Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008)

Norah: There's this part of Judaism that I like. Tikun Olam. It said that the world is broken into pieces and everyone has to find them and put them back together.
Nick: Maybe we don't have to find it. Maybe we are the pieces.
Norah: Nick? I'm coming in... [she goes into the recording studio to have sex with him]

Sound like teenagers?

Nick: [leaving a message on his ex-girlfriend Tris’s phone] I think we both said some things we didn't mean, like... when you broke up with me... on my b-day.

Sounds like a teenager.

Here are some difficulties when writing adolescent dialogue. Go heavy (Exhibit A) and they don’t sound / feel like teenagers. Go humorous (Exhibit B) and the seriousness / intensity dissipates tremendously.

Norah: This is amazing! You are literally like my music soul mate.

Exhibit C is probably right on. But it feels absolutely empty. What is the value in a music soul mate? It is interesting because it sounds right (the misuse of literally, the rhythmic addition of like, the clichéd soul mate) and sounds fresh (whoever heard of a music soul mate?), but there isn’t much substance here. This leads to the bigger question of how much we can lean on adolescent voices to impart something meaningful to the viewer / reader. It’s tricky because we are quite reductive when we think about teenage relationships / feelings / emotions / knowledge. It’s so easy for the viewer to toss these in the file marked “trivial” or "they'll get over it." But, I’ve always been a big fan of teenagers. In story, they are often reliable sources or energy and intensity. Desirous, emotional, fickle, unpredictable youth usually equal adventure—something this film relies on too heavily.

I long to see teens treated seriously. And I’m interested in doing so using their own voices. Some of the moments in the film that I found particularly engaging were those where Nick and Norah reflected on their past relationships. I think that teenagers reflect on the past is too often overlooked. In fact, it seems common sense that teenagers obsess with the (not very distant) past. So, reflection is a real opportunity to let loose a serious, adolescent voice. For one, reflecting is a shared experience—the audience can relate. Also, reflection requires specificity. The character has to refer to specific actions and names and dates. The character doesn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t) get abstract, which is the point where I think most of us stop listening to teenagers because we think they have so little life experience (note exhibit D). Finally, if the teenager reflects as a teenager and not as an adult (the most common way to work around the problem of adolescent stories), then the wound is still fresh, the intensity is naturally higher, years and years haven’t gone by. Try it = write the dialogue of a teenager who is reflecting on a recent, past experience.

Exhibit D

Thom: You just haven't figured it out yet, have you?
Nick: What?
Thom: ...The big picture.
Nick: I guess not.
Thom: The Beatles.
Nick: What about them?
Thom: This. [grabs Nick's hand] Look, other bands, they want to make it about sex or pain, but you know, The Beatles, they had it all figured out, okay? "I Want to Hold Your Hand." The first single. It's F-ing brilliant, right?... That's what everybody wants, Nicky. They don't want a twenty-four-hour hump sesh, they don't want to be married to you for a hundred years. They just want to hold your hand.

Eh.

The Queen (2006)

I really enjoyed this film, and I see that most others have as well. I enjoyed it so much that as I was watching it, I was having a hard time deciding how I would respond to it in a way beneficial to fiction writers.

My first impulse was to offer a spiritual platitude to writers: Think Big. This film is ambitious in its content and in the roles. Because character driven stories so dominate the landscape of literary fiction, I feel too often we resign ourselves to simple characters in simple settings with simple (though serious) conflicts—because we think this is all we know. However, there is so much info out there these days, I see no reason why someone can’t get to know Buckingham Palace as well as the Queen.

This film takes on the largest media event of the 1990s and tells the story through the eyes of the major players: The Queen and the Prime Minister. Think Big.

I knew from the beginning it was the characters that made the film intriguing. Us common folk seem desperate to look inside the lives of the figures we see on the television. Writers shouldn’t forget, us common folk have big desires too; this film taps into those desires by giving us the behind the scenes.

Beyond the conceptual (or early) choices, though, I realized that this story uses POV to the maximum. In fact, wikipedia tells me that the scenes with the Queen were shot in 35mm film, while scenes with Blair were shot in 16mm film. Here, we see how the movie’s conflict—how the Queen and Blair have different views on how to handle Diana’s death—is enhanced through POV.

But, POV isn’t used only to enhance the conflict. It is also used in the resolution, which is what I think writers should take from this film. The movie restricts itself to these POVs and uses no “common folk” characters to help tell the story. We only see the public as these two dignitaries see the public: through media clips.

Dehumanizing as this may seem, the film uses it to its advantage, for the resolution comes when the Queen returns to London, visits the flowers and the people outside of Buckingham Palace, and addresses the public in a televised speech. When the Royal Family is looking at the flowers stacked around the gates of BP, there is a distinct change in POV. We watch the Royal Fam through the eyes of the crowd. Heads and hats and cameras are in our way, while the camera bobs like a person searching for a better sightline. Instead of witnessing through the eyes of Blair or the Queen, and instead of looking at the public through a television screen, the viewer becomes the public, seeing what they see, not what the Queen sees, not what Blair sees.

