Writers-Movies, Day 5: Paterson

There is something magical about the movie Paterson

But, then again, there's something magical about every Jim Jarmusch joint.

Paterson is a poem; it's a love-poem to poetry, and it is actually a poem (several, in fact) being written on the screen as we watch the film.

If you've been to New Jersey (and I have been to New Jersey), the last thing you would think is 'poetry,' and if it were poetry you were thinking, it would be some industrial/manufacturing/dispossessed kind of poetry, no? But, surprise-surprise: William Carlos Williams lived in Paterson, NJ, and Paterson, the bus-driving poet, lives in Paterson, and, because it's a Jim Jarmusch joint, this little film works, and works beautifully.

Here, we have a poet that, unlike Miss Flora Post in Cold Comfort Farm who can sponge off of relatives (which we reviewed yesterday), Paterson is just a dude, so he has to have a job, and his job is being a bus-driver (so, Adam Driver being a bus-driver makes perfect Jarmuschian sense), and on his job, and walking his dog, and sitting at the bar, he gets to observe life, and record it in poems in his little poetry-journal.

Paterson is very much an observer, and the movie Paterson moves at this pace: it's unfettered by any need to rush into action and has an entirely unhurried air. Because of this freedom, the film gets to say a lot, just by watching the characters, and, not surprisingly, it packs in a lot more into this film than a blockbuster can afford to do.

It's funny: Avengers: Infinite Whatever, a film that cost one BILLION dollars to produce, has a plot that reduces to "must stop the bad guy" and has no character-development whatsoever. Paterson, however, looks like it was financed with a credit card, but we get to know not only Paterson, but his wife, his shift-manager, some friends at the bar, and even a bunch of punks in a five-four warning him about the dangers of dog-napping. And we get to learn about and to appreciate the city of Paterson, itself, so much so that it becomes a character in the movie. Paterson wasn't filmed in Paterson because it was just some j-random town they picked; no, Paterson was filmed in Paterson, because Paterson has a rich, living history. Paterson was filmed in Paterson, because it couldn't possibly be filmed anywhere else, and my hat's off to Jim Jarmusch in showing me a little town in New Jersey that, by the end of the film, I fell in love with and would love to visit, and walk about, and live there, and write poetry, and drive a bus, and listen to the conversations the locals have about ... well, anything.

And, I'll admit this: I wrote down every poem written by Paterson, and the little girl, in the movie Paterson.

Judge me.

Paterson informs my writing thus:

• Plot? What is plot? My stories are character-driven stories, but they are not plot-free. I develop my stories from a plot-perspective – beginning, middle, end – and I have that nailed before I write a word, but then, each chapter, as I write it, the characters surprise me with their own revelations, and sometimes (every time? I'm not sure) I have to abandon the plot, because the characters say: "No. We're doing this now." And they say this, not because The Plot Must Change. No, they say this because the plot is immaterial to where they are now in their lives. They're not going to jump off a cliff now because that's just not who they are. Paterson is not a plotless movie, but it is a movie where the plot is immaterial. The characters make their choices that they make every day, the same choices they made yesterday, and the 'plot' naturally falls out from that, because there is no 'The Plot,' there is simply people lives their lives.
• Settings. I research my settings. Why? I want to know where a turn in the road leads to a mountain view, or is the center of town ... empty? thriving? If it's New England, where's the Dunkin Donuts? If it's California, is it North or South California, on the coast or in the desert? I want a reader to be able to feel like they can walk in my book and breathe the air, and know what it feels like. Paterson brings the town of Paterson to life.
• Paterson is a movie of rabbit-holes: a series of journeys with no destinations in mind, so it may be considered in stark contrast to the Lord of the Rings, where there always is a destination ever before the Fellowship. Lord of the Rings is a very tiresome and anxious movie (the books I found to be quite a different experience). Paterson is the opposite: you flow along with the movie, and are delighted to find yourself talking to a little girl who writes her own poetry, or find yourself by a laundromat, of all places, listening in on a rapper honing his craft, or, lo! and behold! what is a tourist from Japan doing in Paterson, New Jersey, but to visit the town where William Carlos Williams lived! Paterson lets you explore and discover and be and at your own pace, because our man Paterson is in no hurry to get 'there,' wherever this 'there' happens to be. Even in Paterson, New Jersey, one can stop to smell the roses.

