The Way

On Scriptnotes, a couple of weeks ago, Craig Mazin was complaining that the 'monomyth' of a suffering hero who dies and rises lacks drama if the hero is Superman (or Jesus).

I think there are two answers:
-first, there is uncertainty as to whether they are Superman (or Jesus) until they outstrip the not-to-be-outstripped. This is surface level but real drama.

-second, more interestingly, these climactic events must resolve the dramatic tension, and in Judaism the tension has always been questions 'Adam, why are you hiding?' or like Solomon's 'will God really make a home on Earth?  The highest heavens cannot contain Him.' Or 'the ransom of a life is heavy, no one can pay enough.' Or 'If there were fifty righteous people, would you not spare the city?'  How will God remain God, absolutely good, judging evil, and yet be reconciled to actually existing human life?

Heidegger's 'technological understanding of being' saw our culture in terms of recurrence of functional relationships, of activity and agency expressed and mediated in techniques.  The characteristic move of this technological understanding is 'enframing', boxing some function by its preconditions and postconditions. This is like the black box of circuit analysis - a thing is what it does, and things not expressed in what it does are arbitrary, meaningless and subject to redesign at will.  The technological understanding of being enables a real engagement with a world of people, equipment and mere physical presence. But it obscures or reduces other things, like values or transcendent meaning in experience or life. If a man or woman can be replaced in a specific function, there is no reason not to replace them. The usefulness of things levels them down to mere equipment.  It is possible to respond to your times authentically (in an original, authorial way), but it is not meaningful to assert that the times are wrong in their very fiber, or that behavior can be transcendentally wrong (or right) as well as locally wrong (or right). Much is already determined in your thrown-ness that amounts to ontological guilt (things that could have gone otherwise but did not and that commit you certain ways - being Australian at the moment commits me to a variety of things I can't get behind (heh heh)).

Heidegger didn't think that the understanding that of being was fixed, but that it developed in each culture and that people could be virtuoso developers of practices, or slavish followers. He talked about 'one' - das man - as a vast repository of convention 'one' could skillfully exercise or unskillfully be lost in. The man of skill (phronemos) is able to respond with new practices to new situations in ways that are applauded. Every so often, a crisis comes along which drives a reorganization of the culture into a new one - some cultural stressor becomes too great and a work of art sets up a new understanding of being.  The life of Jesus is an example, radically reorganizing Jewish culture and then Greco-Roman culture, not simply adding new organizing principles to Rome's power pyramid, but subverting the cross and giving it meaning from Judaism.  These innovations are  institution of new practices.  The slogan from a film (Across the Universe?) is not 'you are what you do' but 'You are how you do things.'  Clive James talks of developing a style as the core of becoming a thinker and a person. The question of being human is primarily how to be, not Hamlet's 'to be or not to be.'

Foucault's famous phrase 'technology of power' captures this in culture. In a culture, power is expressed in ways that fit or strain or violate in certain ways a background of expectations. Where the technological understanding of being holds sway, nepotism is injustice - only one person has the most merit for that job, and that person is probably not in your family.  At other times and in other places, building the apparatus of powers out of family members was both the most secure and the most profitable use of power - simple common sense, the main reason to have power in the first place.

When Christianity was beginning, it seems to have called itself The Way. It began with (the message of) the cross, foolishness to Greeks (lovers of wiseness) and blasphemy to Jews (conspicuous avoiders of anything approaching blasphemy).  It was something more than an innovation - it claimed to give an account of a union of God and Man, in which political murder could also be holy propitiating sacrifice, without the murder being validated. It said power is for love and may be given up entirely and yet retained.

I think the central move in the new understanding is repentance/penitence and that repentance is the full form of which 'enframing' is a manifestation.  The technology of the technological understanding of being is taking what is good and enacting it, openly acknowledging what is bad so it can be worked around or repaired.  Everything that can be shaken will be shaken until only the unshakeable remains. For acceptance of actually existing human beings, sacrificial atonement could be seen as an enframing move - disposing of what is worse, and replacing it with what is better.  But the direct opposition of the world and God as to worse and better is the judgment of the world.

