Mad Men

Ten years ago, when I noticed there was a lot of whispering in Mad Men, someone always pulling another aside in the midst of a chaotic office to ask if so and so had heard the news about such and such, I brought this up with another writer who asked, incisively, how one might show whispering in fiction.

I've been trying to pay special attention to whispering in fiction in the years since but have come across surprisingly few instances. One might think, given the intimate nature of interpersonal conflict in realistic fiction, we'd overhear whispering characters more often. Fiction writers, though, have many ways -- primarily the manipulation of setting -- to get characters alone and have them speak in confidence, which is why, I suppose, we don't often come across characters speaking to one another in fear of being overheard.

That being said, suppose you did want information secretly shared between characters in a crowded setting. The most obvious way is to simply state that one character is speaking softly, doesn't want to be heard, and so on. We this in Jane Austen's Emma, when Franck Churchill says to Emma "This is a pleasure." Austen tags the dialogue with "in a low voice." Later, Emma will continue the conversation "in a whisper."However, most style guides and craft discussions suggest it's best to avoid tagging dialog in this way. They reason that tagging dialogue is less elegant and artful than conveying the feeling of what is said by words alone. The effect of tagging, or reporting how something is said, doesn't, typically, allow a reader to feel how something is said. 

Generally, this isn't bad advice. Yet the scene in Emma comes off more artful than general fiction writing advice might predict. But this is because Austen doesn't merely tag her dialogue. She takes care to set the scene, not only crowding the room with people, but also adding music, as Jane Farifax is playing on the piano. The crowd and noise, working as a contrast, bring out the whispering, making it all the more apparent. The scene is also remarkable as a parody of whispering and speaking in confidence, since it ends with everyone in the room overhearing Mrs. Bates yelling through the window to Mr. Knightly. 

Before coming across this scene, I'd tried to think about solving the problem of representing whispering by imagining how you might show its opposite, yelling. Capital letters have this effect, though most stylists would look for more artful means. The exclamation point is another way, and Austen uses many of them when Miss Bates is at the window. Nonetheless, thinking in terms typography didn't get me very far.

Another memorable scene in which one character speaks to another in whispers comes from Andrew Milward's short story "Skywriting." The main character, Stephen, a recovering drug addict, has confessed to stealing from his mother's friends. He falls to his knees, cries. She accuses him of being on drugs. When he stands up, "she pulled me close and whispered so softly that her breath on my and ear felt like a kiss."

Although Milward uses the word whisper he withholds what Stephen's mother has actually said. On the one hand, it's classic suspense. Something important has happened but we don't yet know what. Additionally, it has much the same effect as witnessing in real life two people talking quietly across the room. Further still, he characterizes the gesture as gentle, touching, comforting, "like a kiss." This is a subtle, strategic move, since it's not what she's said that feels like a kiss but her breath. We won't learn for a few paragraphs, the very last line of the story, in fact, what she's said. I'll leave that for you to discover on your own.

Joker (2019)

After reading reviews for this film, I found it difficult to distinguish reviewers' annoyance with the film itself from its promotion on social media, referred to, cautiously, as "discussion" and "conversation." Having seen the film, though, I understand their displeasure. Joker isn't very good.

Joker is comparable to Batman Begins, the first film in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight series, wanting to be a kind of psychological investigation, an answer to the question of how this villain comes to be who he is. It's an interesting "take" on the superhero film -- where the superhero protagonist is presented as a real person, so to speak.

The Dark Knight series questions the idea of the hero. Are our heroes wholly virtuous? The answer, of course, is no. Batman, or Bruce Wayne, is the dark night, not the white night. He makes, arguably, villainous decisions. So if the hero makes villainous decisions in the Dark Knight series, we might expect the villain in Joker to make heroic decisions. Unfortunately that's not the case here.

Arthur Fleck is mugged and jumped. He is the victim of child abuse. He is the butt of the joke on a late night talk show. Such scenes, it would seem, are intended to drum up sympathy for our villain. And perhaps they do -- which I believe is what the topic of social media discussion -- but it only works to a certain point. The emotional work is much more than putting a bandage on a puppy: we might feel bad for the puppy but the bandage doesn't make the puppy any more compelling. It's weak, incomplete characterization.