Paterson is a beautiful little love-poem to Paterson, New Jersey. Take some of your precious time to watch this movie; it is time taken you will treasure.

Writers-Movies, Day 4: Cold Comfort Farm

"... and introducing (???) Kate Beckinsale!"

And with that, we're off to a rollicking start to one of the smartest period-pieces, Cold Comfort Farm, mocking every young aspiring authoress who wants to be the Next Jane Austin, in the style of P.G. Woodhouse and Oscar Wilde!

Golly, the Brits do have it lucky, they get Shakespeare, then they get all these other smart, wry, funny, observant authors, too. To be sure, they have their Darwins and Dickens (meaning: boorish authors who put you to sleep faster than chloroform), but the richness and depth and breath of writing one can choose from the œuvre is both daunting and humbling.

Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons, tackles this conundrum head-on: if everybody else has already said everything to say, and have already said it better, then ...

... well, give up?

"... the golden orb ..." Miss Post starts again, and stops again, in her writing at this point, groaning in frustration, reading what she's written.

Sounds familiar, authors?

But the thing is, she doesn't give up, she lives her life, which isn't a Romantic Novelization filled with Drama and Ponderous Poetry, but it's a bunch of farmers, bumbling though their lives. But the thing is: their lives are filled with Drama and Poetry, ... and silliness, and from abandoning what she thinks are the Rules of Writing, and living her life and observing the characters that populate her life, she comes up with a much more interesting story to write.

Miss Flora Post actually did have to give up. She had to give up her preconceived notions of "What a Writer Is" and "How a Novel Reads." When she gave these things up, she emptied her cup, so to speak (and, being a Proper British Young Lady, of course it was a tea cup), so that living life could fill it with something fresh and original and something that was entirely hers.

Cold Comfort Farm is a movie filled with expectation-subversions for this young aspiring authoress:

• What writing is
• What a novel is about
• Who people are

Because, in the end, she didn't write the characters, the characters wrote themselves, but only after she opened her eyes to them as living, breathing, three-dimensional people, and not the stereotypical Seth and Reuben she dismissed with a quick sniff.

And when she did that, she did get her Romantic Ending, being swept off her feet by the dashing-yet-unassuming Charles and whisked away in his æroplane.

Both Stella Gibbon's book and John Schlesinger's movie get the humor just right. They mock both the characters and the reader at the same time but they do so gently. Why? because the humor is cheeky, to be sure, but kind, at the same time. The characters are portrayed lovingly and with understanding, but not at all blind to their follies and foibles. In fact, the authoress is abundantly aware of their shortcomings, and her own, too, and so I got the sense that she wrote Cold Comfort Farm just so. 'This is not a Jane Austen novel,' she says, 'this is just my little roman à clef. Not serious, but silly: just like you, me, and everybody else who takes their lives so seriously are.'

Cold Comfort Farm is an easy ride and a delight to watch that, surprisingly, stays with you long after the end-credits.

What did I learn from this movie (and book, as they are nigh unto one and the same):

• Abandon what I am going to write, because that just doesn't work for me. What does work for me is wind up the characters and watch the sparks fly as the collide against each other.
• It was a dark and stormy night is the exact set-up of Cold Comfort Farm, but the book and the movie showed me that the thickened fens of setting and the broody, dark characters have a surprising depth to them, and they can be funny, and they can change, and it doesn't have to be a struggle all the time, either.
• As in Topsy-Turvey (another movie in this genre), taking a break from worrying over writing to live your life can actually inspire your writing, give you a fresh start, and be the impetus to give you the get-up-and-go to write or to rewrite that novel.