You may not be a Christian, so let's make a Durkheimish equivalence. Martin Luther King's very recognizable style is evident in this quote, but the content is very apt to what I am saying.

When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact...that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance; We've learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we haven't learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters...

Is there a Way?  The cross says 'this is how.'

[Updated for more and better]

Anxiety and Screenwriting

Scriptshadow is updating 'his' web-site and asked for suggestions that would support a new community site for discovering good scripts and nurturing talented writing.  There were a lot of good suggestions, most of which revolved around the way a high standard of review could be achieved by non-professional writers, many of whom (like me) aren't even working in LA. Most of these suggestions worked something like Slashdot, where good comments are moderated up, and good commenters gain some status from the contribution.  Moderators can spend their 'mod' points to lift up points they agree with.  A variation on this was to create a low-stakes market where you can offer a basic non-pro read for $5 and once your reputation was lifting your price could go up.

The problem of getting good screenwriting is an interesting search problem.  It's hard to say what  a good screenplay is.  There are perhaps four patterns by which good ones are produced:

• a great screenwriter who knows a lot of tricks, writes a great screenplay.  Easy to find if you know he's a great screenwriter.
• a bad screenwriter with a great idea sells a script on the idea, and then other screenwriters work on it.  Easy to find because the idea should be 'high-concept' - a sentence or two.
• a good screenwriter reworks his screenplay in development hell until it is purified or consumed by fire.  Easy to get into, hard to come out of, unless a great screenwriter lends a hand.
• a novice screenwriter writes a great script by some degree of accident.  Hard to find, because there are so many novices pumping out terrible accidents, and which of them are good?  Who wants to find out?

I would go back to what a good screenplay is.  A good screenplay offers a helpful 4D map of a world, exploring the challenges and the pathways, the anxiety and its resolution.  This post was going to be some examples of that - some of my favourite films.

The Big Lebowski - plays with the anxiety of unmotivatability.  The Dude is seduced by the Bunny Lebowski problem because he lives in denial and is looking for easy money. At least he's not a nihilist.

The King's Speech - explores the anxiety of social responsibility for which your aren't skilled.  The social aspect is important, because Bertie's identity is going to be jeopardised. He overcomes this by gaining a social identity in friendship.

No Country for Old Men - explores the anxiety of the meaning and meaninglessness - which is ultimate? There are two heros - the tragic hero whose realisation and death happen off screen and randomly, no lesson learned, no catharsis earned; the older policeman wise enough to avoid it though it means a young woman will be undefended. He has no fire of his own, but his father will meet him and welcome him. It puts the meaninglessness in a tenuous frame of meaning in life (before he was born & after his death), rather than life floating in a meaningless sea.  But its frail.  It's just a little flame.

Total Recall

I had forgotten how good Total Recall (more Paul Verhoeven) is, or perhaps I had not been alert to its double structure on past viewings. For the case that it was all a sophisticated self-covering memory in which something went wrong, there is some troubling evidence - how would they make money if there was supposed to be a full refund? For the case that it is all real, the intervention at the beginning and at the midpoint in which 'Recall' staffmembers give plot summaries that anticipate events uncannily. This amplifies the tension because instead of coherent mutually exclusive accounts, each is slightly incoherent at points where the other story would make it very plausible. I'm not sure, but it seems very like Philip K Dick. A blurb on neuromancer praises William Gibson's Dickian vertigo, but really, no one can do it like Dick.

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Narrative and Practice

You might recall my Illustration: Story and Game post.

The other realisation I've had since then, is that a story is a 4D map of the world; it gives you a view of a bit of narrative terrain you might have to negotiate.  A rich movie (grand narrative) will pick up alternative paths in neighbouring regions in the subplots.

The relationship that is interesting is that between narrative and practice.  We live by practice, familiar ways of resolving the world.  Narrative is the way of 3rd-person-ing the practice so that it can be out there for us to learn from each other, which is invaluable for infrequent occurrences.

(I'm indebted to Dramatica, and probably sadly derivative of everyone who has gone before.)