Why incomplete? Arthur Fleck lacks what workshop and craft discussions call "redeeming qualities." He lacks the intelligence and appetite for mayhem of the Joker that we've seen elsewhere. 

One of the better scenes in the film, I thought, was when detectives pursue Fleck on the subway. Fleck hits someone in the back and runs to the next train car. When the person turns around, he sees the detective and assumes the detective hit him. A brawl erupts on the train. This, if it weren't unintentional, would be the kind of trickery we expect from the joker.

Joker attempts -- rather artlessly -- to portray the development of Fleck's emotional and psychological state. It gives, unfortunately, no attention his intellect or intelligence, which might serve as a redeeming quality.

Summer Hours (2014)

What is your favorite film? This is a question I have a hard time answering. I like so many. It's impossible to pick one. But if you really pressed me -- if you were to ask me what's the best film I've seen lately, I'd have to say Summer Hours.

Summer Hours is elegant and timely, quiet and charming, touching and wonderful to look at. It doesn't try harder than its narrative requires. And best of all, you might say it has a happy ending.

The plot is simple. Helen, 75, owns a country house stuffed with a collection of art and antiques worthy of France's best museums. As her health begins to fail the dramatic question emerges: what will happen to the estate when Helen dies? It will be up to her three adult children to decide. Their decision is complicated by the fact that one lives in America, one in France, and the third in China.

As I said, Summer Hours is beautiful to look at. The country estate is lush, verdant. The camera lingers on the treasures within the house, many of them authentic, having been borrowed from the Musée d'Orsay. It's a feeling of reverie. I felt pleasantly displaced, as if in a daydream.

I also like the film's approach to character. Helen, the matriarch, is clear-eyed about her health. She confronts her three adult children (on her birthday, no less) with the difficult question of how her estate will be handled. When she dies, her children are equally steely.

Because Frederic and Adrienne both live outside of France, it's Jeremy who must look after the estate, a task he's knows he's incapable of given the demands of his career and family. In the course of events, the characters deliberate rationally. They're not treacherous -- they don't scheme or deceive one another. It's an uncommon choice, given the stakes, for a dramatic story -- uncommon yet refreshing.

The characters suppress their emotions, which means the plot is relatively flat. No character is inspired to act in a dramatic fashion. There is no explosive confrontation. As the story approaches its end, we await big drama, the usual law being that the more feelings are pushed down the larger their re-emergence will be. So, it's an awfully tense final scene, then, when Jeremy allows his teenage daughter to have a party at the house.

In this beautiful house, with its antique effects we've learned will be donated to museums, teenagers are drinking, smoking, dancing -- all the things that fill adults with fear. Yet, in a stroke of genius, the camera lingers on these teenagers as lovingly as it did the house itself. It's an awfully uplifting -- yet extremely tense -- way to say good-bye. 

One thought I have about failed happy endings, the bad kind, the kind that make us groan, is that they try to convince us that things will be happy forever after. The prince marries the princess. Paradise is restored. And so on. Summer Hours avoids this. We see the house being enjoyed as we know it once was but it's not happily ever after because we know the house will be sold.

A thought about good or successful happy endings, then, is that they won't try to convince us things will be happy forever after. That is, like in Summer Hours, they might be both happy and sad. We're happy to watch teenagers enjoy themselves, we're terrified something will happen to the house, and we're sad knowing the house will no longer remain in the family. 

I was reading an essay by Tom Grimes in Tin House's The Writer's Notebook recently and he analyzes the ending of The Catcher in the Rye. Grimes writes: "Salinger's genius was to end his story and yet not end it, to give the reader a sense of closure while leaving the future mysterious and alive." I think that's close to how I see the ending of Summer Hours. We get a sense of closure from watching the teenagers enjoy the house and we aren't sure what the future will bring.

Exhibition on Screen: David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts (2018)

It's been a while. I'm happy to be back. In the meantime I've been watching more movies than ever, still thinking about them in the same way. That is, what can I learn from them?