Remember, kids: 🎵 The Earth will burn and we will QUIVER! 🎵 Watch Cold Comfort Farm to spit out your tea, chorkling with mirth, when you get this reference, foreshadowed so delightfully by Flora's innocent "...but why are they called the Quivering brethren?"-query.

Writers-Movies, Day 3: Blade Runner

We continue our series of blog posts on writerly/writers/writing-movies with la crème de la crème of movies: Blade Runner. 

Blade Runner isn't only the best science fiction movie of all time, it is also the best movie of all time. There never was and there never will be a movie to top Blade Runner and ...

No, wait: there's Blade Runner 2049, a rare gem of a sequel that excelled its predecessor.

Okay? Are we on the same page here? Yes? Great.

Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 are two sides of one coin that ask one question: what is it to be human? And even: what do we do to deserve our humanity? The Blade Runner movies ask us these questions. Whereas Blade Runner follows our protagonist through the movie, self-assured and comfortable in his humanity (where, in fact, he is not human, at all), Blade Runner 2049 follows our replicant protagonist through that movie, so lost and afraid, but growing into his. The irony in both these movies is that it takes the soulless replicants, striving for something they don't have, to teach us what we take for granted: our humanity.

What can be said about the Blade Runner movies that haven't been said before?

This:

The Blade Runner movies are the finest, most successful pieces of fan fiction ever to be realized.

Think about it for a moment. Philip K. Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It was an entire world, with all the buildings disintegrating into 'kibbles,' people reduced to idiocy from radiation holding dead-end jobs on the pretext of keeping a society functioning: a society that had simply given up hope. So, what did people turn to? A VR religion that was a sham based upon the Sisyphean Greek myth, just so they could feel something, and a police force that had long ago (to nobody's knowledge) been taken over by the androids in their next step to take over the world. And, frankly, nobody in that story was likable, not our gum shoe, nor his wife, nor the Rachael android. They were all a selfish, indistinct, navel-gazing lot.

Ick.

So, how do you take all that in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and put it on the big screen?

You don't.

What the screenwriters, Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, did was to re-craft the book into the story they wanted to read or to see: Blade Runner. That is to say, they wrote the best piece of fan-fiction in existence. They took the characters in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and entirely changed the story around them, then entirely changed them, leaving their most basic motivations, to re-realize (or, in Battlestar: Galactica-parlance 'reimagine') the story to what we see on the screen today. But not only the screenwriters get credit for this, but the actor who played the relicant Roy Batty, Ruger Hauer, made his own contribution that is "perhaps the most moving death-soliloquy in cinematic history." They made a movie that had it all: life, death, love and redemption.

How can you top that?

You can't. Or so I thought. Then came Blade Runner 2049. What director Denis Villeneuve did was to replicate the movie Blade Runner, and almost exactly at that, but then turn everything on its head. Instead of the replicants not knowing they were replicants (as was the case for Deckard and Rachael), our leading leads, K and Joi, knew exactly what they were and their place in the world, but then Blade Runner 2049 changed the game when the movie introduced the game-changer, a baby.

For, unto us a child is born.

So, Blade Runner 2049, a Christmas movie?

And, like the original Blade Runner, this new movie asked the question. Now that the replicants have had a baby, what is the status of this child? And, since the replicants have had a baby, what is now their status? Furthermore, what is the weight, what is the value we, as humans, place on our children? The movie shows humanity treating both humans and replicants as material, but the replicants, when they learn that there is a child among them, they place everything on this one hope. Just as Children of Men showed us the very simple message: No children; no hope. Blade Runner 2049 gave the opposite message: One child; all hope. What is the value we place on a child, on children, on people, on the person sitting across from us. Blade Runner 2049 shows people and replicants as worthless because they are valued as such, then turns everything around and says just one child can change all that.

