"When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience the meaning more fully." Flannery O'Connor
I'm going to bring back my weekly Friday Forays in Fiction in hopes that it will stimulate and/or encourage me to return to practicing my craft. It was probably a mistake to drop it when I got lax about writing fiction for it is likely the hiatus would not have been so long nor so hard to return from if I'd had to either muse upon the theme of story craft or present snippets of my stories once a week.
This fiction themed post would sometime present snippets form my own fiction rough drafts. But usually it was discussion about my WIP, musings on craft, work habits, creativity or reviews of books about the craft or biographies or memoirs of authors. Now I'm going to add quotes relevant to the topic to the mix so that I'll always have something quick and easy to post when I got nothing else or no time.
I've discovered in the past that just the simple act of bringing my thought back to the topic will stimulate the creativity and the motivation to return to task.
Judy Garland sings Born in a Trunk (part 1 -- part 2 below)
I have been busy filling in two of the gaping lacuna in my cultural awareness. I watched both the 1954 (Judy Garland & James Mason) and the 1976 (Barbara Striesand & Kris Kristopherson) remakes of A Star is Born for the first time.
I'm star struck.
No that is too glib and too cliche.
I'm thunderstruck.
Again with the cliche.
I'm gaga.
I give in. Sometimes words just can't be worthy.
I'd never seen Judy Garland in anything besides Wizard of Oz so this was a huge treat getting to hear how her voice and acting had matured into adulthood.
The film was just gorgeous all the way through. Not just the set of this musical number.
Barbara Streisand sings Watch Closely Now in the final scene of A Star is Born 1976
The scripts of the two movies were very different with only a handful of lines in common. The basic plot was quite similar but with definite differences due to changes in the culture in the intervening decades. In the first it was the 1950s Hollywood scene and in the second it was the 1970s rock and roll scene.
In both an aging star loosing his grip on his career discovers a new talent and paves her way to stardom. They fall in love. Against his better judgment he marries her and there is hope for a time that her love for him can anchor him and his for her redeem him. But he succumbs to jealousy as her star rises while his crashes and burns. Disgraceful behavior on his part nearly destroys her career and he realizes she is willing to sacrifice her stardom to continue what he sees as her hopeless attempts to save him from himself so he commits suicide.
Oh yes a hanky honker.
A bit of a spoiler that if you've never seen or heard of either one of these movies but not so much unless plot is the be all and end all of story for you because there is so much more to the story. To both stories.
Here Barbara performs one of my fav songs from the movie Woman in the Moon in 2006 just days after the elections that sent a record number of women to Congress--well over 70 between the two houses. We had zero the year A Star is Born was in theaters. The year I graduated high school.
The line in this song, 'I was raised in a no-you-don't' world.' gave me goosebumps.
I watched both of these now because I'd had them in my Netflix instant queue for months and was alerted earlier this week that they would stop streaming on the 19th. I had not been aware of the 1937 original film staring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March before it came up in my Netflix searches. It wasn't streaming so I put in my DVD queue. But while I was looking for clips of the 1954 and 1976 remakes to embed in this post I found that someone had posted the entire film of the original 1937 on YouTube. And it is embedable! At least for now.
So I'll probably be watching it tonight.
I understand it is not a musical like the other two and that the rumors are that the story is based on the real life story of Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay. I remember Stanwyck as an aging female bit part player or character actress in the sixties but I'd never heard of Frank Fay.
I'm watching Joan of Arcadia season 2 this weekend as the DVD set is due at the library Monday. In spite of needing to watch over 20 episodes in two days I just watched episode 8 for the second time in the process of looking for a specific clip from it to post.
This episode has to be one of the top three or four best of both season's so far. It was so intense with a multi-track storyline that had not one wasted word or image with a theme and a message so profound and acting so right on that I can't imagine they can top it. All that in 43 minutes!
The clip I wanted was from the very end where Joan is juggling three glowing blue balls in the dark. The theme and the message of the story is contained in this scene which is beautiful on its own but of course can't be experienced in full without the preceding story. The clip is actually in the last couple of minutes of this video and there may be enough of the story in the preceding segment to orient a newbie to the series but just in case: Joan is always encountering what seem to be ordinary people who identify themselves as God and give her advice, warnings and tasks.
If you want to watch the whole episode from the beginning you can find the first four parts on YouTube posted by the same person who posted this one.
Total spoiler below this line. Also in the clip of course since it is the last minutes of the story.
In this episode her best friend, Judith, helps her prepare for her first fancy restaurant date and while Joan is on her date Judith goes out to party with the druggie friends from her old school and is stabbed while they are trying to score. Joan's policeman father is called to the scene by his boss who believes the injured girl is his daughter as she is wearing Joan's sweater with her name tag inside.
Joan arrives home from her perfect dreamy evening to the news and her Mom drives her and Adam to the hospital where Joan has one last intense encounter with Judith who requests that Joan demonstrate that she can juggle, a skill Judith had been teaching her for their joint Physics class project. Joan attempts to juggle three rolls of bandages and fumbles them several times before finally keeping them going for a full round and the moment Judith sees the success she closes her eyes and the machines begin to howl. I was a total blubbering fool at this point and could barely see the remainder of the scenes through the tears.
There is an intense car ride home with her Mom and when they pull up her younger brother, Luke, his up to this point secret girlfriend, Grace and Luke's friend Friedman who has had a raging crush on Judith since she was introduced in S2E2, are sitting on the front porch obviously having already heard the news. The three of them had gone to a cheesy sci-fi movie marathon that night. Friedman had recently finished memorizing the entire Hamlet play after Judith had promised him a date if he did. He was ready to recite it but had wanted to go to the movie marathon so put it off. Over the next several minutes he quotes very relevant passages from Hamlet in response to the anguished questions or comments from one of the others.
