that being, moving when thou thinkest to move them, and if thy thought be elsewhere, standing idle.  Is that thy desire?'

Then Aulë answered: 'I did not desire such lordship.  I desired things other than I am, to love and to teach them, so that they too might perceive the beauty of Eä, which thou has caused to be.  For it seemed to me that there is great room in Arda for many things that might rejoice in it, yet it is for the most part empty still, and dumb.  And in my impatience I have fallen into folly.  Yet the making of things is in my heart from my own making by thee; and the child of little understanding that makes a play of the deeds of his father may do so without thought of mockery, but because he is the son of his father.  But what shall I do now, so that thou be not angry with me for ever?  As a child to his father, I offer to thee these things, the work of the hands which thou hast made.  Do with them what thou wilt.  But should I not rather destroy the work of my presumption?'

Then Aulë took up a great hammer to smite the Dwarves; and he wept.  But Ilúvatar had compassion upon Aulë and his desire, because of his humility; and the Dwarves shrank back from the hammer and were afraid, and they bowed down their heads and begged for mercy.  And the voice of Ilúvatar said to Aulë: 'Thy offer I accepted even as it was made.  Dost thou not see that these things have now a life of their own, and speak with their own voices?  Else they would not have flinched from thy blow, nor from any command of thy will.'

Our desire to create is itself a gift of our Creator, and a part of that gift is that our creations take on a - very limited - life of their own.  Or perhaps it would be better to say a truth of their own, a participation in Truth itself.  They thus become things that we do not entirely control, and it is our job not so much to tell them what we want them to do, as to discover What They Are, or are meant to be.  And the most important part of our job is to offer them back to God, with the prayer that they will serve His will.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a Mission movie to write.

Of Darkness and Dawn

I am an absolute and total physical coward.  Seriously.  I had a blood test before my wedding, and then one about six months after, and at the second one the lab technician remembered me and how close I had come to fainting the first time.

So, naturally, I write a lot of war movies, I've read everything I can find about Saint Isaac Jogues, and one of my favorite scenes on film is the climax of The Last King of Scotland.  (For those who don't get that reference, and feel inclined to check it out, you have been warned.)

I am deeply ashamed of my cowardice.  And that's why I am so fascinated with violence on film.  Because I agree with Flannery O'Connor that violence wakes us up, returns us to reality, and because I believe that we show who we truly are by how we handle suffering.

I don't get courage.  I don't get how people can handle pain.  So I feel drawn to every example of pain I can find, in the hope that by seeing it and writing it, I may learn it to some small degree how to cope with it.

Which brings me to The Dark Knight Rises.  It seems to me that Christopher Nolan's violence is so hard to watch precisely because it is personal.  The midpoint, the anticipated fight scene between the Batman and Bane, is not the big, exciting showdown of a comic book movie.  It's not "cool."  It is messy and dark and brutal.  And the Nolan brothers' genius is in putting Selina Kyle into that scene as an observer.  As she realizes that she is watching Bane break, not the Batman, but Bruce Wayne - that maddening man with whom she has danced, and flirted, and dueled - she also realizes that she has hurt - maybe killed - not a symbol, but a person.  And she realizes who that person really is.

The Dark Knight trilogy is, ultimately, about pain, and most of its grace is grace refused.  It is Harvey Dent, after all, who promises us that the dawn is coming.  For the Christian, that is the ultimate truth, but it is equally true that no one of us is guaranteed that dawn.  We have the terrible power to flip the coin.

In fact, one can argue that the entire creation of the Batman is grace refused.  In an interview published with the screenplay for Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan said of Bruce Wayne: "There is this hollow quality to him.  He's damaged goods…. Christian manages to make him funny and charming, and there is a good sense of humor there, but you never forget what happened to him as a child.  It hangs in everything he does.  There's a burnt-out quality, in moral terms."  Contrast Bruce's refusal to move on  - from his parents, from Rachel - with the future Alfred wants for him.  Even though he channels his anger to do good, Alfred suggests that it would be healthier if he just let it go: "I never wanted you to come back to Gotham.  I knew there was nothing here for you but pain and tragedy."

Darkness is the absence of light.  These are films that make us feel that absence very keenly.  And when the dawn peeks through - when a man wraps a coat around a little boy to tell him the world hasn't ended - we want it that much more intensely.

On Beauty and Batman

In his inimitable style, Bad Catholic in an interview explains why the modern world will be saved by beauty:

Q: Another favorite topic of yours is Beauty. Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said that “beauty will save the world.” Why is beauty so important and how can we harness its power?

It’s very simple, actually. There are three Transcendentals, three infinite goals that man naturally strives for. He strives for Goodness (that which he should obey), Truth (that which he should believe), and Beauty (that which he should admire.)

To the Christian worldview, these three Transcendentals, in their perfection, are God Himself. God is goodness, truth and beauty. (This, by the way, implies that goodness=truth=beauty (Keats was right!) but I digress.)