And, at the end of the movie, a Dad whose given up on everything, including himself, gets to meet his child he's never seen, and we get to see the light of hope, of love, reignite in the eyes of a man whose heart had gone stone-cold. Blade Runner showed Deckard as a machine, moving through the world, doing his job, just because what else was there to do? Blade Runner 2049 gave Deckard his redemption. The two movies are one movie, a complete story arc that took 40 years to tell.

What did Blade Runner teach me?

• Maybe I've internalized this lesson for so long that I needed to be reminded of this in Blade Runner, but it taught me you don't have to be a human being to be human, and, conversely, being a human being does not grant you a free-pass to your humanity. The most human characters in these movies are the replicants, struggling, striving to earn their humanity, and they do, even if they don't live to see this victory. The lost, soulless characters are the crowds and crowds of people doing their jobs, going from a to b for no reason at all.
• There is shame in being a writer of fan-fiction, and rightfully so: most fan fiction is of the Mary Sue-variety and has too many flaws for just one blog entry (and that is why I have a metric ton of blog entries addressing these errors). But what is fan fiction, at its heart? It is an homage to the source material. Good fan fiction – Blade Runner, Galaxy Quest, American Gods and (ahem) My Sister Rosalie – retell and reshape the original so that you love the original more from what you've read in the retelling. "I write fan fiction." Sure, you can be ashamed of saying that, but know this: you're in very good company.
• You have time. Both movies are 'slow' and have been criticized as being as such. But what is the payoff. You spend a lot of time with these characters, doing nothing: eating, looking at photos, walking in the rain, hanging out at a bar. Their cares become yours, and the payoff is that their lives have meaning and so do their deaths. To die here, in these movies, mean something, and, at that death, that story ends forever, and you don't get it back. These are my stories: my characters spend a lot of time with each other, talking, not understanding each other, and, finally, caring, and when a glimmer of connection appears for my characters, it means something to the readers who have invested all this time in my stories, and it means something to me. It's okay to spend the time, doing 'nothing,' in your stories when your characters matter to you, not only is it 'okay' to do this, but it's a measure of respect, and gives your characters grace that the world does not give them and does not give us.

The Blade Runner movies have shown me what humanity can be in a cold, uncaring world, and from that has shown me that writing can be something that you care about, that writing can be beautiful.

Writers-Movies, Day 2: The Man who Invented Christmas

Hello, all, day 2 of writerly-movies or writers' movies or movies that make you say 'huh!' then write.

Those kinds of movies.

Today, day 2, let's take on "The Man who Invented Christmas"

This is a movie about writing, so I loved it. It's a little frilly, sentimental, happy Christmas piece, but it does glimpse into the writer's life and experience in its ups and downs, and its authenticity? Are you looking for authenticity? Look no further

*Charles Dickens does something writerly, like isolate himself, or fly off the handle, or keep really weird hours, or stare off into space morosely.

My wife: "Uh, huh: that's what living with a writer is like."
M'gurlz: titter

What I liked about this movie is that it showed the writing process, not as we'd think it's supposed to be: plot, outlining, sitting down and writing what you planned from start to finish, but as how I've experienced it, with the long, dry, empty silences, the absolute frustration of finally starting then being interrupted just when you almost started getting going, the characters wresting the story from your grasp and reshaping it into something entirely unexpected, unwanted, and alien from what you envisioned it.

It also showed success, but not as, yay! You're published, and here's a ton of money and you lived happily ever after, but success like this.

• feeling utterly detached from the congratulations
• feeling despair that you'll never write that good again
• feeling frustrated when your readers and editors misinterpret your work, or just don't get it.

And then you're published, and you get the reviews (don't read the reviews!) and ...

... and what? Well, your life goes on, and you have bills to pay, that you can't, and you have people standing in line demanding your next work, and criticizing your last one as 'not up to par. Frankly, I expected better of him, given what's come before.'