Over the weekend I saw Exhibition on Screen: David Hockney at the Royal Academy of Arts. The film presents two exhibitions, A Bigger Picture (2012) and 82 Portraits and One Still Life (2016).

A Bigger Picture features large-scale paintings inspired by England's East Yorkshire landscape. To prepare for these paintings Hockney drove to the countryside to do some drawings. What surprised me was that he drew on an iPad. Those drawings are also featured in the exhibition.

Why an iPad? The advantage is speed. The screen is smooth, meaning the stylus doesn't encounter the same resistance as a pencil on paper. For a draftsman, Hockney says, speed is everything.

Hockney's relationship with technology is perfectly balanced. He sees technology as neither good nor bad. In gaining something you lose something else. Hockney recounts attending the launch of Photoshop in 1989. After the conference, he felt he encountered the death of film and chemical photography. Photography, from then on, he says, is a craft.

I was struck by this, by the demotion in status the word craft implies. Craft is the term fiction writers, in workshops and in books, use when speaking of the work behind their writing. Sometimes you hear substitutions, words like technique or form. Technique feels somewhat different than craft -- perhaps more experimental -- while form, for the most part, is preferred in academic discussions.

So what I take from Hockney's remark is a feeling for a difference between craft and technique. My feeling is that craft tends toward the tried and true, what has proven generally to work. Technique, then, searches for solutions craft cannot solve.

Discussions hinging on a distinction between old and new, traditional and experimental, conventional and innovative might seem trite. They might seem controversial and divisive. They don't need to be. They are controversial when we assume old is bad and new is good, or vice versa. Seems to me we might want to approach such discussions -- and our art as well -- as does Hockney, who, at 82, is both a master of his craft and a champion of experimentation, who, in the same project, draws on an iPad and paints en plain air.

Jaws (1975)

When I told a friend of mine about the topic of this blog post, he said, “You’re not going to say what everyone else says about Jaws are you?” He was half-right. As such, this will be the least adventurous “choose your own adventure” blog you’ve ever seen, if there ever was such a thing. Readers who are familiar with the making of Jaws should skip part A and read only part B; readers who aren’t familiar with the making of the film can follow the usual A to B sequence.


A. The pre-production and early-production of Jaws imagined a very different film from that which was actually produced. Spielberg and company drew story boards that included the shark in many of the film’s early “attack” scenes. Their idea was to build a mechanical shark to be shown on screen. A crew working on the West Coast built a shark in a fresh water tank, but when the shark was brought to the salt waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the electronics failed. Unable to make the shark as responsive and mobile as necessary, Spielberg had to re-envision the shooting of the film without the presence of the shark.

Jaws is commonly described as a horror-film. The success of the film, as many have declared, is that the shark is absent for much of the film. The horror comes from our fear of what we cannot see.


B. What I’d like fiction writers to consider is the idea of constraints. Famous fictional constraints include George Perec’s A Void, a French novel that refuses to use the letter e, the most commonly occurring vowel in the French language, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which is a novel whose temporal setting is restricted to only a single day, and recently, Padgett Powel’s The Interrogative Mood, which is a novel whose sentences are composed entirely in the form of questions. In this fashion, Jaws’s constraint is the inability—or, necessary refusal—to show the shark on screen.

Why use constraints? Among other reasons, constraints force storytellers to employ techniques they wouldn’t ordinarily employ if they were free to tell the story as they wished; constraints generate innovation and invention of form, technique, and style. Often, it is a new form or technique or style that marks the success of a story, that captures a reader’s attention.

Up in the Air (2009)

A. Papatya Bucak, my professor and thesis chair, whose blog “Reading for Writers” is one of this blog’s progenitors, has a keen eye for spotting overused literary devices. I once overheard that she wrote a paper about the preponderance of literary heroines who commit suicide. Commenting on one of my stories, she spotted a female character with a need for intimacy, which immediately suggests a gender stereotype. Does her comment mean that we can never have females with a need for intimacy?

If you intend to generate reader interest for your fiction primarily on the basis of “freshness” and originality, I think it does.