The Queen’s televised speech, then, becomes a union of perspectives, a union of POVs. The Queen, who learns of the public only through the tabloids and television, uses the media so that the public can learn about her, come into her world, if only briefly.

So, the conflict is resolved, but it uses merging POVs to provide the feeling of resolution. A similar technique, used to opposite effect comes in Chekhov’s “The Lady with a Pet Dog.” After restricting POV to Gurov for the length of the story, just before the end we have a glimpse of Anna’s perspective on their relationship and just how different it is from Gurov’s, thus providing the feeling—despite not knowing for sure—the relationship is doomed.

Breaking POV so late in a story (if ever) is a no-no according to the textbooks, but here we have two great stories that break POV near the end because it better facilitates the writer’s desired ending. But how do they get away with this? I’m not sure. My guess is that the story creates a desire to know other perspectives and learning other perspectives feels satisfying.

What seems obvious, though, is that POV isn’t exact, steady, or reliable. In story, it inevitably bounces, oscillates, shifts, and/or breaks. And perhaps the naturally unstable POV is most effective when such movement creates expectations and responds to them.

Try it = when considering your next resolution, ask how POV fulfills the expectations your story has created.

Think Big.

Doubt (2008)

The first black student in a Catholic school. Altar boys. Priest. I don’t like where this is heading. Squirmy as that sounds, interpreted another way it sounds impossible: Meryl Streep opposite Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Priest versus nun. Luckily, Doubt had a head start. It was written for the stage—this film was not adapted from a novel. The story was adapted from the award-winning play of the same name, by John Patrick Shanley.

Regardless of form, one must consider what an intelligent narrative decision it is to place two socially esteemed and trusted roles in conflict with another. This especially works for film because I can think of no serious attempts to portray a priest or a sister as real, flawed human beings (comments welcome), rather than the traditional role they might fulfill in society, and within our minds. Shanley deserves all the credit for this. (Doesn’t he?) It is geniusly simple and simply genius to pose two morally upright souls against one another as the central conflict. It’s genius because conflict forces these two roles, which can easily fall into types, to be treated as human beings. Conflict makes us see their dark sides. I often wonder how fiction writers and storytellers arrive at such decisions. Did Shanley wisely decide on those two characters and their conflict from the beginning? Or, did he write and fight through draft after draft to find his story? Try it = write a piece where two “good” characters have a conflict, a fight.

There are a few scenes about foul shots and American history that are quite topical and shallow, tragically uninsightful and unoriginal, unfortunate to my experience of the movie. Fortunately, the scenes appear early, and the conflict builds enough to where I’m only focused on the characters and what they will do next. In Revision = ask why something feels shallow. Question its necessity.

An elegant aspect of the conflict revolves around lack of communication. It makes me wonder how much suspicion and a lack of communication are linked. In Doubt, the priest refuses to divulge information that should quell suspicions. The Sister, meanwhile, convinces herself despite zero evidence. Whom do you trust more, a priest or a nun? The father believes the sister has an agenda against him because he is “new school” and she is “old school.” The Sister believes the priest is having an inappropriate relationship with the new black student, yet doesn’t ask the student what happened. That sounds like a one-sided interpretation in favor of the father, I know, but the film does well to cast both characters in a light that makes appear good on their word, yet capable of sin.

Probably due to Doubt’s success on the stage, I enjoyed the film’s ability to refrain from making the film too filmy. Happily, there is quite a steady camera, no jumpy, quick cutting scenes that I recall, and certainly no exceptional photography or special effects. I also appreciated the film’s loyalty to some of the tropes we expect in plays. The backstage, not-so special-effects is what I’m referring to. The wind blows at all the right times, thunderstorms crash behind a heated argument. It works on screen, I think, because of the steady camera and static scenery. I was expecting, however, big drama, a scene of theatrical frenzy. My expectation was met with convention. Not flurry and frenzy, but pure, woe-begotten, cathartic melodrama. The confession feels much more for the audience than organic to the story, or naturally coming from characters. Question = Do you think of your fiction as having to separate resolutions? One for the reader and one for the characters.

The wails suspended my suspension of disbelief and the invocation of the title I believe is taboo in a scene of confession—even if the invocation is more thematic than revealing. The invocation of the title late in the story makes it cheesy. Doubt's resolution doesn’t tie the strings of the story together, it just places a factory-made, store-bought bow on the gift. Try it = invoke your piece’s title at the end, without being cheesy, of course.

I liked the lack of resolution. I didn’t need the bow. The most important thing we want to know: did he do it? did he not? We never find out. Maybe that bow was supposed to make us feel like we did.