But then you have an idea – a great idea! – but anybody can have an idea, but just try to put that down on the page and not be screaming at the page and yourself and everybody who comes within shouting range of you. The curse of the writer is that you do have an idea. Now just try to convey that to somebody – anybody – else, and not look at what you've written and scream at yourself: why! why is it not coming together! Why is this so terrible? It was a good idea when it came to me!

And then you write, and you write and you write and you write and you write and it take so agonizingly long. And nobody understands you, and why don't you do something productive with your day, spend time with the family, instead of being cooped up in your room doing nothing?

No, this is not an autobiographical blogpost, this is, honest-to-goodness, in the movie. Swearsies.

Then you've written it.

This movie did skip over the editing phase of writing, thankfully and unfortunately. Writers, unfortunately, think: "I've written it! I'm done!" when they've only just begun! The real struggle is fighting against and fighting with the editors and publishers (which they only hinted at in this movie) to get the work out there, intact, with some shred of integrity in your story remaining. Editors cut deep, sometimes they cut wrong(ly) but sometimes their cuts are good cuts. It doesn't mean that these cuts don't hurt, and some writers have to suffer rewriting their ending, or beginning, or their everything, on the advice of their editors, and, to do that? To dismember your own work because somebody else said what you just poured your heart into wasn't good enough?

The movie skipped that part, but maybe that was an editor's cut who said: "Too hard and too much. This is a Christmas movie." And, again, the editor, here, would be right.

The Man who Invented Christmas also shared the triumph we have as writers. We get to create a world. A world that never existed before until we invented it, and we get to touch lives and touch hearts and connect with people, sometimes even all over the world:

We get to read those reviews of those insightful readers that tell us things about our stories that we didn't see. We get to read those reviews of those readers who write: "You saved my life" and to know that we just did something. We just wrote that, and they can't take that away from us.

The Man who Invented Christmas ends on this high note. Charles Dickens single-handedly reshaped Christmas to what we know it to be today with A Christmas Carol. And we get to see that he saw it happen and know that what he wrote touched hearts.

This is what our writing does, it can be heartbreaking, or silly, or serious, or a flight of fancy, but it's something we wrote, ... something we wrote that touched somebody's heart like nothing else ever has nor ever will, and we did that. The Man who Invented Christmas shares this, our writers' victory.

Writers-Movies, Day 1: Unforgiven

On these five days before Christmas, let us, writers, turn our attention to happy things. What are the movies that you love and that inspire you to write? For each of these five days before Christmas, write a blog entry about a movie you find particularly ... 'something': makes you laugh, makes you cry, makes you recognize yourself, makes you say: "Wow! I wish I could write like that!" makes you say: "Wow! That's a great idea!" and makes you go off and write.

These five movies (one a day): they can be about writing, or they can be particularly well-written, or they can be just so bad, but the actors inhabit the characters so well, that they transcend the original material (ahem! To Have and Have Not)

These movies can be great, and serious, and well-respected, but they don't have to be (ahem, Deadpool). What these movies are are movies that you like and have influenced your writing.

I'll go first. A writerly movie I love is in the Clint Eastwood-genre: Unforgiven.

Unforgiven is a reconstruction of a deconstructionist movie. It tears apart everything that a Western is, but then reassembles all these pieces into something new and whole and, in the end, good. What do I like about this movie?

It's brutal and it's real.

Watching Westerns (except Blazing Saddles) is painful. The acting is stilted, the dialog non-sensical, and the fight-scenes, such as they are, are totally unrealistic. Unforgiven's fight scenes don't allow this detachment from reality. In an Unforgiven fight-scene, you are put into it, yourself, and not only do you feel the blow, being punched, or whipped, or shot, but you feel these blows as you're delivering them. Throwing a punch hurts, and it's tiring! If you don't believe me, get into the ring with me for three rounds. You won't believe the feeling, just three rounds, of how exhausting that is! Unforgiven reintroduces the audience how hard life was there, and they don't tell you life is hard, they show you. Riding, drinking, shooting, fighting, everything takes a toll, and you feel it, every inch of the way through this movie.

