Cats, Vets, and Movie anecdotes

( off to the vet with Wales and Oscar the Grouch )

"Flaws in art...or beauty in the imperfections"

After I watched the film 21 Grams, I had a conversation with Wales about how the film was flawed. You couldn't quite connect to the characters emotionally, because the story is told in such a jumbled manner, scenes are out-of-synch, that was its flaw. Yet, at the same time, I argued, its greatest strength and point. The idea of seeing a tale inside the heads of the characters or how the characters remember it - non-linear, a jumble of memories, imperfect, messy, not neat. The story haunts you because of how it is told, the jumble, the fact that certain scenes seem forced, because you as the viewer came to them from out of the blue, you have to use your head to fill in the gaps. And once you start doing it, start putting those pieces of the puzzel together, start filling in the gaps with your own imagination - whoa. The tale takes on a whole different meaning and shape.

This got me to thinking about how we want things to be perfect.
Stories with tight, neat plots, wrapped in bows. A friend of mine is struggling with story, he keeps picking at it, feels it isn't quite right, the characters are flat, and time moves on while he picks. Making certain everything makes sense. There are no flaws. I wanted to shake him and say "Sooner or later, you have to let the story go. Stop picking. Realize there can be beauty in the imperfection. Beauty in the flaws. Trust your reader."

When my grandmother learned how to bead jewlry from an ARAPHO (sp?) Woman, the woman told her to always leave a flaw in the bead-work. The Native Americans always did. It's bad luck not to. You can always tell Native American jewelry from copy-cats, by that one flaw. The flaw, she told my grandmother, enhances the design - and is always hidden. It's a game to find it.

While reading a recent series of posts in rahael's live journal, it struck me that the greatest strength of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the reason people obsess over it, may in fact be what some consider it's greatest flaw. BTVS was an interesting series - in that it left a lot to the viewers' imagination. It did not tell us everything. It did not wrap everything up in a nice neat bow. The plots were not tight. There were lots of gaps. Lots open to interpretation. Lots happened off-stage, requiring viewers to fill in the action. To use their own imaginations to come up with what happened next. Think about it. After Beneath You - Same Time Same Place, we never saw how Spike got out of the church or how Buffy reacted to him burning himself on the cross. This was left to our imaginations. Or the episode Get it Done where so much imagery is thrown at us, and not really explained. The audience is left to its own interpretation.
Maggot could be a reference to solider movies, or a reference to the slayer and the idea of death. The author doesn't say.
Angel The Series was the same way. We aren't told everything.
A good portion of the story is left to our imagination - hence the online battles between online viewers imaginations. Since we of course, do not all have the same imagination.

It's like the vet was explaining to me today about cats. Each cat is individual. It's vienes are different. Some have big veines. Some tiny. Some roll. And each responds to needles differently. Same with people. Everyone has different vienes. If we have different veines, doesn't it stand to reason, we think differently? How we imagine or view a piece of art will vary. One person will be offended by a piece of art, while another will marvel at its beauty. The best thing about movies or tv shows or works of art that leave things to the imagination is every single person who interacts with that art, will take something different from it, will share a different experience, making the work more interesting, more vital, more real and more lasting. The works of art that last are the ones that trigger imagination.

Of the films I saw this week, only two triggered my imagination, 21 Grams, with its' odd jumble of increasingly tragic scenes, and Random Harvest, a 1942 Mervyn LeRoy film about an amensiac who falls for a chorus girl. (Stars Ronald Coleman and Greer Garson and takes place in the 1920s after the First World War, saw it on TCM tonight). Both films were directed in such a way as to play with my imagination. They didn't tell me everything, yet I knew and felt the characters. I could hear them in my mind and I felt myself filling in the gaps between scenes naturally, piecing together their lives, until these characters became as real to me as family or friends. I'd allowed them to enter my mind, and once they did, they remain unforgettable. That's the trick. Random Harvest of the two films, is the less flawed, far tighter, straight-forward, yet it leaves things to the imagination, showing passage of time with simple camera devices - such as focusing on a changing photograph of a young woman, or focusing on a small cluster of fish, pulling back to show a lake, further to show a bicycle rider, and then close again to show a man under a tree. 21 Grams similarly uses devices to show time - birds flying, a pool covered with snow, leaves blowing. Both focus on character, up close and personal, telling us just enough to be interested, to wonder, giving a bit more to build interest, and just enough to fill in the gaps. BTVS did the same thing. We felt we knew everything there was to know about those characters, yet if you look closely, or even spend time watching a heated debate on a discussion board, you'll realize how much the writer left to the viewer's imagination. So that the viewer felt he/she owned the character just as much as the writer did, because the viewer added their own bits and pieces to the story, making it theirs and as a result more real and more valid to the viewer's own experience. Now that is magic. And it is hard to do, I think.

Laws of Attraction certainly didn't succeed in it. I left that film with a vague sense of who the two people were, actually I left thinking I'd just watched a film with Julianne Moore and Pierce Bronsan. The actors were more real than their characters. Paycheck was the same way, well directed, but, I had no real sense of who the people were nor did I leave feeling I knew them. Making the film, outside of some cool sci-fi ideas, largely forgettable. But Hero? Yes, it did resonate. I remember Broken Sword and Flying Snow, and Broken Sword's passionate assistant, in their dance about love, country, and patriotism. A dance that left a lot unsaid and a lot to the imagination. I also remember being curious about the Nameless One, who seemed to be almost a cipher for everyone elses' tale. That story haunts me. I remember. I have replayed scenes from it in my head and I saw it a week ago. Why? From a writing stand-point, I can't help but wonder what it was that LeRoy, Whedon, and the director/writer of 21 Grams and Hero did right that the writers of Paycheck and LAws of Attraction did wrong? How do you make a character resonate? How do you trigger someone else's imagination in such a way, that they ponder your tale and your characters long after you've left the arena?