If your female character has only one dimension, the desire for intimacy, and nothing else to complicate her character, I think you’ve made the mistake I made in my aforementioned story.

If you create a female character who has a need for intimacy, among other needs—that is to say, a more complex set of desires—I think you’re okay.

The topic at hand is not female stereotypes. The topic at hand is overused literary devices. Up in the Air uses the familiar device of sending a character home, “back to his roots.” Up in the Air portrays home as nearly all films—especially those marketing themselves as artistic or independent. Home is a small, rural town populated with bleak, stifling, and culturally deaf family and friends (as if those types can't be found in cities). It’s always a place “sophisticated” characters have outgrown. Is this more or less true of small town America? That’s not the point. The point is we see it over and over and over again and it gets boring.

A more specific aspect of the “small town” Up in the Air and most other films give us is the “broken family.” In the broken family brothers and sisters don’t speak, divorces are contagious, and the bills barely get paid. It’s “real life”…I get it.

I’m not trying to get all Fox News-ish, though. I’d hate a fiction that blindly praises “Main Street USA” without ever recognizing its limitations. I think it’d be quite refreshing to see “small town” life treated with more complexity, rather than a forgettable and regrettable childhood memory.

Anyway, I suppose this is an argument for awareness. A good writer identifies patterns in other works and makes sure to avoid them in her own.

Charade (1963)

Characterization Characterization Characterization. This is the mantra for fiction writers of “the program era.” At its most basic, characterization asks that we “round out” our characters with both good and bad personality traits, that we make them neither entirely “good” nor entirely “evil.” But, characterization also means “give me interesting characters—characters who will make me turn the page.”

One way to create characters who make a reader a turn the page, or a viewer forget she is eating her popcorn, is to endow them with charm. Charade, with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, remains modern despite the absence of triple flipping body doubles and exploding helicopters because its characters have charm.

Hepburn and Grant have large whites around their irises and slow blinking eyelids, but appearance, the textbooks tell us, is not the only aspect of characterization we writers need give attention. Speech deserves equal importance (as do thought and action).

One aspect of speech that makes Hepburn and Grant appealing is their ability to deliver one-liners at seemingly inopportune times. My favorite lines from this film seem to rescue moments of tension. For instance, in an early squabble, Hepburn shouts to Grant “You know what’s wrong with you?” “What?” he asks seemingly caught off guard. She pauses, blinking ever s0 slowly: “Nothing.”

Later, during another spat over dinner, Grant says, “Oh, you should see your face right now.” “What’s wrong with it?” Hepburn asks, touching it, reaching for a mirror. “It’s lovely,” he says.

There is a pattern to these exchanges. They occur in moments of tension. They begin with a misdirection—an oncoming insult. And then they deliver an unexpected and just cheesy enough compliment. (One-liners, I think, always need a little bit of cheese sprinkled on top. Just enough so that they can be consumed lightly.)

So, being the unoriginal imitator that I am, I impersonated Hepburn once. “Do you know what’s wrong with you?” I asked a girl. “I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me,” she said.

Oops.

But this exchange taught me a lesson. Charming as these two characters may be, they are not without insecurities. And the types of exchanges I’ve discussed fail unless the insecurities arise. What I find unique about charmers is that quite often they allow their insecurities to become strengths of character.

The Wire (Episode 17, Season 2)

I reference the particular episode because it’s highly probable that I will discuss the “the greatest television series ever made” many more times.

The quotation above is important because The Wire is made for television, not for the screen. Therefore, considerations such as serialization, screen size and aspect ratio, and time, are effective constraints for the show’s “makers”—and there are many, as the show features several different directors, as well as guest writers like novelists Richard Price and Dennis Lehane. Further, The Wire doesn’t always work against the traditional constraints of television, but in fact, embraces some of them.

Being the amorous fan that I am, I’ve long wanted to write about The Wire and a particular formal structure I find in television sitcoms, but have not quite had the lexical inventiveness to do so. I find enabling language in (my professor) Marc Scroggin’s biographical study of Louis Zukofsky, who may be contrary to widely-held opinion “the last modernist” (The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, 2007).