Now I've simply got to find a Hamlet video!
Adam had disappeared from the scene at the hospital soon after a brief visit to Judith's bedside with Joan. He arrives on the scene in Joan's front yard an indeterminate time after Joan's arrival, early in this clip actually. Joan's paralyzed older brother, who had dropped Judith off where she was meeting up with her friends on his way to work, drives up in the last seconds of this clip. It is hard to tell if he has heard what happened to Judith yet but since he works for the newspaper I can't imagine how he wouldn't have. Not to mention that the whole family has cell phones.
OK that's the setup for this scene. You can watch it now and get most of the effect.
But in case you'd rather just read it, here's the gist. Or at least the part that is most meaningful to me. When Adam arrives he presents Joan with three balls he had made which light up when he presses a button on them. He tells Joan he had made them for Judith to use in their Physics project. As he hands them to Joan she spots one of the reoccurring characters self-identifying as God. The dog walker is walking several dogs on leashes past the yard. Joan walks over to him and confronts him with his negligence for having not kept Judith alive. Earlier, at the hospital in another guise he had talked about free will and choices good and bad and their consequences. Now he asks her to solve the riddle of the man with three boxes who must cross a bridge that will bear only 200 pounds but he weighs 190 and each box weighs 5lbs so how does he and his boxes get to the other side?
Joan knows the answer is by juggling them and always keeping at least one in the air. But she spits out the answer in anger and disgust not seeing the point until God tells her that the boxes represent her feelings: joy, pain, loss, etc. He takes the balls from her and starts juggling them and then tosses them to Joan one by one and she keeps them in the air effortlessly as he walks on with the dogs.
The last minute or so is all image with musical background as we watch the balls float up and down and the faces of her family and friends watching the balls and watching Joan.
And I'm left feeling a huge YES exactly. That's how I manage not to fall through the floor of my life each and every day. It doesn't take a major tragedy (or several in a few short years as in Joan's case) to make you feel weighed down to the point of being crushed. Even the comparably ordinary burdens of an ordinary life are too much to bear all at once all the time.
I don't think I've ever done this before--relating the entire plot of a movie or TV show in a post. I doubt I'll ever do it again. It's just that tonight I could not tear my mind off of it and thus could not imagine a post on any other topic. When I began I was going to just find the clip if I could and relate the riddle. Quick and easy see. But I should have know myself better than that.
I watched this 3 hour movie streaming on Netflix this afternoon. I can't believe I'd never heard of it before I put it in my Instant Queue a few weeks ago. I had not planned to watch it today or anytime soon really but it was one of 30 movies on my Instant Queue that were going to stop streaming as of January 1. This was the second of the two movies off that list that I got to watch today. The fist was Ghost. I chose both via two main criteria: it was unavailable from the library so I'd have to use one of my 3 Netflix DVD slots to send for it and it was something I thought I could watch with half an eye while crocheting. Ghost fit this latter criteria because it was a multiple rewatch for me and I wanted to listen to the soundtrack more than I needed to see the story again. I chose Barry Lyndon based on the reviews complaining about its slow pace and length.
I was so wrong to think that a movie based on William Makepeace Thackeray's picaresque novel that was slow paced could be watched with half an eye. Not only did I end up having to take out and redo in the second half of the film the two rows of the baby afghan I'd accomplished in the first half, I discovered late in the film that I'd been missing a lot of story that was presented visually. It is not enough to listen to the narrator and dialog only.
Besides missing many story elements by glancing at the screen one or two out of every five seconds, I had missed a lot of the visual artistry Kubrick had given this film. Every scene was like a 18th century painting come to life and choreographed like a dance. The use of color and light was enchanting.
As enchanting as the visual elements was the musical scoring of this film with the use of many classical pieces including Handel's Sarrabande as the primary theme throughout which was given several distinct renderings according to the mood of the scenes via use of different instruments and pacing. That and several other pieces I've not yet identified by name and artist continue to haunt me hours later.
I do believe I'm going to have to send for this one after all. In order to watch it start to finish without taking my eyes off the screen for more than the occasional blink. In fact this is probably going to go on my short list of movies to own that I would watch repeatedly.
Above is the scene in which the Irish rake Barry seduces the married Lady Lyndon during a card game. Note the sparsity of dialog. I actually missed most of this scene during the movie and only got its full impact while watching this YouTube.
Below is the scene near the end of the duel that takes place about ten years after the above scene in which Barry Lyndon and his stepson Lord Bullington square off. Because this was the third of three duels that framed the story as told by Kubrick, I do believe he was trying to say something about the duel as a concept or its role in that era but I'm not clear exactly what.
Lending to the poignancy of this scene are both the memory of the duel Barry fought at a similar age to Lord Bullington and the fact that shortly before his own son with the Lady Lyndon had died in an accident and thus the death of this son in the duel would leave her bereft of both sons.
Based on the material I've read online after watching the movie, I understand that Kubrick changed the story dramatically by including this scene which was either not in the novel or had a quite different outcome and by leaving out the several decades of Barry Lyndon's life that followed in the novel. Now I'm intrigued to give reading the novel a try. I don't believe I've ever read a Thakeray.
I may have sounded like I was complaining about all the pressure exerted by the slough of library due dates in the next three weeks but really I'm eating up the stories so I can't really have too much resentment. In fact it is quite possible that I set myself up for it so I'll have an excuse to spend the extra time with the stories--both DVD and books.
Well. Enough chit-chat about it. The stories are calling me.
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