Free Live Free

Gene Wolfe's 'Free Live Free' is, to me, one of his frustrating misses.  It's a story of four beaten-down (American?) city dwellers, who respond to an advertisement headlined Free Live Free.  Old Ben Free invites anyone to come live in his house for nothing to prevent it being demolished for a freeway.

The title is wonderful, the first chapter is in keeping, and then there follow chapter upon chapter of fussing and negotiating, diversions into storylessness. It's all very attentively written, and conversations with the elderly Mrs Baker are pretty funny - she can't get an expression right:

"You remember when they tore down Mr Free's front?  A little after that.  After work but not quiet dinner time, not but that all my times aren't quiet now that I don't work no longer and Mr Baker's gone."

"We can talk while we have our cooco, Mr Barnes. I'll eat my cornflakes too, if you don't observe."  She spooned cocoa powder into the cups. "The valiant flee to eat their breakfasts on the lip of the line, as the Bible teaches us.  That means that if you're brave you ought to run fast to get your breakfast, if there's just a little while to eat in."

While this is enjoyably and expertly rendered, as is the magic, as is the salesmanship, as is the detective work and the prostitution, the jeopardy seems lightweight.  The protagonists are hungry and homeless, but they somehow bump along all right; the lowest point is the defeat in the beginning.  The story is odd and shapeless, though the high concept and conclusion are typically rich in meaning. It's a book I read for the promise.

Till We Have Faces

In C.S. Lewis' 'Till We Have Faces', the Priest of Ungit confronts the King of Glome, demanding the sacrifice of his daughter.  The kings adviser, a Greek war prisoner made slave known as Fox, speaks up to pick apart the pronouncements of the priest of Ungit, showing them thick with paradox and contradiction.  The priest responds:

 'We are hearing much Greek wisdom this morning, King,' said the Priest. 'And I have heard most of it before. I did not need a slave to teach it to me.  It is very subtle.  But it brings no rain and grows no corn; sacrifice does both. It does not even give them boldness to die. That Greek there is your slave because in some battle he threw down his arms and let them bind his hands and lead him away and sell him, rather than take a spear-thrust in his heart.  Much less does it give them understanding of holy things. They demand to see such things clearly, as if the gods were no more than letters written in a book.  I, King, have dealth with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like the eddies of a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them.  Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.'

An excellent book, but obscure - both little known and hard to understand.  I will post again with some interpretive keys when I finish this re-reading.

M.T. Anderson

I can't recommend M.T. 'Tobin' Anderson highly enough. Young adults seem to be a readership that hold on to literary quality well into the pleasures of 'genre' fiction, and Anderson is a very fine example of the type.  I first read his dyad 'The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation', the narrative of a boy growing up through the American War of Independence, and seeing the moral hollowness behind the great declarations of independence and equality.

More recently I have been reading his book 'Feed', a stylish science fiction, perhaps best-shorthanded as an update to 'Brave New World' for the internet age.  The 'Feed' is the whispering of advertising, augmenting reality all day, every day, everywhere you go.  The protagonist is a young man, Titus (like the biblical Titus, in a gluttonous world & like Titus Groan, in a world that wants you for a component not a whole), who is mentally alive in ways that his friends are not, in a culture which is not. The language is mostly the ugly, lazy, slangy language you can hear on the train or anywhere young people are typical.

Having gone to the moon for kicks, Titus and his friends Link and Marty have gone to a zero-grav funhouse, failed to have fun and are now preparing to eat.  Titus has been watching, attracted, a blond girl in grey who has watchful eyes. His friends arrive:

... they came in and immediately Link and Marty started doing these gymnastics, and they got in trouble, so I could stay watching her without them being a mob on me.  This guy, he was from the club, he was yelling at them because they wouldn't stay out of the snack bar, which was off-bounds for still bouncing.
  Behind the girl in grey was a big window and you could see we were in a bubble way high up over the moon.  Down on the ground, tourists were riding big proteins across the craters.  All the stars were out.
  The guy was still yelling at the others over by the valve. He was all 'da da da be removed from the premises, da da da express instructions, da da.'  I lowered my head and turned it toward the girl in gray.
  When she thought no one was looking, she opened her mouth. Something trembled there.  Juice.  She had filled her mouth with juice.
  Da da da, liability, da da da, think you're doing.  I shifted. I watched the juice. For her own amusement she was letting it go, gentle and sexy.
 