Scroggins examines the early sections of Zukofksky’s long poem “A”:

"In a musical fugue, a short melody, the subject or theme, is stated in a single instrument voice, then taken up or imitated by other voices, New motifs—countersubjects—may be introduced in counterpoints to the subject and reappear throughout the fugue much like the subject. Strictly speaking, the fugue is not a form but a formal principle, a method for generating music through the contrapuntal juxtaposition of melodic motifs. Instead of melodic motifs, Zukofsky counterpoints poetic “themes” or ideas."

So, what does this look like in The Wire? In Episode 17, we see several “contrapuntal juxtapositions.” For one, Keema, an officer recently recovered from a gunshot wound now working in the office (as her girlfriend desires) has the opportunity to get back on the beat as her former boss, Cedric Daniels, who also is in the office, and effectively out of line to rise through the ranks of the “brass,” consenting, like Keema, to the desires of his politically ambitious wife, will head a new detail. Both choose the streets against the wishes of their partners. The theme of choosing between career and home is repeated. Indeed, McNulty, arguably the show’s protagonist, is separated from his wife because of his megalomaniacal dedication to his job (Infamously, in Season 1, McNulty has his pre-adolescent sons follow a known drug dealer through the fish market). As the series progresses, Keema (in law school) and Daniels (with a law degree in hand) handle their situations differently, often commiserating on their predicaments.

Season 2, I tell JMill all the time, is a bit of an aberration in that it focuses on East Baltimore and “the docks,” that is the industry of the Port of Baltimore. Here we find a countersubject to the corner boys in the low and high rises of West Baltimore. Nico, the nephew of union leader Frank Sabotka, is frustrated by not getting enough work on the docks. His cousin, Zig, Sobatka’s son, suggests they sling blow, to which Nico retorts, “I ain’t slanging dope on the corner like some project nigga.” Eventually, Zig and Nico do turn to disseminating narcotics. We find two groups of people, those living in the projects in West Baltimore and those used to relying on the harbor in East Baltimore, who think (as do we, the viewers) they are extremely different from those on the other side of town, resorting to the same alternative. Thus, this strategy of “contrapuntal juxtaposition” sheds light on desperate and seemingly disparate situations. From Nico, desperation is dramatized in terms of a (more or less contemporary) traditional family unit (he needs money to get a place for his girlfriend and their daughter), and therefore avoids the assumption of ruthless criminality that often accompanies the inner-city drug trade. From the “Barksdale crew,” the narcotics conduit of West Baltimore, we learn the ingenuity necessary to successfully thwart Baltimore law enforcement. From both, we can easily identify systemic politics perpetuating poverty and violence.

Why am I so sure this technique is characteristic of television? Think about the Seinfeld episode where Jerry and George decide to both get married. Jerry never proposes, George does. The theme of engagement in dramatized in two different situations. Or, the recent South Park episode where everyone wants facebook friends—Stan is the exception, not wanting to “get sucked into facebook.” I think “time” is the culprit in the sitcom. In less than a half-hour, the episode must dramatize as many variations of the same predicament as possible. Notice, there is usually an opposition—George does, Jerry doesn’t; Stan doesn’t, others do.

Here, The Wire deviates from the sitcom. Recall that Keema and Daniels share the same predicament, as do Nico and the average corner boy, but both handle the situation similarly. Keema and Daniels are back on the beat. Nico, as most up and comers do, hits the street lured by the money. Quite simply, The Wire has more time to make a refined use of contrapuntal juxtapositions. There are differences between Keema (homosexual, unmarried, and caring for a child) and Daniels (heterosexual, married and childless). Sitcoms cover as much as possible in a short amount of time. The Wire carries its narrative across episodes and seasons (Keema and Daniels wrestle with their predicaments to different ends all the way to the series finale). This more refined and subtle handling is why The Wire is so admired.