It has no heroes.

What? No heroes? Yet another deconstruction. The sheriff isn't the bad guy (although he's shown unsympathetically), he's just the toughest guy in town who also is trying to settle down, build his house, and keep the peace in the town, that's all! The 'bad guys' are just a bunch of fools enticed by a large reward to kill two guys, who already paid their dues, who bumble into town, thinking they have a straightforward job to execute. The ... in fact, nobody is bad here. They are all doing what they can, given the circumstance they are in. That's not right! Right?

But, because there are no bad guys, you get to see the innate goodness in every character on screen. Sure, they are all have a role to play and they find themselves stuck in these roles, but we get to see, for example, hookers, just trying to save a little money and do the laundry and get some justice for one of their own, all cut up. We get to see a bunch of guys pull together and defend a couple of cowboys and see the utter futility of what they are doing, and the absolute boredom of it, too. We see an Indian wife see her man ride off, knowing she'll never see him again, and she was right. We see a young kid take out his gun and kill a man, and see he get to feel the cost of that. Which brings me to my next point.

It has no justice.

There is no justice in this movie. There is no right nor wrong, nor morality, nor anything. There is just the West, in all its natural brutality, and the men and the women living there, and their sense of justice being betrayed at every turn. The whores want justice for a little, young girl all cut up, so they start the wheels of this movie in motion, but the sheriff gave them justice already: three ponies and a whipping. The sheriff wants justice so he beats people senseless, just for riding into town. The assassins want justice, and the money, but they're on a noble quest to right a wrong, but they compound wrong with wrongs, so one of them leaves, and he's the one that's beat to death. There is no justice and no fairness here, and:

It has no happy ending.

In fact, every bit of happiness is drained from this movie. The young whore just wants to feel a little bit of love, but William Munny turns her down, politely, not because she's been cut up, but because he's faithful to his wife ... the memory of his wife. Or that's his excuse. Maybe he doesn't want to hurt this young woman, knowing he's too bad for her, or for anybody, but he only ends up desolating her heart. "Justice" is served with William cleans house, but now a bunch of men are dead, and those left in the town have to clean up, and he has to go back across the prairie and explain what he's done and why his friend is dead. The sheriff gets his justice, being killed in cold blood, but now he's waiting in Hell for William Munny, just to say: "See? I told you so!" And, in the end, we see William Munny ride, not off into the sunset

but into the pouring rain, with the poor girl looking after him, knowing his heroic heart, knowing she should be with him, but staying, why? Because she belongs here? No! Because she belongs with him, but how can she say that?

In the end Unforgiven is a 'writerly'-movie in not what it says, or what that it tells us, and especially not in satisfying our expectations and hopes, but in what it doesn't say, and in what it doesn't give us. It is a Western with no justice, no right and wrong, and no happy ending. It is a story where each of the characters is a fully-realized person, each of the characters is (deeply) flawed, and each of the characters is immediately relatable, and if not relatable, then at least understood. You know why each character is doing what they are doing, you know that each of the characters is doing the wrong thing, and you know how you can fix them. But they aren't fixed, they are all broken, and it's heartbreaking, watching them all be swept away by both the events but also by their choices. They are all caught in a trap of being themselves, they can walk out, but they don't.

Unforgiven has informed my writing in several ways:

• A character not only can be flawed, but is flawed, and unfixably so at that, and by choice, but that doesn't make them unlikeable. In fact, their flaws are what makes them them.
• A good story doesn't explain everything to you. In fact, a good story leaves out the explanation. It doesn't tell you what's going on and why: it shows you.
• There isn't a happy ending. There's people coming into conflict with each other, with themselves, and with nature, and they always lose, that's the gritty reality of it, and that's what makes a good story.

Unforgiven is directed by Clint Eastwood, himself, and written by David Peoples, the screen writer for Blade Runner.