She just opened her mouth and pushed it out gently with her tongue.  The juice came out of her lips as if it was being extracted real careful by a rock-star dentist who she loved.

The contrast between the way Titus thinks and narrates what his life is about when with his friends and the feed, and the way he is when with the girl in grey, Violet, is the engine of the story.

I can't think of many writers who I regard as highly for being both writerly and real.

Illustration: Story & Game

Here is about the simplest game you can imagine.  A team is divided into two even halves and they are positioned in squares facing each other, with one empty square between them.  Each member can step ahead into an empty square, or jump a player from the other team into an empty square. They can only move forward.  The game is cooperative - the teams can talk and agree how to handle the situation.

This setup means that at each turn, there are only two possibilities: red or blue can move to occupy the space, creating a space where they were before.  Our group of ten solved this on the third attempt, but some groups never solve it. The 'choice map' is my attempt to show these potential paths - but almost all of them will end up in blockage on the next move or two.

The thing that is like Story (as McKee describes it) is that interest arises from high-stakes choices between apparently equal 'goods'. Dramatica assumes that the point of a 'grand argument' narrative is to teach a lesson, to illuminate a world in a fruitful way.  The best stories furnish us with the moves and types and experiences that make us a little more awake, a little wiser, a little lighter in the step, by illustration.

Our group solved the problem when, on the third iteration, we had learned something about which choices not to make.  No one of us remembered the map of the whole field, but each of us remembered the particular mistakes near us, or involving us, which caused a breakdown in the earlier attempt.  The difficulty for a story-teller is to present regular, realistic challenges that offer this sort of dilemma - things that rather than build character, reveal it.  The story-teller too has a choice, but with this illustration, the better choice may come a little easier.

The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift

I watched this film in two stages and my review is in two parts.

Part 1. This is a terrible film, full of godawful sexism, meaningless machismo, teenagers who should be working hard in school and feeling angst but aren't, and dialogue that sometimes seems written as a stanley fish parody of itself.

Part 2. Despite the above, I liked it. It knew what it was - a jingoistic hymn to being 18, driving fast and being transparently too interested in girls. It hit its story points, and the creation of the last racer from the wreck of his father and the wreck of his dead mentor's loaner was a genuine story turn, not a stupid farrago like the similar car upgrade in Grease.

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The darkness

Gene Wolfe, in 'The Book of the New Sun' gives a wise nun opportunity to analyse a story.  A good man had turned bad, after some changes in his life.  The nun explains that the plant of a man's life does not grow up into the light unless it also puts its roots down into the dirty darkness of the earth.  It is redolent of the parable of the sower.

This is reminiscent of Giant Despair from The Pilgrims Regress, who showed people their insides as things of horror.  Pilgrim realises finally that it is because things from inside should not be visible - if they are visible, something horrible has happened, and rightly, they are tainted with that horror.  But in modest darkness one's bowels do their dirty but wholesome work and we live on.

Robot Defense Free

Today i completed the 'huge score' achievement of 50,000,000 lifetime points in Robot Defense, one of the more popular Android games. Given it takes me about 20 mins even on the highest rated game available to accumulate 200000 points, this is at least 80 hrs investment, and probably much more.

The game is well-balanced, and a very good model of drama. In the course of the game you make many choices in the dilemma of apparently equal goods - missiles or ant-air cannon? Augment the slow tower or convert it to a mine? And the opposition steadily mounts until you fail, a tragedy, for which the seeds almost always appear to have been sewn early (poor layout, not enough anti-vehicle, not enough anti-air, oh my foolish and misplaced enthusiasms!). If you complete 100 levels intact, all is well after all, a comedy, with the affirming moral that human, not robot kind will forever dominate the earth.

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