So, what is the lineage of the fugal mode from modernist poetry to television sitcom? I have no idea, and I’m sure there is a book about it, and I’m sure that lineage includes novels and films somewhere in between. Also, what is the value of the fugal mode at this point, considering its old age, cooption by popular culture, and formulaic properties? My answer is that at this point contrapuntal juxtapositions are essentially “narrative grammar” (Roland Barthe’s term). And, it’s important to remember, its generative capability. Therefore, when the fiction is cornered, a contrapuntal juxtaposition may provide mobility and escape

Crazy Heart (2010)

…Okay, country music fans: here is the film that you haven’t heard about and the film that you hadn’t been dying for, but is certainly worth your nine bucks...but now you know that because you probably watched the Academy Awards.

…One issue that deserves attention is the “the happy ending.”

What qualifies this ending as “happy?” For one, sixteen months after declaring himself sober, Bad Blake, is still sober. What would disqualify this ending from being “happy?” From Bad’s point of view, “his girl” (meaning ex-girlfriend whom he still loves) wears an engagement ring that Bad didn’t give her. Additionally, for the second time in his life, he has lost a son—his exgirlfriend’s four year old son, Buddy. (This is a nice touch, pointed out to me by JMill, as the last time Bad saw his own son, he was also four. And, JMill continues, the movie doesn’t beat us over the head with this subtle bit of fictional “magic”; rather, we’re informed at one time the age of his girl’s son and at another that Bad hasn’t seen his own son in twenty-four years and at another that his son is now twenty-eight.) Back to the happy side, his relationship with Tony Sweet, Bad’s former protégé who “sold out,” seems repaired; and, his agent, who hassles Bad all movie long, is now satisfied as Bad agrees to open for Sweet (The bad / sweet opposition seems too strong, now that I think about it). But then again, his girl who is not his girl is happy with him, and he seems, however perfunctorily, happy for her (to me, this is the heart of the movie, as Blake is a performer and entertainer and in the final scene he has to give a performance, of sorts). The end then introduces a brief encore of pleasantly predictable conflict as his ex invites Bad to talk with her son, Buddy. He politely declines. The camera swiftly zooms out and the remaining figures shrink in the Arizona landscape. Somehow, “it feels all good.” But when I think of Bad’s perspective, it seems things aren’t all good. The resonating effect, then, is one where he makes decisions to make others happy, as I imagine is the essence of the life of a performing artist. Bad’s own desires shrink in the background.

...another something to think about, a pattern I notice in my tastes for stories, is that stories are often a process of creation.

Here, I'm not talking about the process of an artist creating the story. I'm talking about a story which is an adventure into creation. Perhaps you've read The Known World by Edward P. Jones. The novel is coyly presented as a mural--a collection of stories and illustrations that are not in chronological order. The novel ends with the image of a mural depicting all of the stories and illustrations we've read. I also read recently an experimental novel by Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing , which uses the writing of a book as its principle conceit (though I discourage this, as it's a tired conceit in 2010). In Crazy Heart, Bad struggles to write new songs and much of the film focuses on his process of songwriting. The value of writing a fiction that is an "adventure into creation" is twofold. For one, it's the story's propeller, which often comes in the form of a protagonist's desires. Secondly, a character with a creative process is expected to be quirky, irrational, and/or passionate--the characteristics that lead to unique and memorable characters.

Avatar (2009)

As I'd like to accurately think myself a critic, I'm attempting to reserve my judgements of the films I "review." Here, then, I offer a single critique, which fiction writers might make use of.

An achievement of this film's storytelling is the invasion of the humans just after Jake Sully and Neytiri make Omaticayan love. We find here a simple principle, which you can use in your fiction: once something good happens, have something bad happen.

Avatar employs this simple principle in a sophisticated way. For one, the scenes I mention answer two major dramatic questions in close succession. The two questions are: Will Sully and Neytiri become lovers? Will the humans attack the Omaticayans? The reader / viewer feels gratified that the major questions are answered. Additionally, the reader / viewer experiences opposite emotions as the mood of the juxtaposed scenes changes suddenly. Finally, this simple principle works on a conceptual level as well. The union of Sully and Neytiri is a joining of the humans and Omaticayans. The next scene, when the humans attack, is the opposite. The union accomplished by "making love" is destroyed by "making war."