In their imperfect form—that is, in all man’s pitiful attempts to be Good, to know Truth, and to reach Beauty—God is pointed to. They are each images of God. Now our culture got rid of the Good with the introduction of moral relativism—it has been limited to the self, to the I Am The Arbiter of My Own Morality. It got rid of Truth with the public school system—my truth is not your truth, and I promise that statement is true. So we’re left with Beauty as the our last hope to avoid damning ourselves to a delightfully vague and relative Hell.  (Emph. mine.)

It reminds me, rather of Barbara Nicolosi's lecture on "Haunting Moments" in film: those parts of a film that catch your breath away, that transcend the film itself, that become holy because they are true, and good, and beautiful.  She gives many examples - one of my favorite ones being from that delightful Danish film, Babette's Feast (watch here from about 1:38 on...but make sure you put on captions!)- but I might also add the "I pardon you" moment from Schindler's List, Samwise Gamgee's "There's good in this world, Mr. Frodo - and it's worth fighting for!" (or pretty much anything Sam), or a host of others.

So I'd like to talk quickly about two superhero movies which - I'm going to presume - everyone in America (or enough of everyone) has seen.  That is: Spiderman and The Dark Knight Rises.

WARNING!  SPOILERS!

I saw Spiderman first - although no where near its release date - since I was nervous about yet another superhero movie.  I find that too often these sorts of things just become an expensive and dull way to watch someone else play an Epic Video Game - but all of the summer fare this year (the wonderful Avengers very much included) has at least been thoughtful.

Back to Spiderman.  A friend of mine finally convinced me to see it, citing the excellent acting as sure bait to get me to the theatre.  Nor was she wrong.  The trailers inevitably give the Everything Is Action edit, but the film itself is less about the stunts (although those are many) and more about the relationships between Peter and the various people in his life.  Most luminous, for me, was the final haunting moment: when Peter, battered from his final fight with the monster he created, manages to remember to bring home the eggs that his Aunt had asked him to get.

It's a simple, small, silly human thing.  And it's true.  Every day we battle our work, our boredom, our feelings of being trapped or caught, of not loving as much as we could, of financial or family woes, or just plain being tired - we battle them, and we bring back the eggs.

A battered Spidy looks better to me than the pristine Batman.

However, in The Dark Knight Rises, I was hard pressed to find a moment of beauty.  In the wake of the terrible shooting in Colorado at the midnight premiere of the latest Dark Knight movie, I therefore found myself approaching the film (in a movie theatre!) with fear and trembling.  I went with my father, located all the exits as I entered, and planned on hitting the floor should a gunman come in.

As you may have deduced, my precautions were unwarranted, and I was subjected to no worse terror than having a total stranger sit a mere single seat away from me.  The nerve.

However, while I was watching the movie, I found myself perhaps more disturbed than if a merely physical assault had battered at me.  The third Batman movie centers around the villain Bane who is built up as someone having ideals very much like the extremists of the French Terror.  (One visual where Bane appears to be knitting something at a mock court was not lost on this lover of all thing French Revolutiony, Mme. Defarge!)

The violence in the film, however, verged on the pornographic.  I can't quite put my finger on why it felt so invasive - perhaps the spectre of the Colorado tragedy hung over my head - but I would put forth that the violence was worsened because the movie (and, I feel, the whole trilogy) lacked grace.

Sure, there was some attempt at light in the person of John Blake (later Robin) played by that excellent Nolan hat trick actor, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  However, John Blake's adulation of the Commissioner proved to be ill-founded; his attempts to save the children failed; and in the end he gave up on working through the system of the law.  Ergo, our one true hero in the film gives up on the mechanics of grace within the chronology of the film (if not the possibility of grace post-film).

Moreover, Batman himself is Ivanhoed - that is, out of the picture literally and figuratively - for the majority of the movie.  And those times he is crucified, as every good action hero should be, he comes across a somewhat unwilling victim, so that his "final act" feels more selfish than salvific.

Where does this leave the Avengers?  Somewhere inbetween.  I don't know that it's a beautiful movie (neither is Spiderman, for the record - he's just more beautiful to this author in comparison to his fellow summer fare), but as written by that Doge of Dialogue, Joss Whedon, it's at least light-hearted, and surprisingly less atheistic than his usual offerings.  It even, perhaps inadvertently, has a haunting moment, when an elderly German man refuses to bow to Loki, the Norse "puny god" of mischief.

Loki: In the end, you will always kneel.


Elderly German Man:  But not to you.

Man will be saved by beauty - although beauty comes in many forms.  It comes not only in the roses, but in the thorns.  It comes not only in the risen Christ, but in the ravaged Christ upon the cross.  Beauty is in the wrinkles, and the jokes that aren't funny, and the woman who gets up at five with her children, and with the man who goes to a job he hates for a family he loves.

The job of the artist, then, is to hold a mirror up to nature - to show man his beauty by showing man His scars.

Are You Playwright Enough?

There's an exciting NaNoWriMo-like challenge starting tomorrow for all playwrights:

31 Plays in 31 Days is the challenge for playwrights to produce a play a day (one page minimum) during the month of August.

I'm terribly excited by the idea.  I've known a few other playwrights who've managed to do a play a day for a year...trying to make a month is about enough for me!

Today's the last day to sign up officially (I think) so make sure you send your info in!